My first job out of college was at a very large tech company. We’ll call it BigTechCo. I was put on a team that was in the midst of releasing a project several years in the making. My manager showed me to my office and then left me alone to figure out for myself what needed to be done. I didn’t know how to ask for help, and I was afraid that I would be seen as a fool if I did. Unsurprisingly, I got discouraged, and in my discouragement I decided that the best thing to do was to go to graduate school. So I did.
My first job out of graduate school could not have been more different. Instead of being shown a desk and left alone, I was set up with a mentor. He encouraged me to ask questions. We did some pair programming so that I could learn the code base, and the way that testing worked for this project (my first taste of unit testing!). I was productive within days, and learned more in the first few months of that job than I had learned in the entire time I worked at BigTechCo. I credit this almost entirely to the mentoring I got when I started.
Mentoring new hires is critical. Your job as a new hire mentor consists of onboarding, helping this person adjust to life in the company effectively, and building your and her network of contacts in the company. It can be an easier job than mentoring an intern, but the relationship and mentoring will usually go on for a lot longer.
This is an opportunity for you to see the world of your company through fresh eyes. It can be hard to remember what it was like to experience your world for the first time. How does work get done? What are the rules, spoken and unspoken? For example, you may have a standard vacation policy in the HR handbook; this is a spoken rule. The unspoken rule is that you don’t take vacation the week after Thanksgiving because you’re in ecommerce and that’s an important week for the business. A more subtle unspoken rule dictates approximately how long you are expected to struggle with something by yourself before asking someone else to help you. There are many bits of process, culture, and jargon that are so second-nature that you might not realize they’re completely foreign to a newcomer. Noticing these things gives you the opportunity to clarify them. Unspoken rules don’t just make it harder for new people to join, they can also make it harder for you to do your job well. So take full advantage of this gift of fresh perspective.
Effective teams have good onboarding documents they provide to new hires. Things like step-by-step guides to setting up their development environments, learning how tracking systems work, and familiarizing themselves with the tools they will need for the job are crucial for new hires. These documents should constantly evolve to meet the changes of the workplace itself. Mentoring a new hire by helping her work through the documents, and having her modify those documents with any surprises she encounters during onboarding, provides a powerful message of commitment to her. It shows her that she has the power and obligation to learn, and to share what she’s learned for the benefit of your whole team.
Part of the mentoring opportunity here is the chance to introduce the new person around. Companies are full of human networks that exist to transmit knowledge and information quickly. Bringing this person into some of your networks will help her get up to speed faster, and it will give you a new entree into whatever networks she ends up forming and joining in her time with the company. People planning on staying with the same company for a long time, particularly in large companies, often find opportunities via informal networks. Your mentee may someday be on a team that you are interested in joining, or you may someday want to bring her into a team you are running in another area.
Even if you have absolutely no interest in management, it’s very difficult to build a career at any company with multiple teams without building a strong network of trusted people to share information and ideas with. The workplace is built around humans and their interactions, and these networks form the basis of any career, whether it’s focused around management or individual technical contributions. You may be an introvert, or someone who does not find socializing easy, but conscious effort and practice in getting to know new people and helping them succeed will pay off. Your attitude about this will determine success or failure. Adopt the mindset that network building is a worthwhile investment of your time and energy.