The first week

Nobody Can See You

The ordinary mechanism by which a new person gets unstuck is somebody noticing, and remotely there is nothing to notice.

What the people on this page had to find out, and where from

What you had to knowWhere it came fromWeek

Which of the two deploy guides is current

worked out6

Decided by checking which matched the scripts

That nobody reads the team channel after 15:00

worked out7

Learned from two unanswered afternoons

You worked it out alone: 2

two things you had to know · nobody told you any of them · the median arrived in week 7 · all two you went and got

Two things nobody told anybody, learned by noticing. Both were visible in week one and neither was legible until much later.

Home / The first week

Reference

To keep remote-work decisions transparent, teams can visit the product website and agree together how the resulting information will be used during onboarding and review.

A useful independent source for this stage of work is Levels.fyi.

The first week, measured in hours of sitting still

What you were stuck onHours before you askedCost

The staging database would not take your password

3 hanswer: 4 min

You waited because you could not tell whose job it was. In an office somebody would have asked what you were frowning at

The test suite failed only on your machine

6 hanswer: 12 min

You waited because you assumed it was something you had done wrong. Nobody saw the same error on the same screen for most of a day

You could not find the deploy runbook

1.5 hanswer: 2 min

You waited because it felt like something you were supposed to know already. Nobody walked past

You did not know which branch to start from

4 hanswer: 2 min

You waited because everybody else seemed busy. Everybody looked busy because everybody is a small green dot

Hours you sat on it before askingWhat the answer itself took, once asked

four occasions · 14.5 hours spent stuck · 20 minutes of answers · the longest single wait was 6 hours

Fourteen and a half hours of a first week, and twenty minutes of answers. In a room every one of these would have been interrupted by somebody noticing. Nothing here was anybody's unkindness; there was simply nothing to notice. One person's own first week.

In an office, somebody would have looked over at some point in those three hours and asked what you were stuck on.

Not out of kindness particularly. Because you were visible, and a person frowning at the same screen for an afternoon is a thing a room notices without anybody deciding to.

That mechanism is simply absent. It is the central fact of joining remotely and almost nothing else in this collection matters as much.

What is actually missing

Four things, and none of them is a benefit anybody ever listed.

Being seen struggling. The main way new people get unstuck in an office, and it requires nobody to ask for help.

Overhearing. Half of what you learn in a first month in a room arrives from conversations you were not part of. Remotely there are no such conversations; the equivalent would be reading every message in every channel, which nobody does.

Reading the room. Who defers to whom, who is tired of what, which topics make people go quiet. In a grid of faces, almost none of this transmits.

Being interruptible. In a room, a colleague who finishes a task glances up and notices you. On a screen you are a name in a list, indistinguishable from a name in a list who is perfectly fine.

What this does not mean

It does not mean remote onboarding is worse, and it does not mean your colleagues are neglecting you.

They are not neglecting you. From where they sit you are a small green dot that has been green all morning, which is exactly what a person who is getting on fine looks like. There is no signal to miss, and so there is nothing for anybody to have missed.

Understanding this properly changes what you do, because it moves the problem from "why is nobody helping me" to "nobody can see me, so I will have to say".

The replacement

What replaces being noticed is saying, and saying earlier than feels comfortable.

That is the whole argument of this site. Everything else — the twenty-minute rule, asking in public, saying what you have already tried — is machinery for making it cheap enough that you will actually do it.

The first week's arithmetic

Fourteen and a half hours in the panel above, against twenty minutes of answers.

That ratio is not unusual and it is not a story about inefficiency. It is what happens when the ordinary mechanism is absent and nothing has replaced it yet. Every one of those four occasions ended the moment somebody was asked.

What to do about it this week

Three things, none of which requires anybody else to change anything.

Say out loud, once a day, what you are working on. One line in the team channel. Not a status report — a sentence.
When you get stuck, start a timer. Twenty minutes, then ask.
At the end of each day, write down what you did not understand.

The first of these is the one that does the most and feels the strangest. "Spending this morning trying to get the staging database working" is a sentence that costs you eight seconds, and it is the only way anybody finds out you have been on it since nine.

The thing that makes it hard

Not ignorance of any of the above. Almost everybody joining remotely works it out within a fortnight.

What makes it hard is that saying you are stuck feels like an admission, and it feels like one precisely because nobody can see that everybody else is also stuck several times a day. In a room you would have watched three people get stuck before lunch. Remotely you watch nobody get stuck, ever, and you draw the obvious and entirely wrong conclusion.

What replaces overhearing

Nothing, entirely. Two things get part of the way.

Reading the channels. Not your own team's only — the ones for the systems you touch. Fifteen minutes a day of scrolling back through conversations you are not part of is the nearest available thing to sitting in a room, and it is the only way most of the ambient knowledge in a remote organisation moves at all.

Being on calls you do not need to be on. Where it is acceptable, and it usually is for a new person, sitting quietly on a call about something adjacent teaches you more in forty minutes than a week of documentation.

Both of these have a cost in time and both are worth paying for about two months, after which the return drops sharply.

Neither replaces the thing that is actually missing, which is somebody noticing that you have been stuck since ten.

Also in your first weeks