Of all the skills to learn on the job, onboarding quickly is possibly the most underrated. You only onboard to a job once, that initial momentum sets up the rest of your experience.
But people learn from experience, and it's not often that you switch to a new job. Luckily, in college, I had 4 internships, and then immediately worked at 3 startups (which had a big spread—1 IPO'd, and two shut down). So I've been lucky to have some practice.
Now I work at Jam, and we're doing well, so I don't think I'll need this advice soon. But I'm writing it while it's fresh. For my friends, who are switching jobs or have been laid off. For my sister, who's applying for internships. And for you, who could possibly be joining me to build Jam ;)
This is my opinionated take on to make sure you take advantage of your first week.
What you should do when you join a company
- First, found out what your job is
- Have a general idea before you join. In fact, you should learn as much of this before you start, in order to align your expectations with reality
- What are you hired for? (Where do you fit in to the team)
- What is the composition of the team (Where do others fit in to the team)
- Find out what your manager thinks their job is (do they take an active involvement in the team? Do they view 1-1s as a chore?) This will help you understand how to treat them as a resource. And unfortunately, when you cannot rely on them (a situation I've seen too often with friends at larger companies).
- Find out how to do your job (high-level)
- Find out where your team sits in the org chart (and what are your adjacent teams)
- Find out which people you'll need to talk to at those relevant teams (and of course, your teammates should also have some relations with these people to lubricate communications)
- Find out the collaboration process with other roles, especially new roles you might not have interacted with
- For example, at Tandem, I switched from a primarily-backend role (DNS work at cloudflare, systems work at Deviceplane) to frontend/full-stack. My mistake was instead of asking how to work with our designer, I assumed design handoffs were a one-way street. I was wrong, of course, and ended up having a great handoff process with our designer, Bernat. I would give product and design feedback as I was handed designs, as well as suggestions for minor changes that would improve product velocity. But in order for us to make this relationship effective, I first had to understand it.
- Find out how to do your job (low-level)
- What are the systems you'll be building
- What are the repos you'll be touching
- What are the connected systems (upstream, downstream)
- What's oncall like, what metrics, tools, dashboards you need
- You'll probably forget this—that's okay. Better to have a vague idea of what you need to do, than no idea at all
- Ask an experienced coworker for a rundown of how your main area of focus operates (this'll be the main repo you'll be touching), including a walkthrough of the code. After this, you should feel ready to jump into the code
- Engage with excitement, push boundaries, do not become jaded
- One of my founder friends remarked that part of the reason they hired interns was because interns bring energy. As a new hire, you too have this energy, excitement, and something to prove. Express it soon, or it will fade as work becomes routine.
- Read all the interesting docs, especially notes the founders have written
- At Segment, the founders had referenced [author's] post on [commoditizing your complement], which was eye-opening perspective to hear on business strategy, as an engineering intern
- Schedule coffee chats with people on your team, and new interesting people you meet—this is one of the best ways to learn about another role
- At Linkedin, I scheduled a 30m coffee chat with a director, who ended up extending it to an hour after he realized I was based in SF and had trekked down from SF to Sunnyvale for the meeting. People often want to reward you for making an effort to get to know them.
- Browse all the channels
- Read all the interesting docs (and figure out what the travel policy is ;))
- At Cloudflare, there was an almost-hidden clause in the travel policy doc that noted you could get up to $500 for staying with a friend on a business trip, instead of booking a hotel. As a result, every time I visited Austin for work, I stayed with a coworker and earned $500 (and did them a favor by skipping a lunch and expensing them a good dinner) :)
- Offer your opinions — sometimes a fresh set of eyes is the most useful thing you might have. Other times, an energetic response is a useful tool for leaders trying to energize or braisntorm with their team
- At LinkedIn, our extended team had an extended all-hands with a VP, and for what felt like minutes, nobody asked a question. I noticed he had pink laces on his gray Allbirds, asked him where he got them. Having my dumb (though well-received) question to set the bar low broke the ice enough for engineers with better questions than me to start talking.
- Ask questions
Now, as you prepare to make the most of your first week and following month, remember: you're off to a good start!