Onboarding is hard and often companies see it as a somewhat cumbersome task. Having a great process in place ensures the velocity to get new developers up and running while maintaining an easy and clear documentation of your company’s development processes and strategies.
Here are some great examples of developer onboarding approaches:
The team over at thoughtbot is quite open about some of their internal processes. This document describes the basic philosophies and workflows. Other publicly available documents go into detail about their git workflow or their code review routine.
“A fearless adventure in knowing what to do when no one’s there telling you what to do“ They offer their employees an actual book with wonderful hand-drawn illustrations and all. It introduces and explains to new employees all those funny things at valve, such as their desks with wheels, what the first months will be like and what happens if you screw up.
HELLOSIGN describe in their blog post how they manage effective onboarding steps while concentrating on the important points and working with an MVP-approach to the whole process.
Kate talks about technical onboarding, training and mentoring in her 30min presentation at Railsconf 2014