My first 4 months @IBM

5 min readJun 7, 2019

Whew, I made it!

This year I started my new position as a Software Developer for IBM, and man, has it been quite the journey! These past four months have been packed with a ton of life milestones, inside and outside of work.

I’d like to share my experience thus far with you guys, mostly through what my life at IBM as been like. Hopefully in this little write-up you’ll find some useful tips if you’re starting a new position!

A New Career

Onboarding Experience

My new hire journey started in Littleton, MA, where we had two days of team building and development workshops. We covered things like Design Thinking, Agile practices, and IBM culture. I even got to do some test-driven development! Oh, and free food.

We ended up with an entire afternoon to ourselves, and a few other new hires and I took a train to Boston. I’d highly recommend teaming up with other new hires and exploring, wherever your new hire training places you. I managed to meet some awesome people that I still hang out with today.

Ask your team what OS they’d recommend for you when choosing your development machine. Life is usually easier if you pick what they use.

The First Day

A couple things will happen your first day,

You will get lost. Office buildings are confusing.
You will be lost. I’ve never heard so much tech-speak and acronyms.

These two things happened fairly quickly for me. Within 5 minutes of parking, I was already lost outside of the building. Figures! My manager managed to find me by a random door, and led me to an onboarding discussion where I was filled in on the thousands of IBM acronyms that I would hear at some point in the first few weeks.

The First Commit

The first commit is always a big one for me, and something I always push myself to achieve as a first milestone. From my past experience, it can be very easy to not have anything to do for your first few weeks on the job in an internship or first job during onboarding.

While being taught about our product, we managed to find a spot for a small logic enhancement in the current sprint, and I jumped at the opportunity to use it as an initial learning experience.

Through a lot of hand-holding, I managed to get my first PTF (program temporary fix) done in my second week! Thanks, Dan!

Going Bigger

One of the areas that I was thrown into was performance, because faster is always better!

Initially, I started off by writing Java prototypes for certain performance enhancements. More recently, I’ve been porting those prototypes to C/C++ and working with system calls, forking, and pipes. All of those evil things from your senior OS class!

Something interesting that I learned was that C is extremely platform dependent, and C on the mainframe has quite a few differences than normal C. Since z/OS is extremely optimized for certain operations, you can really see a difference between some of the system calls.

Warning: if you tell someone that you know {topic} on the mainframe, you’ll likely be bombarded with questions about {topic}. Sorry to all of the people that told me they know C!

A Patent Appears

IBM puts a huge emphasis on patents. Like most people, my initial thought was: “Are you crazy? I’m never going to be able to think of something patent worthy.” Well, it turns out you’ll just fall into discoveries while doing your job!

While doing performance enhancements, I was having a discussion with my manager and we ended up discovering that we approached something in a fairly unique way, and it might be worth pursuing a patent.

Enter Rosalind Radcliffe, a distinguished engineer, and quite honestly one of the most helpful and encouraging people I’ve ever met. She guided me through the entire process, and within a few weeks my idea was ready to file as a US patent. I still can’t believe it.

The z/OS (mainframe) Environment

My internship prior to IBM was entirely web development, so I was extremely worried being told that I’d be working with the mainframe for my new position. You hear a lot of horror stories about (mostly) COBOL, but quite honestly the mainframe community is awesome to be apart of.

It feels like you’re apart of a niche community when working on the mainframe. The nature of the mainframe means that you interact with people significantly more instead of just googling everything. Networking is required, because you have to network just to learn how to do certain things. I love that.

Also, z/OS is going through a major shift of modernization. Offerings like ZOWE, DBB, and many others are pushing you to learn modern technology. Jenkins, Git, and other modern tools work just fine on the mainframe, allowing you to keep your skills fresh with the latest tools. In my opinion, you have to understand these tools even more than the average Joe because you need to make it work in your environment!

So, if you get thrown on z/OS, don’t worry. It’s actually pretty nice, and you’ll learn a lot.

External Activities

One of the things that they tell you in the on-boarding experience is to get out there, network, and enjoy your time at IBM. I can safely say that by applying that, I’ve had some of the most fun I’ve ever had in my life, and met more people than I could hope to imagine.

Team Dinners

I’m extremely lucky that my manager has a deep appreciation for food, and shares that with us after work. In only a few months, I’ve tried more genres of food than my entire life combined. Raleigh has some amazing food!

Backpacking

I’m your typical homebody, and usually stick at home either developing open source projects or playing video games. However, I never realized how insanely fun backpacking can be. Over the past weekend, some coworkers and I hiked to Grassy Ridge Bald, pitched our tents, and camped on the mountain.

The sights were beautiful.