This is a post for my future self when I will be asking myself: “How were my first days at Acer like?”.
Note: I’m working at Acer EMEA HQ, so when I mention “Acer”, for simplicity, I mean “Acer Europe”.
💭 My expectations
My previous experience was in a small company and a very different sector. Considering this, I was expecting the following challenges in the upcoming scenario:
- An organization with thousands of employees and decades of history
- Several departments and key stakeholders to interact with, each one with specific priorities
- A huge IT department where I’m the youngest member here
- New technologies to discover: in particular, I’ve never worked with most of the Azure tools we are using
- A whole new level of complexity
I wasn’t too worried about the previous points, as I’m happy to learn new things and I’m used to managing projects with different stakeholders. Being a Business Intelligence Developer, my tasks were going to be about managing Power BI dashboards and collecting data from databases, more or less what I was used to doing before…
Example of a typical Power BI report I work with
🤯 What caught me off-guard was the scale of Acer’s IT structure!
- While I was used to querying a DB with a few dozen tables, now I have to deep dive into hundreds (if not thousands) of tables and views.
- While I set up a simple ETL with a few data sources and a couple of MB of data, the new process I’ve been shown features hundreds of queries, with different environments and edge cases to handle.
- While I created a few Power BI reports with single datasets, we have tons of different ongoing projects and dozens of users editing and creating their own that.
- While I was using only a small subset of Azure services, there are several new tools to learn, such as DevOps, Synapse (ETL), Purview (Data Governance), Active Directory (Permissions)
1️⃣ First Week
You may laugh at my inexperience, but the first week I was coming home with a serious case of information overload. My head was so full that it was hurting. There was so much to learn, understand, write down… I was feeling very tired and also a bit stressed.
Every day I was looking at new things, meeting different people, discovering new dynamics to be aware of.
Luckily the team’s mentality is very dynamic, favoring independence and resourcefulness. The challenges are super stimulating, but I’ve never felt frustrated about them, as I’m capable to handle my assigned tasks. I was well supported, and this helped me a lot in the first difficult days, as I never felt alone.
I also noticed that, despite the huge scale of the organization, the architecture I’ve explored is rather clean and documented. I didn’t feel too lost, I was just disoriented by the mass of data.
2️⃣ Second Week
Starting from the second week, I feel that I’m quickly getting used to my new world, as some of the challenges are becoming familiar and all the distinct pieces I’ve seen are clicking together.
Every day I feel just a bit more skilled in my tasks and many things are becoming easier and easier, in perspective, compared to a few days ago.
Once I got familiar to the basics of the services we use, Azure doesn’t look too confusing. For example, I had to write some PowerShell scripts to automate basic tasks and I was surprised of how little time it took me!
The amount of data to explore is still overwhelming, but step after step I identified the more important tables, which are going to be used for the majority of the reports.
Concluding
Despite the difficulties in the first days, I feel more confident than ever about my adventure in Acer. That’s where I’ll grow a lot and create new, amazing things for the company.
I just miss using Python a bit, as Powershell has become my main scripting language (it’s synergizing better with Azure’s APIs)… Yet this is part of a new experience, learning new things!