Ykhjuy

I've been working with software development for nearly 3 years, but always in small companies with 6 employees at most. In Dec 2018, I started to work in a big company and I'm still feeling completely lost.

When I started, no one told me about who was my manager or what project I'll working on. I started with configuring my computer and then I asked people who was my manager, what I'll do etc.

My manager finally shows up. He told me that I'll be out of external projects for now, but when this happens here, they ask for the employees to work in an internal project. I finished all my tasks in about 2 days, which was 1 week ago, and since then I don't have any work to do again.

I sent a message to my manager today at morning to ask for more tasks to do, including suggesting new things. But I think he's on vacation.

I don't know if what I'm doing in the meantime is correct e.g. studying in this free time. It's really annoying me be without things to do, just sitting here and being useless.

What do you all recommend that I do with my time?

Obs:
Sorry for grammatical errors, english is not my native language and I hope you guys can understand me.

It's completely normal to feel lost as a new job the first month

It sounds like you're doing the right thing

Waiting, studying in this free time, and looking for be busy

Keep studying. You will get better.

A few things I do when I start a new job/project

1) Spend personal time reading a book on their technology stack

2) Volunteer for grunt work that will show me more of the system

3) Find a mentor on the team I can go to for help

Some level of feeling lost is normal. But most of what you're going trough is probably related to starting right before the company semi-shut down for the holidays. I'd expect a return to something normalish by next week since even people who burned 2 weeks of time off via Christmas and New Years weeks should be back in the office.

That said, it's still not a good situation for them to have put you in. You shouldn't've been given a mid-December start date without someone committing to be at least minimally available at a level to keep you from being totally unproductive. If nothing else, saying something on the line of "if you finish your first batch of project XYZ tasks, the general backlog is here, feel free to skim off anything that looks obviously valid and which would be appears to be strait forward to implement. Generally this means minor cosmetic issues and quality of life improvements that don't require changing back end logic.

What's done is done though. In the mean time, I'd suggest trying to find anyone involved in the project you did a few days work on, and ask if there's anything else you could do to help them out.

Failing that, if you know where the backlog is, you could still look for other simple tasks. Alternately studying/practicing with the tech stack you'll be using so that when your manager is back in the office you'll be better placed for whatever you are assigned.