Welcome. Here is the tour nobody gives you.
Welcome. You have already had the official tour — the values on the wall, the password manager, the fire exit. I want to give you the other tour, the one that actually determines whether you are happy here in six months.
What we argue about
Every healthy team has one recurring argument. Ours is this: do we fix the thing properly now, or ship the workaround and fix it later?
Neither side is right and the argument never ends, and that is fine — it is load-bearing. The person who says "properly now" is usually thinking about the next two years. The person who says "ship the workaround" is usually thinking about the customer who is waiting today. We need both voices in the room every single time.
If you have an opinion about this — and you will, by week three — say it in the room. That argument is not conflict. It is the sound of the team thinking.
How decisions actually get made
The official process is in the handbook. The real process is: whoever writes the one-page summary wins.
Not the loudest person. Not the most senior. The person who takes the messy discussion and turns it into ten clear lines — what we decided, what we did not decide, who owns what, when we look again. Write that page and your view becomes the default, because everybody is tired and grateful somebody made it legible.
Three names to know
Ask Priya anything about how our systems fit together. Ask Marcus before you send anything to a customer — he has an uncanny nose for a sentence that will be misread. Ask Nadia when you are stuck; she asks one question and you suddenly see the problem properly.
What we will not ask of you
We will not ask you to be available at 11pm. We will not ask you to pretend a deadline is fine when it is not. And we will not ask you to be confident about something you have never done before — that is what the rest of us are for.
One thing
In your first month, your only job is to ask questions that feel slightly too basic. Everyone here is holding a piece of context that made sense to them once and has never been written down. You are the only person who can find those gaps. So find them, while you still can still see them.