My onboarding experience in a remote world

I joined Anaconda in September 2021. During the pandemic, although I got used to working in a remote work setup, starting a new job in a remote first setup was difficult.

The difference

During my time at Curalie, ~1 year was spent in pandemic and remote setup. Things were direct and it was a smooth transition, mostly because I knew the team, I knew the product, I knew the company.

At Anaconda, I didn’t know my team, I didn’t know the product, I didn’t know the company.

Onboarding was not only about getting the job done, but it also involved dealing with the online fatigue, and timezone differences.

I wished to see people and interact with them in real life!

What did I do

We do have a good 30-6-90 day RAMP plan and I used this as an opportunity to understand my primary priorities.

My top priority was getting the EM’s job done.

Since I was new at the company, I also used the time to interact with colleagues on slack, participate in initiatives that were not directly related to my team and get to know other teams and people too.

Ask questions

Apart from the remote-first setup, joining Anaconda to me was coming to a Python world from Javascript. Most of the things obvious to folks was not obvious to me. I had to step back often and learn so many new things.

I kept asking questions.

I tried to phrase answers and be courageous to talk about them so that I could be corrected and learn from the process.

I drew diagrams to help visualise things better and learn things faster.

What can be improved

I have great empathy for new hires across Anaconda. For the ones in my team, I let them know that the onboarding process can be overwhelming, and we try to improve this experience one step at a time for the folks joining next. <3

Photo by Etienne Boulanger https://unsplash.com/photos/LHtFRAsNWSc