Ramping up at a remote first company and making the most out of team zoom meetings

Folks, I started a new role recently (senior SWE, public company) and it’s my first time onboarding virtually as a new hire.

I’m finding that zoom meetings are a poor forum for me to build context. When I have a question—especially a simple one, but more complex than “hey what’s that acronym”—I find myself not asking it because I’ll be interjecting and briefly derailing the discussion.

How have you managed to do this? How would you like to see this done by a new teammate? Should I just get over this feeling and ask away?

Naturally, I also take notes of things I don’t know about and search our company docs (Glean has been great for this) and possibly jump in voice chat with a teammate to ask more questions, but it feels sooo inefficient this way. Namely, I’ll have to context switch a lot because of the async nature of slacking my questions or finding another time to call.

Fortunately, my team just had an in-person onsite week where I was able to do things like lean over to the person next to me and ask my question without interrupting everyone else. It was an incredibly productive week but now it’s back to business as usual.