On your first day at a company, you’re welcomed into a new team with new people, new culture, new technologies, and new code. Getting familiar with the novelty can be overwhelming. If this new job is also remote, you’ll be faced with additional challenges. Where those lunches and runs for coffee in the office presented opportunities to get to know your coworkers, these opportunities aren’t available; they need to be created.
It’s important for companies to set up their new employees for long-term success. By creating a place of psychological safety, and acclimating them into company culture, new employees can prosper and feel fulfilled in their new role.
At Meroxa, we onboard engineers by presenting them with a clear plan, the freedom to complete each task in their preferred timezone and working hours, and establishing a strong focus on pairing.
Let’s dive deeper into what your onboarding experience could look like at Meroxa.
Before Day 1
Your onboarding process starts before your first day.
Before you start, we’ll ask you to complete a questionnaire. We want to know your laptop preferences, logistical details, and more about you!
Once we receive your response, we’ll:
- Assign you an onboarding buddy.
- Create accounts and send out invites for necessary engineering and operations tooling.
- Provide you access to your company email, including calendar invites for the people you’ll meet on your first day!
- Ship you a personalized care package. We always try to find a mix of things with a personal touch and a few new things to explore! Everyone gets a set of common presents (it’ll be a surprise!), but I also got a tiramisu (my favorite dessert!) from a local bakery and an at-home ceramics kit!
- Send out a laptop from your selection of Macbooks to Linux machines.
By tackling these tasks ahead of time, we ensure that you’re not left alone, or lost during your first day.
Day 1
On your first day, the operations team will welcome you with a personalized scrum board full of your onboarding tasks for the month. They’ll walk through your onboarding document (found in the scrum board) that will familiarize you with external services (both operations and engineering related), instruct you on how to download engineering tools, and guide you through the setup of our end-to-end dev environment locally.
Next, you’ll meet your onboarding buddy! For the smoothest experience, we try to ensure your buddy:
- Lives in a timezone at, or close to yours
- Is part of your new team, or is knowledgeable in your new domain of work
- Can create a safe and comfortable space for you to ask for help or ask any questions that may arise
Your onboarding buddy is a guide and your primary point of contact as you come up to speed on all things Meroxa.
As people start their work days, the #general slack channel comes alive with different pings from your new coworkers welcoming you to the team. This will be the perfect opportunity to greet them, and join the myriad hobby slack channels: #cutebeasts, #art, #games, #women_at_meroxa, #home-improvement, #food, and plenty more!
Week 1
During your first week, you and your manager will set up the cadence and structure of your 1-on-1s. Your first couple of sessions are the perfect time to discuss and document your goals for the first 30/60/90 days, and align your yearly goals to Meroxa’s company values.
Daily check-ins with your onboarding buddy are a time to get insights on the structure of specific repositories, more info on the engineering lifecycle, and help setting up your tools and permissions if you need them.
The product team will give you a tour of our product offerings, and you’ll be meeting with other engineers for the architectural overview.
By the end of the week, you should have a clearer understanding of how everything works together, and will hopefully be ready to build your first Turbine application! Turbine is a data application framework for building server-side applications that are event-driven, respond to data in real-time, and scale using cloud-native best practices. To get started with Turbine, check out our getting started guide!
Month 1
Most of our backend components are written in Go, and our front end is JavaScript and Ember. If you are unfamiliar with any of the languages you’ll be working with this is your time to learn! The yearly educational fund should supply the right books and courses to suit your needs. We have slack channels for a variety of topics other people are learning, and you’re encouraged to join the discussion! Joining those channels provides you with a good opportunity to connect with other learners about the same topic, and a curated list of resources people previously used in their learning journey.
Soon enough, you’ll be ready for your first ticket. Your onboarding buddy will encourage you to pair with them on this task. Once the ticket is complete, you will receive a detailed and prompt Pull Request review. Pull Requests are a great opportunity to further your knowledge about our components and best practices. Take the time to learn by observing and reviewing other PRs as well. Know that a PR’s intention should be clear, even when someone new is looking in, so if you don’t understand something, ask as a comment in the PR! If you need more help, ask your onboarding buddy to be there to review PRs with you.
One of your tasks for the month is to pair at least five times with different team members. As intimidating as that might seem, it’s intended to give you a friendly introduction to our components, introduce you to more people on the team, and get accustomed to pairing when you are stuck.
Another onboarding task will be to schedule 1-on-1s with people across the organization. This is a time to connect on mutual interests, and better understand their work domain.
Feedback
Our onboarding process is never complete; it is an iterative process that should always be made better for the next person. If you experience setbacks or tension at any point during onboarding, make a ticket outlining your desired changes, and if you’re up for it, tackle it!
If you’re interested in Meroxa and would like to experience our onboarding process firsthand, check out our openings! Can’t wait to have our first pairing session! :)
