I’ve written a few posts previously about quitting a job (see here and here). Now, I want to turn my attention to a much happier and more exciting topic- what happens when you show up for the first day at your next company.

Starting a new software engineering job is hard, and making this process successful requires a lot of effort from both the employer and the employee. In this post, I want to focus on the former, and in particular how companies can make their onboarding processes better. A follow-up post will offer advice on getting up-to-speed from the employee perspective.

Onboarding approaches

I’ve been through almost a dozen new hire ramp-ups in my career so far. Although the details have varied a lot from company to company, I’ve broadly seen four different styles of onboarding programs, each described below. Note that these aren’t mutually exclusive- some companies have adopted hybrid approaches that combine multiple styles.

Full bootcamp

The most intense onboarding process is what’s referred to as a new hire bootcamp.

The analogy here is to bootcamp or basic training programs in the military. These work by taking a bunch of people from different backgrounds, grinding them down, and then building them back up in a consistent, structured way that lays the foundation for being a good soldier. Those who graduate then go on to more specialized training for their specific roles (e.g., officer candidate school).

Tech onboarding bootcamps aren’t quite as intense (no head shaving or being yelled at by a drill sergeant, fortunately!), but the general idea is the same- to take a diverse set of new “recruits” and give them all the same, baseline skills required to be a productive software engineer at the company.

Typically the way it works is that each cohort of new hires is seated together in the office. For several weeks, they attend classes together and do various, small exercises (e.g., bug fixes) either alone or in smaller groups.

Most new hires are not pre-assigned to teams. Instead, towards the latter half of the bootcamp, a matching process takes place in which each person tries to find a team that they’re interested in, that has available headcount, and whose hiring manager is willing to bring them on. Hiring managers might assign small technical tasks to test out potential team members and ensure that they’ll find the work interesting.

At the end of the bootcamp, those who have met the minimum requirements “graduate” and move on to their chosen teams. The small subset of people who don’t graduate with their cohort are typically given a bit more time to figure things out, but will eventually be forced to leave the company if they don’t complete the program.

Facebook is the best-known adopter of this approach. I haven’t worked at Facebook, so I’m not familiar with all the details of their program, but I went through a new hire bootcamp when I started at Airbnb, who modeled theirs after the Facebook one.

Mini-project bootcamp

A less intense variant of the full bootcamp is one in which the new engineers are all pre-assigned to teams, so there’s no weed-out or team selection process. Instead, the starting class is divided into smaller teams, each of which works on a mini-project for a few weeks to get more familiar with the company’s tools, systems, and products. After the project is done, the project teams are disbanded and people begin onboarding with their assigned, long-term teams.

I went through a process like this when I started at Stripe- they called it “dev/start”, and it took around 5 weeks. I’ve heard of other companies having programs like this, but they’re typically optional and intended primarily for more junior engineers.

Lightweight, team-driven

An alternative to having structured, multi-week training programs is to push most of the learning onto individual teams. After a few days of general orientation, new engineers go and sit with their assigned teams and start an onboarding process that’s customized by their manager for their specific role.

The details vary, but typically the manager will write up a personalized “new hire” doc with a specific list of tasks that the person is expected to do (e.g., meet with person X, read this design doc, etc.). The new hire is typically also assigned a “starter project” to get their feet wet and matched with a “new hire buddy” on the team who can help answer low-level technical questions.

The first few weeks may be interspersed with classes, social events, and other activities that the new hires can participate in together. But, they’re generally optional to attend and fairly low key.

Many companies of lots of different sizes have adopted this approach. I went through it at Google, and then more recently when I started at Segment.

Bare bones

The least intense onboarding is one that’s completely minimal. New hires sign some forms, are shown to their desks, and then immediately dive in to their work (with some manager guidance).

This is typically the approach taken by smaller startups that don’t yet have the critical mass to justify creating a formal onboarding program. I experienced this when I joined MoPub, which at the time had only around 45 employees.

Lightweight is best

Based on my various job starting experiences, I personally feel that the lightweight, team-based approach described above is far and away the best choice for most companies.

Here are some reasons why.

Onboarding isn’t a one-size-fits-all activity

The members of a new hire cohort might range from new grads to industry veterans with 30+ years of experience. Even in small companies, people will most likely be assigned to different teams working on different parts of the product and using different technical stacks.

In this environment, it’s impossible to have a multi-week, general training program that’s optimal for everybody. Even if you break it up into subspecialties (e.g., “frontend bootcamp” vs. “backend bootcamp”), there’s still a tendency for it to be too fast, too slow, too general, or too specialized for some subset of the participants.

A more efficient way to get engineers up-to-speed is to have them do real project work that’s like the work they’ll be doing after orientation is over. And, the best way to do this is to have engineers join their teams early on in the process and lean on their managers and peers for guidance.

The other nice thing about the guided, “dive in” approach is that it can be heavily customized on a person-by-person basis. A new grad or someone who’s never worked in the team’s tech stack might be given smaller, easier starter tasks than someone who’s already an expert in the technology. New hires are able to get up-to-speed at their own pace, without the wasted time or excess stress of a group training program.

Group classes have limited utility

Orientation classes can be fun at the beginning, but, after hours and hours of sitting in a stuffy room and listening to presentations, attentions wane and the sessions all start to blend together. In addition, by their very structure these classes are very much “one-size-fits-all” activities that can’t be easily customized for the requirements of each person’s job.

Personally, I think a day or two of classes at the beginning is fine, provided that these are devoted to things that are necessary and relevant for all new hires (e.g., how to get paid, what the core values / operating principles of the company are, etc.). But, beyond that, classes should be optional and also non-continuous so that attendees can fit them in with their team-specific onboarding tasks.

An alternative to classes, and what I think is a much better use of resources, is to create great onboarding documentation. Unlike a presentation, which tends to go in one ear and out the other, documentation sticks around forever and can easily be consulted after the onboarding is done. People can also work through documentation at their own pace and skip over topics that they already know about or aren’t relevant for their work.

Google had a particularly nice balance here. There were a few technical onboarding classes, but they were extremely high-level and designed to be more about the social and cultural aspects of engineering rather than the technical ones (as I recall, they also had cute names like “life an engineer”). Technical training, when needed, was instead done via written “code labs” that engineers worked on individually.

Doing team assignments during onboarding is crazy

I went through a team matching process during my Airbnb onboarding, and it was extremely stressful for everyone involved. Hiring managers, particularly those on the less-desired teams, spent days marketing their teams and convincing (and sometimes begging) people to join them. On the other side, the members of my starting class and I were bombarded with choices and forced to spend a lot of time talking to hiring managers, doing mini-tasks for the teams we were interested in, and, in general, stressing out over a decision that had to be made quickly and would play a big role in our careers at the company.

Everyone in my starting class was able to find a team that they liked and “graduate” on-time. But, I’ve heard anecdotally about people arriving at these bootcamp-style orientations only to learn that the team(s) that attracted them to the company aren’t accepting any new hires. Or, on the flip side, I’ve heard about hiring managers recruiting people with specialized skills that they need (e.g., database performance optimization) only to have these specialists choose completely different teams at the end of bootcamp.

All of this craziness can be avoided by simply matching people to teams before they arrive. Doing this reduces stress on both sides and ensures that candidates know what they’re getting themselves into. People should be allowed to switch teams within the first few weeks if they really need to, but this should be relatively rare.

Conclusion

The best approach to onboarding engineers is to quickly integrate them with their preassigned teams. Organizing weeks of classes and/or letting new hires pick teams during orientation may seem like a better onboarding experience, but usually just wastes time and causes unnecessary stress.