Onboarding at a new company: what I wish I had known
I spent the last few years at one company. Deepgram was my entire professional identity in voice AI. I knew the product, the community, the internal politics, the unwritten rules. I could answer almost any question without looking it up.
Starting somewhere new means none of that applies. Here is what I wish someone had told me before I started.
The imposter feeling is worse the second time
The first time you join a new company, the imposter syndrome makes sense. You are new to everything. You expect to feel lost. The second time, you expect your experience to carry over and it does not carry over neatly. You know how to do the job in general but you do not know how to do this specific version of it. That gap feels worse than being completely new because you know what competent looks like and you are not there yet.
The fix is to accept that domain knowledge transfers slowly even when role knowledge is instant. I knew how to write API documentation. I did not know this API yet. That takes time and there is no shortcut.
Documentation is the fastest way to learn
I started by writing. Not blog posts, not strategy documents. API documentation, changelog entries, migration guides. Writing forces you to understand the details because you cannot explain something you do not understand. I learned the API surface faster by documenting it than I would have by reading it.
This is specific to DevRel but it applies to any role where communication is part of the job. If you need to learn a new system, teach someone else how to use it. The gaps in your knowledge become visible immediately.
Tribes form faster than you expect
One week in, I already had opinions about which teams were easy to work with and which were not. Two weeks in, those opinions were mostly wrong. First impressions of internal teams are unreliable because you are evaluating them through the lens of your own onboarding friction. A team that seems unresponsive might just be busy with a launch. A team that seems helpful might just have capacity this week.
The lesson: do not form permanent opinions about internal teams in the first month. Your sample size is too small and your stress level is too high.
The loneliness of remote onboarding
Starting a new job remotely is isolating in a way I did not fully anticipate. In an office, you overhear conversations, you get pulled into meetings you were not invited to, you absorb context through osmosis. Remotely, you only know what you are explicitly told. The informal channels that teach you how the company actually works are invisible until someone invites you into them.
I started scheduling coffees with people outside my immediate team. Not with an agenda. Just to talk. That has been the most effective way to learn the unwritten rules.
What I would tell myself
You will feel slow for at least a month. That is normal. You will ask questions that seem obvious. That is also normal. The goal for the first few weeks is not to be productive. It is to build the mental model that makes productivity possible later.
Stop comparing your first weeks to someone else’s fifth year.