Joining a new company
If you’re reading this, you are likely in one of the following scenarios:
- you’re considering applying for one of our open roles 🤔
- you’re currently interviewing with us 👩💻
- you’ve accepted an offer at Signal AI 🙌
Let’s face it, joining a new company can be a daunting experience 🤯. You’re abruptly thrown into the whole induction process, which includes meeting a lot of new people, potentially adjusting to a different commute and scrambling to gain the context that everyone else seems to have, and you don’t.
But the number one question most of us have in the back of our minds is…
What the heck am I expected to do or even deliver during my probation❓
So… we’ve decided to give you a glimpse 👀 into a major chunk of our onboarding document to help clarify that question. Hopefully, if you were in one of those three scenarios we mentioned above, you’ll feel way more comfortable after reading it. Seriously, that’s our aim. 🎯
First Days 👋
Your first few days will be focused on getting comfortable with everything, getting your laptop set up, getting access to all the stuff you’ll need and most importantly meeting your team.
Shortly after you arrive you’ll spend some time with our IT department who will finish setting up your laptop with you. Shortly after that, you’ll meet someone from the SRE team who will set you up with access to AWS and Github.
Your manager will be there for you starting day 1, they’ll be supporting you and helping you navigate 🗺️, so expect to meet them early on and please do ask them for anything you might need 🙋♀️.
Our expectation during this period is that you have your local development environment fully set up and are fully enabled to start making small contributions to our codebases.
First Weeks 📆
Throughout your first few weeks, there will be a mix of company onboarding sessions, usually between 15:00 and 17:00. These should already be on your calendar.
You’ll also spend several mornings shadowing teams other than your own. This involves typically meeting the teams where they’ll provide an overview of their technology and codebases 👩💻. These shadowing sessions will start appearing on your calendar soon. Whilst the calendar invites are usually scheduled for a whole day, they’re often finished by lunchtime, but YMMV ⏱️.
By the end of your first couple of weeks here, your calendar should have settled down enough for you and your manager to pick a date & time for a weekly 1-1.
Our expectation during this period is that you are broadly familiar with your team’s key responsibilities/domain, have a grasp on the main areas of your team’s ownership from an architectural perspective and can start contributing to more complex features.
First Months 📋
Periodically over the first couple of months, your manager will schedule a sync-up to see how you’re settling in. Your manager will also gather feedback from the teams you’ve shadowed, and you’ll go through that feedback together.
Assuming all goes well, there will be a final check-in at the end of your third month. Before that, your manager will gather feedback from your teammates and other people you’ve worked with in your first 3 months, and process that with you.
Our expectation during this period is that you are now comfortable using our internal tooling and monitoring systems, that you broadly understand the services, and storage mechanisms and can navigate the codebases that your team owns. We would also expect you to start contributing to team planning sessions and the various other team ceremonies at this stage.
End of probation 🙌
Your probation period ends at 3 months. Wow, you did it!! 🥳
Now that you’ve acquainted yourself with your team’s mission, and areas of ownership and are fully enabled to contribute code changes to production, we would expect that you are now comfortable with things like the alert management process, and infrastructure and you understand the team’s domain and responsibilities. We’d imagine that you’re now acquainted with the goals/milestones/outcomes and know what your team hopes to deliver now, next, later and are actively participating in the planning of current and future outcomes.