How Do I Start My Job Well? What Do I do First?

How do I get started well at my new job? What are the things that I should be doing right away to make a good impression? How do I make sure that I am successful in my new job? These are the questions we will answer in today's episode of Dev Questions.

[AliMustafa-xpih]

I really can not believe this, that I finally got an opportunity yesterday to work as a backend developer and the first 90 days will determine whether I am going to continue working in that company or not. And suddenly I saw your video. your advice to me has always been a life-changing advice. THANK YOU

[michaelday]

Great list. What a great foundation for a new employee. Here somethings I would like to add:
1. Be honest with timeline estimates. Expect delays, issues and questions. Just because you may think the project is "Two days of work", doesn't mean you won't run into permission issues, or have to wait on an email reply, or have 15 meetings this week. Build in a buffer, and be ready to explain to your boss why you feel it should take that long.
2. Learn the full process of the projects you work on, not just the small task you are completing. (Especially if this is a long term project)
3. Be open to projects other people hesitate on. A developer who is not afraid to take on a tough or unpopular projects is worth their weight in gold.

[domizianoatticciati]

I would like to integrate the valid advices that Tim has given.
Changing job can be a great period of stress, the risk of trying to be "the perfect employee" is to lose sight of yourself and your needs trying to please your boss. “Work as hard as you can” can be a double-edged sword.
What I mean is therefore yes, commit yourself and follow Tim's advices, they're good advices, but remember that you too are a person with needs and that, if it is true that you are in this job to allow your boss to - in Tim's example - building software that needs to be sold, without you there is no software, the relationship is equal and not a "one way".

[anonb]

Starting my new job in a few days, so this is perfect timing! 😊

[DeepWorksStudios]

Sadly i lost my job after successfully 4 months sadly my mental health come into my way...

[Sysshad]

I feel this is very American biased. It's good advices but in some countries most people already does this out of respect to the employer, colleagues and workplace.
And in regards of on board documentation, we as devs must make the lead and product owner understand how important it is to keep it updated all the time.
I've been in teams where practically all who knew anything quitted so those left had a really hard time.

[dand]

I would disagree with some of the info. The part of "ask questions... even be annoying..." Granted their is probably a bit of info stepping into a new job you will need to get from others, no argument there. Would assert most places will have a new hire on-boarding doc, ask for that and read it. And many places i worked they didn't have one, then volunteer to create one. Then about asking the questions, first thing would be to ask your boss "Who should i ask questions...?" But a big factor that will turm me off on a new hire, the person simply doesn't put any effort in to learn it or find it out on their own. Also Tim's suggestion to write down and save information you get from others to refer to later, would suggest write down your questions as you go along and save them, ask the person mentoring you "Hey generally to make the on-boarding easier for you, would you mind if i ping you say every two or three hours? I prefer to struggle a bit and save up my questions along the way, then i can ask you all at once so i'm not a huge burden on you....?" Most mentors i have had in the past will agree and/or speak up and say "Ah don't worry just ask when you have the question, i'll be sitting very close... But this give them the freedom... Best of all it shows you are organized and thoughtful towards others, ie. "A good team player..." While my general rule is I'll put in as much effort helping others as they put in to helping themselves as well. But even still do exactly at Tim said, write the answer down to remember it or a link to the reference to find it... Would suggest it should be electronic such that you may easily organize, search and find it later.

While can agree more with Tim's comment talk to you manager and ask what his needs are, and even talk in terms of building up a channel to talk about stuff. Find out what are the short term and longer goals and issues that are or will be the most prominent. Along with that should ask what will be the immediate tasks you should concentrate on.


Also talking about learning the company's style for doing stuff, ask for the coding standard and design/convention document for the example Tim gave for the sql and naming it "tblCustomer", might be me i started working before SQL was a thing, or might say before $icroMoft bought it, have to admit strange reading through the sources for M$ $QL and seeing "Sybase " the originator for M$ $QL. Many think the Hungarian notation is bad, but really does help in my opinion... Which of these are tables or views? Customer, Sales, Employee? Now the same tblCustomer, vwSales, spEmployee or prefixing with tbl_, vw_, sp_. The only choice might be to use the underscore or not. Get into a database with 400 tables, 1000+ views and oodles and oodles of sprocs will guarantee everyone will start loving Hungarian and the debate is ended 😋 Class and variable names in source, might be more lax in the most stuff id object oriented and we are dealing with classes, Gone are the daZe when it was straight up Win32, and it relaly did matter, say for a pointer, was the memory was malloc(), HeapAlloc() or GlobalAlloc(). Unless you've lived and worked back when there were hieroglyphs in my office (some may call it a cave) the reason for using lpszcSomeString or pzcszCustomerFirst, needing to know the details are gone now... Thus as software development evolved some things dropped off. Would assert a lot of this wasn't done to be a pain, and may seems senseless now, you simply couldn't or wouldn't be able to develop anything sizeable by not doing it...

[gilbertigwegbe]

About creating onboarding documentation, is there a general template for doing that or do i just wing it?