When an engineer starts a new job, especially in a start up environment, there is often a rude awakening/reality check as he or she actually logs in and gets to look “under the hood.” Things are often not quite what was discussed during the interview process. The challenge in the first week is to solve at least one of the problems that convinced cash-strapped management to hire you. It’s not a time to be learning on the job or doing a detached assessment and preparing recommendations.

Your experience from many other similar situations gives you a toolkit of ideas, but the environment you encounter may be unfamiliar. You might want to set up cacti to get immediate feedback about network device utilization. The company doesn’t have any monitoring in place at all and while you would live to convince them to purchase our product, Heroix Longitude, you need to get something in place this week and you still have the notes from you last job where you used nagios. But this is a Windows-based network.

One approach is to transfer your knowledge to the environment quickly. That’s what I did last week as I documented how to instal MediaWiki on a Windows server–I created a “WAMP Server” first. The danger with an approach like that however, is that you can become sidetracked in the skills transference. You have a “time-it-should-take road map” in your mind based on your previous experience and then you encounter an unexpected assumption-obstacle and spend 4 hours figuring out how to do something simple.

Instead of re-inventing the wheel to work on a different car, change the car. Use your virtualization software of choice, such as VMware or Microsoft Virtualization to create a server with which you are familar or install a virtual appliance. This might offend your organization’s sense of standardization, but remember, we are talking about a quick fix here–the goal is to get something working to help you solve larger problems in the organization. If you know nothing about virtualization…then this approach is also obviously not recommended…but perhaps a good reason to learn as you plan for the future.

The key principle is to find a way to use what you know already most effectively. People can speculate how an engineer who is familiar with unix-based tools finds himself hired into a senior role on Windows-based network–or vice versa. But for the best people, it is not about skills per se, but the ability to solve problems. Virtualization can be one of those tools in your problem-solving kit that makes you an instant hero and buys you some time to develop a more comprehensive solution.