I started at Flexport two weeks ago and they’ve been keeping me very busy. (Moving into a new apartment at the same time didn’t help matters any.)
The first week was Flexport Academy, which is a week-long intensive course for new hires in which we all get sprayed by the firehose of information about how the global freight forwarding industry operates, and hopefully remember at least a little bit of it.
Here’s a short video that they’ve produced which talks a bit more about Flexport and Flexport Academy:
In addition to a lot of new vocabulary like “Incoterms” and “Trans-Pacific East-Bound,” we also learned about how Flexport itself works and what the company culture is like. (They have well over 1,700 employees, so they’ve put some thought into this.) I got a special callout on the company-wide chat for following one of the values, “Fill the Gap,” after I got annoyed that the chairs in the conference room were wobbly. (The maintenance person was also a bit surprised when they showed up and the problem had already been fixed.)
![@wolf, a new hire who started on Monday, took it upon himself to fix a broken chair in the Flexport Academy room! He even bought the screws at a hardware store and brought in his tools!!! Talk about filling gaps. [Plus a picture of me standing next to a chair with some tools, and a lot of people reacting with emoji.]](posts/2020-01-27T01-41Z-5.jpeg)
Every group that goes through Flexport Academy also produces a short video to introduce themselves to the rest of the company. The theme we picked was the Hogwarts sorting from Harry Potter, with the houses being the four main divisions of the company: Supply, Demand, Makers, and Administration. We all got together to plan and film, and then divvied the rest of the project up amongst ourselves. I was tasked with editing the video together on the basis of an offhand comment I made about fiddling with iMovie briefly in high school. It went very well considering I didn’t know how to use the editing software, and everyone seems to have been pleased with the result.
Last week is when I got to join the Finance Makers Team, who I’ll be working with, though much of the week was also filled with training on finance-specific things that hadn’t been covered the week before. I think by next week I should be able to sit down and actually start writing code.
I also got all of my stuff shipped from Rochester to my apartment on Wednesday, so this weekend I’ve been busy unpacking. It currently looks like there’s been a small explosion of newspaper and cardboard, but hopefully I should be settled in pretty soon.