Onboarding your next engineer

Deepak Pathania explains what benchmarks and principles you can use for onboarding a new member in your engineering team. Onboarding starts before the actual day of joining. Check with your developers what set-up they are comfortable with, and assign a buddy to the developer.

[deepakpathania]

Hey, the speaker here. I use the term "guy" a lot throughout this talk, which was not intended to create a gender bias about engineers, apologies if it comes off like that. It was supposed to be a generic checklist for onboarding your next engineer. Happy to answer any questions that you might have. :)

[mudassirhasan]

KT is neglected aspect. A mail is sent watch 100 hours of pre recorded garbage videos.

[Thepankaz]

Giving first task which includes the whole stack is kinda overwhelming, most companies have a big code base, he needs some time to atlease explore and play with the code with postman, once he feels he can navigate the code he should be ready for code changes.
also, most of the buddies are senior engineers who are busy all the time, very rarely will they reply on time. so 2 weeks i feel are very optimistic.

[cu]

This is a good concept but the primary assumption here is that the new engineer is somehow a recent grad or fresher. Experienced engineers don't need buddy engineer ( it kinda slows down their internal process )
I would say for experienced engineers, follow this plan.
Explain them top level architecture and give them a list of POC's for different teams.
Let them know company code & branching policies. Rebase vs unique feature branch merge makes lot of difference. Let them know so our IDE's setting are changed.
Access to servers, SSH keys, Monitoring tools, Cloud credentials, RSA setups should be finished within one week so the productivity isn't impacted.

[TwoTinkers]

You obviously used the term "guy" in the context of a male as it was followed by he, him, his, himself, etc. in your talk. So you indeed created a gender bias here!