The Finnish school system has a concept called TET, an acronym that roughly translates to “Introduction to working life”. This usually takes place during 8th or 9th grade and consists of one to three weeks of six-hour working days. The tasks vary from brewing coffee and sorting the mail to whatever a kid can be expected to do that does not involve heavy lifting.
I wanted to do that again for a day. So I posted on Facebook if anyone would take me and the next day I heard that Gapps would like to have me for a day. Finding a suitable day was a bit difficult but I am here now. I had to fetch my laptop from service before arriving so six hours seems to be my contribution today. I have not participated in brewing any coffee yet.
So what can a grown-up do when working for just a day? Whatever is in my capacity that does not involve heavy lifting. So far we have discussed how the Agile software development process Gapps follows looks like and if I have any ideas to how, in my experience, it could be tweaked when the team grows. We also had a look into the delivery pipeline and compared notes about different SaaS tools that both my company and Gapps could adopt. Also, I did get my Google Apps for Work use reviewed as well and an introduction to the Google Apps for Education, which is really interesting for me working in software for education.
This is a really refreshing breeze to my own work day and it is really nice to meet new wonderful teams. Why is it that only kids get these introduction days?