Today sees the close of my first week of fulltime work at Buzzcapture. We (yes we) are a small social media monitoring and analysis company, based in Amsterdam. Despite a PhD in philosophy of language (or something very like it), I’ve joined the team as a programmer.

The biggest challenge of the first week has been adjusting to the hours, after ten years (ten years!) of university life. I’ve been doing something like an internship there already for a couple of months, but an early start two days a week is substantially different from an early start Monday-to-Friday.1 I’m going to have to force myself to go to bed early on weeknights, against both my and Olga’s inclinations.

Business culture is quite different to research culture. I’m enjoying having concrete short-term goals with solid deadlines. I’m enjoying the effort that goes into setting up a working environment in which it’s possible to (and in which you want to) get things done quickly and efficiently. (There’s a whole literature on management techniques for software development, and while it’s mainly overkill for a team as small as ours I’m personally learning a huge amount just from looking at the problems these techniques are designed to solve.) I’m not so much enjoying feeling that I don’t know yet how to balance these pressures (deadlines, efficiency) against my ideas of software and design quality — at the very least I’m going to have to train myself out of the habit of leisurely exploration and reading-_around_ before reading-_about_. And it’s turning out to be a real pain that I proofread everything (including code) — definitely a habit to break, that one.

Mainly, though, I’m enjoying being paid to be a programmer. And not just by-the-numbers, we’re small enough that I have to do significant design work too (not unsupervised, of course). And I’m enjoying having to learn fast and hard. (“Don’t know Python? You’ll need to: learn it.”) Takes me back to the best parts of my undergrad degree. (And of course I’m still hoping for a chance to smuggle Haskell somewhere into the codebase…)

Notes:

  1. My farming family will laugh at me for “early start”. I mean that I’m at work before 9:30; for them if you’re not up before 6 it’s not really early. [↪]