Notes from Kate Heddleston's onboarding description

onboarding.md

Why she got involved in onboarding

• Noticed guys get promoted faster
• Without onboarding, women got left behind

Why is onboarding important?

• Spend a lot of money on recruiting, but then throw people in the deep end
• Extremely high ROI

Who should mentor?

• Pretty much everyone should be involved in onboarding
• Mentoring can be emotionally draining
• Can burn out senior mentors
• Should pair junior engineers with the last people who joined "sophomore engineers"
• The best person to teach something is the last person who did it

What are important ways to have a good onboarding experience?

• Set up goals and make them happen
• Goal is reliable independence
• People who often care about onboarding are those who've been through bad onboarding
• Need executive signoff

What should you be teaching?

• Three major categories of teaching, each about 1/3 of knowledge
• Technology
• Domain specific engineering knowledge - how is the team, code, product set up
• Personal development - confidence, judgement etc
• Don't make junior engineers scope out features - unrealistic
• Give them scoped, well-defined tasks and let them go and figure it out
• Help to bolster confidence: skills follow confidence

What other things are helpful?

• Weekly 1-on-1s are valuable - people need to be heard
• Channels of communication open at all times

What are common issues or mistakes with onboarding?

• Burning out senior mentors is a common mistake
• Two ways to get senior engineers, steal them or make them
• Need a sustainable program for bringing on junior engineers
• If you can't hire any beginners into your organisation, you have a serious problem
• Bad internal tooling makes it hard for new people
• Make robust internal tools and then it will be easier to introduce beginners