Ask HN: Onboarding remotely as an employee during Covid-19

2 points by asdfgeoff 6 years ago | 1 comment

I will be joining a large tech company in a data scientist role next week. Due to the ongoing COVID-19 lockdown, the entire company is working remotely for the foreseeable future.

Does anyone have any advice or acquired wisdom related to onboarding remotely as an employee? Most HN threads on the topic of remote onboarding approach it from the employer's perspective (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16978946), and so many of the suggestions—such as having good READMEs, etc.—are not really actionable as an individual employee being onboarded.

Last time I joined a company, I initially under-invested in building the informal relationships and social ties which prove to be valuable in the long-run. I am particularly interested in strategies to build relationships in a purely remote setting, which poses the additional challenges of awkward Zoom meetings, and lack of opportunities to build rapport in-person or engage in spontaneous interactions (grabbing lunch with someone you meet in the hallway, etc.)

papaf 6 years ago |

I have onboarded new project members remotely for the last few years and so I can try to answer this question by explaining what kinds of behaviour I think are helpful:

- Ask for help whenever you are blocked. People do this face to face but are less likely to do it when remote.

- Before you start working on something, talk through your approach with someone. When remote, it is easy to go off on a tangent and nobody notices for days.

- Take the time to do some smalltalk (the social thing, not the computer language) as part of more formal one on ones. Its another one of these behaviours that occurs naturally in an office but less when remote.

- Most of your visible impact will be things like Jira tickets, documentation, text chats -- take care and go the extra mile with these e.g with formatting, diagrams and clarity.

Good luck!