Pass Probation on Purpose

TL;DR Wait for your probation review like a verdict and you learn at week 12 what was expected at week 2, when it's too late to change anything. How to pass probation: ask your lead what passing means and write it down, keep a brag document every Friday, and ask "what would worry you if it ended today?" while there's still time to fix the answer.

Do this: Ask your lead this week what passing probation means for your role, and send back what you heard.

Part 4 ended with a calendar invite: Pip's probation review, in three weeks. Friday's broken checkout is still the freshest thing in everyone's memory. That evening, wiping down the galley, she says it out loud.

"What if Kit only remembers Friday?"

Bun doesn't look up. "Then show him the other eleven weeks."

Dev Voyage: Calm Sea, in five parts:

1. Your First 90 Days: How to Join a Crew Without Sinking
2. Ask Better Questions: The Skill That Saves Your First Month
3. Make Friends on the Ship: Working Happily With Colleagues
4. When You Break Something: Owning a Mistake Without Losing Trust
5. Pass Probation on Purpose (you are here)

The trouble with waiting

Pip had a 30-60-90 plan from part 1. What she didn't have was Kit's answer to a different question: what does passing mean? A plan says what you intend to do. Passing is what your lead will decide, and the two can drift apart without anyone noticing.

That gap is where probation goes wrong. You think "learn the codebase" is the goal; your lead was counting features shipped. Nobody said it, so you both find out at the review.

Ask what passing means

Pip asked Kit the next morning, wrote down what she heard, and sent it back: "Is this right?"

By the end of probation, Pip:
1. Ships checkout features with tests, reviewed and merged
   (target: the discount rules, end to end)
2. Reviews others' pull requests (2+ a week)
3. Follows the deploy process, including the checklist
4. Asks for help in the team channel with tried / saw / need
5. Is someone the crew is glad to work with (Kit asks Brock and Bun)

Kit changed one word. Pip had done it three weeks before her review. You can do it in week two.

Ten minutes every Friday

Julia Evans calls it a brag document: a running list of what you did, written as you go, because nobody remembers week three by week twelve. Pip built hers from the notes file she'd started in part 1, plus her merged pull requests.

- Shipped: discount rules for bulk orders (PR #412), with 14 tests
- Fixed: test_checkout flakiness, paired with Brock (PR #398)
- Incident: checkout 500s on Fri 6 Nov; reported in 2 min, rolled back,
  wrote the incident note, added the CI migration dry-run (PR #405)
- Reviewed: 3 PRs (Bun x2, Brock x1)
- Learned: how our deploy pipeline orders migrations

The incident is in there. Not hidden, not excused: what happened, and what she changed because of it.

The question that hurts a little

Then the hard one: "If probation ended today, what would worry you?" Ask it at the midpoint. A gap found in week six can be closed; a gap found in week twelve can only be explained.

Kit's answer was honest. Some of her pull requests arrived without tests, and reviewers had to ask. So they agreed a two-week plan: every PR includes tests or says why not, and Kit looks again on a set date. Two weeks later it was true, and it went in the brag doc.

Sometimes the answer is harder: the role isn't a fit yet. Then ask what exactly would change their mind, by when, and whether your contract allows probation to be extended. Leaving with a clear picture and a brag doc full of real work is a strong start somewhere else.

At the review Kit brought up Friday before Pip could. "You told us in two minutes. Passed! Lunch?"

Try it

This week:

1. Ask your lead what passing probation means for your role, and send back what you heard.
2. Put ten minutes in your calendar every Friday for the brag doc, with links.
3. Book the midpoint question now, so you can't skip it later.

Pip has passed, and the Red Fox feels like home. Then, the Monday after her review, Kit announces that the ship's biggest client has a new director who wants to meet the crew on Thursday. Everyone calls him the Admiral, and he has already rewritten one of Pip's estimates by email: eight days became three. That's where Dev Voyage: Open Ocean begins, with how to work with a difficult boss without arguing about the number.

Read this with your AI

Read the post "Pass Probation on Purpose".
1. Ask me about my role, then draft my probation goals in the same format.
2. Turn this week's work, which I'll paste, into a brag doc entry with links.
3. Help me phrase the midpoint question to my lead, in my own words.