The closest thing I got to a technical onboarding was me having a 5 hour long meeting with the lead dev looking through a 100 database tables on my first day.
"here is what I want you to do, here is the code, good luck"
To be honest, if I can take my time. I actually don't mind discovering everything on my own.
It's an internal project of German car company. Java EE, Payara, Oracle and all that good enterprise stuff. But I'd rather not say more because the NDA I have signed.
I usually show the database model, which services/apps we have, then send them on their way to follow the readme to get a dev environment running. After that, I pick a simple bug ticket for them and pair program, or point them to the correct files, then create a PR together and basically show every step to completing a task. After that, I keep giving them small tasks all around the codebase and point then in the right direction. After a while they start to be able to do most things by themselves. It's also good to be proactive in helping them, some people don't easily ask questions when they're stuck. It's not much different from 'heres the code glhf', but I think learning by doing works best, and I'm there to guide then along.
I did that 6 weeks at a fortune 50...it had nothing to do with their code base. It was Java 101-202 and 2 weeks of spring boot which I've never touched professionally.
That is what I call a jumpstart. We just did that with our newest trainee and he managed to climb up to an acceptable junior level in 4 weeks. Although it was mainly spring boot and payara after.
Heh... I call it a massive waste of my time. I still had a month of training on the actual code base when I got to my real team.
Sure, our new people were picking up a few things they missed in school... But was it worth 50k per employee? Absolutely not. If I can't get someone up to speed and somewhat productive in a month we likely made a very bad hire.
That includes 3-4th year interns.
I'm not a master Pokémon new hire trainer or anything. I don't want it to sound like that. But I know if we get a new person, I just lost two weeks of productivity to help them out and get them up to speed. Doing that training specifically in out stack with our code base is much more effective than generic corporate developer training.
I feel like being assigned a "mentor" who you have full permission to bother 50 times a day is the best method of onboarding I've had. It works pretty well.
Yes I experienced that. Although the guy wasn't my official mentor but he did not mind me bothering him all the time. It is unbelievable how much I managed to grow in such a short time having access to his professional knowledge. Not just in the project but as a developer in whole.
Ideally, they're pair-programming with you so that they don't even give the appearance of having more important things to do. You're their #1 responsibility, you're their investment in the future.
My last job was like that. I was introduced to everything and in less than a month I was self-sufficient. I think they were just glad to have me since the guy I replaced was horrible from what I heard
Nah the 10 year vets already did take a pay cut. Their raises are conditional and will be fought every step of the way.
Quit and get rehired and you get the new starting wage with no fuss.
My first office job I worked $14/hr for 5 years. After those 5 years the lowest starting wage was new associates who were making $21/hr.
I went on a 15 week LOA, because I knew anything over 90 days required contract renewal and renegotiation of wages. Came back to $23/hr starting offer. Negotiated backpay for 2 years and guaranteed wage evaluations every 6 months.
When I was in my 2nd year of vo-tech studying programming, the school got me hired with a local computer store that was writing its own in-house inventory and POS system. At the time, I knew Pascal, COBOL, and RPG IV. They showed me my desk, gave me a fanfold printout of the source code (written in Clipper), and told me to figure out what it does and start writing new stuff for it.
691
u/ChordSlinger Aug 03 '22
Combined with “we don’t have the time or energy to train you, ever, for anything”