Advice On Starting A New Job

This week marked my first month at Brex. Time flies and it’s always surprising to see how many discoveries I have made in this first month when looking back. I gained more understanding of my responsibility as a Data Scientist, of Brex business and products, and the company culture.

Starting a new journey is never an easy thing. But if you find the right approach, things can be significantly smoother and easier. I remember on my first meeting with my manager, he sent me an onboarding doc. And one of the top items there – expect the essential steps like setting up tools and coding environment – is to set up meet & greet sessions with almost 30 people, including teammates and key stakeholders. Honestly, as a super introverted person, I was very nervous to have 1:1 meetings with soo many strangers. But I know this is the time that I have to jump out of my comfort zone. Therefore, I went ahead and did all those 1:1s in the first two weeks. It turned out to be a very rewarding experience.

The questions I asked during those first meetings typically include:

• Greetings & self-introduction;
• What brought you to Brex;
• Can you talk about one past project;
• What is your current project/team focus;
• For stakeholders - How analytics can better support your team;
• What is the advice that you would give to someone who just gets started.

I took notes in all the meeting series, and today I would like to share the top five pieces of advice I got for the last question, hoping that it could help you when you start a new job, especially in the data science and analytics field.

Advice on Starting a New Job

1. Ask Questions
‘Don’t hesitate to ask around’
‘Feel free to reach out to people’
‘Ask lots of questions early on’
‘Ask questions sooner, and it doesn’t hurt to ask’
…

This is the single piece of advice that is brought up most often – Around half of the people I talked to suggested me asking more questions when getting started. Asking questions is helpful because, firstly, it helps you to find the right answer faster – something might take you several hours to figure out (or in many cases, still without an answer) as a newbie, but for others, it might be a 10-mins thing they have already got used to. Secondly, people all went through that onboarding period, so people will understand it and there is no such thing as dumb questions when you just started. Last but not least, this also helps you to find the work that has already been done and avoids duplicate works. But of course, ideally, you don’t want to always throw your questions at one single person – maybe distribute your questions to different people instead :)

2. Socialization & Communication
‘speak up more’
‘be active in slack data channels’
‘learn from others’
‘participate in social events’
…

Though data folks are more likely to be introverted, we have to admit the benefits of socialization and communication. Reading papers and googling always help when you are designing your data science solutions but talking to people and brainstorming with each other will provide much more inspiration. Also, since we are working for the same organization towards the same goal, socialization can help people to build up personal relationships and trust, which is by nature harder under this quarantine time, and move forward together more efficiently.

3. Learn the Company and Products
‘learn about the product and people’
‘understand the power dynamics – how the decisions are made and the cadence of people communicating the decisions’
‘attend the decisions reviews’
‘read company updates posts’
…

It cannot be stressed enough that data science and analytics are not only about doing fancy modeling but also influencing/driving the company and product with your analytics findings. But this requires a solid understanding of the company and the product. Luckily, we have multiple venues at Brex – there are bi-weekly all hands and Q&A forums, weekly decision reviews, and a lot of Thread posts around new products, features, service, etc. When we put ourselves into the business context, our analysis will also become more insightful and impactful.

4.Continuous Learning
‘Get yourself familiar with DBT, Airflow, Snowflake, etc.’
‘watch YouTube Looker tutorials’
‘Document as you go’
…

Every tech company has its own tech stack and ecosystem. When I was at Ancestry, we (product analytics team) mainly used Redshift DW, and Cronjob and Alation to schedule scripts. But here at Brex, we use Snowflake DW with DBT and Airflow. And as we are a relatively young company and team, as analysts, we actually need to write our own DBT projects to replicate production data and create new tables in Snowflake. Plus, we used Tableau at Ancestry, but now Looker at Brex (I am still a big fan of Tableau though). Therefore, the learning curve could be steep at the beginning. But I also want to say that being able to learn continuously is always one of the core requirements of Data Scientists, and learning new things is also what excites me a lot when starting a new job. Documenting the learning process and even writing new data documentation is also great advice, as it can both help one summarize and systematize your knowledge and benefit others.

5.Be a Trustworthy Partner and Influencer
‘Build a trustful relationship with stakeholders’
‘Proactively work with cross-functional stakeholders’
‘Transfer from a supporter to an influencer’
‘Understand the context of the requests and go beyond’
‘Execution, curiosity, and go beyond’
…

When one gets started with a data science job, there is a long way to make real impacts. You always need to gain the trust from stakeholders first, by delivering correct, thorough, and insightful analysis, then get their buy-ins and increase your impact by providing actionable recommendations. Obviously, this one has some overlap with the #3 above – you have to gain enough understanding of the business and product to be an influencer.

Summary

Above are the top five recommendations I got during my meet & greet sessions with teammates and stakeholders. Of course, it’s hard to cover all the great advice in one article – there are many other valuable ones, for example, people also mentioned ‘don’t stress out in the first three months’, and ‘set the boundary for work, especially when working from home’.

I have been trying to follow all the advice in my first month, and it worked out pretty well. Hopefully, you will also find some of the advice here helpful and have a smooth onboarding :)