Timeline of things to do at a new job to get the ball rolling.

Week 1

Meet with the team

  • Talk about work and priorities, but focus on building connections over specifics of work.
  • Talk to the manager
  • Talk to teammates

Reach out to friends or colleagues

  • Find out about perks, rewards, hacks, interesting email lists or groups to join.

Focus on Beginners Guides/Ramp up Documents

  • Learn what is specfically called out out to be required for the job.

Week 2 - 3

Set up meetings with as many people are possible

  • Informal questions to build a connection, relationship.
  • Ask:
    • What do you like about the team, org, company? What is something you’d like to change?
    • What are your current projects, goals, challenges?
    • What should we be focusing on? What are we neglecting?
    • Who else should I talk to?

Learn the internal tools

  • Code repo, diff review, IDEs, command line setup.
  • Job scheduling, service deployment, testing infrastructure, batch processing, ML model training, Ops tools, service dashboards

Find out the team and org priorities

  • Learn about the projects the team has undertaken.
    • Why and how were these projects decided?
    • What projects didn’t make the cut?
  • Goal or target
    • What are the OKRs or metrics that the org is tracking?
      • Are the projects fully aligned with these?

Insurance, 401k, Benefits

  • Most companies expect you to pick an insurance within the first 30 days. This can take some asking and digging around, so do not delay.

  • Look at retirement plans offered, calculate 401k contributions based on how much you have contributed already.

  • Read about all the benefits the company provides. ESPP? Health Benefits? Internet Reimbursement. Some of these things could require signing up early on.

Fix small bugs

  • Pick up a small task that touches a part of the system. This will help learn about the tooling, code repos and ensure that the coding environment is correctly set up, while earning some brownie points from your teammates.

Week 4 - 8

Find out about the history of the org, past projects

  • This gives a better grasp of some design decisions made, what the focus areas have traditionally been, what is valued.

Talk to you Director

  • Ask

    • What does the next year look like? What do the next 2 years look like? What’s your ideal state?

    • What are we doing really well? What are we not great at?

    • What is not currently prioritized but should?

    • What keeps you up at night?

    • What would you like to change in the org? Technically? Culturally?

Dig up design docs, presentations

  • With the background already acquired, piece together all the work happening by diving into old presentations and documents and learn about systems already built and used.

Month 3 onwards

Career conversations

  • Find out what the ratings process looks like.

  • Talk to your manager about your career aspirations

    • Ask

      • What does an average rating look like?

      • What does an exceptional rating look like?

    • Clarify your goals

      • Example: I’m looking to reach the next level OR I intend to balance my career and life.

Talk to acquaintances

  • What are some things they learned by observations, things that are not documented

  • What does the company value during performance reviews?

  • What’s a realistic expectation of growth, bonuses, ratings?

Oncall ramp up

  • Generally, people are reluctant to join an oncall and keep pushing it back. But the best and fastest way to learn about all the services and tools the team supports, the failure hotspots and customer pain points is by participating in the oncall rotations. Teammates are also happy to see the burden getting shared!

Talk to partner team leaders

  • Find out what is most valuable to them.

  • Find out What they are goaling on, what metrics matter to them.