How long does it take you to get used to a new position?

DoubleNNs

How long does it usually take you to get used to a new job?
Has the time period lengthened or shortened as you've moved up in skill/responsibilities?
When do you go from "in over my head" to "comfortable" and then finally "impressive" where you're seen as invaluable to your team/company?

What are some things that set you back when trying to get up to speed at a new job? Have they historically been technical aspects? Company/team culture? Management? Politics?

ImThe0ne

Really depends on how large of a company or organization you are going to. The bigger the organization, the more moving parts, the smaller, the less. In a lower role, Helpdesk, Desktop support, etc. in an enterprise environment, I would expect a few months at least to start feeling comfortable. My second IT role was a helpdesk role for a 3000+ employee company, I left 8 months in because I got bored and was destroying everyone elses numbers and they didn't exactly like it. I would take 2 or 3 times the amount of calls each day as the others on my team, my calls were 2-2.5mins long versus their 4 to 5 min calls.

In my current position, I have been in a Server Engineer role at a hospital environment for about 18months, I am a mix of Impressive and still learning. The things I know exist, etc vs the random applications or issues that still show up at times that I have never heard of. But with that being said, our Sr. Engineer has been there over 5 years and there is still stuff that comes up that he has never heard of in our environment. But this is the same place that we finally JUST kicked a few NT 4 servers out of our environment, so when I tell you I have fixed servers as old as I am (23) I am not kidding.

gespenstern

~2 years for a large enterprise, 6 months for medium, 2 days for a small shop.

UnixGuy

3~6 months for me.