First Days as a Pythianite

13 Mar First Days as a Pythianite

One thing that has always amazed me is the way that all of our decisions, big or small, have an impact in our life. Sometimes you can’t notice the fork in the roads that those decisions have caused, but sometimes they are as clear as rain.

For me, a simple Oracle DBA, one of those life decisions was to have a talk with a great friend about your own empowerment in social media and why I should open a Twitter account. This led me to follow Yury Velikanov, who then tweeted a conversation about how to share your blog with Oracle to be able to attend 2012 Oracle Open World (OOW) as a blogger.

So I did exactly that and my proposal got accepted. This this gave me the opportunity to make my way to San Francisco. During those days at OOW, I had the opportunity to hear Pythian’s founder, Paul Vallée’s Ted Talk. After those 15 minutes and an evening talk with Greg Leger, I had the inquietude to join this company that I had just heard of on this trip.

Now this wasn’t going to be a smooth ride, it was actually going to be an arduous interview and hiring process. This is due to the fact that Pythian is made up of the top talent from around the world, and it strives for that.

Fast forward 6 months later: March 4th, 2013 was my first day at Pythian and what a week it has been. Filled since the first minutes with training in the way of life of a Pythianite, and all I can say is that it has lived up to and exceeded everything that I had imagined it was going to be.

Here are a few insights into why:

• Let me know if the first day that you got to your new job, you sat down with the CEO of your company and had a one hour talk with him, regarding its mission and the vision and route the organization is taking.
• You were already encouraged by the owner of the company to start blogging and start raising your game.
• You get to be with, talk, sit around the dinner table and trade ideas with the people considered to be the top 5% worldwide of the field you are in.
• You see that they strive to avoid the pitfall in all of their employees, the famous phrase in Stephen King’s The Shining  “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”.
• You start  believing Pythian’s point of view “that the quality of our work is essential to our clients’ success and the quality of our service is essential to our success”, and with this, it is critical to know that it is a team effort , not a stand alone hero. Hence they make every effort from the beginning, to make you feel like a part of the this growing family.

So by Friday, I was already wearing the “Love Your Data” shirt, sharing doughnuts around the Ottawa office and really excited to be here to give it my best to succeed and be an intricate part of this organization.

And now all I can say after week one has come and gone, and looking back at all the sacrifices and choices I made to be here at Pythian (which I won’t go into in this post, that is for a one on one coffee if you want to hear about it), is that I’m looking forward to week two, three, four and the rest to come …