For me it's a matter of introversion, it all sounds so tiresome and I would most likely ignore the email. At most I'd selectively answer a few things in email but decline any actual meeting. I'd probably bucket the sender as a promotion-seeking hustler I don't really want to work with, though all the best to them in achieving their more social oriented goals.

I share your opinion on a job being there to do actual work. Sometimes that work requires talking to other people (curiously though teams would rather have several long internal meetings arguing about something that could be decided with a couple conversations with customers), but this field needs less of that than others and in many ways suffers too much from over-chatting as it is, when many are just happy to have unnecessary meetings replaced by slightly less unnecessary emails. Even in the submission, the new technical director isn't expected to code. A lot of orgs work that way, after a certain point up the ladder you just stop coding but I think it's wrong. (I pushed back against getting myself promoted at my last job in large part because of that -- very few Principles coded at all, and our 'Architects' never coded. And that's on the tech tree side, the management side with all the decision power was obviously even more hopeless and detached from the way things were.)

Thanks for responding. For what it's worth, I did get a few people who did reply inline to the email, which I appreciated too. Honestly, the reason I even sent the "questions" ahead of time was so that the intro/1:1 would be a valuable use of time for both people (as we could prepare ahead of time). As I am re-reading the questions I sent, which part felt "social oriented goals"? Because that is definitely NOT what I am looking for. The goal is something like, "You've started a company before. You know it's tough getting started, as there is a flurry of information, activities, projects, etc. Help me out here, by giving some the context & direction you wish YOU had been given when starting here" (or something to that effect).

Would you have phrased something differently (assuming you'd send the email at all...)? Thanks again for the feedback. (It's tough to be on the receiving end of it). Learning a lot on this thread!

> which part felt "social oriented goals"?

Every part, especially the gestalt of all the parts together. Your entire outlook expressed by your post and your replies to me and others here makes you come across as a person with a "socially oriented goals" mindset. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, perhaps it's even a very good thing once all the trade-offs are considered, but to me it's something I don't typically get along with (there are always exceptions). The aspect of it that most turns me off is a sense that you're a people-person (validation and enjoyment comes much more from people than things, you value impact over creation/discovery) who also will use people for self-serving ends and in the context of work perhaps at the cost of doing your best work.

Don't take this as harsh criticism -- we all are self-serving in various ways, many ways are innocent (I get it, some people really like socializing and talking to as many people as possible), and we use various means including sometimes other people to get our kicks. That's all usually fine, there's plenty of room in the industry for many kinds of people, even those who don't naturally get along well with each other or have much in common in shared interests or philosophies -- professionalism lets us build things together anyway. My negative reaction is 1) first impression based without getting to know you and 2) colored as a matter of introversion and other personality traits and my own feelings about programming. Neither one is going to be "correct".

There's also some dependence on the kind of company we're talking about. From my understanding Facebook puts new hires into a generic pool for a while and the newbies sort of have to find their own way to a team. Your approach would make more sense there. Reading your reply on the type of company you found yourself in also seems like this approach could be more appropriate, though still one I wouldn't take (especially the chumming-up bits) because again it's tiresome, presumably not much related to why I was hired, I don't want to unnecessarily take up others' time, and I would probably think such info gathering (especially the mass synthesis) a lot lower-value than many other things I could be doing as a newbie... Other companies though will hire you onto a specific team to do somewhat specific things, and in that case many of your questions are sort of nonsensical. (e.g. how do you envision us working together -- if you're on a totally unrelated team in a different department, honestly I don't have a vision, because both of our teams' roadmaps are likely fixed for the foreseeable future and being unrelated now aren't a priori likely to become related later. Perhaps as I get to know you we find a common interest to do a hackday together on, but this is not something I can envision from just meeting you. Create/join some interest groups and maybe we'll find each other more organically, there's no need to optimize for this sort of relationship building now and in any case I'm here primarily to work.)

Another comment had the reaction of "who is this, someone trying to be a manager?" but I would sooner see it, in the context of my previous company, as "where is this person's manager or mentor?" I would not have sent such an email. Instead, I would direct some questions to my manager/mentor/direct team members (and in written form they can be answered in kind, no need for a meeting), and in a way that doesn't require them to spend much time on me. I'd also have an expectation that a lot of that would be answered by them for me ahead of time before I have to ask, as part of their responsibilities to new hires. Depending on the company much can be looked up on your own time, I'd reserve meetings for things that benefit from synchronous interactivity. For other questions I would have asked or inferred before even taking the job.

The first team I joined at my last job had a nice process for new members that would satisfy your goal of improving the onboarding experience. There was a short 1-2 page onboarding doc that acted as a checklist of things to do, not so well advertised policies to take advantage of (e.g. home internet reimbursement), groups/chat channels to join, links to things you should read... the newest person who joined the team was responsible for going through the doc and if needed adding/editing/updating anything they discovered was useful over their first month, without turning it into a long doc, and making sure the next new person sees the doc and understands their responsibility. My final team didn't have that, though by then the company-wide onboarding material wasn't so bad so we could just link to that. For more team-specific stuff there was a master README linking to everything of importance across a handful of hosts, but in my own reaching out to newer people on our team or sister teams to see how things were going I'd frequently find no one had sent it to them yet. So to be sure, sometimes the self-directed requests for guidance and other things you're doing is needed, even when you have a reasonable expectation that someone is looking out for you. When you're pinging tens of people about this stuff though, I think there's more going on in your motivations than just improving your own and perhaps others' future onboarding. Maybe you'll join me in adding http://elephantinthebrain.com/ to the reading list queue in order to better notice or think about those things...

Thanks! The book looks interesting, thanks for the recommendation. This stuff is right up my alley right now.

Thanks - good to know this perspective! My goal was to front-load as much information as I could to the first 1-2 weeks of works so that I could quickly GET to work (and working on the right things), and get as much culture/context about the organization I have joined. In the past, when I've joined an organization, there is a burst of "meet a few people" exchanges (where you build out a small network of people who can help you learn, get unblocked), but quickly diving into work... when I'd actually hoped to get some whiteboard sessions, code reviews, "explain how this system really works" conversations in before diving in. Again, thanks for sharing your feedback.