About this site
Fifty notes for somebody who has just joined a company remotely, written for the person joining rather than for the people who hired them.
What it covers
The weeks between a signed offer and a first day, which belong to nobody and are almost never used. A first week in which nobody can see you, and the habits that have to replace being noticed. Building your own map of who is who, since the chart you are shown is not one. Asking — what a question costs, who pays it, and why the instinct not to bother people runs the wrong way. The first piece of work, which teaches you the organisation rather than the subject. And the first ninety days, including the window in which you can still see the place clearly.
The argument running through it
The ordinary mechanism by which a new person gets unstuck is somebody noticing. Remotely there is nothing to notice: a person who has been staring at the same screen since ten looks identical to a person who is getting on fine.
Nothing has replaced that mechanism, so it has to be replaced deliberately, by the person it is happening to. Everything in this collection is machinery for making that cheap enough to actually do.
What it is not
It is not advice to employers. There is a great deal of writing about how to onboard people well and almost none of it is addressed to the person being onboarded, which is the gap this fills. Nothing here requires a process to change, a mentor to be assigned or a meeting to be moved, because the person it is written for cannot arrange any of those.
It is not about any particular industry. The examples come from software and the structure is the same for anybody joining a team they cannot walk into.
It is not advice about any particular job. Every figure used here is one person's record of their own first twelve weeks, kept at the time and labelled as such on the page where it appears. No benchmark is offered and none is implied.
It is also not legal or employment advice. What a probation period means, what an employer may require of somebody, how work is assessed and what may be expected of a particular role all differ by jurisdiction and by contract, and they change. Those are questions for somebody qualified in the place concerned.