Onboarding 101: New Grads or New Job

How to ensure your next job isn't doomed in the first two weeks by onboarding successfully

You've finished your program, got your degree, even killed the coding interview, and got hired.

Now what?

After your first job, few future employers will care about your education, or any internship, or anything else on your resume.

Your first job can be make or break.

• So how do you ensure you succeed in your first full time role?

• How do you ensure you can land your first promotion quickly?

• How do you land a good reference letter for when you want to jump to your next job?

First impressions are huge.

While this post best applies to new grads, it is equally valid for every new job.

Today, we'll be outlining how you can nail your onboarding period, and set you on the path for success in your new job.

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Ask questions, or it's your fault

While your employer will expect you now how to use a for loop, check language docs, Stack Overflow, leverage AI, and open a PR on Github, there's a huge amount that will be company specific.

What do I mean?

• Custom internal configuration of their CI / CD that runs on every PR and handles deployments

• Custom IDE or local env configuration

• Custom internal code structure, libraries, idioms

• Custom formatters, linting rules, style idioms

• Custom JIRA or ticket workflows

• Expectations around Slack availability, announcement writing voice

• Thoroughness expected of PR reviews

Every company will have their own culture (what's cool to joke about around the lunchroom table) and their own technical culture (all the company specific water you'll be swimming in).

The tricky thing for onboarding is rarely do any companies have a detailed document you can read where all of this is explicitly outlined.

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Often, and especially at smaller companies, it's a mixed bag of:

• random blog posts

• internal docs

• heresay from authoritative colleagues who have shaped the culture

• mutually enforced cargo cult copied practices by colleagues who know how to play by the rules – regardless of whether they feel strongly about them

This means that learning how to be effective involves being curious.

• Ask questions about why things are done a certain way.

• Ask to pair with someone end to end to land your first small PR and deploy the changes.

• Ask what metrics, logs, exceptions to check to confirm it works as expected and hasn't broken anything.

Remember: If you don't ask, it's your fault.

If you do ask and docs insufficient, explanation insufficient, pairing doesn’t work; then it’s your team's fault.

But avoiding asking questions to save face will only make it seem like you're full of ego and unwilling to learn how to do things right and fast.

Timebox, then Ask

Learning from first principles on the new job is mostly to preserve your ego, and not the best approach.

Sure, you could spend hours combing through every layer of the codebase and CI and deployment configuration and grok how it all fits together, but that will take days and weeks and in the meantime your team will be left wondering: "wtf is that new guy doing?"

The better approach is a balanced one of timeboxing.