The first week
Reading Before Asking
Twenty minutes of searching before a question turns a twenty-minute answer into a four-minute one, and the skill is knowing what is findable.
What the people on this page had to find out, and where from
Which of the two deploy guides is current
worked out6Decided by checking which matched the scripts
That nobody reads the team channel after 15:00
worked out7Learned from two unanswered afternoons
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.
Remote onboarding becomes easier to improve when questions are supported by evidence; teams can review this solution for a practical reference on time, activity, projects, and reports.
New employees and managers can compare this approach with guidance available from Salary.com.
Six things that were already written down, and how long each took to find
Where the on-call rota lives
written down2In the handbook; found by searching for a word you guessed at
How expenses are claimed
written down4Three searches, because the document calls them something else
The holiday booking process
written down1Linked from the induction, and read
Which of two deploy guides is current
worked out6Both documents existed; neither said which was current
How to get a staging database password
you asked2Written nowhere, and the answer was one sentence
Why the retry limit is three
you asked9Written nowhere, and in one person's head
six things you had to know · nobody told you any of them · the median arrived in week 4 · all six you went and got
Three of these six were written down and findable, one was written down twice and contradicted itself, and two existed only in somebody's head. The useful skill is telling which kind you are facing before you spend an afternoon on it. One person's own twelve weeks.
Look before you ask. Not for long — twenty minutes — and not out of politeness.
The reason is that a question asked after searching is a different question. It is narrower, it names what has already been ruled out, and it takes the person answering a quarter of the time.
Where to look, in order
The place things are kept. Whatever handbook, wiki or drive the company uses. Search it two or three times with different words, because the thing you call expenses they call reimbursements.
The team's own chat history. The most underused resource available to a new person. Somebody has hit this before and asked about it, and the answer is sitting in a channel from eighteen months ago.
The work itself. How is this done elsewhere in the code, the files, the records? A convention you can see three examples of is a convention, and you no longer need to ask.
The person who last touched it. Not a search, and it is the last step before asking in public: the history of a file or a document names somebody, and that somebody is a better recipient than a channel.
Knowing what is findable
The skill that actually saves time is not searching. It is recognising, within a few minutes, which of three kinds of thing you are looking for.
| Kind | How it behaves | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Written down and findable | One or two searches find it | Keep looking, briefly |
| Written down and wrong or doubled | You find two answers that disagree | Stop; this needs a person |
| Never written down | Nothing, anywhere, in any wording | Stop immediately and ask |
The second and third are where the time goes. In the panel above, one item was documented twice with no indication of which was current, and two existed only in somebody's head — and between them they account for most of the hours.
Three searches with genuinely different words and no trace of anything is enough to conclude it is not written down. Keep looking past that and you are not searching, you are hoping.
What searching buys you in the question
The question that follows twenty minutes of looking has a shape:
Where does the on-call rota live? I have searched the handbook for "on-call", "rota" and "schedule" and the channel back to the summer, and I can see it referred to but not linked.
That tells the reader it is not in the obvious place, saves them repeating your search, and makes it easy for somebody who knows to simply paste a link.
Compare it with "where is the on-call rota?", which invites the reply "it is in the handbook", which you have already read.
Do not over-apply this
There is a failure mode in the other direction and it is the one this whole site is about.
Reading before asking is a twenty-minute discipline. It is not a reason to spend a morning, and it is not a standard you should hold yourself to for anything where somebody is waiting on you.
If the thing is blocking you, if it is access, or if you have searched three ways and found nothing, the reading is over. Ask.
The by-product
Searching for an answer and failing tells you something worth writing down: that this is not documented.
Keep those. They are the best candidates for the first genuinely useful thing you will contribute, which is covered in the section on your first work. Nobody else in the organisation can see that this is undocumented, because everybody else already knows it.
Searching somebody else's vocabulary
The commonest reason a search fails is that you are using your own words.
What you call expenses they call reimbursements. What you call the staging database they call the integration environment. What you call the rota they call the schedule, or the roster, or on-call.
Three tactics, in order of how often they work:
- Search for the error message itself, verbatim, rather than a description of it.
- Search the channel rather than the documentation; people use ordinary words in chat.
- Find one document about the area and steal its vocabulary, then search again with those words.
The third is the one that most often turns a failed search into a successful one, and it takes about two minutes. It is also how you acquire the vocabulary itself, which is half of what a first month is for.