The new guy card

I came across a post on X from The Random Recruiter that described the first 90 days in a new job as the period when ignorance is still interpreted as curiosity. I recognised that from my own recent experience.

At the beginning, asking basic questions is tolerated, but it never feels entirely safe. You hesitate before each one.

Is this a smart question or a stupid one? You ask anyway. Why does a process exist? Why does a team work a certain way? Why has nobody changed what looks broken? A few months later, the same questions can sound different.

But what makes that early window valuable is not simply that ignorance is accepted. It is that you still notice things insiders have stopped seeing. You have not yet learned which assumptions are considered house rules, which workarounds everyone accepts, or which things people keep doing because that’s simply how they’ve always been done.

The danger is that we spend those first months trying to prove how quickly we understand the place. We learn the language and the unwritten rules, and somewhere in that process we stop questioning. By then, asking feels less like curiosity and more like admitting we should already know the answer.