Why MailChimp Doesn’t Let New Hires Work for Their First Week on the Job | Hacker News Reader

Why MailChimp Doesn’t Let New Hires Work for Their First Week on the Job

fastcompany.com

13 pointsdpflan21 comments

Sounds like a dreadful place to work. You have to meet a bunch of people from over a dozen different departments, who you'll never talk to again? Meaningless mottoes and personality tests? A scavenger hunt?! All that crap before you even touch a computer?

Count me out. The information I need to start a job can be written on one side of a single sheet of paper.

I don't know, I know about four people who work there, and I'm sure they will never leave MailChimp. They absolutely love it. In Atlanta, MailChimp is where everyone wants to work, but it's hard to get in unless you're seriously great at what you do.

Just on your personality test point, the Birkman Assessment mentioned in the article is absolutely the pinnacle of personality assessment. It's not like the meaningless toy tests like MBTI/Hogan/16pf you may have experienced before. It covers the usual motivation and behaviour pieces but it is unique in surfacing the underlying needs and stress reactions which often have no correlation to your visible 'normal' behaviour that other people see. Really helpful in determining your approach to different members of the team as well as giving you the common language to explain your needs to other people. In short it's both insightful and actionable for you and your team members in your personal and professional life. Plus it's stable over time, so you take the assessment once and have 20+ years of value from it.

Disclaimer: I work for a company that uses the Birkman Assessment but no relation to MailChimp other than as a user of their newsletter services.

This is ridiculously refreshing compared to the posts I see where you're committing and pushing code to prod on your first day.

Kudos Mailchimp!

EDIT: Lots of sibling posts raining on their parade; if you're not interested in the culture and business as a whole, maybe consult instead?

Haha the sibling posts don't understand what company architecture is. Like software architecture, it's a skill unto itself.

What Mailchimp is doing is fantastic.

Disclosure: I've never been affiliated with Mailchimp. I just think more companies need to refocus on onboarding and training instead of complaining of a talent shortage. It's a market opportunity people!

Outside the personality test which would weird me out a little, seems like something I'd love to have as my first week. I can figure out the code side of work on my own, but getting a leg up in figuring out who I'm working with and how everyone interacts would be so helpful!

I think that can be aimed at solving a different problem to the one superficially described.

I've seen places that take 4-5 weeks for a sysadmin to assist a developer through how to get a development environment going. That is to say, I've been a sysadmin in a place that chose that approach.

Putting the work in with containers or vagrant and a reasonable CI and workflow that just lets people get in front of the codebase and change something is an incredible Godsend and I hope to always have that approach in future. Whether someone actually pushes a fix for something that day should be a side issue.

If a new hire isn't into hand holding and kumbaya, do they have an option to skip straight to getting real work done?

I think it'd be better for them to find another place to work. Not every employer-employee relationship is meant to be.

Mailchimp believes onboarding is company-critical. And their turnover rate speaks for itself.

There are plenty of other places to work.

But is the turnover rate caused by making all new employees sit through a week of inane meetings? Their turnover rate sounds amazing so they're obviously doing something right, but its hard to see how this would account for it.

What's "inane" (defined as: silly, stupid) about these meetings?

Be specific, because I'm curious.

scavenger hunt (around the office—just for fun!)

Kudos to the company for taking onboarding seriously. Most places are abysmal at it. But then again, I've recently been working at places that leverage a lot of contractors/consultants to get work done. The attitude seems to be, "why bother giving them context? They are just here to labor and then be gone."

Is, this that revolutionary? I'm pretty sure a few companies out there in tech give you a week or two of training before you get any assignments?

Yes, it really is special. As you said, a few companies in tech do it. And they have a tremendous advantage.

My overwhelming experience at companies ranging from small $1-5MM revenue shops to >$100MM startups has shown onboarding to be an ad-hoc afterthought. No conscious design.

Many of these companies don't understand how much it's hurting them.

As I've grown more senior, I've learned to onboard myself... seeking out knowledgeable individuals and teasing out the big picture. This is not the default for more junior developers. And thus they lag like an unspun turbo, whining as they try to spin up.

To have full-spectrum -- internal- and external-faced -- onboarding baked into the company culture is a tremendous advantage. It promotes a clear, razor-sharp, global context that allows individuals to move faster with greater alignment.

I love what MailChimp is doing.

You're not wrong, but a well-designed process for welcoming new employees to the company doesn't have to be a dog-and-pony show, or a week of meetings, or a nightmare specifically designed to torture introverts.

I'm open to hearing detailed alternatives.

Company architecture -- specifically, ensuring autonomous strategic alignment while minimizing synchronous communication -- is close to my heart.

It'd be especially helpful to hear how to do this is in a way that's comfortable and welcoming to someone like you.

Most of the things listed in the schedule shown in the article would be better off as a wiki page. They've got a whole one-hour meeting for "Learn[ing] about parking and transportation options". This is information that cannot possibly change frequently, which not everyone will care about, and which you absolutely do not need to give a presentation about, and a wiki page is perfectly suited for communicating this information.

I agree that a lot of the information is perfectly suited for a wiki page. (And I bet Mailchimp has those too.) However, I feel that wiki pages should be treated as secondary sources in the case of onboarding, not primary sources.

It feels like your discounting the benefits of building person-to-person rapport. Rapport is not built through wiki pages. And the easiest way to build rapport -- for both introverts and extroverts alike -- is through simple conversation about simple topics.

I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss face-to-face interaction just because it's uncomfortable or unnecessary. Not everything has to be comfortable or necessary to be useful.

Sometimes a little inefficiency can go a long way towards a happy life. In other words: stop and smell the roses.

Nobody is going to build rapport with anyone at an hour-long presentation about parking and transit options. An hour-long meeting about anything is not a chance to stop and smell the roses; the roses are all outside.

I'm afraid you don't understand what rapport is with such a sweeping statement. But, I'm not here to convince you. Honestly, it appears this type of team wouldn't be a good fit for you and that's okay.

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