Myself, I am very "getting my hands dirty"-oriented, and the corporate onboarding goes over very poorly with me too. Sit through multiple days of material that is dumbed down to the company's lowest common denominator. Having to be giddy with other new hires in departments that you will never have any interaction with anymore. Kill me now. So, if the trainers just go through the motions, why wouldn't the original poster and I just put in the mere minimum to get through it, and start my real job...?
Oh, my real job... in the cafetaria with no desk? So, sure, the manager can forget to put the request in. But would a manager not know that you start, schedule a welcome meeting with you on the first day, touch base a few times in your first week? Plenty of chances, still no desk! It's ridiculous, but I am not surprised. If you don't think that is ridiculous, then, I don't know, maybe you've been conditioned to that sort of environment. With no snark I wish you much joy in your employment there, but then please let the original poster and myself move on^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hrun for the hills.
Here's what onboarding should look like for an Engineering role: you come in at 9:00, do the bare minimum with HR, meet your team, set up your computer, and before the end of your first day, you have your first code changes in production. Then you go home with a feeling of accomplishment. Then, during the rest of the week, some onboarding meetings will happen, but at least you have started with the most important place: your team.
That pretty much describes my department, for the 25 years I ran it.
Of course, it was a fairly small team of experienced, high-functioning, engineers, so I doubt it represented the “industry standard” shop. We hired people with many years of experience, and I found it productive to let each one have a great deal of agency and control of their development environment.
Like adding yourself to a maintainer list or some prepared token handholding task? Or what could you possibly do in the first day before having the time to read the code.
Much of the online ranting (and frankly, hate), including in this thread, would be avoided if people would just spend some time getting to know the human beings behind the text on their screen. The very thing that has been called "infantilizing" somewhere else in this thread.
I do agree that meeting your coworkers and talking to them can indeed have very beneficial effects. I just don't see how a picture of a face helps that in any way. That's the connection that just doesn't seem to exist. It seems like people who want video on on Zoom calls. There are very few cases where that's a bonus.
And yes, I agree that the people who called getting to know their peers via an onboarding process that was probably somewhat corny "infantilizing" seem way offbase.
My point was only that pushing (any) code to prod on day 1 doesn’t have to be an entitled fantasy.
I never even considered how people could fail at those tests (e.g. privacy procedures) until I saw someone that was truly not interested in them take them.
Now I understand why the stupid things require you to spend at least 2 seconds looking at the answer slowly fading in before they allow you to click.
For some people the solution is not understanding the material. It’s just clicking every answer in rapid succession until they get the magic combination.
Hiring someone but forgetting to prepare a workplace for this person seems very unprofessional to me. There could be valid reasons for it, but they must be exceptions, and just forgetting is not a valid reason.
> How is it better to humiliate them in front of the CEO?
Author just provided an honest answer when asked by an unknown person. If manager had a valid excuse, this should not be a problem. If manager feels „humiliated“ because their mistake was exposed, but behaves professionally, also fine - we should feel sorry for our mistakes and should not expect, that everybody will avoid saying truth just to protect your feelings. Shit happens, lesson learned, move on. Our loyalty is defined by our contract and it is to the company and to shareholders, after all, and every manager in the hierarchy deserves the truth - any conspiracies to hide it are counter-productive politics.
The blog post mentions that the author decided to skip steps of the onboarding process and decided to occupy a desk in a moment in time new arrivals were expected to occupy none.
Also, it seems the onboarding process the author decided to skip was a multi-day event, so it seems the need for a desk popped up a few days before schedule.
How many teams have free desks around waiting for unexpected developers to show up?
I've been at companies large and small. One time for example I had to sit on a different floor from my team because they did not have space on that floor. This was a huge downtown office tower owned by the company. They had even put in the request for a desk in time for one to be ready and all that. But there just wasn't space and they had to play tetris on the floor plans and move entire teams around floors to make space for me (and some other new guys that didn't sit with the team either but at least on the same floor. This was explained to me right away though and honestly while not great, it was totally fine in that sense. I just sat in a meeting room or in the coffee area or next to someone else at their desk (yes the desks were large enough for that, no all offices are WeWork sized) for some time (basically ignoring my assigned desk) until this resolved.
It’s not like desk moves happen very often. Unless there’s an intern about to leave, there’s always some free desks on teams that are hiring. At least at every company I’ve worked.
If I’m hiring a new person I generally have desk space available before they show up. Even if that involves fitting 7 people in the space for 6.
If it were me, my answer would be:
On my first day? Before my first paycheck? Before I know what I'll be doing, who I'll be working for, whether any of that is going to be remotely humane or professional?
No. I will not start looking for independent process tweaks and improvements on hour 1, while being onboarding-hazed. Give me a reason to care about this gig, first.
There's a huge distance between "I accepted the offer and will do my best as a professional to earn my paycheck" and "This is my company, my community, and I have a personal interest in improving it in ways outside of my role". Meeting the bar for the first one is on me. Making me want to meet the bar for the second is on the company; good workplaces will give me reasons to get there, mediocre or bad ones won't.
She took the time months later to rant. Could invest time months later to instead improve things.
Which of course won't happen if you already made up your mind on day 1 that this all sucks because you got a laptop with a touchbar that you keep fat-fingering and thus can't stand, had to learn how the corp directory works and a desk assignment was forgotten. Really sounds like a horrible place, who would ever want to work there. /s
Don't try and convert your subjective disagreement into an universal fact. It's bad discussion form.
Accept that your opinion isn't a fact and move on.
She seems to be struggling with this as well.
Where do you get the "struggling" part from?
If you're in tech for some time, you most probably care a lot about tools you work with, especially keyboard, mouse and display. It doesn't mean that these should be super expensive. Just that they offer base functionality. For instance, physical ESC and F keys. Not having that for me is equal to be forced to write with left hand while I'm right handed. Possible, but is it productive?
However having been through enough onboardings the overall tone does resonate, and shows that companies don't spend enough time streamlining and revising their processes. Maybe it might help for them to do trial runs on new machines once a year or spend time removing tech debt out of their dev environments. If a new hire, especially one experienced in your stack, has difficulty onboarding, then something is wrong and it's probably not them.
- first, pushing ignorant (and proud to be, saying that they only need obscure laws of economy to rule the world) managers => we see in decades that NOTHING really new is born and anything is more and more crappy and unsustainable;
- second, pushing a dumb and dysfunctional false sociability mediated by ridiculous rituals some call them "team building" some other less crazy call them nazi voodoo in modern western sauce;
- third, pushing bad tech and bad tech habit because for some of the above ignorant that's not bad, craptops and certain "mobility" push is one of the face of such push: to work we all need for a reason or another DESKTOPS, large screens, sometimes more than one, good large and rich of keys keyboards, a damn desk large enough, a room etc the management push toward "take a craptop and crapphone and you are ready to work", things like https://arstechnica.com/?p=1831722 clearly depict what we are heading: giving cheaper and cheaper crap hoping to keep revenues up lowering costs, shifting them to third parties.
My own personal response to that is simple: managers MUST be pushed toward they role, beancounters, restoring the concept of entrepreneurship. Managerial driven modern nazi society (that's is, modern management techniques are born in the nazi era) is something we can't sustain.
It's also highly unprofessional and demonstrates a high level of disdain for everyone around the author, which is particularly worrying given the author started expressing that at a moment in time when had barely got through the door.
To me it's particularly cringeworthy how the author decided to skip onboarding to afterwards force team members to waste their time onboarding her, and that's depicted as a win. No, it isn't. Onboarding processes are there to avoid wasting everyone's time getting yourself up to speed, and the author forced everyone around to waste their time with an unnecessary do-over. and even that was slammed.
And yet the company had a painful/useless onboarding process. I agree with you onboarding is important, but if you feel powerless as an individual, complying with stupid orders is certainly not the best you can do.
Even from a cold productivist viewpoint, i bet the author was more productive sitting in the collective space and reaching out to a few friends when they needed help explicitly, than sitting through corporate bullshit making you setup half a dozen applications so you can find out dog names.
I don't see any evidence it was useless. It had some parts not useful to the author. But it's ridiculous to expect a tailor-made onboarding experience that comprehensively and exclusively touches on things you personally need to know.
Nor did I see anything other than the length really that painful. Oh no, the author was asked to type in front of people on their nonpreferred keyboard and was clumsy about it (returned to several times)! They were bad at using the internal directory tool and felt frustrated! The clock gave them anxiety!
I believe I have participated in the same onboarding process as the author. (Based on timeline and other hints, not 100% but pretty sure).
In my experience it was fine. Besides the usual basics like setting up accounts and making sure we had access to what we needed it also included a session where everyone made a small change to a service, testing it, PR-ing it and deploying it. Which is more than I can say about my onboarding experiences elsewhere.
Regarding equipment I am not a fan of the touchbar either (or Macs in general) but it was very easy to get an X1 running Linux (and keep the Mac as well). All I had to do was to ask and have my manager approve.
Overall I felt that there was a genuine effort to try to make sure that newhires had a good initial impression and smooth onboarding. The company was growing very fast at the time with a ton of people coming onboard every week so I thought that it was impressive that they managed to do as much as they did.
The point is that it now costs the time of those friends too, instead of the time of the onboarding trainers that were spending that time anyway.
Note that I'm not arguing against 1-on-1 onboarding in general, but there is zero doubt that it costs more time (which is the argument you quoted).
This has zero to do micromanagement. Either your new hire onboards with dedicated staff in dedicated sessions, or that task falls upon the new arrival's team members. The need is always there, and forcing each team to allocate one or two members to do the job that a onboarding meeting does is hard or impossible to justify.
Keep in mind that the blog author talked about SSO and installing software.
At what point we stop pretending that the king is in fact naked and doesn't have new clothes?
Also known as going through an end-to-end user flow?
The point of a "hello world" is also not to greet people.
> At what point we stop pretending that the king is in fact naked and doesn't have new clothes?
No one is pretending anything. There are only those who understand onboarding is about onboarding, and those who fail to understand it and fill in that blank with outlandish interpretations.
My whole point was that the quoted "cold productivist viewpoint" completed neglected the productivity of the team members doing the one-on-one onboarding. I didn't start this line of argument, I was just engaging in it, so it makes no sense for you to hassle me about your perceived morality of said viewpoint: You accused me of approving of "A" when all I did was refute "A implies B".
The OP however did say that going through the template onboarding process didn't seem to net them any valuable knowledge.
From that vantage point you can very easily argue that requiring the personal touch, while not efficient because it's taking away productive time from other team member(s), has the biggest impact on the newly onboarding employee, and might end up being the least inefficient time expenditure during onboarding. I (and I think OP) claim that this is often true.
I found myself in a similar situation several times while complying 100% with the onboarding processes. I can confidently say 95% of them were completely useless for my day-to-day work. I didn't mind e.g. security guidelines and some company history (I did actually find them quite fascinating, contrary to what I thought before entering the meetings) but after 1-2 weeks of onboarding I found myself practically unprepared for my day-to-day technical work.
...And then I ended up needing personal attention from 2 team members anyway because I was progressing at a snail's pace -- because super important institutional knowledge was scattered among 30+ repositories (and the info was often not even in the README files but buried in a long code comment somewhere). Not to mention critically important ops details that were blocking further progress were impossible for me to obtain until a team member figured they'll finally reply with details they can look up in maximum 2 minutes.
So what was my gain from the template onboarding process? Practically zero. I would have been interested in most of the onboarding meetings and live tutorials after I worked for the company for 3-6 months because quite frankly, and looking back and analyzing it, they would have been very valuable then and NOT right at the start.
---
I suppose the right question for us to debate here is: are you confident that new team members needing your time is more unproductive than letting them fumble and trying to feel their way in, resulting in very low productivity for months?
At least from my experience the answer is a firm "NO". You can call me stupid or non-self-starter or unable to read other people's code or anything else if you like -- but I did end up learning everything I needed (eventually). However, every separate key insight came after days (sometimes after two weeks!) of trial and error and getting scolded on standups in the manner of "no no no, do not do it like that, but I won't tell you how". And I am pretty sure that each and every one of these key insights could have been provided by (in total, not for each one) maximum 3 voice chats a week, complemented with screen share and generally just showing you the ropes.
But the team was never bothered to do it even though I calculated that the time "wasted" for them would have been roughly 3.0 - 3.5 hours a week for no more than a month, so 12 - 15 hours for an entire month.
Was that too big a price to pay for recruiting a strong helping hand in your team? To them apparently it was. But it did no favours to the companies we parted ways with because both me and them ended up very frustrated about how long did the "self-starter" style onboarding take. So they ended up wasting money for which they received zero value, and I paid an opportunity cost in lost career growth and maybe a potentially amazing long-term job.
Nobody won, everybody lost. The root cause was this bean counting of hours.
And I agree, no introduction week is going to give you the institutional knowledge that you need to be effective in your team. But, circling back to the article, having your colleagues tell you how to work with the phone book and org chart or guiding you through SSO is certainly not a productive use of their time and much better done centrally.
I'm sorry that you had such a negative and unproductive experience, and avoiding this kind of situation is part of the reason why I still provide one-on-one training to new hires, even though it takes a lot of time. But I am grateful for the stuff that is covered in a central training which I won't have to waste my time on.
So yeah, everything in moderation.
You should read the reply the author wrote the first time this post appeared on HN. https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/05/23/nope/
>>>Point: (anything calling me entitled)
>>>I find that this, like "unprofessional", is a word people whip out when they can't grapple with the actual topic at hand. It's a nice shortcut to know that they are not going to address the matter properly.
>>>Go read pg's "How to Disagree". Then realize you're failing at it.
The reason is that the author of the original blog post failed PG's point themselves. The main criticism is the form of the blog post. Even if everything in it was true, the laptop was actually, objectively terrible, the onboarding was objectively useless, etc. The way all of this was presented is just an immature rant. That's not how one should treat people. Whenever somebody is this arrogant, it puts me on red alert.
In PG's post, he ends with:
> If you study conversations, you find there is a lot more meanness down in DH1 than up in DH6. You don't have to be mean when you have a real point to make. In fact, you don't want to. If you have something real to say, being mean just gets in the way.
There was a lot of meanness in that original blog post. A lot of it is in the lowest of the DH levels. If they had something real to say, that's pretty sad, because the meanness got in the way. Literally, because it spawned this whole thread. People take you less seriously if you express yourself like this, and that's what this thread here is about.
You also could have read the update to know that she didn't waste anyone's time.
You make a lot of assumptions.
It really isn't. It's a statement of fact. The whole point of getting everyone in the same room and showing them how to go through a SSO userflow and install basic software is precisely to not force everyone on your team to endure that each and every single time there's a new hire.
The majority of questions are always the same predictable set of questions, the struggles are the same, the process is the same, the goals are the same. Thus instead of bringing down each and every team's productivity to go through exactly the same thing over and over again, you just get everyone on the same room, get a pair of dedicated employees to do the handholding, and you're done.
I really don't think it is. The author simply seems to have very little tolerance for that onboarding process, and do you know what, that process actually does sound pretty familiar.
I've worked for two companies that give you their hardware, install a ton of trash on it, have a total mess of SSO logins that kind of work or require the use of multiple different accounts for certain services that "were set up with SSO but didn't work..."
And one also had a series of daft orientation tasks that were supposed to promote team work and establish the company's culture, but in fact are just a waste of time that no one wants to do -- with the sole exception of the suspiciously hyper lunatic running the team building session.
Look at the article title. Red flags. Stuff like this might very well indicate that maybe, maybe this company's culture is not a good fit if you have low tolerance for amateurs.
> Putting people on the spot and humiliate them
The author was put on the spot, brought into a whatever meeting, and asked a question, to which they responded honestly and without embellishment of the truth.
So... should the author have lied? They simply replied they did not have a desk. I sure as shit wouldn't lie to cover my manager's ass because, frankly, I'd want a desk.
If the manager felt humiliated, it will have come from within, because you know what, they should feel embarrassed if they've taken on a new worker and not gotten them somewhere to work.
> It's _your_ company now, go help improve it!
No. It's the shareholders' company, they can make sure their employees are properly equipped and appropriately paid to do their jobs, then the good work will follow.
As for suggesting that their onboarding process could use improvement, 9/10 managers who receive that feedback will smile, say what a good idea that is, say they'll take it on board, and then never think about it again.
I've been a manager, and I've been a developer. Most managers don't give a toss.
The article, at least the way I'm seeing it, seems to be a satirical (i.e. intended for an audience that has a common frame of reference and, more importantly, a sense of humour) account of an onboarding process at a company that later turned out to be a bad fit.
And in hindsight, the author is saying that they probably indeed should have seen the red flags from the start as being indicative of whatever would cause their departure.
> You are making everybody else's life miserable without contributing anything positive or helping to improve anything.
That's a stretch. The only person the author has made miserable is you, but why this has stirred such an awkwardly emotive response from you, I don't know.
I've never worked somewhere where there isn't a desk for me in the last 23 years and never had to do an onboarding process like this before getting started (plenty of stuff to do at the desk for sure, and it can take a while before you are setup on everything - but it's usually time you can use to familiarise yourself with everything).
It's just not their duty. Everything has a limit, and this onboarding/whole company is just humiliating and unhuman.
Playing a little onboarding game for a few minutes where people click through a corporate directory is not "unhuman".
No, it's infantilizing your workforce. Don't do that.
Learning your new hire refuses to read documentation and instead asks for the answer from someone else is valuable. Remember, that 10 second ask later can break a developer out of flow and impose a huge cost on them.
If the author wanted to avoid the work, they could have:
- written Fido and trust that the answer was never checked
- assumed it was checked client side and found the array of acceptable names
Those would be ways to move around the problem. Interrupting your coworkers for something you're supposed to do on your own isn't.
If an institution is not capable to be human and empathic even in something as basic as an "onboarding" (which is supposed to make you feel welcome and capable), run for your life or burn the whole thing down. Fuck industrial capitalism.
This statement is too over-generalized and hostile to be made in good faith for a meaningful debate.
First, of course corporations do not "care" since they are not sentient. It's probably management of corporations that you mean.
Second, some individuals in some corporations may not care. And different companies may have different fractions of people not caring. In my experience, the long-term successful companies have a high fraction of people actually caring. And if they don't, then switch to a company where they do. I have worked at many places where the leadership team cared deeply, and it radiated into lower management and all employees. Foul apples tended to leave, since their constant ranting and disrespect was not appreciated or reciprocated, so they didn't feel welcome, and rightly so.
The irony is that it tends to be people with condescending and arrogant attitudes who do most of the "not caring". Just like the author of the blog entry we are discussing here.
If you are joining an organization of this size. There are zero people interested in learning about your feelings on onboarding.
Your manager should have a process they follow when hiring people, and assigning someone a desk is part of that. If the company doesn’t have such a process, that’s a red flag.
I feel like this is a sign of one's tolerance for inefficiencies going down with age. When i started out development, i'd tolerate things like having to manually restart services that went down every few days, or applications without proper logging so debugging errors would be guesswork, or shared access credentials (which are frankly a risk). But as time went on, i stopped thinking that "that's just the way things are" and instead fixed all of it: systemd services (or containers), proper logging and log shipping, separate credentials for each person and so on.
I fail to see why social issues should be treated any differently, with the caveat that you actually need to present yourself as professional, any criticisms as constructive and just generally need to work towards making the job environment not miserable for anyone. That said, there's no reason not to be able to vent about your frustrations freely. I disagree that you're supposed to stay silent about dysfunctional aspects of environments, since they can be a learning experience for others.
> How is it better to humiliate them in front of the CEO? Is that your approach to deal with criticism? Putting people on the spot and humiliate them?
If answering a simple question truthfully is humiliating, i doubt that that's necessarily a failing on your part. Though it's nice that the author was able to find and set up a desk for themselves - a few years ago i myself would have just been miserable in those circumstances... and would have probably cried. I don't think that not even having a place to work at is adequate, unless that's just the culture in the company (e.g. no assigned seating), otherwise it's maybe a tad awkward/humiliating and singles the person out.
> If anything, the person's behavior is the reddest flag here.
I somewhat agree, but i also don't seek to vilify the person because the way they handled the situation differs from how i would. It is perfectly normal to feel frustration as a human being. I still do that when i find blatant N+1 problems in the codebase due to someone wanting to use nested service calls instead of just writing a single longer SQL query to load all of the data for a particular section of the site in one go. Or when i find situations where a lack of indices slows down the data fetching 112 times.
And yet, i bite my lip, decide not to be an ass about it, fix what i can without breaking anything, even if that reflects more poorly upon my own performance (e.g. more time taken per issue, less interesting issues solved on my own) whilst still making the product better. I then proceed to reframe those issues as a win for improving performance and add a few helpful suggestions for the next meeting, to illustrate the potential benefits, fully knowing that none of them will be taken to heart and that the system will slowly rot over the years to come.
That's just how things are - sometimes things are out of your control and you just have to deal with them, other times you can fix things yourself. It is fine to vent about either, though i hope that the author was less snarky in person.
> It's _your_ company now, go help improve it!
Yeah just like companies care about user/employee feedback! Why are they working so hard against unionization then? (which would be a major improvement for all people involved) Companies work as a top-down structure operated by psychopaths and couldn't care less how people feel at the bottom.
> How is it better to humiliate them in front of the CEO?
So what's your advice? Lie to an honest question to cover generalized incompetence/malice? Sure that's what most companies and administration expect of you (producing false reports and/or avoiding to answer questions faithfully so some other team can take the blame), but that's definitely not how to operate a healthy workplace.
I mean, as much as i despise CEOs, if the guy was asking the question in the first place, it certainly means he was aware of the very bad onboarding process and the difficulty to get to your desk, and was either: attempting to measure whether the situation "on the ground" is getting better, or measuring your own capacity to produce honest answers... In both cases, honesty was what the CEO was looking for so the author acted well.
> If it turns out it doesn't work for you, request a different laptop a few weeks later. Big deal.
Or a big company like this one could have a number of supported models from which you can choose. Why impose a single UX on every employee? I'm not asking to let me use my laptop, but please let me choose the best keyboard (for me) among at least 2 options. Everyone has different needs, and trying to fit everyone in a single box is a good way to break more than a few individuals.
> If anything, the person's behavior is the reddest flag here. I'd start feeling miserable the moment anybody with those attitudes joins my team.
If anything, your behavior is the reddest flag here. You are representative of everything that's wrong in Silicon Valley, refusing to hear legit complaint about painful processes preventing people from doing their work. I assume you're a manager type with 5 figure salary. I strongly recommend you get connected with reality (the one experienced by the other 7 billions of us who are not in your privileged position of exploiter) and start to develop empathy towards other people. This would make you a better human being and would significantly improve the lives of everyone around you: blaming the victims of unjust systems may help you get closer to the top of the structure, but will certainly not help you be happy and/or produce meaningful change in the world.
Oh, I have a good one. Be less toxic. Works 100% of the time.
I saw his obituary years later - “passed away unexpectedly at home” at the age of 53. I can’t imagine how stressful and sad it must be to look at the world so negatively.
I agree that many things mentioned about this particular onboarding process are not great. But do you really talk down everybody to that extent? You just joined, some things may not be clear yet, but you still just judge everybody? It's _your_ company now, go help improve it! Help streamlining onboarding! Ask your manager about your desk! Maybe they just forgot, that's human. How is it better to humiliate them in front of the CEO? Is that your approach to deal with criticism? Putting people on the spot and humiliate them?
Ranting about some keyboard and touch bar? Really? The whole second paragraph of this blog post? And _you_ complain about _others_ not being professional? Of course it takes a bit to get used to new devices. Do you really need to start complaining about things the first minute you've tried them? If it turns out it doesn't work for you, request a different laptop a few weeks later. Big deal.
> Now, when I run into a thing like this, I start getting snarky and bitchy and start thinking laterally.
You are making everybody else's life miserable without contributing anything positive or helping to improve anything.
> It gets better, too: they had claimed (and lied) that "your manager will be able to see the results of this".
What? The manager likely _was_ able to see the results. Whether they actually looked is a different question. But it was not a _lie_ that they were able to. This makes me question the accuracy of your whole account.
> wound up leaving anyway a year later.
Probably for the best of everybody involved. If that's your attitude on your first day, why did you even start working there.
If anything, the person's behavior is the reddest flag here. I'd start feeling miserable the moment anybody with those attitudes joins my team.
P.S.: No, I don't associate "onboarding" with "waterboarding". Never occurred to me. After reading this blog post, this could be a nice question to remove candidates with terrible attitudes out of the pool.