First work
Choosing What to Work On First
Three sources will tell you what is worth doing in your first fortnight, and only one of them is your manager.
What the people on this page had to find out, and where from
That the test suite takes forty minutes
worked out3Nobody mentions this until you are waiting for it
That deployment happens on Tuesdays and Thursdays
told3Volunteered by a reviewer who assumed you knew
two things you had to know · one of them somebody told you · the median arrived in week 3 · the other one you went and got
Two things learned from one small piece of work, neither of which would have come from any amount of reading.
Before adding another mandatory check-in, it helps to learn about the available tools and see whether the real issue is unclear ownership, missing access, or an overloaded first-week schedule.
New employees and managers can compare this approach with guidance available from StepStone.
Who had an opinion about what you should do first, and whether you asked them
Introduced, and needed · 4
- Your own manager — met in before you started; needed in week 1
- The colleague two years in — met in week 1; needed in week 2. Noticed from who answered in the channel
- The person who showed you the system — met in before you started; needed in week 2
- The designer on the adjacent product — met in week 2; needed in week 6
Needed, and never introduced · 2
- Whoever is currently on call — needed in week 3. Found by looking at the rota
- The person who runs the release — needed in week 2. Found by reading the channel history
six people · four you were introduced to · six you actually needed · two you had to find yourself
Six people and three worth asking. The one who turned out to know best was the colleague with no formal role in it at all. One person's own first month.
Your manager will give you something to do, and it is worth taking. It is not the only source and often not the best one.
The three sources
Your manager. The authoritative source on priority, and the one to go to when the question is "should I spend my time on this?" Their list is usually a little abstract, because they are thinking about the quarter rather than about your Tuesday.
The colleague two years in. The best source for what is actually outstanding. They know the four small things that have been annoying everybody for months and that nobody has had a free afternoon for.
Is there anything small that has been bothering you for a while that nobody has got to?
That question, asked of the right person, produces a better first task than any formal process.
Yourself. The things that did not work when you tried to use them. Covered in the next note, and it is the one source nobody else has access to.
The test for a first task
Four criteria, and a task that fails any of them is a poor first choice even if it is useful.
It should finish inside a week. It should be something somebody will notice is done. It should have a precedent you can copy. And it should be reversible.
The third one is worth stressing. Having an existing example of the same kind of change is worth more in week two than any amount of explanation, because it answers a dozen small questions about convention that you would otherwise ask one at a time.
What to avoid
| Tempting | Why it is a poor first task |
|---|---|
| The thing everybody says is a mess | You cannot yet see why it is that way |
| A big refactor | No end, no feedback, no learning about the process |
| Something nobody has asked for | Finished, it produces a conversation rather than thanks |
| The hardest thing available | You are not being tested; nobody is watching that closely |
The last row is worth saying plainly, because a certain kind of new person reaches for the hardest available task in order to establish themselves. It does not work. What establishes you is a sequence of small things finished, and the first one arriving in week three rather than week seven.
Saying what you are going to do
Whatever you pick, say so before you start, in one line.
I am going to spend tomorrow fixing the setup instructions — there are two dead steps in them and I have just been through it. Shout if there is something more useful.
This takes twelve seconds and it does three jobs. It gets you corrected early if it was the wrong thing. It tells somebody who cannot see you what you are doing with your Wednesday. And it means that when it is finished, somebody is expecting it.
The person nobody asks
In the panel above, the one person who was not asked and should have been was whoever happened to be on call.
They know what is actually breaking this week, which is a different and more current list than anybody else has. A new person asking "what has been annoying you this week?" of whoever is on call gets a specific, immediate, genuinely useful answer about half the time.
When you are given nothing
Which happens, and it usually means your manager is busy rather than that there is nothing.
Do not wait more than two days. Pick something from the third source — something that did not work when you tried it — do it, and say what you did. Nobody has ever objected to a new person fixing the setup instructions, and it converts an awkward silence into a small contribution.
Two weeks is the limit
If you have not finished something by the end of the second week, pick something yourself and do it.
This is not impatience. It is that the cost of a first month with nothing finished falls almost entirely on you: it is harder to ask for work in week five than in week two, the impressions described later in this collection form in the meantime, and the unease of having produced nothing compounds in a way that is difficult to describe to anybody who has not sat through it.
Fixing the setup instructions is always available, always welcome, and takes a day. It is not the most interesting thing you will do and it is a perfectly good answer to the question of what you did in your first fortnight.