It's a cynical, immature post. Genuinely surprised that it has obviously resonated so well.
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.
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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.