The onboarding doc said I'd ship a small feature in week two.
Week two arrived. I had not yet been given access to the staging database. My laptop, which had been ordered before I started, was still "in transit." I was using my personal MacBook Air, which could not run the project's local Docker setup without overheating into a coma.
I cried in week three. Not in a bathroom — at my desk, briefly, while pretending to read Slack. My manager noticed and was very kind about it.
Things I wish I'd done differently in those first 90 days:
1. Asked dumb questions louder, earlier. The fear of looking stupid cost me about four weeks of progress. The senior engineers I was scared of were universally happy to explain things when I finally asked. 2. Written down what confused me each day. I started doing this in week six and it changed everything. Patterns showed up. The same three things were tripping me up over and over, and I stopped being able to ignore them. 3. Built a small thing for myself in week one. Not a feature. A throwaway script. Anything I could finish. The momentum of finishing one thing made the rest of the codebase feel less impossible.
If you're in your first 90 days: it's supposed to feel like this. The "I should already know this" voice is wrong. You shouldn't already know it. That's why they're paying you to learn.