Day 06 - Life at Red Hat
This post is focused primarily on what it's like to work at Red Hat. My past few posts have been more on the technical side, as much of what I do consists of that. The other interns have more frequent meetings with their managers, but I appear to be on a much smaller team. As a result of this, much of my day is the same with the exception of the technical stuff that I'm playing around with that day.
Before I get into the actual workflow, HERE'S WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW. I hadn't realized how much I agreed with the "ideals" of the company until I actually started working there. A couple of years ago if someone said "Red Hat" I might have responded with "oh, those dudes that are trying to commercialize Linux?" AND OH HOW WRONG I WOULD HAVE BEEN. I guess the biggest and most important thing that I hadn't realized about the company was that Fedora pretty much IS RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux), or at least acts as its upstream. Fedora is on a 6 month release cycle, while RHEL is on a 2 year release cycle. I had originally thought Red Hat "claimed" to give back to to the community through Fedora, but put all their good stuff in RHEL. In reality, they actually work totally in the open, and then add the finished product to the next RHEL release if it goes over well in Fedora.
I don't know if it's the aforementioned culture or what but everyone here is just VERY laid back. Everybody's smiling at you, and nobody seems to throw you a look that says "shouldn't you be doing something important instead of playing around on a computer all day?" What's more, everyone in the company also unanimously seems to agree that they love it. I never see managers asking people to see their work, and I even overheard a story about a guy who they noticed never came in (always worked from home) so they just gave his cubicle to someone else. It's VERY relaxed. I bought a bunch of semi-fancy shirts only to find that everyone just wears jeans. I REALLY dig the atmosphere. You can tell because I'm using the word "dig" to describe just how much I dig it.
There is a break room on every floor which contains snacks, fruit, coffee, and (most importantly) water. In addition to that, every single morning there are bagels just straight up available with cream cheese. Other than that, though, my daily routine consists of mostly bouncing back and forth between the break room and my cubicle to (fill up on water) and (read documentation || pound my head against some linux thing) respectively.
When lunch time rolls around, so far I've only ever eaten at the cafeteria on the first floor (which is pictured above-- it looks really nice because they just redid it). Usually, as mentioned before, I get the grilled chicken sandwich, although today I opted for a turkey wrap. The selection isn't too great, but fortunately what they do have are foods that I eat. There are two main issues that I currently have with lunch: 1. I don't get paid to do it and 2. I have to pay to do it. Even though each meal runs me about $5, it still doesn't feel great to see the money leaving my card balance. What especially doesn't feel great is the fact that if I had greater self control I could probably just tuck away a morning bagel and have that for free.
Sometimes at the end of the day one of the two people on my team (my manager and pseudo-manager) will come up to me and meet with me for a bit and discuss my progress and what I should be looking at and focusing on. Thus far, I've still just been focusing on the lvm stuff and primarily the lvmthin stuff. There is talk about having me take a look at dm-cache though. With any luck, I should be contributing semi-meaningful bug reports soon.
Other than that, there isn't much going on outside of the technical things discussed here. Once a week all the interns get together and have a group lunch (which we get paid for) and there is talk about a final intern group presentation that we would have to coordinate. Additionally, while I'm at work and connected to the intranet, I hang out (but currently do not talk in) IRC channels for lvm and the interns.
Drive there, park, scan inside, eat, cube, drink, cube, drink, cube, eat, drink, cube, drink, cube, talk to manager (sometimes), leave, drive home. And I love it.