Thoughts on on-boarding new hires

Bad onboarding:

• A top-down marathon of meetings with tiers of managers and painfully boring training videos
• New recruits treated like helpless new kids.

A better on-boarding:

• Giving new recruits a very safe way to actually do, learning by doing is actually the best way to learn anything
• Since building software is a social activity, giving them an opportunity to work with different teams and different code bases across the organization. This also helps communicating the big picture and the endless opportunities at the company.