I joined OmbuLabs as a Senior Software Engineer on February 11, which was a Friday-more on this later! Tomorrow I will have completed 2 weeks here. So if you want to find out about the onboarding process at OmbuLabs, read on.

Before officially joining the team

There are a bunch of things that happen behind the scenes before you have joined the team. Things like getting your laptop, getting your email, getting access to relevant tools, etc.

So I got my laptop a day before my first day. It was easier said than done. Since I am a developer working from India, there were a bunch of issues like timely delivery, payment methods not supported by Indian sellers, etc. The operations team worked hard and we came across a solution that works the best and I had the laptop just when I needed it. The operations team also made sure that I had access to my email account and other various tools like Slack, Tettra, Jira, etc., a day before I joined the team.

The only expectation was to set up my email account and Slack before coming for the first day and that’s exactly what I did. As an engineer, there is a strong urge to set up your dev environment at the earliest, but I did wait for the first day to just hear what the team had to suggest.

The day of the joining

As I mentioned earlier, I joined on a Friday and this was intentionally kept on a Friday as at OmbuLabs, we have an end of the week call which all full-time employees attend company-wide. So it is a good chance to get to meet the whole team at one place (a zoom call to be precise). The operations and the onboarding team made sure that I was not bombarded with too many calls or too many things to read on the first day. I had an introductory call with the onboarding team where I also met my onboarding buddy, a welcome call with the operations team, and an end of the week call with the whole gang. The end of the week call is not just about work! The whole team sits together and plays some games or just hangs out and does anything but work.

The first week after the onboarding

At OmbuLabs, there are a bunch of internal teams like open-source, marketing, operations etc. So I spent most of my time in the first week trying to get to know more people and what they do in their teams. I ended up doing at most 2 meetings every day with various respective team leads who explained their roles and responsibilities, and various company policies.

I was not expected to know all the company policies at the end of the week or feel comfortable with everyone on the team. The purpose of this week was for me to get an idea of the people, the work, the company policies and feel comfortable enough to ask anyone for any help I need. My onboarding buddy and one of the senior engineers constantly checked in with me on if I needed any help or generally on how I was doing, which was great to see. At the end of the week, I was assigned to an internal team that has its own goals for the next 6 months.

The second week after the onboarding

Depending on your role and various other factors, this week can look different for everyone. For me, I was not assigned a client project at the time, so I had time to start contributing in small ways and also keep learning about various projects at the company. In my second week, I spent time doing a bunch of different things like open source contributions, working on this blog post, and learning more about the internal projects. I read existing blogs, our ebook on the Rails upgrade process, talked to more people, and felt comfortable with the team. Most importantly, I understood some of the internal banter that keeps on happening.

Wrap up

A few things which stood out for me during my onboarding journey was

1. How welcoming and helpful everybody in the company has been for me.
2. There was a lot of documentation to read and the teams are working hard to put everything in place.
3. The company is willing to change things/processes if they know something can be made better.
4. The company understands that there is life outside of work and it is not looked down upon.

I hope this gives you an idea of what your first couple of weeks can look like at OmbuLabs.