[anders30]

Yes and, since I had a good manager, I was rewarded when "the next person" came along and the amount of time required to onboard dropped from one month to two weeks.

Everything in that situation came down to documentation and I spent my first couple of days just chasing down the "correct" IT person to setup all of my accounts (company network, version control, bug tracking software, customer network, remote access, email - each required a different person and I had to ask around to find out who they all were). I commented that having one IT person who can handle everything would be ideal; but I had to settle for creating a list of "who to contact for what". This still shaved days off the next person's lead time.

Simple stuff like having a development machine ready to go (installing Visual Studio, an Office suite, etc) when the new person arrives really makes a difference. There was a learning curve w/r/t the actual system but the new person didn't have to switch gears between hunting people down, installing a myriad of in-house software with which they have no familiarity, and other general "drinking from the firehose".

I took some stabs at making the firehose drinking not as overwhelming; but I didn't do as well as I wanted.

The organization's attitude mattered, in retrospect. Bringing on new people took a significant amount of time (still does but it's better) and everyone did what they could to help me document the process. I imagine if the organization had not been incentivized to help me, then I would have failed and "first write the documentation" would not have worked at all.