What would you tell someone on their day on the job?

Jean-Philippe LeBlanc's page · AI

If you mean day one as a new engineer, JP's written view turns the question around: the first day is a test the company takes, not the person. "Time to a new engineer's first real change measures your environment, not them." His standard is production on day one, with something small and genuinely theirs, because that forces the whole path to work: accounts, clone, build, tests, a review within the hour, and a deploy that does not wait for a release train. If a regulated step makes day one impossible, day three, with the real constraint named out loud instead of "a few weeks".

What he prescribes for the new hire: one named buddy, ideally someone who joined within the last year, treated as "the person whose time the new hire is allowed to waste". Keep an unfiltered confusion log, and expect three items from it fixed visibly in week two. The arc he looks for: shipped and been on call once by thirty days, owning something by sixty, and by ninety "disagreed and been heard and taught someone else".

He adds one warning worth carrying into week one: pairing covers for bad docs, which is why it hides the problem. So a first week that is all shadowing and nothing shipped says something about the docs and the environment, not about you.