Starting my new job NOT in lockdown
Tags: onboarding, career
Published: 2022-07-12 18:49:43

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title: Starting my new job NOT in lockdown
published: true
description: Starting a new job remotely, deliberately this time
tags: onboarding, career
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Last time I started a new job, [everything was on fire](https://dev.to/matmooredev/starting-my-new-job-in-lockdown-39ol) and I unexpectedly became a remote worker. And it was fine (eventually). I kept working from home and I didn't actually meet most of my coworkers until my very last day when the tech team in London met for a picnic. 

Since I am very bothered by loud noise, having my own space makes it a LOT easier to focus on my work and be productive, without feeling completely exhausted at the end of the day. Not having to commute 2 hours a day and being able to take short breaks to cook, clean, take a walk or answer phone calls massively improves my quality of life.

(Elon Musk can go fuck himself)

So this time, I made the deliberate decision to look for a company that supported full remote working, and I knew a little of what to expect. I am also continuing to work part time (4 days a week). I started this arrangement in my previous role and it has helped a lot with my mood and anxiety levels. It gives me extra time to unwind and I can use the extra time for study or travel. Currently this is worth more to me than 20% of my salary.

The onboarding process here was ok but not as good as my previous job. I initially felt very overwhelmed with information - it's an unfamiliar industry and I'm having to do a lot of intros with different parts of the business. There seems to have been a lot of turnover, just like my previous company, which is challenging for figuring out what's going on and how to get stuff done.

The nice thing is that technically they are in the process of transitioning to microservices, and they are quite well set up for this, having leaned into [Domain-Driven Design](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain-driven_design) and with engineering management starting to think about the structures needed for teams to work autonomously without pulling in different directions. This is very interesting to me and is a nice continuation of the work I was doing in my previous company to break apart a large monolith by establishing [bounded contexts](https://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/BoundedContext.html).

My team are working on authorization, so I have a well defined problem area to work within but I will also get to interact with a lot of other teams since authorization affects the whole platform.

Two weeks in I am starting to get the hang of things and have picked up a couple of tickets. I always find it a bit of a shock going from quite high understanding of a codebase to zero understanding, but it's helped to slow down a bit and dig into the codebase. This week I realised I didn't fully understand the data model I was working with so I spent some time creating an entity relationship diagram in mermaid and figuring out all the constraints ([this is now built into github and gists!](https://github.blog/changelog/2022-02-28-gists-now-support-mermaid-diagrams/)). I feel like there is a lot of pressure to pair a lot when onboarding, but going through this process by myself helped make things click for me in a way that I don't get from just pairing.