Career & Leadership › Junior Habits & First Job
Your First Weeks
Setting up, meeting people, and shipping something small early.
Also known as: onboarding, first weeks at a new job, starting a new job, first 30 days, new hire onboarding
The first weeks in a new job aren’t about proving how much you know. They’re about getting set up, learning how things work and getting a first small win shipped.
Week one: get running and meet people
- Set up your environment and get the project running locally (dev environment setup). Note every missing or wrong step, then fix the docs. It’s a real contribution, and your fresh eyes are the best test of them.
- Get access to everything you need (repos, chat, tickets, cloud consoles, CI), early, since access requests can take days.
- Meet the team and your manager. Ask what’s expected in the first 30, 60 and 90 days, and how you’ll know you’re doing well.
- Find your go-to people: a buddy or mentor for everyday questions (finding a mentor).
- Learn the rhythm: standups, planning, release days, on-call, where decisions get made.
Early weeks: learn and ship something small
- Ship a small change in the first week or two, such as a docs fix, a small bug or a test. It teaches the whole path from ticket to production: branch, review, CI, deploy. It also builds confidence.
- Read code and docs with a question in mind (reading a codebase).
- Ask questions, and write the answers down (asking good questions, engineering journal).
- Follow the team’s conventions before suggesting changes (following conventions).
- Observe before you propose. Keep a list of things that seem odd, and revisit them in a few weeks when you understand the context. Some will prove sensible.
Habits that help
- Take notes on people, terms and systems. You’ll forget a lot of what you hear.
- Don’t struggle silently. Say when you’re blocked (when to ask for help).
- Be honest about what you don’t know. Pretending slows your learning.
- Check in with your manager regularly, and ask for feedback early, not just at the review.
- Pace yourself. It’s a lot of new information. Tiredness is normal.
Feeling slow or lost at first is expected. Almost everyone does (impostor syndrome). In a few weeks, the map fills in.