From Honeymoon to 'Oh, That's Why' Joining a New Engineering Team
·1189 words·6 mins
Author
Mohammed Khaleel
You’ve signed the offer. Negotiated the salary. You’re bringing your years of experience, your war stories, your battle scars from production incidents. You know how to engineer solutions. You’ve shipped products. You’ve seen things.
But none of that prepares you for this codebase, these people, these processes.
You’re about to spend a year learning why everything that looks stupid actually isn’t. Buckle up.
Weeks 1-2: The Honeymoon Phase (Everyone’s So Nice!)#
Everything seems easy. The team is friendly. People are stressed out but you don’t understand why. “This should be straightforward,” you think. guess what!: It wasn’t.
Some teams hand you nice starter tasks. Others throw you into the fire on day one and expect you to handle it. Either way, you’re not expected to deliver anything serious yet.
Here’s what nobody tells you: those first two weeks are pure intelligence gathering. Fill your calendar with coffee chats. As many as possible. This is your real onboarding curriculum.
Why? Because you need to:
Understand what the team is actually focused on (not what your manager sold you in the interview)
Validate or invalidate the statements you heard during hiring
Get a sense of who’s friendly enough to ask for help later
Identify the types of personalities you’re dealing with
The key: Let them talk. Listen more than you talk.
You’re mapping the terrain here. Understanding their role, their perspective on the projects, their scope of responsibilities. This helps you ask the right person when you’re stuck later.
You’re also identifying influence. Is that Principal Engineer actually influencing technical direction, or is it just a title? Is that Product Manager driving strategy or just managing tickets? If you want to push something forward (or push back against something), you need to know who you’re working with.
Think of it as reconnaissance. You’re not here to impress anyone yet. You’re here to understand the game board.
Weeks 2 - Month 6: Imposter Syndrome (Even When You’re Not an Imposter)#
Welcome to acronym hell. Every company invents their own language. DAPE, CQRS, BFF, whatever internal system names they came up with at 2 AM. You’re nodding along in meetings pretending you know what people are talking about.
You’re doing things a certain way because that’s how they’re done. You don’t know why yet. And that’s fine.
You see something that looks inefficient. A process that seems redundant. Code that makes you go “why would anyone write it like this?”
Stop right there.
You might have 10 years of experience, but you have 2 weeks of context. There’s a difference.
Here’s the thing: always assume that when someone built something, they thought it was the best available option at that time. Maybe they knew the shortcomings but had timeline pressures. Maybe there were technical constraints you can’t see yet. Maybe there was a business reason that’s not documented anywhere.
If you can’t see why it’s a good solution, assume you just don’t know enough yet.
Challenging things too early? It feels offensive to people. They might have built it themselves. Or they spent months living with it and already know its problems. Coming in hot with “we should just do X instead” signals that you don’t respect the history.
This is when things get real. You get your first substantial project and suddenly the layers of history start revealing themselves.
“Gotcha!” moments everywhere. You understand why we structure data this way. You see the compromise that was made three years ago. The acronyms start making sense. You even start using them in your replies you’ve become one of them.
You start to see how we ended up with the system we have today. And things start to make sense.
Except for that one part in the pipeline that still doesn’t feel right. It seems redundant. You’re tempted to delete it or “optimize it”.
Don’t. Not yet. There’s a reason. You just don’t know it yet.
Something weird happens around month six. You become the go-to person for a specific topic.
You don’t know how this happened. You certainly don’t feel like an expert. But people start tagging you in Slack, GitHub issues, Jira tickets. Random questions from other teams. “Hey, you know about the Ticketing module, right?”
Sometimes you don’t have the answer. But you’ve learned something valuable: the art of the good follow-up question.
You watched your teammates dodge questions this way. Someone asks something vague or impossible to answer, and instead of saying “I don’t know,” they ask clarifying questions that help narrow it down. Half the time, the person asking realizes they didn’t know what they were asking in the first place.
It works. You start doing it too.
You’re vital to team operations now. When the next new person joins, guess who’s onboarding them? You.
You’re onboarding the next new person. Which is wild, because you still feel new. But that’s exactly why you’re good at it, you remember what it’s like to be confused.
That “redundant” step in the pipeline? It’s there because two years ago the deployment process would occasionally skip a critical validation, and it caused an outage. The redundancy is intentional.
That manual process everyone hates? It exists because the automated version failed in a specific edge case that happens twice a year, and when it fails, it costs the company real money.
Joe’s CSV export? Joe preferred Excel because he built an entire reporting workflow around it. He trained his team on it. They created documentation. Other teams started depending on it.
Oh, Joe left the company? Time to remove the CSV export then, right?
This is the hardest lesson. The one that separates engineers who ship code from engineers who ship impact.
Our job isn’t just writing code. It’s changing behavior.
That CSV export? Even if it’s not ideal, people built processes around it. Hacks. Learning materials. Muscle memory. Reflexes. Other systems started depending on it, even in non-ideal ways.
The cost of breaking comfort is always greater than you think.
You can optimize the machine, making the code cleaner, the pipeline faster, the architecture more elegant. But if you don’t account for the human part, your “improvement” will either get ignored or cause chaos.
You understand that “stupid” solution are often the smartest compromises. And the fastest path to impact isn’t rewriting everything, it’s understanding everything.
You’ve gone from “Why is this so complicated?” to “Oh, that’s why.”
And that’s the real 1st year milestone. Not the code you shipped. Not the features you built. But the moment you stopped seeing problems and started seeing trade-offs.
