What to expect and how to prepare as a new hire at a Tech Company during your first week!
Yesterday I concluded my first week as a full-time Software Development Engineer, and although the week mostly consisted of info sessions and mandatory trainings, I wanted to share some of my experiences, new insights, and things you can be prepared for if your about to start a new job.
I’m going to talk about the following:
-Benefits
-401k ~ Retirement
-The Schedule
-Directing your questions to the right person!
Benefits:
First, and probably most exciting, are the benefits. If you have the option to attend a benefits session I highly recommend that you do so. Or be sure to ask around and self research all the benefits you’re eligible for. And I’m not just talking about stuff like health insurance and dental. Prior to joining my company I had no idea about benefits such as ‘wellness reimbursement’ which will reimburse me up to a certain amount for pretty much anything relating to wellness. For example, this will cover my ski pass I plan to purchase, gym memberships, at home office set up and much more! Additionally, in addition to my regular health insurance, I learned that I have access to 6 free months of talkspace online therapy at my disposal at any point throughout the year. It’s things like this that if I hadn’t attended the benefits session I wouldn’t have known about.
Retirement Contributions:
Next advice I would have is to start thinking about what kind of retirement contributions you want to make. Prior to a week ago, I didn’t exactly realize that there were multiple ways to contribute to a 401k account. This might be obvious to some people, but I was definitely in the majority at my company. And the options might be different depending on where you work, but at my company there was essentially 3 main options; pre-tax contributions, roth contributions, or a mixture of both.
Pre-tax means that your money goes straight into the account to grow, and you don’t pay any taxes on it until you are retired and start taking it out. The Roth contributions are essentially the opposite, you pay taxes now, so that when you retire you don’t have to pay any. My original thought process was to do the pre-tax, with the mindset that without paying taxes on it now, there would be more money in the account and thus grow faster. However, upon talking to some people I trust, I learned a different thought process. That being that the Roth contributions are better because I’m only 22 years old, and by the time I retire I’ll hopefully be making more money than I am now, and thus I will be in a higher tax bracket meaning I’ll have to pay more taxes on the money if I wait until retirement. Overall, I talked to a lot of people this week from my parents, friends, people I know in finance, etc… and almost everyone gave me different advice. Upon my own research I found that a lot of experts have more concrete metrics such looking at your current tax bracket, your predicted, etc. But all in all, I think this decision isn’t black and white, it’s going to be different for everyone, and what’s most important is making sure you feel like you made the most informed decision possible.
The Schedule:
For those curious what the schedule might look like during your first week, here’s some insights on what mine was like. However, I want to clarify first that my company essentially has a two week training period. The first week is focused on learning about the company values, structure, etc. And the second week is more role specific training and preparation for when we are to join our actual full-time teams and roles. This could be similar or completely different from another company, so just keep that in mind. With that said, this is what a typical day looked like during my first week:
09:00AM — 10:00AM — Computer Set-Up
10:00AM — 11:30AM — Company Info Session
11:30AM — 12:00PM — Benefits Session
12:00PM — 12:30PM — Spotlight Speaker
12:30PM — 01:30PM — Break
01:30PM — 02:30PM — Communication Session
02:30PM — 03:30PM — Emotional Intelligence Session
03:30PM — 04:00PM —Business Training
I just included some of the types of sessions we had throughout this week. Some were in person but most were on zoom so new hires from multiple offices could all participate and attend together.
Although my hours weren’t terribly long, and there really wasn’t any truly hard tasks for me to accomplish, I have been exhausted!! Going from nothing to full-time will take it out of you, and fast! I went from a bedtime of almost midnight to 9pm in the course of 2 days. And I honestly might have been at risk of getting sick if I hadn’t been chugging water like there was no tomorrow haha. I’ve worked in many restaurants and service industry jobs before, and don’t me wrong those are extremely exhausting too, but thats expected with jobs that have you on your feet all day. It’s almost comical that the most strenuous part of my new job is lifting my fingers to type, but don’t underestimate the toll of being ‘on’ all day. Make sure to prepare yourself not only mentally, but physically for the start of your new job. Especially if you’re like me and this is your first real ‘big girl’ job.
Questions (who NOT to ask):
My last big advice I learned this week that I think is pretty important is to direct your questions to the correct people. Our new hire slack channel has been flooded all week with tons of valid and important questions. But lots of them are all answered with the same response, which is ‘this would be question for _____ department or team.’ My best example would probably be asking the software development team group leaders why you can’t access your health insurance benefits. Which sounds so silly, but happened multiple times. The reason for this is probably because they didn’t know who else to ask, which is fair because people get stressed. But, my part two advice/insight on this would be to keep in check that it’s your first week and you’re not expected to have everything figured out yet! Furthermore, in the long run, it will actually be more beneficial for you to have learned the proper channels to go through to get help on your own anyways! And trust me, there’s no need to freak out because you probably won’t have access to everything for a few days anyways just because it takes time to process everything for new hires! I’ve probably had to request access to over 10 different security groups this week and all took varying times to be approved.
Hope this helps give some insight into some important parts of my first week of work. If anyone has questions about stuff I mentioned or is curious about something I didn’t mention I’d be more than happy to do a part 2 to this!
