Ask HN: What was the best onboarding experience you had as a new employee?

You can see the best by noticing what made Amazon the worst.

Their onboarding experience is incredibly regimented and planned out for 60-90 days. Day to day tasks, goals, etc.

Know what it was missing? The people. I was 100% isolated from others and the people who excelled at amazon (that this process did not bother or disturb) are those who like isolation and do not want to be social. Reaching out to them during my onboarding time was a painful lesson in transactional communication alone.

My best experiences have been recharacterized by my experience here - my bar has lowered. If I get connected to people, the workers, the management, and get a sense of belonging or community then its at the top of my list now.

Friends don't let friends join Amazon.

Data scientist here.

I really enjoyed having a roughly 50-50 split between scheduled presentations/workshops/content and free-time where I was left to my own devices to spend time on my onboarding project, coffee chat with colleagues, ask questions and just tinker round.

Then I helped out with onboarding the next lot of newcomers, which cemented a lot of learning for me.

Probably the one where we paired all day, every day, from day one. Everything was learned in context, just when encountered, and there are so many little tips and details that just wouldn't have been documented if onboarding was done differently. The problem with documenting a large system was less needed by use of microservices. So you had docs for the connection of services and most services were small enough to get by with high-level in-repo docs.

27 years of experience Software Engineer with master's of science Forever.com Jeff Stonebrook experience was wonderful Had a doc that detailed how to build software from day one after 1 week we had a conversation, and we agreed on a time table that we both agreed was a guess and not a hard milestone I worked, and asked questions during the work day via email. supervisor liked my complete thoughts and analysis My work mostly completed with regular effort except for some edge cases My experience allowed to learn code as I was adding a new feature, so I enjoyed the process.