Please provide great onboarding questions for a new hire
- Team Charter: Overview of our mission and values?
- Milestones: Key goals for 2 weeks, 2 months, 6 months - clear success indicators?
- Key Contacts: Priority teams and individuals for relationship-building; schedule meetings? Essential tech leads and engineers contacts for insights across the org?
- Priorities: Weekly/quarterly priorities and alignment with company goals?
- Challenges: Major team challenges and my role in addressing them?
- Time Allocation: Expected distribution of my time across tasks?
- Learning Resources: Key documents or experiments to review?
- Project Ideas: Prospective projects and their scope (T-shirt sizing)?
- Performance Criteria: Access to the performance and progression rubric?
- Meeting Cadence: Preferred frequency for one-on-one meetings with manager, skip and peers?
- Feedback Schedule: Ideal timing for feedback sessions for peers, manager, and skip?
- Communication Preference: Written or verbal communication preference? Anything else?
- Asking for Help: Procedure and contact for assistance; onboarding buddy?
- Proactivity & Dynamics: Steps to proactivity and understanding organizational dynamics?
- Current Focus: Main current team issue or project?
- Recent & Future Work: Recent achievements and future plans (month, quarter, year)?
- Innovation Opportunities: Any tool/process gaps I can fill with a new solution?
- Team Charter Feedback: My understanding of our mission and KPIs; do you agree?
- People to Meet: List of essential PM's and people to influence across org teams.
- Project Ideas: Observations and potential impact with rough T-shirt sizing.
Anything else, also please reply if you were my manager if you can Alex + Rahul?
Discussion
(3 comments)- 1
25 days agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course HeroI think the new onboarding course should cover most of these topics: [Course] The Complete Onboarding Guide For Software Engineers: Succeeding When You're New
I totally get wanting to hit the ground running, but there's only so much you can prepare upfront. My advice is to go with the flow and ask individual questions as they come up. For things like project ideas and people to meet, it's hard to give concrete advice on this until you join a team and share more context about it.
The Taro Community will always be here for you! No rush 😊
- 125 days agoStaff Software Engineer [E6] [OP]Meta
I did the onboarding class and your coding training as well - super useful. I would like to get more advices on code reviews - especially common mistakes. The same question applies to the design review. It will be great to get more relationship building ideas. Last but not least the most difficult is business side of Meta, can you elaborate on that while onboarding?
- 125 days agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
Code review is definitely a big one when onboarding. For most new Meta engineers who weren't able to survive, I could see the problems in code review. In particular, they weren't good about dealing with feedback, both in terms of velocity and how they ingested the feedback.
Dealing with code review feedback should be one of your top priorities when joining Meta, especially as there's such an emphasis on moving fast. If you have a diff out, I recommend literally checking your Phabricator notifications every 1-2 hours so you can respond to feedback ASAP if need be.
I cover this in-depth in my code quality course here: https://www.jointaro.com/course/level-up-your-code-quality-as-a-software-engineer/code-review-feedback/
I recommend going through the entire code quality course as it largely stems from my time at Meta, and that course tactically covers the most important signal you need to show as a fresh E6 (i.e. "I'm really good at coding").
For relationship building, I recommend this: [Masterclass] How To Build Deep Relationships Quickly In Tech
For design review and the business side, don't worry about it too much. That is putting the cart before the horse. Focus on making people like you first and writing stellar code. That will take 1-2 months at least. After you have solidified yourself, you can think more seriously about those other levers. A failure mode is jumping straight to the most advanced stuff before mastering the basics.
