When I was hired at Oracle, I knew very little about it. No, that's not quite right. At West Coast I loved reading the computer industry weeklies so I had and still a fairly good handle on the business software industry. Oracle to me was just a big database/applications company. Boring but I'd be doing the exact kind of work I had been taught in college, or so I thought.

Now, my situation is going to be a bit unique because we were starting a new group at Oracle. I was the fourth person in the group. We had one manager (Dave) who had been at Oracle six months, one person (Prasad) who had been at Oracle one year, and two new people (Michael and myself) who had just started. In other words, very little working- at-Oracle experience in our group. Not only that, we were going to do all our coding in Java, one of the first groups to do so at Oracle.

So the upshot of this is that we didn't know the company rules and we were charting our own standards in any case. The thing about working for a big company (and Oracle has over 30 000 employees) is that there are a lot of rules. Necessary rules to be sure, but they're all over the place. Nothing is written down. Everything is on their internal web sites. But there are dozens of web sites, each one run by a separate department. You go here for Human Resources information, here for desktop services, here for Unix services, etc. It's all a big distributed mess, not well organized at all. The best way to learn how to do something ("how do I submit an expense report?" "where do I get more paper clips?") is to ask someone else. It was that way four years ago, it's that way now.

Actually we didn't even have a product to write. We only had a hazy concept that Dave had. No, that's not right. Dave had a good concept since his group was going to create the same kind of product that he had been working on at his last job. But he didn't give us any specifics, mostly because he wanted our unbiased opinion on what we should create. Of course we had no idea. We needed to do research. So the first thing we did is attend the Computer Telephony Expo in Los Angeles.

I'd been to a couple of trade shows when I was working for West Coast. It's a lot of people, a lot of vendors, a lot of hype. This one was no exception. Dozens and dozens computer telephony vendors hawking their products, giving out brochures and free gifts. There were also classes on developing and selling Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) products. Speeches and talks. It was quite a whirl of confusion but it was a nice week. A good team-building experience even if I got very little out of the Expo.

We came back. I had a slightly better idea of what kind of things we were going to work on. (Actually, Michael also came from Dave's old company so he had a good grasp of CTI.) The next three months for me were uneventful. I had to learn Java at least. I also read up on the Oracle database, PL/SQL, and Client/Server programming. I bought lots of books and read a lot and made lots of little programs. Meanwhile our group slowly grew to about 10 people. Dave and Michael had written some white papers and we had a clearer idea of what we were going to write.

Dave assigned projects to each person. My first project was to write a SQL integration layer for the group. Just about everyone we hired at first had no Oracle experience. Hence my jos was to hide the database from the group and provide utilities so that they could just simply write what they wanted and not deal with database connections and sessions and other things like that. Even that was too much for people so eventually I wrote all the SQL code too and provided getter and setter methods for people to use.