One Week at Hazy

Day 0

I’m convinced to join Hazy. Not many interviews spend the first 15 minutes discussing an obscure Canadian hockey show (Letterkenny).

Day 1

Monday was all business. I arrived at The Post Building, 5 minutes early because, you know, who isn't mortified of being late on their first day? Well, call it 15 minutes early, because I walked around outside the building for 10 to ensure that I was early-but-not-too-early. Everyone does it.

Inside, I received my passcard, met Charlie (workplace ops), and went up to the floor. Coffee, tea, lockers, canteen, hot desks, yup. But also: arcade machines, roof terrace, ping pong and foos tables - I've been in Big Corporate too long!

Right. Business.

I met the CEO, Harry. He'd be sitting behind me today. We have a quick chat, I let him know that this is the token day where I'm in a nice shirt and that tomorrow would be right back to shorts and free tech t-shirts (yes, October is shorts weather in the UK). Chit chat has to end as the Monday all-hands call is starting. Harry welcomes me to the company.

I'm given my laptop and get to it.

• 2 device updates (1 hour)
• 12 accounts (Zoom, Slack, CharlieHR, ...)
• 57 (!) emails
• 5 dev tools installed (VSCode, DockerHub, ...)
• 3 intro "coffee" chats

Day 2

Back to the office - it's nice seeing the team in person.

• 2 more accounts for dev things
• 2 coffee chats
• 1 Data Science backlog grooming (and onboarding for me) call

And, GitHub access!

The rest of the day gets spent on getting my dev environment set up, python environments, and dipping my feet into running some core demos. It went okay. In terms of onboarding as a developer, hats off to Hazy, this is my first time able to get to coding in under 10 hours of employment.

Day 3

I joined on a good week (is there such a thing as good or bad weeks?): this Wednesday is one of the bi-weeklies where local and remote team members are encouraged to localize on site here in London. Of course, with option for social activity when we clock out.

• 2 coffee chats
• 1 (requested-by-me) manager chat to go over working styles and some extra onboarding questions
• 1 impromptu pair programming session to help debug some pytest issue (glad I could help, Ed!)
• 1 help call as I can't get my VSCode terminal to run through Rosetta (thanks James!)

Oh. Critically, I made my first large post on Slack. I was invited into the pets channel (thanks Petra!) and got to share some photos of my muddy, muddy dog:

It’s not even a rare occurrence.

Day 4

• 5 coffee chats
• 3 branches created for my first code submissions

Facebook and some other Big Tech™ are claimed to have a policy of pushing code by day 2 [citation needed]. I don't know how I feel about that. Move fast, break things? Great. But also, maybe it's good to contemplate, learn, evaluate, and ask some questions.

So no PRs for me today. But, ya know, I could have.

Day 5

• 3 coffee chats
• 1 Data Science standup
• 1 all-hands Friday wrap up call

Someone has decided to put my face on a company LinkedIn post. Fine. but I need a quote? Look. It wouldn't be meta if I didn't use a generative language model for this. And ya know, this is for fun, so I don't mind using some OpenAI GPT-3 (text-davinci-002 for the super curious) credits for it:

prompt: Write an inspirational quote for a linkedin post, 
for a new employee at a tech company that generates 
synthetic data, 50 words ([temperature=0.91])

> When you join a new company, it's easy to feel like 
a small fish in a big pond. But with hard work and 
determination, you can make a big splash. Whether you're 
generating synthetic data or coding algorithms, you have 
the power to make a real impact at your new company.

> "If you can dream it, you can do it."

> "The best way to predict the future is to create it."
 - Abraham Lincoln *

> Starting a new job is always a new adventure! 
I'm excited to join the team at a company that is making 
a difference in the world by creating synthetic data. 
I can't wait to see what the future holds for us!

* fake news!

Thanks GPT. Maybe I'll write my own.

Looking to join the world of synthetic data?
Check out our current open roles on our careers page.