New Hire Experiences and Expectations

So you just got hired and you’re about to start your first day on the job…now what? This section hopes to give you some insight into common expectations that you might have, what to look out for, and some tips to make the most of your time as a newbie to prepare you for success!

Preparation

How to prepare before you step into the office.

What to Bring?

Bag - Good enough size to carry paperwork and anything else you brought.
Some way to take notes - Not sure if I’m old school, but I always bring a notebook and paper. I know you iPads are all the rage for notes now so that should be fine as well.
Your financial details - I’ve never not had to fill out some paper work with Social Security number, and some form of ID, so don’t forget it!
Something for your desk - Something small that you can put on your desk to say it’s yours. This gives a sense of ownership for your desk, and might even be a conversation starter for your cube-mates.
Water bottle - You’ll probably be stuck in long meetings your first day with a lot of talking. Be sure to pack a water bottle to get you through the day.

What to Wear

I’d just take stock of what your expectation is and do one notch over. You can always correct to more casual once you get a handle on the culture there. On your first day you’ll probably be meeting with a lot of management and HR which typically dress up a bit. If you have any questions feel free to ask the recruiter what the typical dress code is around the office.

Expectations

First Day

This is a typical first day. Experience will vary greatly. If you have any questions ask your recruiter.

Meet at company lobby
Recruiter or manager will meet you and bring you to your area
You’ll have some time for introductions, getting to know each other, and maybe some team stuff
You’ll be taken to your desk, where you’ll have a chance to meet with your team members
Break out for lunch
Come back to your desk to complete paperwork and/or start HR training (probably some videos).
And then you successfully finished your first day!

Not bad right? As I mentioned there will probably be differences on your first day if you start for a start-up vs something like a bank, but they common expectations from all of them is that the goal is just to get you situated and to fill out some paperwork. Don’t worry about having to program some exotic search algorithm on your first day, there will be time for that later ;).

PROTIP: Make the most of your first day of getting comfortable with your surroundings and starting to create relationships around the office.

First Week

The first week you will probably be wrapped up whatever training material they give you. This comes in a variety of forms (some better than others…), but this includes things like:

Setting up your development environment
Walk though of current code/architecture
Learning about your team members and responsibilities
Learning what the team’s development process is (how to get from code to deploy, management processes like Scrum)

By the end of the week you’ll probably get assigned your first task. Usually the team has a long list of easy tasks they want to do but don’t have time to do, which are perfect for newcomers to get experience working with the codebase and processes. You should be under direct supervision of someone from the team to make sure that all your bases are covered.

First Month

By now you will start to get into the groove of working within your team. You may have completed one or more change requests and are comfortable with the development and release process. Congrats! During this time you should continue to focus on understanding the current codebase, why things were done in a certain way, and identifying how you can work effectively within the team.

First Year

This is where things get interesting because now you should be comfortable working on most of the codebase your team maintains and can start to make suggestions of your own. This is important to your growth because you should have enough knowledge of the system as well as the contextual background to provide support for the changes you want to implement. At this point in time you will begin to learn how your team integrates with the rest of the organization and begin cross-team communications.