What was good/bad in your onboarding expirience as software engineer?

I've had a good expression from onboarding when I got the understanding from where to start and where to receive answers.

I'm wondering is a way to make it go even futher?

Can you describe some of you expirience when you were really delighted from the onboarding?

Comments

[Joe Mainwaring]

For the most part, the majority of my onboarding has been smooth, but I can think back to at least one occasion where I found myself at odds with other collaborators because everyone wasn't on the same page.

What I find makes for a good onboarding:

• Getting Started Guide. The more self-service you make your guide, the better. Ideally, a person should be able to get an instance of the application running locally without asking for assistance.
• Pairing Time: within a day of me trying to get started, having a pairing session with an experience engineer is essential. 60 minutes should be allocated, allowing time for the pair to address any blockers that may have surfaced getting started, and walking through either a project core project workflow process (feature development) or targeted information (Upgrading Ruby).
• An appropriate starter task. For a junior, it could be something like change the label on a button, but if the onboarding is a specialist, the task may be instead one of discovery: time box your efforts and map out the epic you've been assigned
• Regular check-ins. For the first 30 days, I check-in with my new additions at the beginning of every week with two questions:
  • What are you currently working on?
  • Do you have any blockers which you need assistance with?
• A contact list: Knowing who's the best person to ask what question can accelerate potential blockers

[Pavlo Zhmak]

Thank you for the great answer!

I totally agree about assistance, but based on my expirience everywhere need to keep the balance. It's kind of an edge case, but still I've been helping an expirienced engineer with his onbording and this person has been asking me questions right away when there was an obsticle. Because of that he loose "opportunity" to actually learn/understand how it works.

Also I find usefull when the new joiner is taking notes in case there some missing points in Getting Started Guide. That way we can analize them afterwards and improve documentation.