Welcome to the Team: Hope You Speak Acronym

I thought a bit about what should be the topic for my first real post, and then it hit me - what could be more fitting than writing about the first day in a new corporation?

When I say "first day", I don’t mean the fresh-out-of-college, junior-level first day. This feeling doesn’t discriminate. Even the most senior folks, with years of experience under their belts, will find themselves swimming in the same pool of confusion. Corporate onboarding isn’t just about adjusting to new responsibilities. It’s also about decoding a language you never signed up to learn.

We’re not going to talk about HR orientations, icebreaker activities, or those meticulously crafted “Welcome to the Company” PowerPoints. No, this is about the actual first day you step into the area and products you’re expected to manage. The day when you meet the people who assume you already know what they’re talking about.

Because here’s the secret: everyone speaks fluent corporate acronym. And guess what? They expect you to as well.

You’ll nod through conversations about processes like “We’ll sync after the QBR, but make sure the SDA from the ADLs aligns with the FY strategy…” Meanwhile, you’re mentally calculating how many of those letters you’ve heard before in any logical combination. If you’re lucky, you understand half of it. If you’re lucky.

Then comes the inevitable product presentation. Someone shares their screen, confidently navigating an outdated document from three years ago (because why update it when you can just add more pages or slides?). Or worse, they open Confluence, and it's like entering a digital jungle: messy pages, half-written notes, and diagrams that look like someone spilled spaghetti on a whiteboard and called it architecture. Believe it or not, I once saw an architecture/system design drawn on a tissue and photographed. And they were so proud of the design...

By the last hours of your first day, you think you’ve seen it all. You lean back, certain that nothing could be messier than what you just witnessed.

Boy, how wrong you are.

Now, here's the best technique to survive day one: take advice from the cartoon penguins in Madagascar — “Smile and wave, boys. Smile and wave”. Nod knowingly. Scribble notes. Maybe even throw in an occasional, “Ah, got it”, even though all you've got is a page full of meaningless acronyms and arrows pointing to nowhere.

And whatever you do, do not ask them to explain an acronym on your first day. Never. That’s how you go from being “the new person” to “the second-day person who still doesn’t get basic stuff”.

Welcome to the team. Hope you speak acronym.

Oh, and by the way, from tomorrow you take ownership of ASD and DMM. First meeting is at 10:30. Good luck figuring out what that means.