Gentle Bison asked

answered 4d ago

About to join Google Cloud as a customer engineer (L5), whats best to do to have a strong start and first impression

Philip's answer

This is hard to answer without knowing specifics about you or the team. But here are some general thoughts that I feel help in most situations:

  • Take time to understand the full context before making big changes to what the team is doing. Someone at your level is expected to lead initiatives on the team, which you will absolutely do in due time, but it's important to only make moves once you understand enough context. A lot of the first weeks is about learning that context.

  • Relatedly, teams have very different interaction expectations with how they collaborate with each other. Some teams favor strong, independent action: shoot first, ask questions later. Other teams can be very committee-oriented when it comes to making changes on the team. There are many ways other than these two to work, and so fitting in well is often about shaping your natural inclinations toward how the team prefers to work.

  • In your first weeks and months, it's especially important to get feedback that helps you quickly attune to expectations of your manager and of your team. You should get this feedback both by asking your manager explicitly, but also by asking key members of the team that will know your work well. The frequency of feedback can go down as you're in the job longer because you'll increasingly be vectored in the right direction. In your first few weeks, especially, it's easy to go off course if you don't get corrected early.

It's exciting that you're starting a new job! Wishing you all the best.

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