Ask HN: How to approach first days on a new job as a senior engineer?

Exactly this. I keep my personal life and work completely separate.

My wife and I travel a lot and we have done the digital nomad thing for a year.

I go out of my way not to talk about that at work because I don’t want people to say I’m “being distracted” or when I actually do have something like doctors appointments for them to think that I’m goofing off during work hours.

I worked from 15 cities the year before last.

That’s partially PTSD from my time at AWS (Professional Services).

Something that has always been really appreciated, and can be an easy "first commit": update/complete the docs. There's always a missing step, something unclear, an outdated link, and undocumented "whys", something to automate, ...

When you've just joined from outside, you're in a unique position in that you haven't internalised yet all the little idiosyncrasies. Best to take note of them, understand the context, and maybe help change them.

I'm starting as a Staff SDE at a new company next week, and this is roughly my onboarding plan:

1. Meet a lot of people through 1:1s, both from tech, leadership and customer side.

2. Get the codebase working on my machine, document anything that's missing from the docs they already have.

3. Ask questions in the open - in a team Slack rather than DM'ing people. Everyone can learn from my questions, and in a team Slack it'll be searchable.

4. Understand from my lead (director) on what the short and long-term goals of the org are. And then talk to others to see how they fit with that story :)

5. Ask about what the role expectations are, how they do performance evaluations, etc etc. I'll ask this to my manager and peers to get a better view.

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There's probably more that I'll do once I actually start, but this is the quick list of what came to mind.

My experience is limited to technical teams in technology companies (primarily CA Bay Area based), as such what I've experienced and learned may not be as applicable to what you're getting into. That said, there are some common things I've noticed, and one is that 'new senior guy' is a disadvantageous position to start in. Generally due to the competitive nature of such places there are others in the team who probably feel they would have been a better choice to fill your new role.

Listen a lot, keep a notebook, don't go in with the idea that you are going to make the product better, go in with the idea that you're trying to find ways to make the team better at making product.

Sometimes that takes mentoring, sometimes that takes technical leadership, sometimes that takes being the person who can help others see each other's perspective.

Be really clear with your manager about what you learn your evaluation of the current situation and look for and listen to feedback to gauge your discernment accuracy.

Always ask people you meet what could you help them with, what would make it easier for them to accomplish what they are trying to accomplish.

Finally, take time to do things that a 'junior engineer' would do as part of the program of helping. People will want to know you can work at all levels and that you aren't just some 'high level thinker' who doesn't understand how things really work.

I have always advised new senior engineer hires, even though you're senior you are going to have to go through your entire career in speed run mode it seems at the new place so that people understand how you got to be senior.

There was a discussion about 8 months ago about a "wtf" journal and all of the things that need to be considered about current processes and team dynamics before you start making big (and effective) waves. A lot of the points are already made in the replies here, but it was a good discussion and article you may be interested in:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40078106