Just some red flags. No big deal. Just ignore them (2020)
rachelbythebay.com
rachelbythebay.com
I agree that many things mentioned about this particular onboarding process are not great. But do you really talk down everybody to that extent? You just joined, some things may not be clear yet, but you still just judge everybody? It's _your_ company now, go help improve it! Help streamlining onboarding! Ask your manager about your desk! Maybe they just forgot, that's human. How is it better to humiliate them in front of the CEO? Is that your approach to deal with criticism? Putting people on the spot and humiliate them?
Ranting about some keyboard and touch bar? Really? The whole second paragraph of this blog post? And _you_ complain about _others_ not being professional? Of course it takes a bit to get used to new devices. Do you really need to start complaining about things the first minute you've tried them? If it turns out it doesn't work for you, request a different laptop a few weeks later. Big deal.
> Now, when I run into a thing like this, I start getting snarky and bitchy and start thinking laterally.
You are making everybody else's life miserable without contributing anything positive or helping to improve anything.
> It gets better, too: they had claimed (and lied) that "your manager will be able to see the results of this".
What? The manager likely _was_ able to see the results. Whether they actually looked is a different question. But it was not a _lie_ that they were able to. This makes me question the accuracy of your whole account.
> wound up leaving anyway a year later.
Probably for the best of everybody involved. If that's your attitude on your first day, why did you even start working there.
If anything, the person's behavior is the reddest flag here. I'd start feeling miserable the moment anybody with those attitudes joins my team.
P.S.: No, I don't associate "onboarding" with "waterboarding". Never occurred to me. After reading this blog post, this could be a nice question to remove candidates with terrible attitudes out of the pool.
Myself, I am very "getting my hands dirty"-oriented, and the corporate onboarding goes over very poorly with me too. Sit through multiple days of material that is dumbed down to the company's lowest common denominator. Having to be giddy with other new hires in departments that you will never have any interaction with anymore. Kill me now. So, if the trainers just go through the motions, why wouldn't the original poster and I just put in the mere minimum to get through it, and start my real job...?
Oh, my real job... in the cafetaria with no desk? So, sure, the manager can forget to put the request in. But would a manager not know that you start, schedule a welcome meeting with you on the first day, touch base a few times in your first week? Plenty of chances, still no desk! It's ridiculous, but I am not surprised. If you don't think that is ridiculous, then, I don't know, maybe you've been conditioned to that sort of environment. With no snark I wish you much joy in your employment there, but then please let the original poster and myself move on^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hrun for the hills.
Here's what onboarding should look like for an Engineering role: you come in at 9:00, do the bare minimum with HR, meet your team, set up your computer, and before the end of your first day, you have your first code changes in production. Then you go home with a feeling of accomplishment. Then, during the rest of the week, some onboarding meetings will happen, but at least you have started with the most important place: your team.
That pretty much describes my department, for the 25 years I ran it.
Of course, it was a fairly small team of experienced, high-functioning, engineers, so I doubt it represented the “industry standard” shop. We hired people with many years of experience, and I found it productive to let each one have a great deal of agency and control of their development environment.
Like adding yourself to a maintainer list or some prepared token handholding task? Or what could you possibly do in the first day before having the time to read the code.
Much of the online ranting (and frankly, hate), including in this thread, would be avoided if people would just spend some time getting to know the human beings behind the text on their screen. The very thing that has been called "infantilizing" somewhere else in this thread.
I do agree that meeting your coworkers and talking to them can indeed have very beneficial effects. I just don't see how a picture of a face helps that in any way. That's the connection that just doesn't seem to exist. It seems like people who want video on on Zoom calls. There are very few cases where that's a bonus.
And yes, I agree that the people who called getting to know their peers via an onboarding process that was probably somewhat corny "infantilizing" seem way offbase.
My point was only that pushing (any) code to prod on day 1 doesn’t have to be an entitled fantasy.
Hiring someone but forgetting to prepare a workplace for this person seems very unprofessional to me. There could be valid reasons for it, but they must be exceptions, and just forgetting is not a valid reason.
> How is it better to humiliate them in front of the CEO?
Author just provided an honest answer when asked by an unknown person. If manager had a valid excuse, this should not be a problem. If manager feels „humiliated“ because their mistake was exposed, but behaves professionally, also fine - we should feel sorry for our mistakes and should not expect, that everybody will avoid saying truth just to protect your feelings. Shit happens, lesson learned, move on. Our loyalty is defined by our contract and it is to the company and to shareholders, after all, and every manager in the hierarchy deserves the truth - any conspiracies to hide it are counter-productive politics.
The blog post mentions that the author decided to skip steps of the onboarding process and decided to occupy a desk in a moment in time new arrivals were expected to occupy none.
Also, it seems the onboarding process the author decided to skip was a multi-day event, so it seems the need for a desk popped up a few days before schedule.
How many teams have free desks around waiting for unexpected developers to show up?
I've been at companies large and small. One time for example I had to sit on a different floor from my team because they did not have space on that floor. This was a huge downtown office tower owned by the company. They had even put in the request for a desk in time for one to be ready and all that. But there just wasn't space and they had to play tetris on the floor plans and move entire teams around floors to make space for me (and some other new guys that didn't sit with the team either but at least on the same floor. This was explained to me right away though and honestly while not great, it was totally fine in that sense. I just sat in a meeting room or in the coffee area or next to someone else at their desk (yes the desks were large enough for that, no all offices are WeWork sized) for some time (basically ignoring my assigned desk) until this resolved.
It’s not like desk moves happen very often. Unless there’s an intern about to leave, there’s always some free desks on teams that are hiring. At least at every company I’ve worked.
If I’m hiring a new person I generally have desk space available before they show up. Even if that involves fitting 7 people in the space for 6.
If it were me, my answer would be:
On my first day? Before my first paycheck? Before I know what I'll be doing, who I'll be working for, whether any of that is going to be remotely humane or professional?
No. I will not start looking for independent process tweaks and improvements on hour 1, while being onboarding-hazed. Give me a reason to care about this gig, first.
There's a huge distance between "I accepted the offer and will do my best as a professional to earn my paycheck" and "This is my company, my community, and I have a personal interest in improving it in ways outside of my role". Meeting the bar for the first one is on me. Making me want to meet the bar for the second is on the company; good workplaces will give me reasons to get there, mediocre or bad ones won't.
She took the time months later to rant. Could invest time months later to instead improve things.
Which of course won't happen if you already made up your mind on day 1 that this all sucks because you got a laptop with a touchbar that you keep fat-fingering and thus can't stand, had to learn how the corp directory works and a desk assignment was forgotten. Really sounds like a horrible place, who would ever want to work there. /s
If you're in tech for some time, you most probably care a lot about tools you work with, especially keyboard, mouse and display. It doesn't mean that these should be super expensive. Just that they offer base functionality. For instance, physical ESC and F keys. Not having that for me is equal to be forced to write with left hand while I'm right handed. Possible, but is it productive?
However having been through enough onboardings the overall tone does resonate, and shows that companies don't spend enough time streamlining and revising their processes. Maybe it might help for them to do trial runs on new machines once a year or spend time removing tech debt out of their dev environments. If a new hire, especially one experienced in your stack, has difficulty onboarding, then something is wrong and it's probably not them.
- first, pushing ignorant (and proud to be, saying that they only need obscure laws of economy to rule the world) managers => we see in decades that NOTHING really new is born and anything is more and more crappy and unsustainable;
- second, pushing a dumb and dysfunctional false sociability mediated by ridiculous rituals some call them "team building" some other less crazy call them nazi voodoo in modern western sauce;
- third, pushing bad tech and bad tech habit because for some of the above ignorant that's not bad, craptops and certain "mobility" push is one of the face of such push: to work we all need for a reason or another DESKTOPS, large screens, sometimes more than one, good large and rich of keys keyboards, a damn desk large enough, a room etc the management push toward "take a craptop and crapphone and you are ready to work", things like https://arstechnica.com/?p=1831722 clearly depict what we are heading: giving cheaper and cheaper crap hoping to keep revenues up lowering costs, shifting them to third parties.
My own personal response to that is simple: managers MUST be pushed toward they role, beancounters, restoring the concept of entrepreneurship. Managerial driven modern nazi society (that's is, modern management techniques are born in the nazi era) is something we can't sustain.
It's also highly unprofessional and demonstrates a high level of disdain for everyone around the author, which is particularly worrying given the author started expressing that at a moment in time when had barely got through the door.
To me it's particularly cringeworthy how the author decided to skip onboarding to afterwards force team members to waste their time onboarding her, and that's depicted as a win. No, it isn't. Onboarding processes are there to avoid wasting everyone's time getting yourself up to speed, and the author forced everyone around to waste their time with an unnecessary do-over. and even that was slammed.
And yet the company had a painful/useless onboarding process. I agree with you onboarding is important, but if you feel powerless as an individual, complying with stupid orders is certainly not the best you can do.
Even from a cold productivist viewpoint, i bet the author was more productive sitting in the collective space and reaching out to a few friends when they needed help explicitly, than sitting through corporate bullshit making you setup half a dozen applications so you can find out dog names.
I don't see any evidence it was useless. It had some parts not useful to the author. But it's ridiculous to expect a tailor-made onboarding experience that comprehensively and exclusively touches on things you personally need to know.
Nor did I see anything other than the length really that painful. Oh no, the author was asked to type in front of people on their nonpreferred keyboard and was clumsy about it (returned to several times)! They were bad at using the internal directory tool and felt frustrated! The clock gave them anxiety!
I believe I have participated in the same onboarding process as the author. (Based on timeline and other hints, not 100% but pretty sure).
In my experience it was fine. Besides the usual basics like setting up accounts and making sure we had access to what we needed it also included a session where everyone made a small change to a service, testing it, PR-ing it and deploying it. Which is more than I can say about my onboarding experiences elsewhere.
Regarding equipment I am not a fan of the touchbar either (or Macs in general) but it was very easy to get an X1 running Linux (and keep the Mac as well). All I had to do was to ask and have my manager approve.
Overall I felt that there was a genuine effort to try to make sure that newhires had a good initial impression and smooth onboarding. The company was growing very fast at the time with a ton of people coming onboard every week so I thought that it was impressive that they managed to do as much as they did.
The point is that it now costs the time of those friends too, instead of the time of the onboarding trainers that were spending that time anyway.
Note that I'm not arguing against 1-on-1 onboarding in general, but there is zero doubt that it costs more time (which is the argument you quoted).
This has zero to do micromanagement. Either your new hire onboards with dedicated staff in dedicated sessions, or that task falls upon the new arrival's team members. The need is always there, and forcing each team to allocate one or two members to do the job that a onboarding meeting does is hard or impossible to justify.
Keep in mind that the blog author talked about SSO and installing software.
At what point we stop pretending that the king is in fact naked and doesn't have new clothes?
Also known as going through an end-to-end user flow?
The point of a "hello world" is also not to greet people.
> At what point we stop pretending that the king is in fact naked and doesn't have new clothes?
No one is pretending anything. There are only those who understand onboarding is about onboarding, and those who fail to understand it and fill in that blank with outlandish interpretations.
My whole point was that the quoted "cold productivist viewpoint" completed neglected the productivity of the team members doing the one-on-one onboarding. I didn't start this line of argument, I was just engaging in it, so it makes no sense for you to hassle me about your perceived morality of said viewpoint: You accused me of approving of "A" when all I did was refute "A implies B".
The OP however did say that going through the template onboarding process didn't seem to net them any valuable knowledge.
From that vantage point you can very easily argue that requiring the personal touch, while not efficient because it's taking away productive time from other team member(s), has the biggest impact on the newly onboarding employee, and might end up being the least inefficient time expenditure during onboarding. I (and I think OP) claim that this is often true.
I found myself in a similar situation several times while complying 100% with the onboarding processes. I can confidently say 95% of them were completely useless for my day-to-day work. I didn't mind e.g. security guidelines and some company history (I did actually find them quite fascinating, contrary to what I thought before entering the meetings) but after 1-2 weeks of onboarding I found myself practically unprepared for my day-to-day technical work.
...And then I ended up needing personal attention from 2 team members anyway because I was progressing at a snail's pace -- because super important institutional knowledge was scattered among 30+ repositories (and the info was often not even in the README files but buried in a long code comment somewhere). Not to mention critically important ops details that were blocking further progress were impossible for me to obtain until a team member figured they'll finally reply with details they can look up in maximum 2 minutes.
So what was my gain from the template onboarding process? Practically zero. I would have been interested in most of the onboarding meetings and live tutorials after I worked for the company for 3-6 months because quite frankly, and looking back and analyzing it, they would have been very valuable then and NOT right at the start.
---
I suppose the right question for us to debate here is: are you confident that new team members needing your time is more unproductive than letting them fumble and trying to feel their way in, resulting in very low productivity for months?
At least from my experience the answer is a firm "NO". You can call me stupid or non-self-starter or unable to read other people's code or anything else if you like -- but I did end up learning everything I needed (eventually). However, every separate key insight came after days (sometimes after two weeks!) of trial and error and getting scolded on standups in the manner of "no no no, do not do it like that, but I won't tell you how". And I am pretty sure that each and every one of these key insights could have been provided by (in total, not for each one) maximum 3 voice chats a week, complemented with screen share and generally just showing you the ropes.
But the team was never bothered to do it even though I calculated that the time "wasted" for them would have been roughly 3.0 - 3.5 hours a week for no more than a month, so 12 - 15 hours for an entire month.
Was that too big a price to pay for recruiting a strong helping hand in your team? To them apparently it was. But it did no favours to the companies we parted ways with because both me and them ended up very frustrated about how long did the "self-starter" style onboarding take. So they ended up wasting money for which they received zero value, and I paid an opportunity cost in lost career growth and maybe a potentially amazing long-term job.
Nobody won, everybody lost. The root cause was this bean counting of hours.
And I agree, no introduction week is going to give you the institutional knowledge that you need to be effective in your team. But, circling back to the article, having your colleagues tell you how to work with the phone book and org chart or guiding you through SSO is certainly not a productive use of their time and much better done centrally.
I'm sorry that you had such a negative and unproductive experience, and avoiding this kind of situation is part of the reason why I still provide one-on-one training to new hires, even though it takes a lot of time. But I am grateful for the stuff that is covered in a central training which I won't have to waste my time on.
So yeah, everything in moderation.
You should read the reply the author wrote the first time this post appeared on HN. https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/05/23/nope/
>>>Point: (anything calling me entitled)
>>>I find that this, like "unprofessional", is a word people whip out when they can't grapple with the actual topic at hand. It's a nice shortcut to know that they are not going to address the matter properly.
>>>Go read pg's "How to Disagree". Then realize you're failing at it.
The reason is that the author of the original blog post failed PG's point themselves. The main criticism is the form of the blog post. Even if everything in it was true, the laptop was actually, objectively terrible, the onboarding was objectively useless, etc. The way all of this was presented is just an immature rant. That's not how one should treat people. Whenever somebody is this arrogant, it puts me on red alert.
In PG's post, he ends with:
> If you study conversations, you find there is a lot more meanness down in DH1 than up in DH6. You don't have to be mean when you have a real point to make. In fact, you don't want to. If you have something real to say, being mean just gets in the way.
There was a lot of meanness in that original blog post. A lot of it is in the lowest of the DH levels. If they had something real to say, that's pretty sad, because the meanness got in the way. Literally, because it spawned this whole thread. People take you less seriously if you express yourself like this, and that's what this thread here is about.
You also could have read the update to know that she didn't waste anyone's time.
You make a lot of assumptions.
It really isn't. It's a statement of fact. The whole point of getting everyone in the same room and showing them how to go through a SSO userflow and install basic software is precisely to not force everyone on your team to endure that each and every single time there's a new hire.
The majority of questions are always the same predictable set of questions, the struggles are the same, the process is the same, the goals are the same. Thus instead of bringing down each and every team's productivity to go through exactly the same thing over and over again, you just get everyone on the same room, get a pair of dedicated employees to do the handholding, and you're done.
I really don't think it is. The author simply seems to have very little tolerance for that onboarding process, and do you know what, that process actually does sound pretty familiar.
I've worked for two companies that give you their hardware, install a ton of trash on it, have a total mess of SSO logins that kind of work or require the use of multiple different accounts for certain services that "were set up with SSO but didn't work..."
And one also had a series of daft orientation tasks that were supposed to promote team work and establish the company's culture, but in fact are just a waste of time that no one wants to do -- with the sole exception of the suspiciously hyper lunatic running the team building session.
Look at the article title. Red flags. Stuff like this might very well indicate that maybe, maybe this company's culture is not a good fit if you have low tolerance for amateurs.
> Putting people on the spot and humiliate them
The author was put on the spot, brought into a whatever meeting, and asked a question, to which they responded honestly and without embellishment of the truth.
So... should the author have lied? They simply replied they did not have a desk. I sure as shit wouldn't lie to cover my manager's ass because, frankly, I'd want a desk.
If the manager felt humiliated, it will have come from within, because you know what, they should feel embarrassed if they've taken on a new worker and not gotten them somewhere to work.
> It's _your_ company now, go help improve it!
No. It's the shareholders' company, they can make sure their employees are properly equipped and appropriately paid to do their jobs, then the good work will follow.
As for suggesting that their onboarding process could use improvement, 9/10 managers who receive that feedback will smile, say what a good idea that is, say they'll take it on board, and then never think about it again.
I've been a manager, and I've been a developer. Most managers don't give a toss.
The article, at least the way I'm seeing it, seems to be a satirical (i.e. intended for an audience that has a common frame of reference and, more importantly, a sense of humour) account of an onboarding process at a company that later turned out to be a bad fit.
And in hindsight, the author is saying that they probably indeed should have seen the red flags from the start as being indicative of whatever would cause their departure.
> You are making everybody else's life miserable without contributing anything positive or helping to improve anything.
That's a stretch. The only person the author has made miserable is you, but why this has stirred such an awkwardly emotive response from you, I don't know.
I've never worked somewhere where there isn't a desk for me in the last 23 years and never had to do an onboarding process like this before getting started (plenty of stuff to do at the desk for sure, and it can take a while before you are setup on everything - but it's usually time you can use to familiarise yourself with everything).
It's just not their duty. Everything has a limit, and this onboarding/whole company is just humiliating and unhuman.
Playing a little onboarding game for a few minutes where people click through a corporate directory is not "unhuman".
No, it's infantilizing your workforce. Don't do that.
Learning your new hire refuses to read documentation and instead asks for the answer from someone else is valuable. Remember, that 10 second ask later can break a developer out of flow and impose a huge cost on them.
If the author wanted to avoid the work, they could have:
- written Fido and trust that the answer was never checked
- assumed it was checked client side and found the array of acceptable names
Those would be ways to move around the problem. Interrupting your coworkers for something you're supposed to do on your own isn't.
If an institution is not capable to be human and empathic even in something as basic as an "onboarding" (which is supposed to make you feel welcome and capable), run for your life or burn the whole thing down. Fuck industrial capitalism.
This statement is too over-generalized and hostile to be made in good faith for a meaningful debate.
First, of course corporations do not "care" since they are not sentient. It's probably management of corporations that you mean.
Second, some individuals in some corporations may not care. And different companies may have different fractions of people not caring. In my experience, the long-term successful companies have a high fraction of people actually caring. And if they don't, then switch to a company where they do. I have worked at many places where the leadership team cared deeply, and it radiated into lower management and all employees. Foul apples tended to leave, since their constant ranting and disrespect was not appreciated or reciprocated, so they didn't feel welcome, and rightly so.
The irony is that it tends to be people with condescending and arrogant attitudes who do most of the "not caring". Just like the author of the blog entry we are discussing here.
If you are joining an organization of this size. There are zero people interested in learning about your feelings on onboarding.
Your manager should have a process they follow when hiring people, and assigning someone a desk is part of that. If the company doesn’t have such a process, that’s a red flag.
I feel like this is a sign of one's tolerance for inefficiencies going down with age. When i started out development, i'd tolerate things like having to manually restart services that went down every few days, or applications without proper logging so debugging errors would be guesswork, or shared access credentials (which are frankly a risk). But as time went on, i stopped thinking that "that's just the way things are" and instead fixed all of it: systemd services (or containers), proper logging and log shipping, separate credentials for each person and so on.
I fail to see why social issues should be treated any differently, with the caveat that you actually need to present yourself as professional, any criticisms as constructive and just generally need to work towards making the job environment not miserable for anyone. That said, there's no reason not to be able to vent about your frustrations freely. I disagree that you're supposed to stay silent about dysfunctional aspects of environments, since they can be a learning experience for others.
> How is it better to humiliate them in front of the CEO? Is that your approach to deal with criticism? Putting people on the spot and humiliate them?
If answering a simple question truthfully is humiliating, i doubt that that's necessarily a failing on your part. Though it's nice that the author was able to find and set up a desk for themselves - a few years ago i myself would have just been miserable in those circumstances... and would have probably cried. I don't think that not even having a place to work at is adequate, unless that's just the culture in the company (e.g. no assigned seating), otherwise it's maybe a tad awkward/humiliating and singles the person out.
> If anything, the person's behavior is the reddest flag here.
I somewhat agree, but i also don't seek to vilify the person because the way they handled the situation differs from how i would. It is perfectly normal to feel frustration as a human being. I still do that when i find blatant N+1 problems in the codebase due to someone wanting to use nested service calls instead of just writing a single longer SQL query to load all of the data for a particular section of the site in one go. Or when i find situations where a lack of indices slows down the data fetching 112 times.
And yet, i bite my lip, decide not to be an ass about it, fix what i can without breaking anything, even if that reflects more poorly upon my own performance (e.g. more time taken per issue, less interesting issues solved on my own) whilst still making the product better. I then proceed to reframe those issues as a win for improving performance and add a few helpful suggestions for the next meeting, to illustrate the potential benefits, fully knowing that none of them will be taken to heart and that the system will slowly rot over the years to come.
That's just how things are - sometimes things are out of your control and you just have to deal with them, other times you can fix things yourself. It is fine to vent about either, though i hope that the author was less snarky in person.
> It's _your_ company now, go help improve it!
Yeah just like companies care about user/employee feedback! Why are they working so hard against unionization then? (which would be a major improvement for all people involved) Companies work as a top-down structure operated by psychopaths and couldn't care less how people feel at the bottom.
> How is it better to humiliate them in front of the CEO?
So what's your advice? Lie to an honest question to cover generalized incompetence/malice? Sure that's what most companies and administration expect of you (producing false reports and/or avoiding to answer questions faithfully so some other team can take the blame), but that's definitely not how to operate a healthy workplace.
I mean, as much as i despise CEOs, if the guy was asking the question in the first place, it certainly means he was aware of the very bad onboarding process and the difficulty to get to your desk, and was either: attempting to measure whether the situation "on the ground" is getting better, or measuring your own capacity to produce honest answers... In both cases, honesty was what the CEO was looking for so the author acted well.
> If it turns out it doesn't work for you, request a different laptop a few weeks later. Big deal.
Or a big company like this one could have a number of supported models from which you can choose. Why impose a single UX on every employee? I'm not asking to let me use my laptop, but please let me choose the best keyboard (for me) among at least 2 options. Everyone has different needs, and trying to fit everyone in a single box is a good way to break more than a few individuals.
> If anything, the person's behavior is the reddest flag here. I'd start feeling miserable the moment anybody with those attitudes joins my team.
If anything, your behavior is the reddest flag here. You are representative of everything that's wrong in Silicon Valley, refusing to hear legit complaint about painful processes preventing people from doing their work. I assume you're a manager type with 5 figure salary. I strongly recommend you get connected with reality (the one experienced by the other 7 billions of us who are not in your privileged position of exploiter) and start to develop empathy towards other people. This would make you a better human being and would significantly improve the lives of everyone around you: blaming the victims of unjust systems may help you get closer to the top of the structure, but will certainly not help you be happy and/or produce meaningful change in the world.
Oh, I have a good one. Be less toxic. Works 100% of the time.
I saw his obituary years later - “passed away unexpectedly at home” at the age of 53. I can’t imagine how stressful and sad it must be to look at the world so negatively.
I find out what I need to do my job, and get the company to give it to me. Usually means making the same request again and again and again. Which is good practice for the actual work of coding in big orgs.
Then there are the pro forma classes that are a necessary evil:
No, I will not give bribes to foreign officials in violation of the American Corrupt Foreign Practices Act.
No, I will not engage in a romantic relationship with a direct report.
No, I will not make stock trades based off insider knowledge.
Yes, I support will support the company’s effort to promote diversity, even though 80% of the people I work with are contractors and therefore not included in diversity statements (and all fall into predictable ethnic categories).
These classes aren’t bad, but they feel like moral potty training.
The worst part is making all the freaking accounts. Every employer contracts out every possible function. Paystubs in one web site. 401ks in another. New insurance cards.
And make sure you give Expensify your banking info.
And then there’s the mandatory security training for certification.
Then you have the weird way we auth into AWS, which is totally different at every single place.
Oh yeah, and don’t forget about the next Sprint ceremony. And BTW, every company has its own Sprint liturgical calendar.
I’m married to a lovely woman who happens to be an Orthodox Christian, so our family celebrates Christmas and Easter on two different dates in two very different ways. During Advent my wife is fasting while I’m feasting.
It’s like that but with Retros and Planning sessions. Just similar enough to be confusing.
Maybe I should just stop switching jobs so often.
Onboarding processes are done to get most/all those questions answered immediately out of the bat, and in the process spare your team members from time sinks of being repeatedly pestered with having to answer the same question over and over again.
Onboarding is really not about you. It's for everyone which will have to be around you. More importantly, it's to avoid everyone around you wasting their time and energy with unnecessary hand-holding.
If you make onboarding about yourself, you're missing the whole point.
Then... there is onboarding with your enterprise. And that is all about compliance and benefits. It's still "really not about you". It's about HR, Legal. All important functions of the enterprise, but only very loosely related to the job you're hired for.
It also doesn’t give the customer any value, so how do you justify losing out making stuff better for the people who pay your company money?
I just kind of assume on boarding will suck, and it’s not a reflection of the rest of your time there. Maybe I’m wrong, but it’s been true for me.
What are folks’ tips for making onboarding smoother?
1. New hires start on Monday at the HR office. Take badge photos, get badges, given basic overview of company policy. Told that the company respects and trusts us, that our badge should open any door that does not have a safety reason to be restricted.
2. After orientation I found my manager waiting in the lobby. He told me how to get to our part of the campus.
3. My manager shows me to my cube. It has a computer in it with a sticky note with a temporary password. I log in, am able to open the SSO page and change the temporary password.
4. I'm given an introductory binder with answers to lots of questions, who works around me, what they do, what I will likely be doing soon, etc.
5. My manager suggests I start doing trainings (medical company, lots of trainings to meet certification standards), but says if I get tired do something else.
6. A bit later in the day a local tech person came and helped me run a magic script that got the developer tools setup and ran a build to make sure it was all good.
7. Proceed to get my first project and get started.
Overall the process was the minimum needed to make sure I got into the building and had what I needed.
I wish I had that. I spent like 2 weeks installing a million different things, and configuring like 200 different files and even then, my build ran but not everything worked.
A magic script is great if you’re a user of the tools/software it installs but if you’re a developer you’ll sooner or later need the knowledge of how the thing works.
Quite often you will never get a chance to meet colleagues from different departments the same way so you should make the most of it and make connections.
Looking back at what worked when onboarding my immediate team ... having equipment that "just worked" at least after a day of finagling / being personally walked through 1:1 by IT ... a mentor there to walk them through the first month, and always available via chat during work hours as well as weekly 1:1's ... specific "small potatoes" assignments ready for them at the end of week one that are kinda crafted to guide them through the branding/process ... "showing" them they can fail and be okay ...
The biggest thing is to have comprehensive written documentation of the process and keep it updated.
I agree with the other suggestion to have SSO or official password manager practices.
And steer clear of the shitty MacBook Pros Apple made from 2016-2020. The hellish butterfly keyboard and Touch Bar era.
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.
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.
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.
You are going to generate more value for your customers long term by having employees who feel like their time and contributions are valued. Solving these types of problems (onboarding, knowledge management, communications, internal tooling) are literal force multipliers for companies. But they are often ignored by leadership because they don't show immediate revenue value.
> 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.
When you hit a certain scale, it will in fact be someone's actual job to build a system to onboard people (not necessarily full time). Onboarding is both hard and expensive, and right now your onboarding is probably "here's a computer and a JIRA, etc login. Our standup tomorrow is at X, here's some documentation and see if you can address small problem by then. John's been assigned to answer your questions". Which is fine. But at some point you're going to have enough moving parts that it's worth paying someone to build an onboarding process. And it will probably have cringey humor and waste new hires time to some degree.
I'm not sure if there's great onboarding systems or generic advice for smaller teams because they're so individual to the company and the cost of making a more formal process probably outweighs the cost of just having an engineer do it by hand the few times you're doing it.
As you said, you have other, more pressing, issues. Good luck! I hope you get those customers to get (good terms on) your next round.
--> We ensure that new equipment is ordered for when they start
--> We keep the people a new hire has to deal with to a minimum (they meet with a manager, a single mentor, and HR only - after that, it's team members)
--> We make sure everything in documents (policies, procedures, etc.) are also covered by one of the aforementioned people, leaving room for questions
--> We show new hires the location and use of the coffee machine before anything related to their job ;-)
On the other side, IT setup is hard. Things like SSO and accounts are always pain in the ass, because there’s always no budget to pay SSO tax on some subscriptions, no budget to offer corporate phones or hardware tokens, some services do not offer SSO integration etc.
Why not?
> because they’re new and have their actual job to get to.
No, they don't. Their job right now is to get up to speed. Part of my job is to get them up to speed. If anything, a minor diversion to spruce up the onboarding docs a little bit is one of the more concrete contributions either of us can make. And importantly, they don't have tribal knowledge crudding up the works, and if they manage to say something that is completely wrong, then that means they didn't understand something important and there is no better time to fix that than right now.
If you let an awful experience stand as it is, you aren't a neutral party, you're complicit.
Nobody is going to make the onboarding process awesome instead of getting down to coding, but it should be better every time you run through it. If not before (due to entropy), at least after.
Obvious mistakes, by all means fix them, but for more complex things its often a net negative for a new person to try and fix before they have context.
How’s your turnover rate?
Restating facts as you have heard them is a valid form of consensus building. If they don’t match, then everyone is better off if that is corrected before you act on them. If I unload a bunch of information on you and you just nod along, I have absolutely no idea what’s going on in your head, I just have my own narrative which could be anything from wow this is going awesome to wtf is wrong with this bobble headed jackass. Unless you articulate, I won’t know which it is until you’ve done a number of things incorrectly and we finally challenge you to explain yourself.
If you think the docs are wrong, and propose a fix that is worse, then a conversation about that will save us days, weeks, or even months later on. And that will also save your standing with the team. But if you’d rather fashion a pretty necktie out of all of this rope then I can’t really stop you, but I sure am going to heckle you while you do.
If you don't care, they can find their own way, ask around, copy someone else's half-broken configuration, and make their first commit after a month.
If you are a manager, team lead or tech lead, you likely just poured a shit-ton of time into recruiting, interviewing, hiring. Now, go spend a few hours on making sure that setup document in Confluence is updated.
It is also an iterative process. For every new hire, you spend a little bit of time, and incrementally the onboarding will improve. After a while, and particularly after having not hired anyone for a while, you use that time to just refresh the already basically good materials.
For example, if important dev env setup documentation is wrong and needs an update--that person should make the change or put in the change request to fix it, and follow-up. It should be no different from finding a bug in code.
The same goes for realizing key organizational or engineering patterns are going unexplained or are not explained in enough detail.
One of the key things to include is an onboarding buddy. Microsoft shared research showing the impact of an onboarding buddy: https://hbr.org/2019/06/every-new-employee-needs-an-onboardi...
There are many other articles and research studies showing that onboarding is critical to reducing the amount of time it takes a new employee to be effective and has serious implications for retention.
How to make it smoother in tech? One could do some research and come up with your own thing. Or you could just check out the articles and resources Gergely Orosz has put together.
I have seen a number of companies basically ignore onboarding and the new employee experience. When they have succeeded it was in spite of this--not because of it.
The new employee's manager should expect to escort them continuously for the first week. Onboarding is, generally by design, a rare event and something will always go wrong. Quite often, managerial authority is required to cut through the logjams that appear.
Yes, there may be a stupid HR requirement--as a manager, let the new employee know that you understand this is stupid but that we just need to get it out of the way, anyhow. As an engineer in semiconductors, I have had to sit through the "Acids are bad, mmkay?" fab worker safety lectures more times than I can count even though I was not allowed to even get close to the production fab floor. That's just life due to lawyers.
It is not (both). Hypergrowth startups and large companies onboard several dozens new people every month with limited HR, IT and management resources and usually do not have luxury to make a lot of things wrong in the process. Hence the need to optimize and build a standard operating procedure for it.
>The new employee's manager should expect to escort them continuously for the first week.
This task can be delegated to a „buddy“. It helps people to grow and spares some time for the manager (who still needs to plan some more time than usual for this new team member).
That seems to be a better solution. A new employee may hesitate to ask their manager questions that show they don't understand something. But they may feel less nervous about asking a co-worker. Also, a co-worker might have more relevant technical knowledge than a manager would.
How are you going to make stuff better when you don’t even know about the stuff?
Yeah. I sat through the sessions and followed along. But the internal docs were sorta out of date, and basic stuff seemed to just... not work. And SREs do what they do- ask a ton of intimidating questions and make you feel on the defensive.
But I wasn't expected to get set up. Part of onboarding was slogging through the tech. The k8 madness, the permissions and salts and accesses and everything else. And although it fueled my imposter syndrome at times, I appreciated knowing everybody else went through it too. I wasn't expected to just get it.
We expect people to take a few weeks to settle in. I value that - because onboarding is intimidating as hell. A company that doesn't see that - red flag, for sure.
It's the masochists who think 20 copies of the same code for 18 customers is an okay thing. Who think an 8 hour manual process you need to run once a month is just fine (hey, they can't fire me because nobody else will do it). It's the averse who decide to get that down to 3, and then the next set of averse people get it back down to 1.
Re: not recognizing CEO. Having worked as a senior technical person at board-2 levels in large companies I often failed to recognize the faces board members when meeting them in person. Some people are not good at face recognition, I am one of them. No harm ever came my way for not recognizing some dignitary or other. They truly dont care.
What does board-2 levels mean?
Took forever to get a decent office chair, then they started moving us around, a few months go by, and then we had to move to another cubicle. Then another building.
Logins wouldn’t work. Benefits, pay, nothing was up-to-date, and it got even worse when they instituted a clocking in system. People would just clock in, and then clock in all their friends at the same time. It was ridiculous.
I left about the time one of my coworkers had a heart attack and died at his desk.
All that to say, the on boarding sucked, and all of the problems that came after that were compounded upon that very bad on-boarding.
My last two roles as a Senior were “fill out these HR forms, here’s the payroll portal, just sign up. Trust me bro. It’ll work. Ok here’s your laptop. Here’s some tickets. Standups are at time:thirty”.
]no one actually said “bro” that’s just to illustrate the level of confidence it seemed the HR person had in the payroll SaaS: none.
Fortunately, macOS happily runs off an external disk and the installer supports restoring from another macOS install. So I spent my first week booting my personal machine from an external SSD.
Fully agree of noisy leisure game located in the office space. Air hockey and ping pong are the worst.
Then I remember working at an insurance company and someone trying to hang themself in a conference room. I guess that's worse.
At one place my predecessor had been fired. I could tell he left unexpectedly because his lunch was still in his desk drawer. Three months after he left. It actually got worse from there on in.
Seriously though, I have enough empathy and awareness from supporting elderly friends and family navigate the digital world that I could help build seriously awesome on-boarding experiences.
As much as I hate the touchbar, I've never had this problem. My hands sit on the home row, and my fingers rarely hit anything higher than the midsection of the number keys. I'm genuinely curious as to what natural hand position results in accidentally hitting the touchbar / function keys.
In any case, the fact that I found it surprising while you're (and others are) running into it on a regular basis, doesn't speak highly of Apple's UX testing.
I think developers and the odd MMO players are the only ones these days who use the function keys. I really want physical ones back but I don't think I'm going to win that democratic vote. I tend to almost exclusively use an external keyboard with laptops however. The touchbar is not even close to the top ergonomic problem with trying to type 50+ wpm on a laptop.
I am also a heavy vim user with caps mapped to ctrl, so perhaps you're not as odd as you think :-)
Have you ever considered that maybe the simulation appears just lazy enough to make you skeptical?
I hit the touch bar by accident most frequently when typing parentheses, since I try not to twist my wrists at all, so I'm curling my left pinky for Shift and moving my whole palm up very slightly for the 9 key, or doing a weird chord for Shift-0 all on the right hand (a habit I'm trying to train myself out of, along with a few stubborn glyph sequences where I type 'y' with my left index).
I'm on the last Intel touchbar-having MacBook I'll ever own, and vowed to never own two of the butterfly keyboards, which they fixed before I left the platform, so Apple is fixing its mistakes juuuust fast enough to not lose me. The only people I've ever heard speak up for the Touch Bar do a lot of photo editing while traveling.
Added: the biggest failure of the touch bar wasn't accidental presses, but the lack of a haptic engine to confirm that it recognizes presses. In fact I'm sure this would reduce accidental hits, because fingers are very sensitive and need that kind of feedback to know they've moved wrong. When I hit play accidentally going for a ), which is The Worst, it's several keystrokes later that my brain realizes I triggered a 'button'.
Conversely, when I am trying to interact with the damned thing, I have to give it my undivided visual attention, and I'm often trying to look at something my own finger is occluding for feedback.
Haptic engine. How did this product ever ship without a Taptic™ engine. Apple makes the best haptic feedback in existence! Make sure you've worn the Watch for at least a week if you want to debate this. I'll never understand that decision, and we'll never know if the touch bar could have worked.
So instead of having good documentation of how to do stuff or whom to ask, they have an onboarding session so that there is a chance that at least one person in the new group remembers this minor fact out of this huge amount of information that put in front of you that you thought you'd never need. It's quite literally the equivalent of throwing s*t at the wall.
In this follow up she is answering a lot of negative comments about her first post. Trashing HN while doing it. But then you take a look at that thread today:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23280610
I did a quick review of the top root comments (i.e. the most upvoted ones, the ones the HN, as a community, mostly thinks represents their opinion). The first 6 or 7 are fully supportive of her take, empathizing with horrible onboarding processes, saying they would do the same as her. Then comes a couple of comments mentioning how she is getting flak and referring to a lot of top-level negative comments. This shows that (obviously) she wasn’t delusional addressing negative comments, they were there at the top a few hours after the post was published. But, again, these comments were supportive of her, saying the negative comments were unfair. Then it comes more 5 or 6 posts still supportive or neutral or orthogonal to the point.
Then, only the 14th root level comment is a truly negative one (one that she addressed in her follow up). And, for me, 14th is too far down to matter. Or to represent what HN is as a community.
This shows to me that HN, as a community, was fully supportive of her text, her tone, her take, and her actions. This is the reaction that was overwhelmingly more upvoted by all. Only temporarily felt like the opposite.
That’s why I always wait a day to really grasp what’s the overall reaction of HN as a community to any particular post (if I happen to care about such opinion).
"In retrospect, there were many red flags. *Well, pink flags.* Whatever."
(I've never used Lyft or Uber in my life though, so maybe that's why)
EDIT: Okay, I see you added an edit where you say you've never used it - so to remove any semblance of snark I'll clarify that you will in fact find pink if you do that.
I rarely see the "what to do to avoid them" in Rachel's posts, and I think that's why I find them so frustrating.
Which I also get – a lot of stuff in the world is stupid. But I also understand that if that is the attitude you go in with, you will almost certainly find what you are looking for (things to be annoyed at).
Probably more useful as catharsis than an actual guide.
> I managed to stumble onto the Google spreadsheet (yep) they were using to track feedback for the process. There were dozens of entries, and they were all gushing about it, like oh it was so good, and so fun! Please do more!
Getting accurate feedback from employees is hard, and I can only imagine new employees feel even more pressure to say positive things.
There's always an in-group/out-group in any group and if you're not aware who the current "least favored" person is in a social circle, its probably you.
I'm certainly not claiming we had a great culture, but I don't think it was that bad.
> There's always an in-group/out-group in any group and if you're not aware who the current "least favored" person is in a social circle, its probably you.
If I'm not hearing gossip on who the "out" person is, it's me? If this is good culture I'll take bad any day.
The amount of times things are asking for feedback has increased by orders of magnitude in the last decade and yet things keep getting shittier and shittier.
I have never ever got any perceptible improvement or even follow-up from leaving detailed feedback so I no longer bother - instead I do whatever is easiest to make the thing get out of my way so I can get back to my actual work, so everyone gets 5 stars or whatever is the “good” answer because I don’t want to get some poor soul in trouble in case there’s a “if avg_feedback < 99: fire()” somewhere.
Yes, in enterprise situations you’d hope the feedback actually gets looked at by a competent person and doesn’t just go into a black hole, but as a user I have no way to tell, so either I just write off the issue or I will do the thing that will guarantee the issue is resolved which is to email their manager instead of gambling my time on whether the feedback system works or even gets looked at.
Walmart added a "rate your experience" screen to their self checkouts, thus slowing down the self checkout lane and creating a worse experience by asking for feedback. I seriously want to meet the person who did it just to get some attempt at justification. I long for the days when Palm had a person counting clicks.
https://blog.prototypr.io/what-you-remove-is-more-important-...
How about you just don't respond instead of lying? That saves even more time!
I understand why you pick 5 stars instead of giving bad ratings but why bother faking a response at all. What situation is it where you're forced to give a rating (is this irl or something) until you're allowed to leave the session?
I’m not saying I lie in the ratings on purpose, but I’m not going to do extra work to find the ignore option - I’ll use whatever option is more prominent.
> What situation is it where you're forced to give a rating (is this irl or something) until you're allowed to leave the session?
Email-based systems will often send multiple follow-up ones and the only way to stop it is to essentially submit. If it’s a system I use often I’ll make an email rule to trash them (or passive-aggressively send them back to someone at their company) but if it’s an unexpected one I’ll just respond to prevent the next one.
Some mobile apps make the dismiss option hard to find/reach (literally - it’s at the top corner of the screen on a big phone) while the 5-star option is more prominent.
IRL I would also answer since declining is essentially implicitly admitting that something isn’t right and could get someone in trouble.
Ideally there should be a “don’t ask me ever again” option to disable that behaviour somewhere but I have yet to see it since every company seems to have a “feedback monster” that they need to continuously feed with ratings, even if they are meaningless.
If the actual product or developer workflow is that much of a mess? Yes, that's a real problem. But if it's the day-one-never again onboarding? Who gives a crap.
The only real pita that carries on is the not-actually-single-sign-on. I'm so goddamned sick of Duo pop-ups, especially my work that has a 20 second timeout on that and sometimes it stalls.
True SSO is what Kerberos and/or Active Directory has where all the auth is handled out of band and you never ever see a login pop up.
SAML/OIDC is a kluge that offers a worse experience than a password manager and in practice means you’ll be interacting with login forms a lot more frequently.
Password manager flow:
- Open website’s login page, manually, from bookmarks or even the password manager to begin with
- login form has username & password field on the same page which the password manager fills and submits
- you are logged in
“SSO” flow:
- Open website’s login page
- login form has only email/username, can’t really use a password manager because there’s no password and you don’t want to interfere with the flow (by using a dummy password) because you’ll need your PW manager for the next step and you don’t want the manager stuck on waiting for a password field to appear to fill in that dummy password
- wait for (at least one, but typically several) redirects which take a couple seconds (and much worse on flaky mobile connections)
- now you fill in your actual SSO credentials - this is where you use your PW manager.
- now click through whatever upsells your SSO provider has such as nagging you to use their proprietary 2FA app (another one!) instead of your standard TOTP client
- finally go through a few more redirects and end up back on the original site
Since the SSO-integrated website has no way to actively tell when your SSO session has expired, it usually defaults to a conservative value which means you need to go through this crap every 12 hours or so.
The password manager flow is much much faster. IMO unless you’re able to do proper, real (Kerberos/AD) SSO, just give your employees a good password manager.
I understand the technical reasons behind why things are the way they are, but IMO as an industry we should do better and not expose implementation details to the user in such an annoying way. Security shouldn’t be at the detriment of user experience.
I agree that it's a win if you only ever have one bad day in the office and it's only downhill from here.
But if you could, say, not have this bad experience, wouldn't that be even better? Isn't it good to share this experience so that, even if their own employer doesn't take the hint, others might?
Plenty of places take days to get to this point, often with many false starts. You should be working now. No? Oh, we forgot about this thing. How about now? Still no? Dang. Let me ask David... no wait David is on vacation this week.
My personal phone is a Nokia 3310. If the company wants apps on my phone they can provide a phone and a plan. It is a work phone and it will live at work. If you want to reach me outside of work hours, (555) 867 5309
I'm also sorry she had to put up with a lot of bullshit from companies. I only wish her the best. She seems to get stuff done, and fix bad problems. It seems most companies would be very lucky to have her join.
Have you seen this sort of thing before, is this normal where you're from / in companies or branches you've worked?
I don't think I'm capable of doing that dance again...
> You HAVE to type it in correctly
Yes. That's how names work. Words as well. But I guess author cannot touch type on one of the most ubiquitous keyboards in the world.
Honestly I'm not sure why the site comes up in HN so often.
Maybe it's a condemnation of the regular viewership here (and myself), but I find Rachel's posts pretty easy to identify with.
I read it instead as a story about silicon valley companies tend to focus a lot on image over substance. They crate these overwrought hype machines made to market to investors and customers, but then use the same techniques to sell to their employees as well.
Every silicon valley startup has a story about how they're saving the world with their product, when in reality it's just another business that's trying to extract value out of some market.
As an employee I appreciate when a company doesn't demand that I drink thier cooperate kool-aid just to work there. A company that understands that I am there to do a job and exchange my time and knowledge for money. Maybe I've just gotten as cynical as the author over time, but as someone who has been in this industry for 20 years, I don't want to spend extra time at work doing non-work things. I want to get something useful done and go home. I bring value in my skills and experience, and if you work with a company that can't recognize that and wants to put all employees through the same junior exercise of corporate orientation then as the author said, that's a red flag.
They either are a slight cut above, better at some things and worse at many others, or full on delusional. If they're actually much worse, which happens from time to time, then you can joke about how they're head and shoulders up their own asses.
Sturgeon's law applies. The people who know they're a little full of it are usually the ones who have better luck correcting that situation, or at least dealing with the consequences of it.
For anyone legitimately doing this, you might be delighted to learn of ^W. (Or Ctrl+Backspace sometimes, but that's a different mechanism.)
Mostly they feel self entitled and not getting bigger picture.
Just like this one on on-boarding - oh great you are "sooo smart" it could be done better. But have you ever run a company with at least 100 of employees?
Right to point out shortcomings is always there as with movies when, movie critiques never made a movie themselves. But there is a fine line ...