>>"
Humans are not dogs."
This could be a whole forum. In the most important sense (the moral sense), we are not. It's a bad road to go down, thinking of other people this way.
OTOH, we are very much like dogs... a lot moreso than we usually think. It's very useful to remember this and "train" yourself. We tend to assume that we are rationally driven, and sometimes we are. More often, we (me, certainly) are impulse driven and rationalize ex post. The neurochemistry of learning, habit forming and such is something we're better working with rather than against.
Re: onboarding...
I agree with the author that this is important, and usually badly done. I disagree on the particulars.
First, HR and boilerplate management stuff tends to do a pretty bad job onboarding.
"Endless HR videos, slow security processes, a mountain of fragile technology setup"
This stuff sets the tone for culture, and it should be a lot better. Considering how many people these days are explicitly responsible for this stuff in a modern company, it should not suck like this.
I disagree about the "social, light hearted, get-to-know-you stuff." We need more, not less of this. People need to know who they're working with and have as little barrier to asking a wide range of people a wide range of questions.
I do agree that the initial period needs to be taken advantage of. One reason is the "dog training" aspect. Habit forming and such. Good advice in general, not just for work. Build your habits intentionally, especially if you (like me) struggle with bad habits. More specifically for work, use this very limited grace period to ask dumb questions, sit in on stuff and such.
If you (as a manager) put newbies onto boilerplate stuff for 3 weeks, you are wasting the opportunity (of the newbie) to encounter real problems while that grace period is in effect. It's a lot easier to ask "where do I see bugs" on day 8 than day 80. These inevitably come up once real work starts.