Onboarding

Starting a new job is exciting. New company, repos and team members.

Below are things that are good to do while on-boarding.

Meet everyone you can. This includes team members and managers. Ask them what they do, the issues they are seeing and what they plan to work on next.

This will give you an understanding of the business, the current issues and the product roadmap.

Understand your company org chart. This will let you understand how the company is structured and how it operates. Try to figure out the charter and responsibility of every team

Understand the architecture and the different services. Draw an end to end flow of your product and the different areas it touches.

Enlist in the repo. Get your IDE setup. Get couple of bugs fixed ideally across the stack. Do not skip this step. It is hard to get a feel and true understanding without getting close to the code.

Understand the monitoring dashboards. These usually end up capturing the heartbeat and priorities of the business.

Finally, ask a lot of questions. Be curious. Be humble. Show professionalism. Be on time. Add any missing info to the onboarding doc. Show and share progress of your onboarding. Enjoy and make new friends.

Good luck!

---

Mastering Software Engineering Course on Maven

If you liked this article, I will be teaching a “Mastering Software Engineering” course on Maven where I will teach hard-learned lessons I acquired developing large-scale products at companies such as Uber, Airbnb, and Microsoft.

---