Meeting everyone on a new team | Hacker News Reader

Meeting everyone on a new team

annashipman.co.uk

266 pointscraigkerstiens83 comments

I did something very similar when I joined my last team. I like Anna's questions. One of the questions I asked was 'who do you go to for advice and bouncing ideas off'. This gave me a great view of the key knowledge nexus points and how people are connected to each other in the team.

After I'd spoken to everyone, I created a report for the executive committee summarizing all topics that had come up multiple times, and highlighting individuals that were widely relied on.

Oh man, I love that “who do you go to for X?” question. I’m starting as an SWE on Monday, so that’s big on my mind.

what is SWE?

Software Engineer

More importantly, who do you ask “what is SWE” to?

Seriously in any big company who can you go to ask what acronym $TEXAS means is an important question.

seen this pattern work in two orgs - create an online dictionary through a chat bot interface for acronyms

/wtf

which of course stands for, What The deFine?

In the big company I work for there are several valiantly started and quickly forgotten TLA dictionaries available on various SharePoint sites. Yet none had the few critical ones people were using when I started. Wondered if the popular jargon changed or different groups had splintered their technical talk.

We even have an internal web app. After years, still new acronyms are added every day.

We even have an internal web app. After years, still new acronyms are added every day.

A previous employer had one of these. Submitting a new acronym required a change request and took several weeks to make onto the site. Needless to say, it was useless for its intended purpose.

The thing is every group exclusive TLAs from their local group, from their greater group, their company, their industry, etc. These acronyms can easily conflict and live very different lifespans, making a wide dictionary hard (except for identifying common ones, of course)

It's "Software Engineer" forced awkwardly into a TLA format.

And TLA?

Three Letter Acronym, presumably

> This is confidential. If you say something about someone else I’m not going to go and tell them.

Warning to all of you in non-managerial position: be very wary of confidentiality proclamations. It happened to me that my manager ran immediately to the CEO, when I said I'm going to start looking for a new job in 3-6 months time. I told him that I specifically don't want this information to leak, but yeah, everybody knew it by the next working day.

Lesson learned: never tell anything sensitive or important in your 1-on-1s with the manager. Except pleasantries, hobbies and other useless stuff.

Very true. For me saying this conversation is confidential has a negative connotation. It raises some flags like:

1. Are we going to talk about something which we can't broadly address? 2. How do I trust someone new on the team to actually keep things confidential, what have they done to earn my trust? 3. I'm going to be more guarded about what I say, because now I'm thinking this person will probably want to misconstrue what I'm saying to their benefit.

Talking about career conversations. I wouldn't tell anyone about my career plans until the day I have to. In my experience telling people early has no tangible benefit.

It's stupid in hindsight, but I just wanted to give him a chance to better prepare for me leaving, like start looking for new developer(s) or shift plans, etc.

I don’t think it’s stupid at all, it just shows you had a not so great manager. They could have used this information to start preparing without revealing the specifics. Unfortunately it’s these types of incidents that make people weary of engaging in this level of candidness.

At the company I just left, I felt extremely comfortable telling my direct manager I was interviewing. By the time I got an offer we had a plan in place for my departure.

It’s certainly a situation specific action, and it’s unfortunate that more managers aren’t equipped to handle this adequately.

> I don’t think it’s stupid at all, it just shows you had a not so great manager.

No, it was epically stupid. The manager was actually very good at their job for reporting that a key team member was planning on leaving and the process for replacement and knowledge transfer needed to begin ASAP.

What both you and the GP haven't figured out is your manager is not your friend, their duty is to the company and you can be friendly but you can't ever let yourself forget you're both their for a paycheck.

If either of you slip information to the other that jeopardizes that person's paycheck you've done them a disservice and force them to choose between financial stability and perceived loyalty to you.

The most pernicious propaganda I've seen in startups and small companies is that _we're a family_ and you can come to me at any time about anything. That's absolute dogshit and you need to put the coolaid down, family doesn't negotiate pay raises and equity, families don't quit or fire each other.

I disagree with almost everything you've said. That remark about financial stability is laughable at best.

Look, I don't have any problem with my coworker(s) being more loyal to the company than to me. I do have problem with lying, though. Lie to me once and I'll never want to deal with you again.

Another way to handle it might have been to say, "we need to improve cross-training on the team in case someone leaves". Let them figure out if the subtext themselves, if they manage.

Isn't what notice period in the contract is for? If you find something nicer, you give a notice and they can prepare your replacement. Why this additional weird dance?

That's an extended courtesy. As a manager, one needs to continuously be planning on how to not let all the tribal knowledge collect with a select few. Pairing people, coming up with processes for documentation and presentations, etc are part of being a successful manager.

would you say that you trusted your manager enough not say anything or were you just venting and maybe revealed too much?

For me, potential job changes is the only thing I will lie about to a current manager.

I appreciate that a manager might be concerned about losing staff but if half the team have gone due to very clear changes in the way things are run (dictated from above), why would I be any different?

I wasn't venting at all. I told him on purpose, so I could say that I trusted him enough. Obviously that trust was misplaced and we also didn't have a 1-on-1 again, I simply refused. What can they do? Fire me? Then didn't, but I left anyway in about 3 months' time.

Workplace these days is a minefield. If you have to talk to someone, only talk about what needs to be talked about and nothing more. Preferably also try to record every interaction or at least run a diary - location, time, who, few bullet points describing the encounter plus some additional facts - what was in the room? was there anyone else? how they looked like? in what manner the person talked to you? and so on. You will thank yourself later if it turns out you were working with a snake.

Yeah, this stinks. I've known a few people that got pregnant at 'the wrong time', and things could have gone a lot better.

From a managerial perspective, here is my issue: I want people to feel comfortable coming to me with issues and concerns. That is important in terms of doing good management. Yet if someone revealed something to me that is highly reportable, I may need to act on it. I'm primarily thinking HR issues, but can easily think of others.

One way to manage this is to have the casual conversation, and then in a separate 'official' conversation broach only that issue with the employee.

But yeah--highly recommend building relationships with managers before talking about career plans outside company. Career plans inside your company is a different deal. If you have a useful manager who actually is invested in the growth of the team, it is a great opportunity. (growth = expertise, not growth = number of direct reports)

I have done that in my previous two jobs. And I find it easier to do as soon as I join a new company than later. Once I get involved in projects it requires more effort to get the time. And to know everyone and their opinions is very important to get up to speed. The views of managers/product/developers/testers are not perfectly aligned. Also, it is a great opportunity to understand the views of the less vocal members of the teams. Finally, it is important to present yourself, so people have an easier time to rise any concerns when they arise.

Sadly, right now, I am technical leader for too many teams but once the situation is solved (we are hiring a new architect) my focus is on getting more regularly in contact with all teams and not just the ones working on the topics that require my attention. There are always small things that go unsaid unless done in a one on one.

One year later, I repeated - just for three teams - the ones on ones and asked for personal feedback and the general "Is there anything you think I should know about?" again. It was very insightful, and I was able to get more into the nuance of the people's views as I had more knowledge about the company.

I recommend, if you have the opportunity, to go to training on coaching. I got the training as a manager several years ago, and I found that type of training very useful for all positions and an important part missing in the software engineering curriculum. It is very difficult to help to solve technical problems without knowing the views of the people that would design and implement the details of the system. Spending time to create rapport it always pays off, and - for me - it is something fun to do.

That's a great piece, thanks for sharing!

Knowing that engineering teams are overloaded most of the time, I've got that question for first 1:1s: "If you have a week without having to closing tickets, what would you do for the project?" Those are not necessary an items for my to-do list, but clearly showing people's priorities and what they think is really important.

At a "lower" level, I've done something a bit along those lines when starting at my last job: I picked a bunch of people from each team at the company and reached out to them to schedule a one-on-one about them, the way they see things, their experience so far, their team, and a short introduction on my part.

It wasn't about trying to be ten steps ahead of anything or about taking any statement as absolute truth, but to understand different perspectives, to explain in quick and simple terms the reason why I had joined and in what ways I could help them, and to establish those contacts to facilitate future interactions. Every single discussion was worthwhile, because I understood a lot about the company really quickly (which helped me in my work) and every time an issue came up I could easily feel empowered to connect with those people and be put in touch with the right person, or to hear the non-official stuff that is sometimes harder to share across teams and therefore help the team with a little bit more personality than by slinging tickets across boards.

Assuming you're not working in a place with an overwhelming amount of psychopaths (which I assume is a reasonable goal for the majority of people), I would say that caring about other people does pay back quickly and significantly (as shallow as that might sound).

As a software developer, being introduced only to the managers and not the team as part of the interviewing process is one of the biggest red flags (except during social distancing times, of course). Picking up the vibe is an excellent way to know whether I'll be able to contribute as much as possible. It doesn't have to be time consuming at all; simply joining a standup should be plenty.

For example, are the tech lead and managers listeners or talkers? Do they solve problems, delegate them or ignore them? Is the team as a whole enthusiastic about the work? Are there rock stars, cowboys, social justice warriors, dominant/submissive personalities, blamers, micromanagers or virtue spiralists? A little bit of even several of these is probably inevitable in any team, but it's possible to take any one of these to a toxic level.

Don't know why this is being downvoted, its right on. I need to know I'm working for, but I also need to know who I'm working with.

Probably can't actually peg all potential problem team members, but getting a chance to do so is valuable and shows good will on the part of the employer.

I guess some people are upset at the characterisation of "social justice warriors" as a negative. Don't really want to get into the politics part - but that's kind of the point. There is a place for politics at work, when it can alleviate genuine suffering, but advertising which in-group you belong to isn't it. That goes for both sides of the political divide.

I would like to work with her.

I've had bosses occasionally call me in for these types of open questions. It's really useful. But there's also a bit of mystery to when it happens and why it is not equally distributed across the team. There's a bit of "teacher's pet" anxiety associated with it.

There's another thing that can happen in these confidential conversations which she was not in a position to do at this point... Sometimes the boss can explain the political landscape he/she finds themselves in, such that you can contribute better insights to help them protect your team.

Would a similar strategy be valuable for an IC (individual contributor) joining a new team? For example, setting up 1-on-1 meetings with direct teammates soon after joining.

Yes! This is what we do. We even explicitly typically put it in your 30 day plan.

> With a team of ~50, that’s a lot of hours, and I was also working four days a week so each meeting takes up a greater proportion of time.

At thirty minutes a pop these meetings come out to 25 hours. That does not strike me as “a lot of hours” given that this is talking to everyone who works in your department. Put another way is like a sanity check on the biggest and most important category of your department’s budget, at roughly 1% of your annual time.

At the exec level, a good 70-80% of your time is probably unable to budge, so 25 hours of discretionary time _is_ a big investment - probably most of your discretionary time for a calendar month. It sounds like it was well worth it though.

Uh, why would your time not budge? As I’ve become more senior I’ve also been left more and more alone to determine what is important to be doing at any given time.

As an executive, your calendar will fill up fast with meetings, planned and unplanned. 1:1’s with direct reports, 1:1 with your boss, your staff meeting, your boss’ staff meeting. Meetings to manage down, meetings to manage up. Meetings with product, meetings with sales, meetings with operations. Various steering committee meetings to move larger initiatives forward. Meetings with customers and prospective customers. Meetings that need your decision, your expertise, or need to bring you up to speed on evolving issues.

And many of these meetings need preparation in advance to be productive. So your time is quickly depleted. Many executives do their deep thinking in the early morning or on the weekends since their day is a day of interruptions.

At least that has been my experience in my last 3 roles.

I once worked with an exec who had an interesting solution to this: he accepted meetings of 30minutes max. Hard limit (which is a good idea regardless of length ofc).

He was quite senior, so most people wanted to meet him rather than vice versa, so he could 'afford it', which someone in a more junior position probably couldn't pull off.

These meeting were the most effective I've ever experienced. No smalltalk no beating around bushes, there's no time! Regularly I need to discuss 4 to 6 issues with him, which meant my prep needed to be perfect and laser focused. He would read your preparatory docs fortunately, I can't work without unprepared meetings either.

That works sometimes, but only if it makes sense for one side of the meeting spending the necessary time to make such a presentation. If the meeting takes 2x as long unprepared, but it took you longer to make materials it can be more of a toss up. I wouldn't look at such prep as the hallmark of a good meeting, but more as an adaptation to a particular constraint.

Of course, difficult to communicate ideas (such as in science) require preparation or they are unintelligible and the meetings are a waste of time.

No prep often means two things:

1) the meeting will be as fast as the slowest reader/understander. Personally I dislike having to wait until the meeting to learn about its content in depth. 2) No recall. Many people do not remember things that weren't written down. Good minutes may help, but given the effort investment I prefer good prep docs. More succinct.

Making good materials usually means you can reuse them, so in my experience that pays for itself.

"Preparation for meeting" and "presentation" are two different things. Preparation means you know what you want, you know what to say and that you dont use time during meeting to figure it out. It means we are all not waiting while you are struggling with words or go to tangents or are going through jira figuring out which issues are relevant.

It does nor have to be polished presentation.

Senior IC or senior manager side? IC you usually are left alone. Senior manager side and your times fills fast.

That said, the 1-1’s in the article are totally worth the time.

With remote working becoming so prevalent the thought has crossed my mind about what it might be like to start a new job without having much contact with most people who work there.

Seems like it would be harder to become friends with coworkers, or easy feel isolated in your work (particularly outside of software development).

My company is fully remote. I schedule a 30 minute 1:1 social call with a random colleague once a week. I find this is a good balance for me personally -- it ensures I get enough social contact (in addition to my other meetings and 1:1s with my managers) but it's not a huge chunk of my work week taken up.

On the calls we talk about random stuff like our hobbies, what's going on in our lives, what we did this week. Occasionally we talk a bit about work but we usually try to keep it as socially focused as possible.

I've found that it contrasts well with the typical situation of being in an office. In office I find there is continuous social interaction, but it can be more shallow (banter, quick chat, etc), whereas a 1:1 format like this allows you to develop a deeper connection with each person and have more nuanced discussions.

We do as well, we use a slack bot that pairs people that are member of a specific together every Monday.

I think it's this one <http://www.randomcoffees.com/>.

Perfect timing. I just joined a company this past week as a software engineer. Day one, I knew 5 people, only topically. By the end of week 1, I have introductions/1:1s scheduled for 30+ top-notch people at the organization. Here's the method I used to do this:

I created a really comprehensive intro email about myself (work stuff, personal stuff, passions, etc). I wrote this in Google Docs, so it would be easy to paste into Gmail, and preserve the nice formatting. In this email, I included several questions (see below), which I wanted to ask the person. I got these questions from a few sources, including "The first 90 Days" book, along with some other questions I found through Google. At the end of the email, I marked in bold: Suggest 3 other amazing people for me to connect to, and why you recommend them.

I sent the emails out, and got replies within 1-2 days - 75% provided me with 3 names! If some did not provide me with names, I politely followed up with warm, thankful email, but also a reminder to please send me name, which each of them did.

I then sent out "cold" emails to THOSE people, starting with "X person said to reach out you" (helping bring a familiar name immediately at the beginning of the email). I used the exact same email template for that, along with asking for more names.

I used a Google spreadsheet to keep track of all the people I reached out with, along with columns for questions, the people they referred, and who referred them.

At current, I have 15 1:1s scheduled for next week, and tentatively 5-10 scheduled for the week after. I'm using labels in Gmail to flag "@ Waiting" for the people who have not responded, so that I can follow up after a few days.

In the meeting invites I sent to folks, I included the agenda items in the description, so it was top-of-mind for them, as they checked their calendar.

I'm using a note taking tool called Obsidian (https://obsidian.md/) to take notes on all the conversations I'm having with people. This tool lets you write in markdown, and quickly crosslink topics (like a personal wiki). The goal is to create a knowledge base of information, based on all the "here's what you need to know" topics that people share with me.

Finally (and important). I made sure to set expectations with my manager before doing this. I basically told him: (1) I am going to setup conversations with many people this first 2 weeks of work. (2) I will use this output of these conversations to build a learning plan of topics which these people suggest focusing on, (3) I will then synthesize these notes, and will share them with you (manager). (4) You and I will review the learning plan, and prioritize it together. (5) We will use this plan, along with our weekly 1:1s to build out a 30/60/90 day plan.

This was important, because it allowed me to "buy time" before being thrown into a million meetings, assignments, etc. Each person I have spoken to so far has had different suggestions on what the first several things to focus on, learn, etc are. However, they have all been incredibly valuable - and in many cases, they are things I would not have immediately known to even list down.

The great part about this approach (in my opinion), is that all of the people I'm meeting are essentially pre-selected for awesomeness by someone awesome. All of the conversations have been enormously valuable.

The feedback I've gotten from the people has been really great, and validating!

Bonus: I have been using an app called UpHabit (https://uphabit.com/), which is a "Personal Relationship Manager". It lets you tag people (e.g. by skill, passion, etc), and then assign regular reminders to reach out to them (e.g. "connect with this person every 3 months"), and lets you take notes on the conversations you had. I have found this tool enormously valuable, as its allowed me to "scale" my personal network, and trust that important people don't get forgotten. I find myself a very LIFO person (the people I most recently connected with, I'll remember to connect with. The folks from long time ago, I often forget). This tool has been helping me re-invigorate my personal/professional relationships.

Note: I have no affiliation with either of the tool recommendations in this post, aside from finding them very useful!

Below are the questions I included in my intro email. If anyone would like to see the "full" email, I could probably generify it, and share directly.

--- Tell me about yourself! If you feel comfortable sharing, I’d love to hear what you are personally passionate about, and what topics, processes, areas etc you are passionate for at X.

What is your role & your responsibilities at X?

What’s a “day in the life” like for you? This helps build empathy and understanding for your world, and how I could best help.

What are your top 3 priorities in the next two months? What specifically are you hoping to achieve?

What do you feel are the top 3 challenges/blockers (1) facing X, (2) facing your team, (3) you professionally at X?

What is your understanding and expectations of me and my role?

How do you envision us working/partnering with one another?

If you were in my shoes, what would be the top 3 things you would prioritize, learn, or focus on in the next month or two?

For each of the above, what would be an actionable next step to make progress? (it could be as simple as, “reach out to X person”, or “read this blog post”)

What do you think would be some realistic, achievable and impactful “quick wins” or contributions I could make, for me to consider taking on as I get started at the company?

Very Important: Suggest 3 amazing people at X for me to reach out to, who you think connecting with and learning from would help make me successful in my journey at X. Be sure and tell me what about these people is so amazing & awesome!

Thank you for posting this! I'm going to be starting a new job sometime soon, and this is giving me all sorts of ideas! Especially thank you for being so comprehensive in your comment. Some questions:

What size is your company, and what level of SWE are you? Did your referrals tend to move up the org chart, or stay at the same level? Is your role very broad? I ask this last one because a question like "How do you envision us working/partnering with one another?" seems like something I would ask an immediate coworker, not necessarily someone two connections away. Are you a tech lead, or someone with reports (or some other position of authority?).

Finally, one of your questions contains what appears to be your company name, I don't know if it was intentional to leave that there, just letting you know.

+1 about the company name.

Thanks, no matter how many times you re-read, you always miss something!

The company is pretty big. Traditionally, the engineers have been contractors, but the company is now bringing more development in-house. As such, the teams are going to be growing quickly, and there is a lot of the engineer practice which is undefined. I'm newer to being a software engineer as my "day job" (my previous roles have been in product management, and a few customer-facing roles, like "pre-sales engineer").

The referrals seem to be all over the place! Since I interviewed with a few "levels" of people (engineer, product manager, engineer leadership), everyone has introduced me to a couple different "flavors" of who they consider great in the company. Different departments, titles. So far, they have all been really fun and interesting conversations - hasn't SEEMED to be a chore to folks, but I could be missing something.

"how to you envision us working together" - At the beginning of my personal intro email, I introduced my role and team/group. Since - in the end - its a technology role, I believe that everyone can envision how technology would make their life a little better. There's always something to be automated, an annoying process fixed. I write down the interesting questions people ask, and do my best to research them and follow up, or connect with someone who knows more than I do. Hoping it could help get their problem some attention, and I get to learn about "real" problems in the process.

While my role is not overly broad, I know that since we are planning to grow the team rapidly, there is expectation (I believe) to have an impact and to help scale/onboard the new team members. I am hoping to do a lot of this front-loading NOW, so when I inevitably need to help onboard a new engineer in a few months, I'll hopefully have a bunch of "you need to know this" info handy, and can help introduce them to people I found helpful when joining.

Did that fully answer your question? If not, pile on!

As this currently reads, this evokes intense feelings of vitriol at the mere hypothetical of a peer attempting to coerce me to engage in a pathologically transactional relationship I would want zero part of. In the most satisfying job roles, I would expect to endure hardship for the sake of others' success, and this would immediately put me on notice that such endurance would likely be wasteful and painful in its lack of reciprocal personal investment. It would also signal that engagement in technical subject matter was merely a means to an end rather than an inherent fascination, which would make me significantly less likely to feel comfortable sharing the war stories that drive the motivation behind the current state of the team.

Am I missing something here? The post itself comes across as in-good-faith, so I'm having a hard time reconciling...

It's certainly... a lot.

Kind of reminding me of a coworker who kept a secret tracker of everyone in the office's dogs and kids. She considered herself a networking genius, but imo it was kind of creepy.

Sounds like it wasn’t very secret...

Yeah, I’m just imagining receiving this demanding message out of the blue on a typical busy day from a new joiner in a different team.

Most of these questions seem more suited for your direct colleagues or team lead.

I think I might have replied politely, but also kept a mental note, "careful: possible insane colleague".

Those mental notes are helpful.

Yikes! Good to know that's how it comes across (a little too late!) . I'm a pretty friendly person "IRL" - sometimes it's tough to get your writing voice to sound close to your mental/speaking voice...

Look, first impressions can change, so probably no harm done. I think possibly this is a case of "trying too hard" out of sincerely good intentions. Just take it easy, try to earn people's attention and advice by finding ways to give to them first.

Thanks - appreciate it!

Wow, thanks for this comment. (as a quick aside, you have an incredible command of the language). A couple questions...

(1) "attempting to coerce", "pathologically transactional" - maybe it's tough to see it in my own writing, but that is definitely not what I'm intended. My goal was to actually build a mutually beneficial relationship with the people I reached out to. In previous jobs, I've always made lots of colleague friends, helped each other out in the workplace, and in many cases, became friends outside of the workplace. What language did I use which made it feel coercive or transactional? What would you have suggested instead (again, if you had followed this approach). If you had similar goals, what other approach would you try?

(2) "means to an end" vs "inherent fascination". I actually DO have a personal interest in how all the puzzle pieces fit together in an organization, and code-wise (system-wise?), I am more effective in my job when I have a good understanding of how things work under the hood (I learn a lot by "doing"). I suppose that one "means to an end" is "connect with someone I can learn from" - for this specific email/intro, I'm hoping to build some awesome colleague relationships as soon as I can. But it's less for "resource extraction" and more for developing good, mutually beneficial relationships with colleagues over the course of a career with intentionality. Again, is there different language or phrasing which would convey that better, and trigger less skepticism?

Again, thanks again for your insightful feedback. It stung the ego, but that's where the learning happens!

In fairness, a lot of what you described is probably what ambitious and extraverted hopeful executives are doing implicitly and instinctively in their heads. It's just that in the context of you being an engineer and "saying the quiet part out loud" (so to speak), it does come off as a bit overbearing and maybe mad-scientist.

I think it's possible for you to execute it well, but it will require real empathy for the people who are your "targets". It sounds like you are aware of that though, so good luck with the plan!

You joined as an engineer, not a manager. Why are you asking people how you can help with their challenges when it’s very unlikely you have the power to do so? I’d find this entire email process very bizarre, demanding and power-seeking (you want me to tell you who the bigshots are so you can meet them and what you should do to get promoted, and you’re pretending it’s for my benefit? Who are you trying to kid?). I’d certainly end up with a very negative view of you. Just so you know.

Thanks for responding, and for the feedback. I really appreciate it (hard to get a 3rd person perspective sometimes!) Some of what you have said is hard to hear because (from my viewpoint), the emails/intros are in good faith. For example, you say "big shots" / "power seeking" - certainly, in any organization, there are just some incredibly talented & experienced people, who are always down with providing useful knowledge, if folks just asked... wouldn't you want to connect to those people as soon as you can? Wouldn't you want to accelerate or own learning, or support someone else who wants to do that?

I've always loved having "context" about/around my job, and like getting to know co-workers outside of my team bubble.

Is there a better way I could have phrased some of the questions, the structure, or even the approach (to achieve the same objective of meeting the smart/helpful people & learning a lot).

Again, thanks again for sharing the critical feedback...

Sorry for the harsh feedback. As a new starter, I’d expect you to be making it clear how you’re useful to me - not the other way around! It seems fairly clear that your motives are self-directed (how can I connect to talented people? What can I learn? What should I be doing? I want context.) and that you believe you deserve other people’s time. Following up on people who don’t answer your cold emails is really quite pushy in that regard. Yes, you ask how you can help, but you’re still putting much of the burden of figuring out what you can do on the other person rather than figuring it out yourself.

I want to work with people on a project, not help people with their grand mission of self-improvement. One of the points in How to Win Friends is to truly consider and appeal to the other person’s interest. Do you think everyone you email is interested in you and wants to spend their time answering questions about how you should conduct your learning and career, essentially having an interview with you? (You might also want to consider how some people will feel if they know you’ve only selected “awesome” people to interrogate, and they weren’t on the list...)

I don’t think you have to stop doing this if it works for you, but I’d suggest at least letting people off the hook if they don’t reply!

Maybe I am too European for this, but I'd be very wary if I received such emails. I'd shrug and throw it in the bin. You come across as a try hard that is more concerned with "chit chatting" than performing actual work.

My 2 cents for starting a new job: shut up and work. Contribute, show what you can do. Teams are often overworked. Start closing tickets, making small improvements. Don't step on anyone's toes. Observe and contribute first.

For me it's a matter of introversion, it all sounds so tiresome and I would most likely ignore the email. At most I'd selectively answer a few things in email but decline any actual meeting. I'd probably bucket the sender as a promotion-seeking hustler I don't really want to work with, though all the best to them in achieving their more social oriented goals.

I share your opinion on a job being there to do actual work. Sometimes that work requires talking to other people (curiously though teams would rather have several long internal meetings arguing about something that could be decided with a couple conversations with customers), but this field needs less of that than others and in many ways suffers too much from over-chatting as it is, when many are just happy to have unnecessary meetings replaced by slightly less unnecessary emails. Even in the submission, the new technical director isn't expected to code. A lot of orgs work that way, after a certain point up the ladder you just stop coding but I think it's wrong. (I pushed back against getting myself promoted at my last job in large part because of that -- very few Principles coded at all, and our 'Architects' never coded. And that's on the tech tree side, the management side with all the decision power was obviously even more hopeless and detached from the way things were.)

Thanks for responding. For what it's worth, I did get a few people who did reply inline to the email, which I appreciated too. Honestly, the reason I even sent the "questions" ahead of time was so that the intro/1:1 would be a valuable use of time for both people (as we could prepare ahead of time). As I am re-reading the questions I sent, which part felt "social oriented goals"? Because that is definitely NOT what I am looking for. The goal is something like, "You've started a company before. You know it's tough getting started, as there is a flurry of information, activities, projects, etc. Help me out here, by giving some the context & direction you wish YOU had been given when starting here" (or something to that effect).

Would you have phrased something differently (assuming you'd send the email at all...)? Thanks again for the feedback. (It's tough to be on the receiving end of it). Learning a lot on this thread!

> which part felt "social oriented goals"?

Every part, especially the gestalt of all the parts together. Your entire outlook expressed by your post and your replies to me and others here makes you come across as a person with a "socially oriented goals" mindset. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, perhaps it's even a very good thing once all the trade-offs are considered, but to me it's something I don't typically get along with (there are always exceptions). The aspect of it that most turns me off is a sense that you're a people-person (validation and enjoyment comes much more from people than things, you value impact over creation/discovery) who also will use people for self-serving ends and in the context of work perhaps at the cost of doing your best work.

Don't take this as harsh criticism -- we all are self-serving in various ways, many ways are innocent (I get it, some people really like socializing and talking to as many people as possible), and we use various means including sometimes other people to get our kicks. That's all usually fine, there's plenty of room in the industry for many kinds of people, even those who don't naturally get along well with each other or have much in common in shared interests or philosophies -- professionalism lets us build things together anyway. My negative reaction is 1) first impression based without getting to know you and 2) colored as a matter of introversion and other personality traits and my own feelings about programming. Neither one is going to be "correct".

There's also some dependence on the kind of company we're talking about. From my understanding Facebook puts new hires into a generic pool for a while and the newbies sort of have to find their own way to a team. Your approach would make more sense there. Reading your reply on the type of company you found yourself in also seems like this approach could be more appropriate, though still one I wouldn't take (especially the chumming-up bits) because again it's tiresome, presumably not much related to why I was hired, I don't want to unnecessarily take up others' time, and I would probably think such info gathering (especially the mass synthesis) a lot lower-value than many other things I could be doing as a newbie... Other companies though will hire you onto a specific team to do somewhat specific things, and in that case many of your questions are sort of nonsensical. (e.g. how do you envision us working together -- if you're on a totally unrelated team in a different department, honestly I don't have a vision, because both of our teams' roadmaps are likely fixed for the foreseeable future and being unrelated now aren't a priori likely to become related later. Perhaps as I get to know you we find a common interest to do a hackday together on, but this is not something I can envision from just meeting you. Create/join some interest groups and maybe we'll find each other more organically, there's no need to optimize for this sort of relationship building now and in any case I'm here primarily to work.)

Another comment had the reaction of "who is this, someone trying to be a manager?" but I would sooner see it, in the context of my previous company, as "where is this person's manager or mentor?" I would not have sent such an email. Instead, I would direct some questions to my manager/mentor/direct team members (and in written form they can be answered in kind, no need for a meeting), and in a way that doesn't require them to spend much time on me. I'd also have an expectation that a lot of that would be answered by them for me ahead of time before I have to ask, as part of their responsibilities to new hires. Depending on the company much can be looked up on your own time, I'd reserve meetings for things that benefit from synchronous interactivity. For other questions I would have asked or inferred before even taking the job.

The first team I joined at my last job had a nice process for new members that would satisfy your goal of improving the onboarding experience. There was a short 1-2 page onboarding doc that acted as a checklist of things to do, not so well advertised policies to take advantage of (e.g. home internet reimbursement), groups/chat channels to join, links to things you should read... the newest person who joined the team was responsible for going through the doc and if needed adding/editing/updating anything they discovered was useful over their first month, without turning it into a long doc, and making sure the next new person sees the doc and understands their responsibility. My final team didn't have that, though by then the company-wide onboarding material wasn't so bad so we could just link to that. For more team-specific stuff there was a master README linking to everything of importance across a handful of hosts, but in my own reaching out to newer people on our team or sister teams to see how things were going I'd frequently find no one had sent it to them yet. So to be sure, sometimes the self-directed requests for guidance and other things you're doing is needed, even when you have a reasonable expectation that someone is looking out for you. When you're pinging tens of people about this stuff though, I think there's more going on in your motivations than just improving your own and perhaps others' future onboarding. Maybe you'll join me in adding http://elephantinthebrain.com/ to the reading list queue in order to better notice or think about those things...

Thanks! The book looks interesting, thanks for the recommendation. This stuff is right up my alley right now.

Thanks - good to know this perspective! My goal was to front-load as much information as I could to the first 1-2 weeks of works so that I could quickly GET to work (and working on the right things), and get as much culture/context about the organization I have joined. In the past, when I've joined an organization, there is a burst of "meet a few people" exchanges (where you build out a small network of people who can help you learn, get unblocked), but quickly diving into work... when I'd actually hoped to get some whiteboard sessions, code reviews, "explain how this system really works" conversations in before diving in. Again, thanks for sharing your feedback.

I work remotely, where most of my team doesn't (well, didn't before Covid). I took the habit of initiating conversations with new employees, remotely or whenever I visit the office. It doesn't take much but it's worth it. It brings more trust and ease up future relations. Surprisingly, I've noticed some people can be isolated from their colleagues even when sharing the same office.

In my time of bouncing between jobs and meeting new teams on a regular basis I found that the biggest hurdle for me was remembering where everyone sat in the org. So I made a little app to keep track of this (Collaborative Groups)

good article and agree that continued 1:1s with a team of 60 wouldn’t be worth it. i’d switch to a group meeting format or have 1:1s with key leads

Why is this blog called JFDI? What does it stand for?

Just fucking do it?

> When I joined the Financial Times as Technical Director for FT.com, I inherited a team of around 50 engineers. One of the first things I did was meet each of them for a one-to-one. I was initially resistant, but it was extremely valuable, I’m glad I did it, and I would definitely do it again in a future role.

I recently joined a startup, and I am glad I did not meet everyone (except learned a lot of faces in video meetings) because of COVID-19. More precisely, the second wave has been officially recognized by the government last week. Remote working is the status quo, and it will remain that way. Not my preference, normally, but it'll remain this way for the time being. Perhaps an interesting article in 2021.

You can do this remotely.

If in a historic remote team or now, I still encourage this practice.

why were you resistant at first?

The &gt in the first paragraph means they're quoting the article.

They joined FT in 2018 from what I can tell, so meeting everyone would have been entirely normal. In a remote working model, you could obviously do it over VC.

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