Communications of the ACM

extra invested in that new hire doing well once he or she joined the team? Even a minimal investment will have a psychological impact on your potential coworkers. If they meet you or interview you, they will have already invested some amount of time in you and will be more inclined to want to see that investment rewarded.

˲ You will not be “brand new” on your first day. As humans, we are naturally resistant to change and to new people whom we know nothing about. If you show up on your first day having met no one yet, you are a stranger; your coworkers are more likely to see you as an “outsider” taking up space. Even a short meeting in advance will prime them to see you as familiar the next time you see them. Plus, you will have some baseline knowledge about the team that can help you fit in more quickly, as opposed to starting to learn about the team culture after you have joined.

Be Smart When You
Choose Your Next Role

When you are searching for the next step in your career, don’t just think about the surface-level benefits. Drill down on your biggest goals and do a little thinking about whether or not each job will help you get closer to those goals.

The best careers are not defined by titles or résumé bullet points. The smarter you are about what you choose next, the closer you will get to the things you truly want from your life and your work.

Pick People, Not Projects

Another easy trap to fall into when picking your next job is to focus too much on the projects you think you will get to work on.

Of course, we all want to work on things that are interesting and exciting or that could make us rich and famous. The truth is projects get canceled all the time. They change and become less exciting. The roles within them change, and you could end up doing legwork that is not actually very interesting or exciting to you.

In college, I got a job working in a lab. I was so happy because I was envisioning myself working on exciting experiments and getting my work published in major journals. While those exciting projects did happen in this lab, I never got to do them. I ended up running the same experiment day after day, collecting the same data over and over again. This is often what research is—you need to make sure any results are statistically significant, so you do the same thing repeatedly.

The projects the lab was working on were exciting, but my life in the lab was not.

It is so important to consider what your day-to-day life will be like in a role. What will you actually spend your time doing? Will it add value to your career? What will you get the chance to learn?

Remember, when you are new to a team, you have no career capital built up with this organization. Career capital is your currency at work; when you provide a lot of concrete, visible value to the team or the organization, you have more leverage to do the things you want, such as work on the most exciting projects or get more flexibility in your schedule.

When you are new, you have not
earned this leverage. That means if
you are assigned to a boring role on
an exciting project, you pretty much
just have to do it. Sometimes that
can be OK (maybe you actually want-
ed to learn this boring skill because
it will help you get a job you want in
the future), but if it’s not, then you
are just stuck.

For example, I have a friend who really wanted to work on machine learning, so he joined a team doing that type of work. For the 18 months he didn’t get to do anything related to machine learning, and instead was stuck writing deployment scripts and updates to data loaders—work that was much less interesting to him than the project he was on previously.

Projects are never guaranteed, so ensure you understand the specifics and exactly what work you will get the chance to do. Also, instead of thinking just about the work, I recommend thinking also about whom you will be working with.

Basing your decision on the people you will be working with is one of the best ways to pick a job. If you must choose between an exciting project or a great team, always go for the great team.

Some 99% of my happiness in a job has to do with who my manager and coworkers are. I bet it is the same for you. You spend so much time at work; if you work full time, you probably spend as much (or more) time with your coworkers than you do with your friends or family.

In some organizations, it is common to interview with the boss and at least one other member of the team, though this does not always happen. You should always ask for the opportunity to meet more of the people you will be working with.

This has a few benefits:

˲ You can meet with the people you will work with every day. Not only will you get a feel for what it will be like working with them, you can also ask them for insight into other aspects of the role. Do they like working there? How much turnover is there on the team? How does collaboration work? Does leadership listen to input on decisions? What are the things they would want to change about the team/com-pany/culture? Why do they work there vs. anywhere else?

˲ Your coworkers will feel invested in your success if they are part of the process of hiring you. Think about it—if you met with a candidate you liked and fought for him or her to be hired, wouldn’t you be