New Hire Onboarding

New hires need to be onboarded properly - specifically, you need to set expectations quickly. Having a place (like confluence, or other wiki) where these are documented is a good start (so you can later reference them) - but simply put, you should sit down next to this person, and help them to understand how, but more importantly, WHY you would suggest certain changes. Take the time to build trust with this person. Make sure, at all costs, that you come from a place of helping / teaching -

It's also the same for new teams or even new large projects. I have worked at {Big Tech Company} for 7 years and WFH has barely been a speed bump for me.Last week I decided to switch teams. My onboarding rate is glacial so far. Naturally I don't have a big workload, because I am new. However between tasks I can't just try and learn by osmosis, because there's nobody around. I have to go out of my way to schedule meetings with people and say "what are you working on? e

This is a mind shift for the new hires. I typically ping them after a few days asking if they need any help understanding the problem or just a friendly chat on why we are doing that particular project and how it will make relevance to the business. The good ones quickly understand if the path they are choosing makes sense and most of the times opens them up to ask questions.

What follows is my usual way of working and/or the type of behavior I appreciate when onboarding someone in my team. YMMV.1) You're going to have plenty of questions, and a lot of the stuff you'll see / hear / read won't make sense at first.- Accept this fact- When you get stuck on something or don't understand it, make a note of it and move on to another topic. You'll have plenty to look at anyway.- Keep a running list of questions and ask for

Put them near an experienced one. Let them observe and learn from the ones that know the job already.In the company I work now, we call that work buddy. You’re being assigned a person for your first week who sits close to you and you get to ask them anything you want, work together etc.Also, as time goes by, write down the most asked questions and issues so people can reference those for simple and recurring questions. That will scale better.

Talk to people. You should be asking these questions to your direct management. They clearly don't have a great onboarding process (even more difficult if you're remote) so you'll need to do some extra work to stay on top of things and figure out how your role fits within the team and the company.

Does anyone have any best practices for onboarding new engineers to a situation like described?

The problem at company B was everyone was experienced so they haven’t needed to onboard anyone. As a result you had no onboarding and that’s a team failure. I tell new joiners their fresh feedback is the most important thing they can contribute when they start and we place a lot of value in a smooth onboarding.The result of not doing that is that people are taken off their work to help the person onboard manually. This then can cause the feeling they’re being held up as you experienced, this

This is a symptom of a problem you might help to address. companies spend a fortune on recruitment and next to nothing on on-boarding. The problem is multiplied when there is a lot of technical debt or weak infrastructure, because they make onboarding harder.Often, the people who grow up with a mess don't see the issue because they learn it a little at a time as it's being created, but bring a new person in and require that they understand it all to be successful and you have a real

Most jobs I've been at if you're the first new hire in a while you are going to experience something like this, and it's important that you spend a lot of time adding to the documentation to make it easier for the next new hire.