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Comment by snailtrail | Hacker News Reader

First week is to set up tooling? If the new person does not ship their first PR the second day something is terribly wrong with your plan.

It should take 2 hours max to set up tooling.

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Lol. There's so much to unpack here that I started to suspect it's a bait. It is, right?

You're lucky if you got an access to everything you need on day 1, not to mention setup the tooling.

You can't improve the product if you don't know it yet and that takes time.

It is an old meme, but that said, a week to setup a dev environment is pretty ridiculous.

I try to have folks delivering business value even if very small within a week or two. I find it reduces a lot of new hire anxiety around performance if they can ship _anything_ relatively quickly.

Most of the companies I worked with/for won't even have the security credentials set up in a week to have access to anything. VPN, keys etc. So not much you can do the first week accept sit with others to get tours of the codebase, frameworks, best practices etc.

You’re probably not working in startups, then. If a new developer can’t push code to production on the first day in a company of <100 people then there’s something wrong. If you’re joining a big corporate with thousands of employees and regulatory obligations then sure, a week or more for security credentials is normal, but in a startup, a week is a terrible sign of dysfunction.

Depends on the business I guess; I work mostly with companies (including startups and massive firms) in banking and gov ; there are companies with 20-30 people who cannot get people to do anything within weeks simply because of all the red tape.

That's entirely due to the sector you're in. That 20-30 person company may be small, but it's attached to a massive external bureaucracy. They don't need to invent their own red tape, and all other companies are playing with the same handicap.

In a different sector, 20-30 people is the stage where you should be capitalizing on how much faster you can move than the large bureaucratic incumbent, and if there's red tape that takes weeks to navigate it means someone in the company put it there.

> That's entirely due to the sector you're in.

I am aware of that; I like it that way. I like long term stability and large bags of money without stress.

The capitalising and ‘faster’ and hurry and stress you speak off is nice if you want bankrupt-or-unicorn. We don’t need to be market leader or whatever; we need to have stability decade after decade and we do. I like profit of millions$/year and small teams, not some breakneck VC funded fast growing all-or-bust stuff. Each their own of course.

I gravitate towards startups for this reason. In my experience with big orgs, everything takes forever and involves 20+ people. Often, still nothing really gets done. At startups, I or someone sitting virtually next to me is the one creating the initial integrations, accounts or credentials. Similarly, I am compelled by the MVP and the express lane it demands. I loathe red tape and process for the sake of process—and it's most evident as a new-hire, watching others scramble to onboard you, only to keep hitting corporate walls.

While I don't think as a blanket rule a new hire should push prod code on day or week one—they should be able to without being ham-stringed by needless bureaucracy that has nothing to do with security or engineering. (IMO)

lmao right? My new hires spent the first week in corporate/domain training, then a few days getting situated, setup and stuff. Probably 2 weeks before I "expect" a PR but even then the first few tasks are a gentle introduction.

I think the way I phrased it might not have been very clear. But many things happen in the first week, concurrently, like machine setup, product walkthrough, and a bunch of orientation sessions.

Considering the total time spent on the machine setup, it takes approximately ~2.5 days. This includes installing all the tools like Docker or IDE, setting up access to cloud environments, and VPN. Some of it is automated, and some of it is manual. It also involves installing homegrown tools, which new people won't be familiar with, and you can't find anything online.

Many environments are complex. At a previous startup, they had a "setup" script that configured your laptop with all the tooling, dependencies, etc. It had bugs and could bomb out in the middle. Even with all the automation, it could take a day or two to get through it.

At an earlier startup, however, we expected someone to push to prod by the end of their first day. It was stressful for new and current hires alike!

I highly recommend a documented walkthrough rather than a scripted setup. As you note: with a scripted setup if it breaks you're left debugging it and trying to work out what on earth it has done to your machine. I think 1-2 days of setup is entirely reasonable, but it shouldn't be taking an entire week.

Pushing to prod on your first day seems…interesting.

I can get Visual Studio and git installed in about two hours, mostly limited by network speed...

But, it's the "everything else" that takes awhile. Email filters, browser settings, bookmarks...

Wouldn't it be nice if that were true?

;-)

I don't understand why snailtrail is downvoted. Your ecosystem is a complete joke when it takes a week to set something up.

I will agree that I am not including tooling:

1. Set up all the tools and pull down repo. Confirm access. 2. The code should "just run" at that point.

That's why I don't welcome Docker & K8S - you are all a bunch of hype chasers. Most companies don't need it at all. If you work at FAANG, fine. If you are an ML startup that rents out GPUs from a datacenter, fine. Other than that, run it on a cloud instance and pay $5 more a month.

Because, shockingly people don’t respond well to overly generalized statements that might apply at some places but clearly not the vast majority.

Especially when those statements pretend to be gospel shared from the SWE gods.

If the company provides Linux laptops, Docker in your stack can be the fastest road to the code "just running". Docker on Mac and Windows can be pretty awful from what I hear, but on Linux it can be a huge time saver in getting a dev environment set up. It doesn't get much easier than "install docker, run docker compose up".

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