Onboarding is a product

A product delivers value by solving problems.

Onboarding delivers value to new hires by giving them a clear path to go from outsider to insider. It delivers value to the team by preparing the new hire to contribute while minimizing negative impact.

Treat engineering onboarding like a product, use metrics, user research, and iteration to improve.

Treating onboarding as product means focusing on delivering value to onboarding users by deeply understanding their problems, needs, and context, then designing solutions to solve their problems and satisfy their needs effectively in their context.

User-centric

Starts with understanding the user’s goals, pain points, and context—not just building what’s asked, but what’s needed.

Onboarding is a process that transforms an outsider into an insider of a particular group.

Your user, the person being onboarded, went through a hard and stressfull hiring process, they showed up their first day hungry to prove that you made the right choice in hiring them. They don't really know anyone and they have just a faint idea of what success looks like for their first few months in the company. They don't know much about the internals of your software systems and proceess, and they still don't have access to your code repositories.

Outcome-focused

Prioritizes impact (solving a problem or improving a metric) over just output (shipping features).

Systems-aware

Balances user needs, business goals, technical feasibility, and long-term scalability.

Prioritization-driven

Applies judgment to what not to build just as much as what to build—focusing effort on the highest-leverage problems.

Iterative

Uses experimentation, feedback, and data to guide decisions and improve continuously.

In this book, we will focus on the onboarding of Software Engineers into an Engineering group. As most topics around Software, Engineering Onboarding is full of tradeoffs.

Time: Should the onboard be 0 days long (here's a laptop, this is your team, good luck!) or a more structured 90 day long process?

Focus: Should onboardees be sequestered and only focus on onboarding or should the process be integrated with their regular work?

Breadth: Do we teach about all the systems we have or should we focus on teaching the systems that they are more likely to interact?

Depth: Do we give general overviews or we go deep into all of the topics?

Onboarding is also a sociotechnical system.

It includes understanding the company's culture and goals, its engineering culture, idioms, procedures, and best practices.

150 Engineers

Before reaching approximately 150 Engineers, onboarding looks a lot like an apprenticeship. A more tenured Engineered is paired with the new person and run a hypercustomized onboarding process similar to a master blacksmith teaching their apprentice. From the perspective of the learner this is very efficient as they are taught exactly what they need close to when they need it and they have access to a fast learning feedback loop. It can also be very positive for learning the company culture and can lead to a professional closeness that continues long beyond onboarding. From the perspective of the instructor is has a non-negligeble cost. All the time they spend teaching the new person is time they are not working on other team goals. With a focus on the near future the cost is well worth it as it leads to another person supporting the goals of the team.

Things change at some point after 150 Engineers, especially when the company is hiring fast. The cost of having say 1/3 of the Engineering group engaged in onboarding starts to look scary. 150 is also Dunbar's number, an estimation of the limit of the number of people a person can maintain stable social relationships with. After 150 you see more subcultures emerge in the organization and there is generally less uniformify in procedures and experiences at the company. So a person being onboarded on team A could have a very diferent onboarding experience than a person being onboarded on team B.

A combination of the lack of uniformity of the thoughput impact leads to apetite in the organization for professionalizing onboarding and centralizing it in one team. If you are reading this, chances are you are part of such a team.