Many developers find onboarding experience worrisome. Here are 6 helpful tips to make your onboarding experience a pleasant one:
Ask for a project-specific tech stack and look for stuff that you might not be familiar with. One month is enough to cover the basics of anything you didn’t learn at University or have no prior experience on and will save you lots of time (and stress) once your job or internship starts.
Don’t be embarrassed about asking for help. To get where they are now, your teammates had to go through the onboarding process and all the stuff you’re facing now. Define when you should ask for help with your team. You’ll run into obstacles every day. Some might take 30 minutes to solve, and others might take forever. Find a balance - You don’t want to interrupt the whole team every 30 minutes, but don’t let one problem turn your job/internship into an unpleasant experience.
Most likely, you won’t be micromanaged, but it’s a good idea to keep everybody updated on your progress. Doing this, your team might offer some useful advice based on your progress or prepare you for upcoming obstacles in the task. If something isn’t right, don’t be silent. Your teammates aren’t wizards, and they can’t read your mind. If something is bothering you, you’re stuck or not comfortable doing something - Just talk! Everybody is willing to help, but you need to let them know first.
Practice rubber duck debugging. You don’t want to schedule a 30-minute meeting with your team and 2 minutes into explaining the problem you get to the aha! moment where you figure out the solution to the problem. In a nutshell, before asking for help, try to explain the problem you’re having to a random object. Most of the time, during this process, you’ll get new ideas and solve a problem by yourself without needing somebody’s help.
If time allows it, plan virtual pair-programming sessions with your teammates. Once a week, pick a short task and try to solve it together. Doing this, you will pick up domain-specific knowledge faster, learn how to navigate new codebase efficiently, and improve your problem-solving skills.
Socialize with other team members on Slack channels like #random and #watercooler. Just because you’re new to the team doesn’t mean you shouldn’t participate in casual conversations with other employees. They are social beings too and are probably looking forward to getting to know better new colleagues.