My remote onboarding as a developer

I was asked by my awesome colleague Rita Maggioli to write a few words about my onboarding experience at Landing.Jobs. More specifically, about how my remote onboarding went: the good, the bad and the great!

I will try to be as subjective as possible (because that’s what matters in these cases, right?)!

(Quick overview of) The hiring process

Funnily enough, I got hired for Landing through Landing. I think at the time we had a position open, and some poor soul here thought that I was a good choice for the role of front end dev. Every step along the way was smooth, I swapped some mails with the people team and ended up talking in person to my current big boss. I loved what he had to say about the company, the project he talked about and the vision Landing had for the future of hiring and tech work.

Apparently he also fell for all my tricks and after a few days (maybe like a week or two) I was in! In my specific case, I had to give a few more weeks to my old company*, though.

The moments before

Before actually starting to do work, there were a few (very boring) things we had to get done like insurance forms, signing contracts, etc. I’d love to see all of this thrown in the trash and just have like one place to sign for all of it, but, of course, this is mostly outside Landing’s control and I will have to complain to the portuguese government and insurance companies (please, just let me login with my national login, guys).

You probably won’t be surprised when I tell you that messed some stuff up, like some documents I forgot or something. But the People department never hesitated to remind me what I had done wrong so I could fix it asap. So in the end, everything was straightened out and rolling nicely. I had my insurance, my (surprisingly awesome) food allowance card and whatnot.

The first days at the offices (home also counts!)

The first days were relatively calm. The first time I ever visited Landing’s office, in the center of Lisbon (btw, it’s a super duper cool office that makes teamwork a breeze!), I got the chance to meet lots of people, whose names I didn’t memorize at the time, but who I am getting to know better every day. My line manager had a 1on1 with me, and we talked about our past experiences, what we expected from the project and from each other, and just general stuff about each other. Turns out he was friends with some of my friends!

I picked up one of the laptops we had lying around (not the ones running our playground bots eheh) and started working. My whole dev team was working remote that day, I believe. Julia and Marcelo live here in Lisbon, and Renato is living in Brazil (for now). I talked a bit with them on Slack, we traded some words and they told me how I could get started. They helped me get set up and running.

I think it’s interesting that the amount of people that were in the office that day was almost prefect! Not too crowded that it was messy and confusing to talk to everyone, but not too empty that it felt that it was a 👻 office.

Funny story: since I’m always very annoying, on my first day I started making suggestions about important stuff on slack, and another colleague from marketing, Sara, walked downstairs to take some suggestions I had! I believe one or two even sneaked into the final delivery (the website for our FWTC.

All the logistics like getting the email setup, “walking into” Slack, Github and all of those

The following days

After that initial impression, most of the onboarding was really nice. My team is awesome, everyone welcomed me to the team. I met many more people over these weeks from completely different departments like talent acquisition, sales, etc.

I spent the majority of my days working@home, although I really enjoyed (and still do enjoy) showing up in the office every now and then (I do it like once a week but want to make a habit out of it!). Working face to face with people you like just hits different, and motivates you to do work in completely different ways. Also, like our amazing management team once said, “it gives way for unexpected outcomes” (paraphrasing), which lead to innovation and new ideas.

I felt like the balance between home and office working was really nice and still feel the other people at Landing agree with me for the most part.

The meetups

I thought these deserved their own section. They’re so cool! I’m talking about stuff like All Hands meetings, team building lunches, Christmas parties, you name it! Everyone gets together, we get to know each other a bit better, we talk about the company, each other, we play darts (yeah, we have a board at the office 🎩) and just overall have an awesome time. This was incredibly important for my onboarding process since it tied together all the “loose ends” of the initial weeks (and still does most of the time), where I’d spend some time without seeing my teammates.

Wrap up

I loved my onboarding at Landing.Jobs. Everyone is nice and the process went by fast and smoothly.

The only not-so-good thing I have to say is that I wish the bureaucratic part was… not so bureaucratic, but it doesn’t really depend on Landing, so I’ll let it slide.

*small aside: loved working there and all my teammates were freaking amazing