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Finally got a job, what can I do to make my onboarding experience better?

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Entry-Level Software Engineer at Taro Community12 days ago

After being laid off 8 months ago, I’m in a new role! 6-month contract that started earlier this November. The first two months revolve around holidays, so stuff might be slow, but things will pick up after. I want to do everything I can during the first trimester of my contract to earn fulltime with the company. This is a junior position. My manager is a kind person who says nice things about my ability to communicate, learn, and write documentation.

I reviewed the complete onboarding guide on Taro. Since I was a tad bit tired from my job search entering the company, didn’t have much direction with my first task provided in my first week, and my manager was the only person giving me communication, my initiative in my first week and a half of onboarding was lax. But now, I have sense of urgency to do more! 

I was learning company cultural norms, meeting people, etc. There was lots of stuff different from my previous employer. I also noticed there wasn’t a clear onboarding strategy. I was just given code to read through, and went over it with my manager. I’d ping my manager in the morning and in the afternoon with status updates summarizing what I’ve learned and used the formula from the guide to ask great questions. Due to my initial confusion, I decided to make an onboarding guide myself for future engineers! Eventually, I was given a senior engineer to shadow, who I also reach out to during the morning and afternoon just like my manager. I’m also building relationships with my teammates, slowly but surely finding out what teammates are in the give knowledge buckets vs the get knowledge buckets. 

I’m always vigilant to add impact. Just today, I noticed that anyone had edit access to some really important documents other than read, so I reached out to the person in charge of the documents saying “hi, I found anyone can accidentally edit these. To prevent a future mistake, I found this link that shares an idea of how to stop this.” 

Every week I make 3 goals for myself to improve on, such as “understand this code base”, “improve skills in SQL”, “make my first meaningful code contribution”, etc., and record my progress on these set goals throughout the week. My manager would have a meeting with my contract team monthly to discuss how things are going. 

My manager told me I’m still just in the onboarding phase, so I should just follow the formula, and everything will fall into place. Given all this, what else should I do?

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Discussion

(2 comments)
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    AI/ML Eng @ Series C startup
    11 days ago

    Hi, seems like you're on the right path! I understand your urgency, as it's a 6-month contract and you're trying to secure a full-time gig.

    I found these courses really helpful at my last job where I had to deal with some serious leadership drama, switch teams, and turn around my performance as a "Research Engineer"-turned "SWE with a sprinkle of AI".

    Courses

    Junior to Mid Level Engineer

    https://www.jointaro.com/course/grow-from-junior-to-mid-level-engineer-l3-to-l4/

    Helps with code quality, communication, and distilling requirements for projects.

    Leveling up Code Quality

    https://www.jointaro.com/course/level-up-your-code-quality-as-a-software-engineer/

    Really helps you get into the feedback loop of improving code quality with the more senior engineers, as they'll get "setting the bar" for what gets pushed into the codebase and what's rejected.

    Performance Optimizations, for work

    https://www.jointaro.com/course/maximize-your-productivity-as-a-software-engineer/

    If you feel like you could be way more productive at work, you're not wrong. It's an iterative process, but there's some good pointers here. Alex also politely tells you not to be a lazy bum.

    **Doing these courses in sequence yielded really good results. It takes a few days to go through all of these, and maybe 2-3 months to really internalize.

    Masterclasses

    Shipping Real Features

    https://www.jointaro.com/course/frontend-system-design-masterclass-building-playlists/

    I borrowed the design doc format for this masterclass and got amazing feedback from my team. There's three ways to use this IMO:

    If you're at a larger company, hopefully they already have a uniform design doc format and you can just take away some nuggets of wisdom from this class. If you're at a startup, chances are you aren't getting much guidance, so you'll have to bootstrap a format on your own and iterate on it. You can also just practice by writing design docs for your side projects. Here's a somewhat incomplete design doc I wrote for making a Figma AI copilot

    These can be fun to write in your free time + you get to really think through your ideas.

    Anyway, hope this helps.

  • 0
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    Entry-Level Software Engineer [OP]
    Taro Community
    12 days ago

    Oh, and one more detail that couldn't fit:

    I listened carefully to when the complete onboarding guide empathized that doing tutorials alone won’t cut it, and that you have to dig into the code. So, I figured I’d focus on code at work, and do a tutorial on the side after hours to cement what I learn at work, that way I can draw conclusions as to what concepts are important for the job at hand.