Resist The Urge To Fix Everything In Your First Month

Fresh eyes are a real asset, and spending them all in week three is a waste.

New starters see problems immediately. The process is clunky, the file naming makes no sense, two teams are collecting the same information separately. All of that may be true. The temptation is to say so, energetically and often, on the reasonable theory that you were hired partly for this. The difficulty is that you cannot yet tell the difference between something that is broken and something that looks broken because you do not know what it is protecting. Plenty of awkward processes are scar tissue from a failure you have not heard about, and removing them cheerfully reproduces the failure.

The better approach is to hold your observations rather than suppress them. Keep a private list of everything that looks strange, dated, with a sentence on why it looks strange to you. Do not act on it yet. Instead, spend your first months asking about the items on the list one at a time, in a genuinely curious register: I noticed we do this in two places, is there a history there? Perhaps a third of the time there is a good reason and you quietly delete the item. The rest of the time there is no reason, only inertia, and now you have a case rather than an impression.

When you do raise something, raise one thing. A person who identifies a single fixable problem, explains it clearly and offers to take it on is useful. A person who arrives with fourteen criticisms sounds like they dislike the place. The content might be identical. The reception will not be. And there is a practical reason for restraint beyond politics: you have limited credit early on, credit is spent by asking people to change, and spending it on the largest item on your list rather than the first one you noticed is simply better allocation.