First Few Days

First Few Days #

Welcome!

We are super pleased that you’re joining our group. This page gives you an overview of what to expect from your first few days. They are maintained by the group, we hope that new-starters feel empowered to edit them if there are useful changes to be made.

Introductions #

Each new starter gets assigned two buddies to be friendly points of contact. The person in charge of onboarding should let you know who these are a bit before you start; If that doesn’t happen, please email them about it. Your buddies will welcome you on the first day. In the first few days there will be a welcome coffee to give you a chance to introduce yourself to the whole REG team, and within the first few weeks you will also have a 1-on-1 meeting with REG’s Director.

You will have a week or so before you will be assigned to a project. Please use this time to do admin stuff, set up your laptop and tools, get to know people, read this handbook and our internal wiki, and shadow meetings (see below). Here we go over the main points you should remember to do, but for an attempt at listing all the small tasks that occupy a new starter, please see (and improve!) this checklist.

We also have a page of tables available with information about links and resources related to REG and the Alan Turing Institute.

Administrivia #

HR will set up a meeting with you to discuss general information e.g. pay, health, leaves, benefits. IT will also meet you to discuss accounts and Turing wide systems. Both of these will typically take place in the first day or two.

We have a dedicated page for various systems REG uses. Have a look at the high priority section on your first day.

We also have a Remote Working page for Zoom, Teams, and Gather.

REG offers new starters the opportunity to shadow meetings across the group to meet people and get a feel for how we work. The shadowing document should be updated with meetings you are free to come and listen in on, if it hasn’t been please bug the person in charge of onboarding.

To access the office you will need a British Library pass. To get a British Library pass you will need to go through the background screening check. Hopefully that process will have been completed by the time you start, but if it hasn’t even been started yet (this happens), please talk to HR to make sure the process gets going. Once the screening is done, HR should let you know within a few days that your pass is ready.

In the meanwhile, you can either enter the British Library through the general public entrance and come talk to the Turing’s reception, or, preferably, arrange for a visitor pass for yourself for the days when you’re coming in. For the first day or two, ask your line manager to take care of this, once you’ve got your Turing account going you can directly ask reception.

The password for the “ATI Guest” Wi-Fi network can be seen hanging around the office. IT can arrange access to the Eduroam network. Eduroam credentials can be used to access Wi-Fi at many academic institutions.

Please also write a short, informal paragraph about your background for to be put into the next REG newsletter, and send it to the newsletter owner.

Overview of How REG Operates #

Work at REG revolves around projects and service areas. You will typically be assigned to two different projects at any time, with at least one other REG person and usually some external collaborators. You may want to browse REG’s portfolio of projects in the project tracker to get an idea of what we’re up to. The project tracker is also used for expressing preferences on which upcoming projects you would like to work on, but you don’t have to worry about that for first few weeks. We very much encourage REG members to learn new things, so feel free to choose projects that sound interesting to you even if they are unfamiliar. Check this section of the handbook for more details.

Service areas are REG-internal work, such as looking after this handbook, organising recruitment, or managing our computational resources. Usually people contribute to one service area, which should take approximately half a day a week. This, too, is something you don’t have to think about for now, but come back to it once you’ve settled into your workflow with a project.

REG also gives its members some time, known as 22 days time, to work on side projects they find interesting. Your line manager can give you the details on this.

If you like, you can see our team reporting structure. Note, however, that we do not have a hierarchical culture, and line managing relations are not about assigning work to people. Your work tasks will be coordinated with the people in your projects.

You should talk to your line manager about things such as

  • How project allocation works, and what kinds of projects you would like to work on
  • Managing your time and growth
  • How we work (practices, tools, languages, etc.)
  • How you would like to grow and develop in your role and what opportunities exist to support that.

Please also take a some time to browse this handbook, it’s got plenty of useful information about what we do and how we do it.

Set up Your Machine and Coding Environment #

See systems setup.

Regular Events #

Check out our regular events and coffee breaks. Please consider signing up for a tech talk sometime in your first six weeks. If you don’t see a calendar invite for the weekly tech talks, ask the person in charge of onboarding to add you to the relevant mailing list.

What to do next #

If you’ve done all the above, read through the handbook and the repo and are still waiting for your first project to start, go and talk to the person in charge of onboarding. They will find something meaningful for you to do which might be something like:

  • Browse the Project tracker and emoji any projects in the Finding people and Awaiting go/no-go columns.
    • Note: you will be notified to do this before being assigned to a project.
  • Browse the Service areas list, discuss the different areas with people involved and emoji those that are looking for people.
  • Work on a Turing Data Story. There’s always a story to join or a new one to start. You can then keep working on it on your 22 days time once allocated to a project. This option has been very popular.
  • Tackle a GitHub issue marked with the good first issue tag in a repo that REG works on. Whenever a new starter is looking for things to do, the person in charge of onboarding will send a message on Slack asking everyone to tag suitable issues.
  • Work on a REG-internal project that is easy to rotate in/out of.
  • Any ad hoc ideas that come up. Maybe you found a project that really interests you and want to help, or maybe there’s some team organisational thing that comes up that you volunteer for.

Points of Contact #

You can find useful points of contact here. This page also holds other useful information such as remote meeting details and team responsibilities.