The Engineering Executive's Primer

Chapter 21. Engineering Onboarding

Most companies say that it takes three to six months for newly hired engineers to fully ramp up. Engineering leaders know it’s unwise to admit that it takes their team longer than that to onboard new engineers, so that’s what they say out loud, but they generally believe it takes longer for a new engineer to become fully productive. They also know that their most impactful engineers are still becoming more productive after years with the company.

Running Engineering onboarding means optimizing two closely related goals:

• Increasing the percentage of engineers who are reasonably productive in their first three months

• Setting the foundation that supports engineers to become more extremely impactful within a few years from now

Done well, onboarding should excite new hires and raise the floor for success. Indeed, in rapidly hiring companies, effective onboarding is the highest-value investment you can make into Engineering productivity, but somehow it’s often dismissed as a secondary concern. Fortunately, like many oft-forgotten processes, you can go from no onboarding to rather good onboarding in short order.

To get there, in this chapter we’ll walk through:

• The fundamental components of onboarding, including examples of several real companies’ onboarding processes

• The role of the executive sponsor, orchestrator, manager, and buddy in a typical onboarding process

• The curriculum to consider including in your onboarding process

• Why onboarding programs ...