Why does nobody talk about how messy your first 90 days at a new job actually are?

I started a new gig about 2 months ago and I swear I used to think I had this whole onboarding thing down. Back at my old place in Austin, I just showed up, got a laptop, and was doing real work by day 3. This new company? Paperwork took a full week. Then another week just to get access to the Slack channels and the shared drives. And the manager keeps saying 'we'll get you up to speed' but nobody has time to actually train me. Yesterday I spent 4 hours trying to figure out which spreadsheet was the real one. Is it just me or do companies just throw you in the deep end and hope you know how to swim? Has anyone else felt like the first 3 months are basically a waste?

3 comments

3 Comments

daniel_walker12d ago

4 hours on one spreadsheet? Bro that's on you lmao. Honestly sounds like you're overthinking it, just ask the new guy two cubes over where the real file is.

xena112d ago

and that whole "just ask" thing is easier said than done when you don't even know who the "new guy two cubes over" is because the office map is out of date... my second week I accidentally sent a client update to the wrong Slack channel, it was supposed to go to the "blue team" but I found out there's actually three different blue teams... felt like an idiot for days but turns out the guy before me did the same thing and they just laughed it off.

grace50811d ago

Wait, three different blue teams? How are they even organized, like blue team-client, blue team-internal, or is it department based? I can totally see how you'd mix that up though, our company has "red folders" for everything but there's red folders for HR, red folders for project updates, and red folders for IT that are all different. Did you figure out a system to tell them apart or do you just triple check every time you send something now?