5 weeks, jeeez.

I spent around three days trying to get the 802.1x wired ethernet authentication to work* at one organisation and felt completely useless for that period. I'm not sure I'd have coped well not having any network access for five weeks.

*It turned out the ports I'd been directed to use hadn't even been patched in (in hindsight I should've figured this out a bit quicker from my EAPOL frames seemingly going into the void!). IT eventually figured out what was going on, seemed surprised I was surprised the port wasn't even active, and said they never patched more than 1 port per cluster of desks...

Having contracted at many big corps, I know this situation very well. The worst issues are the fact that nobody really knows what you're supposed to be requesting, the systems you have to use for requesting them are a complete maze, and a lot of the time, you have to request one thing before you can request the next thing (waiting for those tickets to be serviced sequentially, with their multi-day SLAs).

But don't stress over it. Your manager definitely knows how bad their onboarding is, and isn't expecting you to be able to do anything about it.

Our onboarding is a hot mess but if I can’t get you at least the source code by the end of day 2, you get an apology. That’s the part I can control, a bit.

Pro tip: collect all of the accounts one needs into a Wiki page, ordered roughly by how soon you need them. This page looks like it’s for you, but really it’s for the person doing your onboarding, so they can go poke people before you even know you need the account.

Pretty good, you had a desk the first day ;)

Hey at least the company knew that they had hired you. I had that once, the joy of contracting agencies I guess.

It was a 6 month contract and at the end of it they still had not gotten me badge access to the area I worked in.

So what did you do? Sit in the lobby waiting for your badge for six months?

The lobby bit was only 3 hours. The rest of the gig entailed a lot of knocking on doors and getting onto a first name basis with every security guard.

It can be alienating. When this happens to me I try and think “this is their money, if they want to set it on fire it’s their prerogative, I get paid either way”. But yeah easier said than done.

This have changed at my first job (a long time a go) the second day I got an hours crash course in RT/11 (a DEC OS)

I was told to learn FORTRAN IV from McCracken (A Guide to Fortran Programming)

I recently started working at a huge financial concern and it was 12 weeks before I got my laptop in the mail.

We started a contract and they gave us Windows laptops with 2GB of RAM. For coding Java. I probably should have run at that point but I was new. I’m fairly sure 2GB is either an IDE or running the app. We could use our own hardware though, or the contracting company could cough up a few.

I had just upgraded my personal laptop and my old one was 16GB of RAM and 2nd Gen SSD so you’ll never guess what I did.

I just... What did you even do in that time? (Sincere question; if I started a job and didn't have a machine I don't think I could work, and I assume a financial place won't let you BYOD)

That's the crazy thing actually, virtually the entire company is BYOD with Citrix access to a Windows VM hosted in a datacenter. Only software developers need a specific machine.

I spent the whole time watching compliance training videos, no joke.

> financial concern

The probably unintended double meaning works great