It can also be disappointing to go through a multi-week onboarding full of outings and lunches and fun activities, only to discover that the real job is nothing like the onboarding. Then you have to learn how to actually do the job after the onboarding.

IMO, the best onboarding strategies give the current employees and the new hire some room to get to know each other naturally, without forcing it into overly structured activities. For example, giving the whole team a budget to go out to a long lunch with the hire 3 days per week on the first 2 weeks.

Unless you have a team of lone-wolf type or antisocial developers, usually the person's peers have a better idea of how to onboard a person than a manager several steps removed. Or worse, a person in HR trying to imagine what a good onboarding activity looks like for engineers.

The actual, useful onboarding, was mostly me asking my colleagues where to find the things I needed to find. I can program, I can learn what I need to learn, I just need some good pointers and for my teammates to be patient, supportive and understanding.

I run a fully remote team and am always looking for ways to make a new member feel comfortable, and the existing team comfortable with the new person... or at least less-awkward.

Also, anything to specifically avoid?

Payment at the hotel will foul up. I want overcharges and idiocies on my card and not on my employee's.

Access cards and tokens will foul up. I need to meet the new employee the first day on the morning and probably for lunch.

Network account provisioning will foul up. I need to see what the problem is and go escort the process through.

Lots of people will blow them off for asking beginner questions. I need to be around so that people answer the question properly.

The presence of a manager means that everybody who normally just fluffs off onboarding will pay fscking attention.

As for timelines, it takes about three months for a new employee or intern to no longer be actively hazardous. It takes another three months until they become a positive force for productivity.

Yes, during that time they're doing something useful otherwise they won't learn, but they're generally a productivity drag until about 6-8 months in.

I also agree with the helicopter aspect as well, that’s a key insight on your part and I bet your team likes your mangement style (mostly :)

I dislike when employers don’t structure their expectations accordingly. I once worked somewhere where we almost lost one of our most talented developers (in terms of productivity and quality and insight, a real rock star) because initially failed to understand this. Thankfully our director stepped in and made it right.

Great lesson to have learned early in my career

I have talked to coworkers who have left, and generally if the start of their employment was rough it comes up in a discussion of why they left. It’s not why they left, but a part of a narrative about patterns.

The output may look the same, but there is still a toll. Wear and tear is wear and tear.

This could be a whole forum. In the most important sense (the moral sense), we are not. It's a bad road to go down, thinking of other people this way.

OTOH, we are very much like dogs... a lot moreso than we usually think. It's very useful to remember this and "train" yourself. We tend to assume that we are rationally driven, and sometimes we are. More often, we (me, certainly) are impulse driven and rationalize ex post. The neurochemistry of learning, habit forming and such is something we're better working with rather than against.

Re: onboarding...

I agree with the author that this is important, and usually badly done. I disagree on the particulars.

First, HR and boilerplate management stuff tends to do a pretty bad job onboarding.

"Endless HR videos, slow security processes, a mountain of fragile technology setup"

This stuff sets the tone for culture, and it should be a lot better. Considering how many people these days are explicitly responsible for this stuff in a modern company, it should not suck like this.

I disagree about the "social, light hearted, get-to-know-you stuff." We need more, not less of this. People need to know who they're working with and have as little barrier to asking a wide range of people a wide range of questions.

I do agree that the initial period needs to be taken advantage of. One reason is the "dog training" aspect. Habit forming and such. Good advice in general, not just for work. Build your habits intentionally, especially if you (like me) struggle with bad habits. More specifically for work, use this very limited grace period to ask dumb questions, sit in on stuff and such.

If you (as a manager) put newbies onto boilerplate stuff for 3 weeks, you are wasting the opportunity (of the newbie) to encounter real problems while that grace period is in effect. It's a lot easier to ask "where do I see bugs" on day 8 than day 80. These inevitably come up once real work starts.

"A group of new trainees got an additional hour of on-boarding focused not on the company but on the employee. They were asked questions like: What is unique about you that leads to your happiest times and best performances at work? They were asked to imagine they were lost at sea and to consider what special skills they might bring to the situation. At the end, they were given a sweatshirt with their name. Trainees in the latter group were much more likely to stay longer in he company than trainees that went through normal on-boarding"

https://hbr.org/2015/11/the-powerful-way-onboarding-can-enco...