First Impressions: What People Judge Before They Read Your Code

In your first month at a new company, people form a view of you from a small amount of evidence. Not from your code, because almost nobody has read any of it yet. From whether you turned up on time, whether you were ready, and how you sounded when something looked difficult.

That view is durable and often unfair, but it's an unavoidable reality of working with humans.

Having just gone through a similar transition at a new company, I've given this a lot of thought and this article covers some of the recent reflection.

Being on time is the cheapest reputation available

Punctuality is noticed because it requires nothing. Anyone can do it. Failing to do it reads as a choice rather than a limitation, which is why it carries so much weight.

In your first month, it carries even more. Nobody yet knows whether you can code. They do know you were late to standup twice.

It’s not pleasant, especially if you have to commute. Trust me, as a night owl with a long commute, I would know.

But it has to be done. Build your life and routine around getting to work on time, if not some minutes earlier.

A few practical points:

• If it's an online meeting, join the call a minute or two before it starts. Being "on time" in the sense of arriving exactly as it begins means the first two minutes are you settling in. In office work, punctuality is highly visible because meetings happen at fixed times.

I watched this play out from the other side once. Somebody joined the team who was, as far as I could tell, perfectly capable, and was two or three minutes late to standup most mornings. It was never discussed and it was never a formal problem. However, it was also the first thing that came up whenever their name did, months later, long after the lateness had stopped mattering to anybody's actual work. If you want to progress and be respected, you probably don't want to be them.

• Prepare what you want to say. Some folks are better at freestyling their updates than others. Personally, I've always benefited from jotting down a few notes before the meeting begins, as well as mentally practicing my delivery. I maintain a dedicated section for meeting notes in my notes app of choice (OneNote). I tend to stutter if I'm not prepared, and that can come across as less capable.

• Know what you want out of a meeting before it starts. For a meeting you called: state the decision or answer you need at the start. "I need a decision on approach A or B" gets a decision. "I wanted to talk through the payment thing" gets forty minutes and no outcome. For a meeting you were invited to: read what was sent and write your questions down. Written questions survive the moment better than questions you think of on the fly. For a one-to-one with your lead: bring a short list. This is dedicated time and wasting it saying "everything is fine" is common. Two asks and one observation makes you look more organised than most.

• Be ready before it starts. Have what you need open. Watching someone find a window for ninety seconds multiplied by eight people in the meeting is not a small cost.

• Say something if you will be late. A one line message costs nothing and removes the entire problem. Silence is what irritates people, not lateness.

• Keep promises you make in meetings. In remote and asynchronous teams, this is a form of punctuality. Punctuality is really about honoring an agreed time, not just arriving at a meeting on time. Saying “I’ll look at that this afternoon” creates the same kind of expectation. Someone is relying on you to act by a certain time. If you do not, it is much like turning up late to a meeting. Because these informal promises often do not appear in your calendar, they are also easier to forget. Stick them on your to-do list.

Being presentable, without overthinking it

In-office dress codes in tech range from suits to whatever you wore at breakfast. The rule is: read the level around you and sit slightly above, especially in your first weeks.

Slightly above is the safe direction while you are learning what the norm is. It is easy to relax later, and mildly awkward to correct upwards after you have established a baseline.

A few practical points for being presentable on video, which is where a lot of interaction now happens:

• Dress matters most when client-facing or presenting, including online. Being a notch more polished is minimal effort with real effect.

• Camera on when the team has cameras on. Match the room. If everybody else is visible and you are a grey circle, that is noticed, particularly when you are new and people are trying to get a sense of you. If the team's norm is cameras off, do not be the one person insisting.

• Don't ignore your background. Tidy, or blurred, or a plain wall. It takes ten minutes to solve permanently.

• Get the audio right, because it matters more than the video. People forgive a poor picture and find poor sound tiring. A cheap wired headset beats laptop speakers and a room echo. If people frequently ask you to repeat things, that is a hardware problem to solve, not a fact about your voice.

• Test camera, microphone, and screen sharing before the first important meeting. Discovering permission problems in front of eight people is a bad way to spend a Tuesday.

• Focus on the meeting. Don't work away at something on your computer. Folks can tell who's paying attention. I try to take notes on everything being said, even when some of it does not make sense at first. It helps you focus. As the conversation develops, the context builds, patterns emerge, and the dots often begin to connect, which then helps you communicate more effectively.