What questions should I be asking my onboarding buddy?
Starting my first day and I was assigned an onboarding buddy. I was wondering what are some of the main questions I should ask.
Some questions I have asked:
- Wiki on how to set up dev environment
- Info about all meetings that I was invited to
- More info about what our team does?
I'm wondering if there are any other main ones I should be asking or is it just ask as they come along?
Discussion
(2 comments)- 243 years agoRobinhood, Meta, Course Hero, PayPal
Those are all good tactical questions, and I have the following additional recommendations:
- "What's the most important thing I should get familiar with for this team?"
- "Do you have any external resource recommendations like books and online tutorials I can consume outside of work to augment my learning?"
After you get more settled in (1-2 weeks in), I would ask more "meta" questions about performance like:
- "Am I onboarding fast enough and completing my initial tasks at a good rate?"
- "How is my code quality compared to the standards of the team?"
I also recommend checking out the following Q&A about initial ticket speed, which also links a bunch of useful resources for onboarding: "How long should I take on my first JIRA ticket?"
Lastly, you should also leverage your onboarding buddy as a feedback source in general and start proactively looking for real feedback every week after your first week. Onboarding is such a crucial time, and it's important to knock it out of the park when you work at a FAANG company like Amazon. Follow the advice here to get full value from your mentor: "How do you get the most out of mentorship?"
- 203 years agoMeta, Pinterest, Kosei
Those questions feel like a good start! I especially like asking about the meetings since that gives you context on how the team operates and how the organization is structured. A few other questions to ask:
- What do you think are the main challenges the team faces?
- What are the biggest wins/failures in the past year? What went well in those projects?
- Where are learnings documented from past experiments?
All of these build on this notion of context: you want to understand the history of the team, understand what is prioritized, and what the learnings were.
As an entry-level engineer, you should also spend a lot of time shipping code. So I'd ask questions around what ideas your onboarding buddy has for well-scoped projects that don't have many gatekeepers. These projects/areas of the codebase are really valuable to dive in and make some changes.
Finally, one last note: you can (and should) ask these questions of people beyond your onboarding buddy! Don't limit your interaction to just your assigned buddy.
Check out these good responses from Alex:
- "How do you enable seamless onboarding of a new engineer or intern into your team?" - It can be helpful to understand the perspective of the onboarding mentor.
- "How can I best spend my time ramping up?"
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