Ninety days
What You Are Actually Judged On
The standard you are assessed against in a first quarter is almost never written down, and asking for it directly is both allowed and rare.
What the people on this page had to find out, and where from
What your manager actually wants from you
you asked8Asked directly in week eight, and the answer was two sentences
That your probation review happens in week twelve
written down1In the contract, and read once you went looking
two things you had to know · nobody told you any of them · the median arrived in week 8 · all two you went and got
Two standards that applied to the whole quarter. One was asked for in week eight and could have been asked in week two.
A useful onboarding review separates time spent learning from time spent blocked, so teams can review the complete platform overview and discuss the pattern with the employee rather than relying on impressions.
New employees and managers can compare this approach with guidance available from General Assembly.
Five standards that applied to you, and where each was written down
That you should be asking fewer questions by month three
worked out9Nowhere; inferred, and probably not even true
That the team values things being finished over things being clever
worked out6Nowhere; worked out from which pull requests got praised
That the quarterly objectives in the system are not what anybody uses
told7Said in passing by a colleague, with some embarrassment
That your probation review happens in week twelve
written down1In the contract, and read once you went looking
What your manager actually wants from you
you asked8Asked directly in week eight, and the answer was two sentences
five things you had to know · one of them somebody told you · the median arrived in week 7 · the other four you went and got
Five standards, and the probation date was the only one written down anywhere. Two were inferred, which is a polite word for guessed. The one that was asked about took two sentences to answer and could have been asked in week two. One person's own twelve weeks.
You are being assessed. The standard is not written down, and the formal objectives in whatever system exists are frequently not the standard anybody is using.
This is not deception. Most managers have a clear sense of what they want from a new person and have never articulated it, because nobody has asked.
What the standard usually is
In a first quarter, for most roles, some version of four things.
Are you getting on with it? Can you be given something and have it come back without three check-ins.
Do you ask well? Fewer questions over time, and better ones. The direction matters more than the number.
Do you say things? When something is wrong, when an estimate changes, when you are stuck. The expensive new person is the quiet one.
Are you pleasant to deal with? Unmeasured, unstated, and the first thing anybody will actually say about you when asked.
Notice that none of these is about the quality of your output, which in a first quarter is not yet informative.
What the formal objectives are for
Sometimes they are real. Frequently they are a thing that was written at the start of a quarter because the system required it, and nobody has looked at them since.
You can find out which in one question:
How much do the objectives in the system matter? I want to make sure I am working on what you actually need rather than what is written down.
Managers answer this honestly, often with relief. If the answer is "they are what we are measured on", that is important. If it is "do not worry about those", that is more important, because it means the real standard is somewhere else and you now need to ask what it is.
Asking for the real standard
Week three is about right. Not week one, when nobody has a view of you yet, and not month three, when the question arrives too late to act on.
What would make you think, at the end of my first three months, that this had gone well? I am not fishing — I would just rather aim at the right thing.
Two sentences. The second one is doing work: it removes the reading in which you are asking for reassurance.
In the panel above, that question was asked in week eight and answered in two sentences. The honest note attached is that it could have been asked in week two and the answer would have been the same.
What to do with the answer
Write it down, verbatim, with the date.
Three months later you will have a conversation about how it went, and having the original standard in the words it was given to you in is worth a great deal — not as a defence, but because it lets the conversation be about the actual thing rather than about two people's recollections.
| What to record | Why |
|---|---|
| Their words, not your summary | Summaries drift towards what you wanted to hear |
| The date | Standards change and nobody announces it |
| Anything they said was not important | The permissions are as useful as the requirements |
The standard that is never stated
That you will be asking fewer questions by month three.
Almost nobody says this and almost everybody believes it. It is also not quite true: what people actually expect is that you stop asking the same kind of question, not that you stop asking.
The practical consequence is worth getting right. Continuing to ask about new areas in month four is fine and expected. Continuing to ask, in month four, where the staging password lives is not — and the difference is entirely addressed by writing down the answers, which is a note of its own earlier in this collection.
When the standard changes
It will, once, somewhere around month three, and nobody will tell you.
The standard for a new person is about learning and asking. The standard for somebody three months in is about delivering, and the transition between them is not announced because it does not feel like a change to anybody who has always been there.
The signal is usually small: a piece of work given to you with no explanation of context, or a question answered with "what do you think?" rather than an answer.
Both of those are promotions of a kind. The right response to either is to take the decision and say what you decided, which is the note on questions that are really decisions, arriving at the moment it starts to matter.