Hacker News Reader

Comment by majewsky | Hacker News Reader

One thing that I find sorely missing in many teams is onboarding documentation. So when you come in, document everything that you need to do (required permissions, development environment setup, mailinglists, subscriptions) and how to do it.

View on HN

Every new person on my teams, I have document what knowledge they are missing and what their questions are. We then fix and update the documents we have to address this. If you're on a growing team, this approach saves time/money in the long run.

We have a onboarding wiki page that has everything that's required on your first day to the day you getting your first code to master branch. We hand it to the new joinee and ask them to update it if they find something that wasn't documented. It has gone through so many reviews that in most cases that's all they require for a smooth onboarding.

I also export important bookmarks from my browser and add it to the on-boarding documentation. Links to dev/qa/prod app URLs, AWS account console pages, wiki pages, JIRA links, git repos, timesheet app, organization chart, IT support page, slack channel, project home page, etc.. just anything that a newbie to the team would need often.

Strangely, onboarding documentation does not exist in many places. I ended up creating new on-boarding doc for at least 4,5 consulting engagements and the managers appreciate that a lot.

A good place to start, I did the same in the past.

It's either missing or if there's any documentation it's scattered all over the place and outdated.

This is a really good idea. Reminds me that I should finish up my onboarding notes and publish them internally

This is a great way to write the onboarding docs for the person who replaces you when you get laid off

Happened to me...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com