I thought it would be good to get some general advice from the community about people's strategies for the first few days/weeks at a new company, as a software engineer in a non-leadership position.
Understand the big picture direction of the organization, team, and product I’m working on: management, marketing, sales, and engineering.
* Talk to relevant managers about where we’re going, and what they’d consider success or failure. Also a chance to meet managers I didn’t talk to during interview process.
* See if anyone’s done a pre-mortem, or if not try to informally or formally do one: “it’s one year in the future and the project has failed. What did we do wrong?” Usally I’ve started mentally creating a list of big picture risks, but many of those are probably irrelevant, and I’m probably missing quite a few.
* Learn meeting schedule, start forming opinions about existing ones (useful/needs improvement/useless) and what meetings might be missing.
* Get to know co-workers: names, roles, who knows what.
* Wander around introducing myself, and asking people what they are working on.
* Figure out lunch and snack culture.
* Join social chat rooms / email lists.
Set up work environment.
* Standing desk, with keyboard and monitor correct height.
* Kinesis Advantage keyboard.
* Mat for standing desk.
* Install Linux on laptop.
* Editor configuration (using my dotfiles repo). * Setup email, chat, other communication methods.
Start learning the development process, code base, tool chain, and relevant technologies.
* Get code checked out, figure out how to build and run it.
* Figure out how to file tickets.
* Get smallest possible commit merged (fixing a typo, say).
* Improve or write documentation for the above three, for the benefit of future developers.
* Next smallest code change: improve code quality by adding a linter, or setup EditorConfig.
* Start work on a small, real feature or bug fix.
* Order (and expense!) books covering topics I don’t know enough about.
Logistics.
* Health and dental insurance.
* Retirement account.
* Bring relevant legal documentation first day (passport / birth certificate).
* Figure out best time to leave for work.
* Figure out bike parking.