I have been at AOL for about 7 weeks now. I have yet to get any real work, unless you call working on excel charts for someone else, work…

It is, well, different here. I am getting the feeling that you are suppose to just know their proprietary code and infrastructure. Since what I do is not truly based in unix administration but in more application administration, I am tending to get very frustrated since I have no frame of reference for any of this.

As an example, I have been told to start managing one of the subsystems here. When I asked the current owner how to do that, I get basically …take ownership of it and it’s all yours… Um.. that is not what I asked. I have yet to get enough training to make me useful in this environment.

Seven weeks is a long time to try and hunt for work and training to do the work. It is draining any excitement I had for the job. At other recent assignment like SAIC, Discovery, Cable and Wireless I was deep into some project or task by this time. From talking to people here it has taken as much as 6 months before they got meaningful work. I hope that is an exaggeration on their part.