Well I made it down to Cincinnati on Friday with Will and Jacqui. I got there about 15 minutes early and hung out in the break room until the manager was available.
We talked a little bit about what I was going to do which was meet the three RF engineers that currently work the Cincinnati area. I met with all three guys for about 20 or 30 minutes each and learned a lot about the job, the area, what I might be doing and most importantly about the types of people I might be working with at T-Mobile.
Some stuff I learned:
My initial duties – These would probably be to create a system to process and refine a crap-load of quality and statistical data that is produced by the towers. The engineers spend a lot of time pulling all of this data down, getting it together, and analyzing it. A few hours each day is wasted just getting to the point where they can start looking through the data to identify any trends or problems. What I can do to alleviate this problem is create some sort of system with input from the engineers on how I could automate the retrieval of the data, process it in a standard manner and offer up some ways to display the data in a way that tries to predict what the engineers might want to see and how they’d like to see it.
The team at the Cincinnati office is small and they work really close – This was something I was pretty excited about. The way we work at CERIAS is small and it works well I think. It helps us communicate a lot better and I think that a lot more gets done in that kind of work environment.
The people working there are diverse and seem really cool – The three guys I met all have different personalities and I was able to relate to all of them in different ways. They all seemed to genuinely enjoy their jobs and what they were doing.
T-Mobile is a big company – That means there’s a lot to do in a lot of different places and that they can offer employees a lot of cool benefits. That’s something that’s important to me, and looking through T-Mobile’s site I saw a lot of neat things that they offer their employees.
Overall I felt that the people I met think that I’m a good fit for the job and I would tend to agree with them. The manager told me that he’d get back to me in a week or two with his decision and I felt pretty confident that he’ll choose me, but I’m still nervous :)