Notes on starting a new job
Starting my new job at GitLab has me reflecting on the ups and downs of new beginnings!
A new start is a daunting thing.
Imagine you’ve just moved house: suddenly you realise you don’t know where the stopcock is and panic that your kids are going to flood the bathroom while you run around fruitlessly yelling “WHERE IS IT”.
The first time you greet your new next door neighbour, they call you Mark instead of Matt, and you pause a fraction of a second too long while debating correcting them. Too late: you’ll need to answer to a different name for the rest of your time there.
The parking situation is new and mildly challenging: suddenly you have to parallel park on the street again for the first time in years while your new neighbours watch through their living room blinds. One of them sarcastically shouts “good job, Mark!” when you eventually nail it.
These first impressions, settling-in periods and panicky moments of uncertainty don’t come too often in life, but when they do, they can be intense.
Back on the job
This week I started a new job. When I sat down at the keyboard on Monday morning, I reflected that it was the first time since November that I’ve logged on for a day of paid employment. There’s a certain level of “background pressure” there already: can I still remember how to do this? How can I impress the people who hired me so they don’t regret their decision? How can I make sure people like me?
The last time I did this, it was September 2020 and the world had been plunged into lockdown. First impressions were unclear: I didn’t meet a colleague or see inside an office until the following year. People were scared, damaged, uncertain: I don’t think too many people were particularly bothered about the new guy who was sporting a “covid haircut” (eg. none) for the first few months.
This time, though, I’ve joined an organisation who have thought about this stuff an incredible amount. I’ve begun a new role at GitLab, my first proper tech company role. GitLab are famous for being one of the largest all-remote companies in the world, and they’ve literally written the book on remote/asynchronous working. It turns out that they’ve also done an incredible amount of thinking about the challenges of new starts, and done their best to make it easy.
For one thing, I couldn’t start on a Tuesday. The company has a structured, documented Onboarding process for all new joiners, where each day in your first week is planned thematically. If I missed Monday, the carefully-scheduled introduction process would be chaotic and wrong. And as anyone who’s ever started a job knows, your first day (at least) is almost completely spent logging into things, setting passwords, configuring software and installing stuff. I couldn’t afford to spend Tuesday—”Our Values and ways of working”—asking IT to reset my password.
If you didn’t document it, did it really happen?
The company is “Handbook-first”. This means that for every question, process, tool or cultural value the organisation has, there’s a document which answers, explains, contextualises and publicises it. Honestly, go and read it. This is basically what I’ve spent this week doing. It’s mildly overwhelming, a bit like someone giving you a link to Wikipedia and saying “go read this for a week”. Soon you’re falling down rabbit holes and before you know it, you’re midway through the article on the United States Olympic mixed doubles curling trials and asking yourself, well, how did I get here?
So what I’m saying is: it’s been a lot. But in a great way. I’ve spent an entire day reading about the company’s Values. I know that most non-trivial organisations have these things now and like to talk about them during recruitment (and occasionally when a new head of HR joins). But having spent a week not only reading about them, but interacting with some of the thousands of team members who use them, I can already see people take this stuff seriously – and reference it, daily.
Without wanting this post to sound like it’s sponsored by my new employer, it’s making everywhere else I’ve ever worked look a little bit silly and misguided in comparison. Other organisations have a kind of “implied” culture: much like the British constitution, it’s unwritten. This means you have to spend a long time acclimatising to the actual values and mores of the organisation, pick up on the people and politics and “read the room” until you get a true sense of the place. Of course my new gig is going to have those elements too, but by making every new hire spend detailed time reading about this stuff before they so much as write an email or join a meeting, there’s a huge effort being made here to help you get through that difficult “new start” period with grace. I’m super impressed.
So I’m sitting here at the end of my first week and still thinking about first impressions. It hasn’t all been smooth sailing: one British-focused Slack channel had a jokey poll about the best type of pancakes on my second day and I may well have alienated myself from all my fellow Brits by choosing for “thick” pancakes over French/crepe-style. (My rationale: these kind of pancakes allow you to cook 4 or 5 at a time, which is an important delivery metric when you’re serving hungry kids). And I know I’ll look back at this period and reflect on relationships I started and introductions I made with both pride and cringe. But that’s life. And right now, I’m feeling pretty happy about it.
Mini-feels this week
Yet more costumes
Last week was my son’s first week back at school after the holidays and we inexplicably had to dress him up as “a country” for one day. I attempted to make him resemble the Portuguese flag, and went about my day.
Yesterday, though, was World Book Day, so once again, out come the costumes: except this time, school have asked for kids to dress as “their favourite word”. What was Ted’s? “Rockstar”.
After fighting it for a while, I gave up and resigned myself to making a cardboard guitar the morning before school, roping him into helping me colour it in. (my own pride and vanity as a longtime guitarist meant I couldn’t allow him to go to school with one he made solely by himself: if he got the number of strings wrong, I’d have to hand my instruments back to their manufacturers).
I even let him put gel in his hair for the day, like a true rockstar.
You can imagine my frustration and confusion, then, when we received an email from school this week telling us that next week, we need to dress the kids in a third costume: something “maths-related”, for next Friday’s Pi Day. Does anyone know where I can buy an algebra costume?