The Office

Let's talk a little about the office here... It's very different from the Seattle office.

• It's one big room with 3 offices for the very few managers here squeezed into them. All the developers are just at these huge joint desks with no cube partitions.
• During the day it's exceptionally quiet - I'm used to people shouting over tall cube partitions or standing on things to look over cube walls. I've held conversations with colleagues before routinely who are more than just across the single divisional wall. Here, there's no talking -- until the phones start ringing around 4pm which is around when Seattle Folks start getting into the office. Thank god for my iPod.
• Location location location.... meaning lunch options lunch options lunch options.
  • The Seattle office is located in the International District - this means lunch is Asian Asian Asian or Specialties Deli -- unless you desier walking to Pioneer Square. The Dublin office is located in the midst of the Guiness Brewery. This means there's nothing around to eat so you're pretty much limited to 3 options: go to the Spar (posher version of 7-11 with a sandwhich counter), go to Manny's (pretty decent panini lunch spot), or go get free admittance to the Guiness Storehouse Visitor Center and skip the tour to go to the resteraunt on the top -- all of this, again, unless you desire walking to Temple Bar.
• Hysterically, there are 2 lunch shifts pretty much: the software developers and their managers; everyone else and their managers.
• The people that I used to have rather entertainingly disjoint and at-odds conversations with via e-mail and other correspondence methods now sit behind me. So we're now nice to each other and I get so much more done.
• Paperwork? I thought paperwork was non-existant at the Seattle office - ha!! Dublin shows them how to make paperwork non-existant.
• The time difference and the small size of this office makes me much much more productive - not nearly so many interruptions and pretty much no e-mail after my first purge in the morning.
• It's so damn international it's wonderful!!! Today's lunch talk was politics in formerly Communist countries (I was one of the few people who hasn't lived through the abolition of Communism in my home country at our table); amazing stuff.
• The people are friendly and my team is hysterical - talk about team bonding. I think the Tester for my team and I are going to get kicked out of the office some mornings though... it's so quiet (see above) that when we get into our normal morning gossip session much laughter ensues and it sounds so loud! We've taken it down to a whisper with some practice since our desks are caddy-corner to each other and we tend to play bumper roller-chairs all day.
• Too many people, too little space - love your neighbor!
• It's ridiculously weird being in the top 5% of seniority in the office.

There's the quick and dirty rundown. Hope it didn't bore you too much - but you guys do keep asking, so I aim to please.