<story><title>How to Onboard Software Engineers</title><url>http://blog.fogcreek.com/how-to-onboard-software-engineers-interview-with-kate-heddleston/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>agentultra</author><text>Kate Heddleston is freaking awesome, if you don&amp;#x27;t know. Her talk at Pycon 2015 about diversity in engineering environments is fantastic. Well explained in language free of activist rhetoric -- it was a pragmatic and thoughtful speech. Her blog expands on much of what she covers and should be read.&lt;p&gt;On the topic of on-boarding -- &lt;i&gt;super&lt;/i&gt; important to get right! The idea of &lt;i&gt;making&lt;/i&gt; your people the best they can be is lost, I think, on our generation. My grandfather-in-law was a mechanical engineer at Chrysler back in the day when they had a special school they ran to train their new recruits. When he started he had no idea of how cars worked but they picked him up from school and gave him the training he needed to become an important figure in their company.&lt;p&gt;Focusing on hiring the best because hiring someone mediocre will damage your business is negative thinking that can kill your on-boarding, and thus your culture and business. I&amp;#x27;ve worked at places with terrible on-boarding and it was a fight just to get some direction and support for your work. Getting the attention of management was something you wanted to avoid which led to people becoming complacent about their work and its quality.&lt;p&gt;Great article. On-boarding is important to get right.</text></comment>
<story><title>How to Onboard Software Engineers</title><url>http://blog.fogcreek.com/how-to-onboard-software-engineers-interview-with-kate-heddleston/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>patio11</author><text>Onboarding is a people&amp;#x2F;process&amp;#x2F;docs&amp;#x2F;technology problem.  To the limited extent that it is a technology problem, you &lt;i&gt;really&lt;/i&gt; can&amp;#x27;t go wrong with a) treating it like it is an actual shipping product of the company (implying a minimum standard of care like e.g. a repository, documentation about it, and a dedicated place to put issues) and b) actively maintaining something with the goal of getting someone up-and-running &lt;i&gt;quickly&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;None of my projects are at the point where you can just &amp;quot;vagrant up and go&amp;quot;, but the next-best thing has been READMEs in the relevant repositories with exact lists of &amp;quot;Type this, type this, type this, type this.  You now have a fully-working system running on localhost and you should be able to type this to get a full green test suite.  If you can type this and it does not come out green, fixing that is more important than anything Patrick is doing right now.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Here&amp;#x27;s, for example, what we have for getting someone up and running on Appointment Reminder (in preparation for me soon no longer being the engineer who keeps all of that system in my head): &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;gist.github.com&amp;#x2F;patio11&amp;#x2F;a0b1063c5d33b5748da6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;gist.github.com&amp;#x2F;patio11&amp;#x2F;a0b1063c5d33b5748da6&lt;/a&gt;  Feel free to steal ideas in terms of level of detail or useful things to include.  (A lot of the magic is in the rake commands like &amp;quot;setup_site&amp;quot;, which take care of &amp;quot;All that crufty configuration stuff which you would otherwise need a senior engineer to do for you prior to actually seeing the page render correctly on localhost:3000.&amp;quot;)&lt;p&gt;Quick hack which helped us on making sure this guide was actually accurate: we had two engineers coming into the project at the same time.  I wrote down everything &lt;i&gt;I&lt;/i&gt; thought they needed to know.  Engineer #1 implemented to the document I had written, filled in the blank spots where he needed to ask questions, and then we committed the readme.  Engineer #2 then had to do it off the readme &lt;i&gt;without&lt;/i&gt; asking me any questions.  Given that he was actually able to do this, we have high confidence that there is not at the moment anything rattling around in my head which is absolutely required to get up-and-running and documented nowhere else.</text></comment>