It has been a while since I last wrote. Recently, I chatted with some new hires about how to fit in at a large Silicon Valley company, adapt, grow, and eventually stand out. Talking with newcomers feels a lot like mentoring interns over the summer: it gives me a chance to revisit things I have long taken for granted, reflect on them, and share what I learn.

My US career has taken me from an East Coast startup to software teams at SolarCity and, briefly, Tesla, and, in recent years, to several product teams at a FAANG company. Here are the suggestions I would share with newcomers.

1. Make the Most of Your Training Period

New hires at big tech companies all get a period of training, anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. This is your time to learn the company’s technology, culture, and way of working, and how different products are built and run. Because performance during training usually does not count toward your performance review, it feels happily like school: a low-pressure time to meet people and learn. I really miss my own training days: learning together with the friends in my cohort, trying tasks with different teams, and sitting in on other teams’ meetings.

2. Be Open to Input From Everywhere

Company channels are not just about work; many are organized around shared interests. Whether it is playing board games together, eating exotic fruit, investing, joke threads, or serious threads asking for advice on career problems, join a few groups that interest you. They give you natural points of connection with colleagues, including people on other teams.

3. Have More Than One Mentor

Many companies give you a mentor during training, and after you join a team, your manager or a senior colleague becomes your mentor. These are all great resources to help you ramp up and fit in. Many large organizations maintain org-wide mentoring resources, often under a director. Companies also tend to have plenty of company-wide mentorship programs, and a mentor outside your reporting line can offer a more objective perspective on sensitive topics and help you grow.

4. Help Improve Your Team’s Onboarding

Once you join a team, people will help you onboard with documents, tools, and process walkthroughs, and will introduce you to the people you need to know. If your team has an onboarding wiki, treat your fresh perspective as an opportunity to improve it. You are best positioned to fix anything that is unclear, undocumented, or out of date. You learn in the process, and you make life easier for the next newcomer.

5. Communicate Your Ideas, Your Process, Your Results, and What You Learn

Newcomers may think it is enough to finish assigned work, that they are not expected to have opinions or ideas, and that their work will somehow be noticed without being shared. But in the US workplace, you can and should have opinions about the tasks assigned to you and about how the work should run. In a software engineering environment, teams generally try to give people work that interests them, because people do their best work that way. Expect your ideas and solutions to be questioned and challenged; that is a normal part of the job. If you can make the case that your approach is better than the original plan, raise it. People are usually glad to hear it, and they may well adopt it.

Beyond that, keep your collaborators and your manager updated on your progress and results, so everyone knows where things stand. If you learn something, share it too, so others in the future can avoid a few detours. These are all ways to grow and stand out. In my case, I write a weekly status update summarizing the major work from the previous week, my plans for the coming week, and links to the various ongoing discussions. Each of my projects also has its own group, where we share discussion topics, problems, and results with everyone involved. That keeps my manager, PM, designer, and collaborators current and makes the discussion asynchronous, so everyone can contribute.

My earlier post on choosing an industry, a company, or a team when job hunting is related to starting a new job, and you may find it useful. There is more to say on this theme, but I will start with these five points. If you are interested, or if you have questions, feel free to share them in the comments so I have material for what comes next. :)

This post was originally published on my former blog, 「半路出家軟體工程師在矽谷」 (September 2, 2022; the site is now offline, and the full text is preserved via the Wayback Machine). It was lightly edited when it moved to this site.