Quarantine Day 50. Another Wednesday, another all-hands, another round of work, then another hump day happy hour.
Not too much to write about the all-hands today, other than the fact that the revival of work.com is complete. Or almost complete. There was a demo of it — mostly around how it functions as a “command center” that companies can use to see how COVID-19 is impacting their business, and pandemic workforce management (e.g. by spreading out shifts for better social distancing, and to trace exposure to known cases).
To be honest, I’m actually quite impressed by how fast it got put up. As usual, there’s always reason to be skeptical of demos (though I’m sure if I really wanted to, I could go and test it for myself, that doesn’t follow the golden path). But from what was presented, everything I saw was totally feasible and reasonable to make; the whole product is pretty much a reimagining and reconstruction of existing Salesforce components. So I believe it. I’m also curious which team(s) got scrapped together to build it, though I’m sure I’ll find out by the end of the year when they get awards.
Not too much to say about work either. More testing. More coding. Eh.
The main “new” thing about “work” today was that instead of having one happy hour, there were TWO today. One from 4-5:30. Then another from 5:30-7.
The first one couldn’t have come at a better time. Mostly because I was pretty much done. I had more work to do (there’s always more work to do), but I was feeling a little burnt out. This happy hour was also “officially” sanctioned by the managers and involved everyone across both engineering, data science, and product teams (though for some reason, I’m often the only person that joins from data science). So I couldn’t feel too guilty about this one.
Anyways, Adam brought out Jackbox and we played two rounds of Quiplash. There were 14 of us, but since quite a few people only wanted to participate as Audience, I played both rounds.
The first round went pretty poorly for me because Adam didn’t want to pipe the game’s narrator over the screenshare. So I lost on time. That said, I got the one and only Quiplash! during this game — seems like it’s harder to get an unanimous vote with over a dozen people voting! For the record, the question revolved around how to get fired at work. 😛
I did a lot better in the second round. In fact, I was far and away the winner. 😀 The main difference was that I asked Adam to warn everyone when time was running out. So I got all my answers in.
On that note, one interesting observation from playing Quiplash with different groups of people are the answers that different groups generally enter.
With my data science group, it was pretty obvious who was entering what answer. For at least a handful of people, submissions were very factual. Logical, even. This made for quite boring answers. That said, votes still went to the most creative answers… I ended up winning first place by far, partly on word play.
With this wider group, I saw similar patterns. Not surprisingly, the first round went to Jake, the UX guy. Out of everyone in the group, he has the down-to-earth, sassiest, and by profession, most creative personality. After Jake, it was kind of a mixed bag. I was kind of expecting Jake to be my main competition for the second round, but he had to go. I think my best answer in this round (if only because the other answers were kinda boring) was “long sausages” to the final round question of “what would make bad replacements for skis?”
After this happy hour ended, my second happy hour started. The usual crew was there: Tiff, Natasha, Kristen, Melissa, Son, and a guest appearance by a former member of the team who had left before I joined. The interesting thing about this group, actually, is that the first three people in that list are all in UI/UX. I’ve never worked with them before, and in fact, I’ve not met Natasha in person. But I really enjoy conversations with them because the banter is so good. Actually, during some weeks, the conversation has carried on well enough that we don’t play games at all.
That said, we did play a game this time. The drawing game has become the new hotness, and Kristen pointed us to this site (apparently made in Mexico lol). It was super laggy, but the words that came out were pretty good. Interestingly, I did pretty well, though Natasha was really good, on average. I had a good time.
It was still light when the 3 hours of virtual socializing ended. But since I knew I was going to be running some 4 hours on Thursday, I decided that I should rest.