Posts Tagged ‘Work’
Working at AMD – Initial Impressions
Last Tuesday, I’ve began my job at AMD’s Markham location. This would be my very first official, proper job, as all of my previous jobs dealt with selling knives at people’s houses and working little jobs in little chain stores. I wouldn’t belittle those jobs, as I did feel I learned much from them, but AMD’s experience will be very, very different.
For one thing, this is an office job. I get a cubicle with plenty of space, and throughout the course of the day, instead of punching timeclocks and following orders strictly, I am free to meet my position’s needs however I want to. Hence, my performance is now completely my own responsibility. If I want to be outstanding, it’s totally up to me – my own initiative, and my own efforts. In a nutshell, I work in a team of roughly around eight to twelve people. Our team is called the Component Quality Engineering (CQE) team, and we basically do preliminary regression testing for component code that come out of the dev team. In order to perform my work, I need to first get familiar with the software associated with my tasks, then I need to gain the necessary experience to make good decisions in monitoring daily changes in the code, and there’s a bunch of miscellaneous tasks and responsibilities as well. All the people in the team have been very nice and helpful so far, especially my current mentor, who has been explaining things to me nonstop for the past week despite having his voice going noticeably hoarse at least twice now. I will try to learn quickly to make their jobs easier.
The software we’re working on is basically the various drivers for AMD’s graphic cards (the ATI cards). Particularly, I volunteered for the application portion of these drivers. The most significant thing I’ll be doing testing for is ATI’s Catalyst Control Panel (CCC). This is a rather visible piece of software that everybody who has an ATI card must be very familiar with, and I have to say, being a part of this company culture, seeing the scale and orderliness of the corporate system here, and working on something that will enter so many gamer’s daily lives – all these makes me feel quite important. It looks like I’ll have to learn VB for this job, but more importantly, I’ll be getting real experience and knowledge on how the software development works in these huge and successful companies, and I think that will probably be the most valuable part of this experience.
Since the past Wednesday, I’ve started driving to work. Traffic in the morning was alright, but traffic in the afternoon is usually horrible. It takes about a bit less than an hour in the morning to get to work, and up to an hour and a half in the afternoon to get back home. The good thing, however, is that I’m already getting lots and lots of driving experience. I look forward to see how incredible of a driver I’d be after sixteen months of driving like this. As long as I’m careful, I’ll be able to avoid accidents. Access to a car also means quite a bit of freedom that I never had before. All of a sudden, my world no longer extends only a few blocks outward from UofT, although I have no idea what new possibilities are opened up. It’s like playing Age of Empires 2 and having just researched the cartography tech – all of a sudden you can see the terrain of the rest of the world, but there’s still the fog of war preventing you from knowing what’s really in those places. Haha, what a geeky metaphor, though I’m sure if anyone has played any RTS game they’d know what I’m talking about.
To everyone else who are starting their jobs: good luck, work hard, and be smart!
