Your first 30 days as a developer

Good job ! You’ve successfully gone through all the steps in the recruitment process of your new company and the challenge & environment they offer closely match what you were looking for in in a new career. In an ideal world, you would start your new job and hardly look back at your decision. However, it’s well known and documented that the recruiting process is not an exact science: it’s impossible to get an accurate picture on either sides after spending so little time together. I think it’s important to consider the first few weeks of your new mission as an extension of the recruitment process. Not only should you continue evaluating the company but it’s important to show them that they also made the right choice. Let’s find out how you can do that.

Assessing the environment

Evaluating this new job opportunity doesn’t stop after you sign your work contract. You should use the first weeks to continue reflecting on your decision. There is not a fixed number of days to keep in mind here, but I believe that you should have a strong opinion after the 30 days or so as to whether the company & mission really fit your expectations.

So, what can you do during the first month? Every dev has their own motivation when joining a company but there are some base things to check & experience to help forge that opinion :

Understand how the company & your team work and the purpose behind this organisation

Before starting the first day, you should already have a good idea of what the company is doing but now is when you should dig into the details: how your company (and your own team) fulfills its mission, how it’s structured and organized, what it values and what it doesn’t etc. The idea here is to make sure that you’ve joined an environment in which the way the work is done motivates you. There is a good chance you will learn about all these topics if the company provides a solid onboarding process. Depending on the company, the onboarding process could vary a lot: some are well-oiled machines and others won’t have even set up a computer by time you join them. So stay observant and try to find the blind spots.

Experience the complete software lifecycle for a piece of functionality

As a software engineer, you’ll spend a good part of your work doing the same kind of activities and doing the same working loops. The sooner you will be able to experience these loops, the better you will be able to evaluate how efficient and pleasant they are. How are new initiatives decided? How are they planned? Specified? Coded? Deployed? How much time does it take for each step? Of course, I’m not saying that you should re-consider your new job every time you encounter something unpleasant. My point is that it’s fundamental to understand the complete lifecycle of a work development because you will spend most of your time there.

Prioritize evaluating what you value the most

There are so many things to learn about an organization and every developer has their own motivation when joining a company. Like in the recruitment process, prioritize what you value the most and make sure to find the various ways to acknowledge them. If you value working on complex topics, check if some of them are being currently tackled and try to give an opinion on them (or at least understand them). If you value high-quality work, observe the processes, the practices, and the codebase that should highlight that.

Around the 30 days mark, you should now have a strong opinion, so share them with your manager. If they are positive, it will increase the confidence between your manager & yourself. If they are mitigated and you haven’t shared your feeling until now, don’t wait anymore to talk about it.

The first 30 days are not only about you

Hopefully, you did a great job assessing all of that during your first few weeks and you’re even more confident that you’ve found an enriching environment 👍 However, don’t forget the company needs to continue evaluating its choice as well. Again, not every company will address it the same way. Being proactive and influencing their assessment will pay dividends.

Discuss with your manager what success will look like & have regular feedback on it

It might look strange reading this, especially if you’ve never had any issue after joining a new company, but your ideal first 30 days might not correspond to your manager’s expectation. The company and your new manager have a specific context, a history, a culture that shape how they will assess your first weeks. Maybe they’ve just had a previous bad experience with a developer and they’ll be particularly attentive to a detail that you’re not aware of. Maybe you have a different perception of how fast you’re supposed to ramp up, how quickly you’re expected to deliver the first bits of work, etc…

Discussing with your manager how they believe constitutes a successful first 30 days (or the entire trial period) is actually the only way to make it happen. Write these expectations and objectives and make sure you regularly check on how they’re going.

Use the skills & behaviors you showcased during the hiring process

Depending on the hiring process, you might have been asked to do some work samples, pair on a piece of code, or even write code on a whiteboard 😭. Finding the right format and relevant questions and spending the right amount of time on highlighting your skills or interesting aspects of your personality is not an easy task. But now that you’ve joined the company, there are a lot more opportunities and time to do that! Know your strength and try to find some activities or events where it’s relevant to put them into practice. If writing documentation is something you excel at, I’m sure there are some parts of the system that are not documented yet and that were waiting for you 😉. Use these opportunities to reinforce what you put forward during the hiring steps.

Conclusion

My point is that you should be deliberate in the way you approach your first days and weeks and see it as a continuity of the hiring process. Starting a new mission has many challenges. With the excitement, the information density, the knowledge to be acquired, the relationships to build, it’s pretty easy to have its head in the handlebars and forget there is still a lot of things to assess at your arrival, on your side but also on the company’s.

Interested to start a new challenge at Shipup ? We’re hiring! Check out our job openings at careers.shipup.co