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by morgante 1545 days ago
> Honestly? Onboarding is hard. How are you supposed to do it? Everyone who has to go through it isn’t going to fix it, because they’re new and have their actual job to get to.

Give them time for onboarding (ie. don't expect them to do their "actual job" immediately) and empower new hires to fix things as they go along.
3 comments
Griffinsauce 1545 days ago
> empower new hires to fix things as they go along.

This _sounds_ like a good idea but I haven't seen it really work in practice since new hires are by definition the least empowered.

Often problems are not small and local either but caused by general hairiness of older systems / docs / tools.

It seems like this could be made more powerful by making it the explicit task of an onboarding buddy (ie. experienced employee) to drive improvements together with them.

It's a difficult problem because there is a disappearing stakeholder, once the new hire gets through the friction with some help the motivation disappears quickly. This means for bigger problems that once they have the power to change it they have bigger fish to fry.

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HWR_14 1544 days ago
> empower new hires to fix things as they go along.

Sometimes things are the way they are for a reason. "This is a regulatory requirement". "This matches the style of six million lines of code and redoing it isn't on our hitlist - in fact match this way going forward." "Yeah, the CEO got drunk and made a bet with another CEO that all new lines of code could avoid 'e' in variable names, so it's a hard rule that we write it n3xt."

I certainly think it's very valuable to get an outsiders impressions and the problems that they see being raised before they get used to stupid ways of doing things. There's a continuum between the new programmer deciding they're going to convert all tabs to spaces and patching a critical security hole they see because of an out of date library.

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paulryanrogers 1545 days ago
This is what I've seen works best. It catches holes difficult to see as someone already setup or familiar with the ropes. Ideally new hires can at least improve docs, if not the ramp up tooling itself.
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morgante 1545 days ago
Exactly. One of the first steps of onboarding should be to make sure new hires are set up to fix the onboarding doc(s) themselves.
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