Every month, either at the beginning or end of the month.
30 minutes.
- Fill out the (internal) employee survey (Gallup Q12) to assess my engagement at work
- Review what was planned for the month
- Provide feedback related to the plan
- Review yearly plan and align
- Plan next month
The onboarding process described here is specific to a software engineer joining a tech company. While some/most of the items may still apply to any job where you mainly work from a computer, the assumption will be that you develop software as an individual contributor.
- Setup laptop
- Access to slack
- Access to zoom
- Setup calendar reminders
- Initial meeting with buddy
- Access to git central repository
- Installation of development tools/languages
- Request software licenses
- Access to CI/CD
- Find where task management is done
- Find the documentation to build projects
- Connect 1 on 1 with each member of the team
- Meet with manager 1 on 1
- Define a 30-60-90 days plan with manager
- Verify access to various systems (SSO, code repository, insurance company, payroll company, etc.)
- End of week meeting with buddy
- Setup and run the one step build process
- Determine how are features/tasks prioritized, who prioritizes features/tasks
- Review the team documentation
- Review team practices/processes documentation (code style, code review, standups, planning, retrospective, demos)
- Review common vocabulary, terminology, glossary documents
- First PR + code review
- Review the career ladder of the position
- Review user definition, use cases, requirements
- Read prior team meetings notes
- Identify how deployments are done
- Review the team roadmap
- Determine where I can have the biggest impact
- Determine a timeline where I'll have reached my 80/20 at the company
- Determine the maturity of existing projects
- Determine how fast can we iterate on certain aspects given the team/company composition
- Identify the core/principal/staff contributors and their contributions
- Review the architecture of the system
- Review the database architecture
- Learn about "how we got to this point"
- Determine whether the product is a monolith or micro-services
- Identify which (3rd party) tools are used by the team/company
- Determine the portfolio of STARS situations of the team/company
- Determine a rough estimate of the number of people in the different organizations
- Connect 1 on 1 with important collaborator in other teams
- End of first month meeting with buddy
- First month performance review with manager
- Informal 360-degree review with manager and peers on adaptation
- Month 1 job satisfaction review
- Team interaction diagram
- Month 2 job satisfaction review
- Month 3 job satisfaction review
- Write/prepare an agenda listing the items to be discussed
- Indicate the duration and responsible/lead of each
- Aim for a meeting to last under an hour. If more time appears to be required, then prior work should be done in order to reduce the amount of time necessary for the meeting.
- Define the list of invitees, try to keep it short, possibly under 6 people
- Share the agenda with all the attendees
- Schedule the meeting around boundaries (beginning/end of day, before/after lunch)
- Present the agenda
- Designate a person that will make sure that the agenda is respected
- Determine next actions
- Define deadlines for each next action
- Assign a responsible for each next action
- Create tasks in a task tracking system for the next actions
- In the case where a recurrent meeting needs to be scheduled at a different time than usual, specify in the body of the message the reason of the change.
25
May
2019
Working in a software company
History / Edit / PDF / EPUB / BIB / 1 min read (~48 words)- Always prioritize your work
- Always work on something that is a task in a task tracking system
- You should always be able to tell someone else what task you are working on and link them to that task
- Always provide an agenda when you book meetings with others