Before you start
What Not to Do With the Gap
The weeks before a first day can be spent badly in three specific ways, and all three feel productive at the time.
What the people on this page had to find out, and where from
Which repository is the real one
you asked1Four days of reading the wrong one first
The holiday booking process
written down1The one thing properly documented
That your manager prefers a written update on Mondays
told3Said in passing, in week three
three things you had to know · one of them somebody told you · the median arrived in week 1 · the other two you went and got
Three of the things this page is about. Two of the three were answerable in a message sent the week before you started.
When a new employee is learning an unfamiliar workflow, team performance data with Monitask can show where time is going before a manager assumes that a slow start is an effort problem.
For a separate career or employment reference, consult edX.
The people somebody met before starting, and what each introduction was worth
Introduced, and never needed · 2
- Two people from the wider team, on a welcome call — met in before you started
- A recruiter who stayed in touch — met in before you started
Introduced, and needed · 2
- Your own manager — met in before you started; needed in week 1
- The person who would be showing you the system — met in before you started; needed in week 2
Needed, and never introduced · 2
- The person who runs the release — needed in week 2. Found by reading the channel history
- Whoever owns the billing dashboard — needed in week 3. Found by asking in a channel and waiting two days
six people · four you were introduced to · four you actually needed · two you had to find yourself
Four introductions before the first day, of which two were useful. The two people who mattered most in the first month were not introduced by anybody and had to be found. One person's own twelve weeks.
There are three ways to spend the weeks before starting that feel productive and are not. They are worth naming, because each of them is a reasonable instinct taken too far.
Learning the job
You cannot. You have no access, no context and no work, and what you produce by trying is a set of confident wrong ideas that take a month to unlearn.
Reading the public surface for an hour is useful. Working through a textbook on the company's technology for a fortnight is not: you will learn it faster and better in week two with a real problem in front of you, and the fortnight spent beforehand buys almost nothing.
The exception is a genuine, nameable gap — a tool you have never used that the role obviously requires. A few hours on that is sensible. The test is whether you could say in one sentence what you are trying to be able to do.
Being conspicuously keen
Messages to your new team before you start, offers to join calls, a request for reading material followed by a request for more.
This is read as eagerness for about one message and as pressure thereafter. The people receiving it have jobs, and your start date is a thing in their calendar rather than a thing on their mind.
One message, asking practical questions, is right. A thread is not.
Worrying
By volume this is what the gap is mostly spent on, and it is the one nobody admits to.
The specific shape is worth naming because it is so common: a slowly growing conviction that you will be found out, built out of nothing, in a month with no information in it. It arrives particularly hard for people joining remotely, because there is no building to walk into and no ordinary human contact to interrupt it.
Two things help, and neither is reassurance.
The first is doing the practical preparation, because a laptop ordered and a first morning confirmed occupy the same part of the mind that the worry does.
The second is remembering what the first month is actually for, which is covered in the section on the first ninety days. Nobody expects output. They expect you to turn up, ask things and gradually stop asking the same ones.
The introductions that are worth taking
If your manager offers a call before you start, take it. If they offer to introduce you to the person who will show you the system, take that too.
Other introductions are usually hospitality rather than use. A welcome call with four people from the wider team is pleasant and you will not remember any of it, and the panel above shows the usual pattern: the people who turn out to matter in the first month are not the people anybody thinks to introduce.
That is not a criticism of whoever arranged the calls. It is a fact about organisations: the person who introduces you knows their own part of it, and the parts you will need are somewhere else.
The one thing worth doing that nobody suggests
Write down, before you start, what you expect the job to be.
A page. What you think you will spend your days doing, what you think will be hard, what you think the team is like, and what you are worried about.
You will be wrong about most of it. The page costs ten minutes and it is the only record that will exist of what you could see before the place became normal to you, which turns out to be the most valuable thing a new person has and the thing they lose first.
Three questions people ask themselves instead
The month before starting is mostly spent on these, and all three have the same answer.
- Am I going to be able to do this job?
- Did I make a mistake leaving the last one?
- Should I be preparing more than I am?
The answer to all three is that you cannot know yet, and that nothing available to you this month will tell you. They are not questions; they are the shape anxiety takes when it has a month and no information.
What does help is doing the small practical things — the message, the hour of reading, the page of expectations — because they occupy the same attention and produce something.
What does not help is more preparation, which is the same anxiety wearing a respectable coat, and which is how people arrive at their first day already tired.