What New Twitter Employees Do For The First Week

What New Twitter Employees Do For The First Week(quora.com)

164 points by RBr 15 years ago | 66 comments

phaedrus 15 years ago |

My "new hire" treatment as government contractor was so bad I almost quit. Even though it's a huge organization there's no process at all in place; you're just thrown to the wolves. Basic things like where and how to get my security badge and car tags were not covered. I was not given any input about what was expected of me, but I found out about things I was supposed to do only when I was getting yelled at for not having them done. Everyone I work with are of the baby boomer generation, while I am a millennial, and instead of mentoring me they excluded me. Often I would get in trouble for missing meetings because the location of the meeting was spread by word of mouth but no one would come by and tell me. My first project was to port some code written by a much older engineer, but this engineer believed that he had job security if he were the only one who knew the system. Our boss told him "You WILL let him shadow you and read your code," and he shot back, "He will NOT shadow me and he will not see my code!" For the first few weeks, the only copy I had of the code I was supposed to port, I got from snooping in his trash when he threw away a CD (old hacker trick :) ).

Things got better eventually but it was definitely the worst way to treat a new hire.

lsc 15 years ago | |

Huh. I had a government job in highschool; I went to a poor school with a big 'occupational program' where you get one or two periods off and some school credit to go to work, you know, to help the kids who are thinking of dropping out get a diploma. It was pretty sad because there were mandatory class days where they showed you videos about how to be a better retail employee; I can still tell you the steps they taught us to spot short-change scams and shoplifters. It's sad because they could have just as easily spent some time talking about various trades one could learn by becoming an apprentice. I had a job at the local computer repair shop the summer before[1] where I obtained some contacts, so I became the IT guy for the local county health department.

It was a really great experience for me. I was about 16, and I think 40 was pretty young for the office. I don't know if I got much by way of mentoring as an IT guy (well, later on they hired another guy who was way better than I was and I did get some mentoring, but for most of the time I was there it was me and the office manager, who probably knew less than I did about most computer things) but there was a lot of /very important/ social mentoring I got. I learned how to (at least kind of) act like an adult, or at least how to interact with adults in a healthy manner. On a social level, the semi-technical guy who hired me was one of the best people managers I've worked for.

I think it was an all around win/win; I got treated like a human being (which feels /incredibly special/ to a high school kid.) and I learned how to more productively deal with less-technical adults, and I got out of some school. They got a reasonably skilled IT monkey for minimum wage.

After I got out of high school, of course, it was .com time, and I have not had reason to look back at government work since, just because I don't value stability that much and there's little chance I'd have the patience to wait it out long enough to get the pension. I still look back somewhat fondly on my time working for the state. (Or rather, the county.)

[1] my stepmother made me quit that job 'cause they had no workman's comp and I was being "exploited" for slightly under minimum wage. I was 15! it was far less dangerous than anything else a kid that age might reasonably do for fun, and they gave me discounts on used computer parts for the next three years, so I thought it was great. Anyhow, it worked out okay, but it's another side to "exploitation"

ry0ohki 15 years ago | |

Contractors are the lowest scum in the pond in the Government (they all know your making twice what they do). "Real Employees" get treated a little better, but you'll often find the same indifference.

pluies 15 years ago | |

I work in a French administration. We have a special day, the "journée des nouveaux arrivants" ("newcomers' day") for new hires, where we are taught the history of the service and learn about the different departments. The only problem is, since there are few new hires and organizing it requires the animators to be here, that this event takes place about twice a year.

I was lucky, my manager thought about it and managed to get me to do it after a bit less than a year. Some people have been working here for years without the "new hire day" (in all fairness you don't learn a lot of practical things, but still...).

macov 15 years ago | |

Gov jobs are great! When I was a contrator I saw ladies browsing internet, playing computer games (like Sims), streaming video. It was fun!

georgieporgie 15 years ago | |

I did some work for the government while in college. While I'm glad I did it, as it gave me a purpose and venue for my essentially self-taught advanced coding, I would never do it again.

Splines 15 years ago | | |

I did work for the city gov't too while in college. It was a strange experience, being the only computer intern working for the Dept. of Agriculture, giving my end-of-summer presentation about JS and Access forms to a room full of other students who spent the summer hiking around farm fields taking measurements.

klbarry 15 years ago | |

Wow, how strange.

ck2 15 years ago |

How can over 100 people be needed for basically a scaled blog system that consists only of 140 character titles (not even any article content) and RSS feeds? It doesn't even have a search feature (past the previous week) or html, or tags, etc.

Doesn't WordPress.com do it with like a dozen people and their system is way, way, way more complex?

update: no, wait, in December 2010 they announced it's over 350 people now

http://blog.twitter.com/2010/12/stocking-stuffer.html

What on earth are they all doing?

aditya 15 years ago |

Quite a contrast from the purported Honda "onboarding" process (or lack thereof). They basically let you figure out where you'd be most useful, and no one really tells you what to do. It seems to scale well, I suppose.

A funny thing happened on the way to the solution. Try and picture this. On my first day of work, no one told me what to do. On the second day, the same thing happened, and on the third. That’s as much as I could take. I decided to meet with everyone I was coming in contact with to find out more about their individual talents and personalities, and to find out what was going on. Before I knew it, I was developing a picture of how things really were, and who needed what, and I became creatively involved in defining my own participation in relation to the skills I could bring to the table. In the process of doing this, I had complete access to everyone in the company, from other newlings to the President. Nothing but open cubicles no higher than 3 1/2 feet. I was allowed to learn, interact, and find solutions to every problem and need I recognized. I always found something important to do, and it became natural to provide effective solutions as needed. I am not a very unique individual, but I am effective because I am allowed to be. I also know it may be different for some people, experiencing this kind of freedom. I know that some people are petrified by this kind of freedom, and equate it to abandonment, and it drives them crazy not knowing what to do. I also know that even under the best of circumstances, people become sedate sometimes and settle in to patterns of repetition for false comfort. The answer, then, is to have them all switch places every few years, no matter how well they may be doing their job, because it is just as important to let everyone see their own position from someone else’s position. It also allows for the surprise of finding how much fun change can be when your creativity meets a new challenge. See what you end up with. It’s either this, or that.

More here: http://aditya.sublucid.com/2008/11/20/let-your-employees-fig...

wildmXranat 15 years ago |

My first software dev job entailed building and configuring a LAMP stack. It wasn't much to deal with: some perl, some bash, some administration, IP filtering, code deployment, the basics.

On my first day, the person responsible for the project went on vacation and for next 10 business days, I was told to do research. That's about it. It was the oddest startup experience I have ever had. Other members of the group, asked me questions about how everything was going, but couldn't answer any of mine. So I indeed did research.

pavel_lishin 15 years ago |

Seems like kind of an overwhelming amount of attention.

robryan 15 years ago | |

Many people would muddle there way through things trying to work stuff out that would be easily explained to them. If no one has engaged the person to explain it to them, they will assume that they should just know it and be afraid to ask. This ensures everyone gets up to speed early, probably looks like a lot of time spent at the time but probably saves a lot of time down the track.

flashgordon 15 years ago |

for some reason this feels a bit skimpy on the details compared to the "first month at facebook" (or may be 6 weeks) item that came about a few weeks ago...

dustineichler 15 years ago |

What does the engineering onboarding involve?

x5315 15 years ago | |

Talks about the codebase, about the system as a whole, also about specific sub-systems, about how to think through some things and, maybe, about recent design decisions.