First Months
How to be useful in a first month when you know almost nothing
There is real work available to someone with no context, and finding it is the fastest route out of the…
· 4 min read
After the First Job — Years one to five, without the platitudes
First Months
What a probation period is actually assessing
Probation is rarely a test of whether you can do the job yet, and understanding what it does test changes how you spend the first three months.
By Marta Kowalska · · 4 min read
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First Months
A good question makes you look more capable, not less
The fear of asking is really a fear of a particular kind of question, and the difference between the two…
· 4 min read
First Months
The first weeks set a reputation that later work has to argue with
Early impressions are sticky for reasons that have nothing to do with fairness, and knowing the mechanism…
· 4 min read
First Months
Onboarding is bad almost everywhere for a structural reason
The people who could write good onboarding are precisely the people who can no longer remember needing it…
· 3 min read
Managing Up
What a manager is actually paid to do
Most friction with a manager comes from a wrong model of their job, and the real one is narrower and more…
· 4 min read
Managing Up
A one-to-one is your meeting, and most people waste it
The regular catch-up is the highest-leverage half hour you get, and it is usually spent reciting a status…
· 3 min read
Managing Up
Raising a problem so that it reads as information rather than complaint
The same facts land completely differently depending on their framing, and the difference is mostly about…
· 3 min read
Managing Up
Most of what your manager knows about you arrived secondhand
Believing that good work speaks for itself misunderstands how information about junior employees actually…
· 3 min read
Managing Up
Some managers are simply bad, and that changes the calculation
Advice about managing up assumes a competent counterpart, so it is worth being able to tell an overloaded…
· 3 min read