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Onboarding

Shamelessly stolen from: https://icanthascheezburger.com/wordpress/sweat-the-small-stuff-resources/

The best way to make sure you’re onboarding successfully is to have the steps somewhat documented and always be iterating on these steps.

Before the first day

  • Tell your new hire when you’re expecting them (ProTip: have them come in a bit later on their first day so that you have time to prepare) and make sure they know where to park and where to go when they arrive. If there’s any security involved make a to-do for yourself to ensure that’s taken care of before their arrival
  • Get their desk set up and cleared out. This can be hectic if you’re rapidly growing and running out of space but do your best to make sure they’re with the team
  • Ask what kind of computer they want! Engineers enjoy having agency over their equipment. Best to give them a big budget and let them decide what to get
  • Find out if they have any specific furniture/desk needs. Some people might need a different chair for ergonomics, for instance.

First Day

  • Introduce to everyone on the team
  • Get lunch together as a team. Bonus points if you leave the office for this
  • Have a 1 hour 1:1 in which you are telling the new hire specifically about what your team does, what they’re working on right now, etc.
  • Have the new hire spend some time pairing with an engineer on something. They’ll probably be mostly observing but it’s a good way to start.

First week

  • Pair them with someone on dev environment setup. Have the engineer document any situations where the actual process ended up deviating from what’s documented, and see if the documentation can be updated.
  • Get them access to all systems they need access to
  • Have the engineer attending all agile ceremonies (iteration planning, dailies, retro, any backlog grooming)
  • Set up 1:1s with other roles so the new hire understands how the greater team collaborates
    • SRE/DevOps engineer can talk about deploy procedure, architecture overall, and how the team conducts post mortems
    • Designer can discuss how design is collaborating with engineering
    • A product manager can talk about product goals
    • A project manager can talk about the team’s process
  • At the end of the first week, have a retrospective about their experience with things so that you can learn what worked and what didn’t and apply that to future new hires.
  • Set up a regular cadence to have manager 1:1s with new hire and set expectations for how those meetings should go.

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