On Becoming Competitive When Joining a New Company

Metadata

• Author: ludwigabap.com
• Full Title: On Becoming Competitive When Joining a New Company
• Category: #articles
• Summary: When joining a new company, I quickly learn systems, ship work fast, and pour extra time into everything. I build relationships with key people to gain trust, knowledge, and agency. That trust lets me work on important projects and rise to a top engineer role.
• URL: https://ludwigabap.com/posts/On becoming competitive when joining a new company

Highlights

• When you join a new job, the shorter your “onboarding” / the period where you lack the capacity to deliver high-quality code at speed, the better your “onboarding” is going imo. (View Highlight)
• I spend ages in the codebases, mapping systems and their relationships out, where the data is stored, where does it go, who transforms it, why do we do this at all, etc… going up and down the stack. I try and devour PRs, observe how things get done, how problems get approached and solved and just trust my brain will absorb the patterns. (View Highlight)
  • Note: When starting a job, diving deep and absorb everything
• Anything that I believe to be low-signal, I ignore and treat as a magical blackbox, trying to keep my focus on only the most important subcomponents I have to deal with for that specific task. End-to-end understanding will “come over time” and “through repetition”. (View Highlight)
• Who are the 20% guys doing the 80% that matters?1i.e Pareto Principle ↩ This is usually a month+ long process which is almost entirely vibes-based. (View Highlight)
• Once I have a solid list, I try to get closer. I join the same channels, I read every message they post, I stalk their PRs, I try to map out in which spaces they move, what people they interact with etc. I’ll even look up their Slack, Jira and git history to get some vague lines of the main large projects they worked on and the texture of their expertise. (View Highlight)
  • Note: When joining a new job, get close to the wizards, observe them, and understand how they work
• I make lists obsessively: of both people and their skills or even their personal traits, scratching down every thought I have and making sure to feed my brain with as much data as possible so my intuition and soft-skills have something to go on. (View Highlight)
  • Note: When joining a job, make a personal CRM of all the people at the company you could interact with