- Noticed guys get promoted faster
- Without onboarding, women got left behind
- Spend a lot of money on recruiting, but then throw people in the deep end
- Extremely high ROI
- 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
- 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
- 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
- Weekly 1-on-1s are valuable - people need to be heard
- Channels of communication open at all times
- 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