I recently saw a tweet that offered advice to new Microsoft employees:

My initial reaction was that this is very true and also bad. I said it was a sign that the onboarding process is broken. But there’s more nuance to it. I want to draw a distinction between not knowing all of the pointy ends of a job and not knowing how to do the tasks necessary.

The former is good for personal growth. I wouldn’t want to take a job that I already know exactly how to do; I won’t learn that way. And even when you’ve done the job somewhere else, each organization has unique nuances that it takes time to learn.

Where it gets troublesome is when the difference between what you’re asked to do things you haven’t been taught how to do. Here I mean the internal processes and tooling, not the general act of doing it. It’s reasonable to expect a marketing person to know how to write a blog post; it’s not reasonable to expect them to know how to submit it through your internal tooling.

Perhaps that’s not what Carmen meant, but it’s certainly what came to mind for me. When I joined Microsoft, we had no documentation for what was expected of people in my role and no documentation for how to execute those tasks. So I would have people coming to me for things that I had no idea how to do — or even what they were. In my time there, I tried to document as much as I could so that the next person who joined the team would have a less stressful onboarding experience than I did.

But even if Carmen was talking more about the “not knowing the pointy ends” scenario, it occurs to me that this may not be healthy. Personal growth is great, but if the difference between what you know how to do and what you’re expected to do gets too large, it’s no longer growth — just stress. People I spoke to at Microsoft seemed to embrace the “you’ll feel stupid” part, and maybe that’s unavoidable, but it’s not a good thing to embrace.

In a talk at the Southern California Linux Expo last week, Jono Bacon said something that really stuck out to me. “[Burnout and stress] is a topic that isn’t talked about enough. In our industry, particularly in Silicon Valley, stress is glorified and that’s stupid.” If you’re in a position to help with onboarding new hires, give them the tools to know how to do their job so they can learn how to do their jobs.