My New Job Checklist

I recently completed the first week at my second job as a mobile software engineer. The feelings of excitement and nervousness were expected but I even felt a bit confident. Even though it was a new company and a new engineering level, it felt familiar. I had subconsciously been going through a checklist on how to navigate.

These are some of the items on my checklist that I have follow when starting a new job as a software engineer.

Fresh Start ☀️

• Like going to school for the first time, going to a new job is a clean slate to be the best version myself.
• I show up early. It’s drilled in my head that being on time is considered late.
• I made the mistake of not being as involved in communities at my last job and joined as many groups as I could as soon as I got slack access.

Meet The Team 🤝

• An awkward standup intro is the bare minimum.
• During standup, I mention that I would be reaching out to schedule a brief 1:1 with all the team members. This helps breaks the ice and let them know that I want to be someone they can go to for questions.
• After these 1:1’s, slack messages, and daily stand ups my goal is to not feel not like another zoom square on a screen but a contributing member of the team.

Manager Expectations 📝

• I try to setup a 1:1 with my manager ASAP.
• I ask for their expectations of me now and for the next 30 days.
• There’s a plentiful amount of HR literature that will consume most of my time so the expectation is to get through it but now my manager knows I am ready to hit the ground running.
• A 3 month probation period is common and I use to stress about just getting fired but I never realized that this goes both ways. I focus on do I like working here and does the culture suit me.

Dev Environment 💻

• Contributing to a new codebase can be overwhelming. Green flags of a good company are plenty of internal documentation, encouragement of questions and channels for help, and understanding that it will take time for me to get comfortable with the codebase.
• The dev environment and tech stack varies from company to company so I focus more on where to ask for help and if this documentation is up to date or not.
• As a native iOS developer I know I will be using Xcode and a Mac so I always import over a couple things:

Xcode Snippets

 ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/UserData/CodeSnippets

Xcode Key Bindings

~/Library/Developer/Xcode/UserData/KeyBindings

The Whole UserData Enchilada

~/Library/Developer/Xcode/UserData

• I created a repo on my personal Github to easily access the defaults from my work computer.

Cheers on the new job.