New job, part 2: My New Employer

So, what is this Autodesk of which you speak?  Let's start with that, and in explaining it, let's start with this:



This gorgeous piece of film making is 100% CGI, that is to say, computer-generated imagery, and the main piece of software that was used to make it (not to mention Avatar and the like) is an Autodesk product.  And if the wondrous buildings depicted in this film were ever to be built, they would almost certainly be designed, from facade to plumbing, with others of our products.  So:  Autodesk is a thirty-year-old software house specializing in design and animation.  It sold about two billion dollars of software last year, which is about half of Adobe's sales for the same period and perhaps 3% of Microsoft's, just to give you a sense of scale.

It appears we're great to work for, or so says Fortune, which ranks us #52 on their list of best employers in the US.  (And if I understand the underlying data correctly, they--as for me "they" were at the time--filled 121 jobs in 2011 by selecting from a pool of 38k applicants, allowing each applicant a 0.32% average chance of success.  You have to wonder about the sources and the accuracy of these figures, but they are surely good enough to serve as yet another reminder that trying to get a job via normal channels is a game for only the very most sincere optimist.)  So says Fortune and so says me, albeit only a month into this new gig.  It's difficult to overstate the differences between my current work life and my former job as a consultant working for huge non-US-based (thus foreign to me) corporations in what I think we can all agree is one of the more dysunctional sectors of the global economy, and it's quite impossible to list them all, but, certain exceptional colleagues aside, I have yet to find a single aspect of my new work that is not wholly preferable to my old.  Take, by way of trite but telling example, coffee.  Here is how you got coffee (and still get; this photo was taken yesterday at Gustav Mahlerlaan) in the Netherlands:

I rarely used this awful device, and never without thinking of Douglas Adams's Nutri-Matic:

He had found a Nutri-Matic machine which had provided him with a plastic cup filled with a liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea. The way it functioned was very interesting. When the Drink button was pressed it made an instant but highly detailed examination of the subject's taste buds, a spectroscopic examination of the subject's metabolism and then sent tiny experimental signals down the neural pathways to the taste centers of the subject's brain to see what was likely to go down well. However, no one knew quite why it did this because it invariably delivered a cupful of liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.

 Unlike, and simply terrible.  Autodesk?  We pipe in Peet's:

That's Major Dickinson's on the right there, a favorite of mine for over a decade now.  And for those with the necessary skills (not me, not yet), there's Mr. Espresso:

And yes, there is an automat:

I've tried it--that's my mug there--and won't pretend it's a real cappuccino, but it is infinitely better than the almost-but-not-quite-entirely-unlike that's standard in Dutch offices.  Classy display, too.

There are little kitchens equipped with some or all of this equipment scattered around the various buildings, and there is often a view worth viewing should the urge strike you to sip contemplatively.

Another difference, telling, and I think not so trite, is the presence in the office of dogs.  This one, Dolly by name, works, or rather sleeps, in the cubicle across from mine.  Seeing, and occasionally petting, a dog while at work may not be to everyone's liking but it surely is to mine.  They go to meetings, too, which I, no fan of meetings here or anywhere, find comforting.

But enough about the office environment, what is it I do there?  I could tell you what I have done--it has been a busy month and, I think, a productive one--but I'm not sure I or anyone else is yet in a position to tell you what it is I do.  Bear with me, reader:  time will tell and then I will tell you.