Obviously, no one expects a newly graduated hire to know everything during their first week, but early impressions stick. Question for the managers and senior engineers on here: What can a new grad do in those first few days to make you incredibly glad you hired them? What sets them apart early on?

I'm a junior engineer, but I inherited a project mid-construction because the designer left. I wasn't around for the early phases, but now I’m running the site meetings. I'm stressed about the technical gap and being asked questions I don't know the answers to. I don't want to appear clueless in front of the clients, even though I am. Is it okay to say that I don't know, but I will get back to them? Or does that look unprofessional?

Do you think engineers spend enough time thinking about the user experience of internal tools? I’ve seen teams tolerate painful internal systems that they’d never ship to customers.

Do you think engineering gets more technical or more psychological over time? The longer I work with teams and systems, the more human behavior seems to matter.

Finally getting into AI in the way that I think it was meant to be used. Claude is a game changer. I was just using chat GPT to make goofy images. Claude can actually do work! Anyone else using AI in cool ways? Need some ideas