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it’s friday, so i feel like i can take some creative liberties with the last few hours of my day and do some personal writing. after all, i did work a lot this week.

one thing that has been striking me all day is the realization that i learned a tremendous amount of “stuff” in two years at oracle. when people ask me “what was it like working at oracle?” i usually fall short with a succinct answer. how do you really sum up two years of life experience in 30 seconds? time (and really, words) are wholly inadequate for describing life experiences. the truth is that whenever someone asks you a question like “how was australia?” or “how was going to stanford?” or “how was raising a hyena in your backyard for five years?”, you usually end up coming up with a completely crap, regurgitated answer that sounds like what they want to hear. my traveling friend will and i have had many discussions about this.

anyhow, today was one of those odd days where it seemed like so many daily nuances reminded me of oracle and, specifically, what i learned there. the biggest lesson from my first real job?

SPEAK SLOWLY THE FIRST TIME AND ALWAYS SET CONTEXT: when i first started working at oracle, i started talking in the same speed that i thought about things. that was a pure disaster. i would talk about a concept, people would look at me blankly, i would try to ‘explain’ it, they would look more confused, i would start over, S-L-O-W-L-Y… and it wasn’t because i was so much more brilliant than they were, but it was because i was thinking at the speed of my head. in other words, i would start speaking with the same assumptions and inferences that i had built up in my head. i used to stop by my manager’s desk to talk about some obscure design point and completely confuse the hell out of him. the conversation would go something like:

jack: “hey, so we got that thing figured out. we’re going to go with a concurrent program to do the thing. it’ll be awesome.”<

rahul: “wait, what are you talking about?”

jack: “you know, the thing. yeah? awesome. great.”

clearly that’s an exaggeration, but you get the point. after a while though, you just get used to starting slow and speeding up later. that way people don’t feel like they’re trying to jump onto a moving train.

it’s funny, at a place with as many smart people as google, people strangely mistake “not setting proper context” with being really smart (because the speaker is talking way ahead of everyone else). i’ve often heard people say ridiculous things like: “so and so is brilliant. he’s a genius. i can never understand what he’s saying.” that’s just crazy. the smartest people always seem to make sense when they talk, not the other way around.