What kills me about engineering onboarding is how haphazard it always is. I don't think I've been in a single company where the company has cared about it enough to make sure there was any engineering onboarding process, much less a centrally-managed process. It's always completely team-specific, so some teams have great onboarding and some have none.
I just want a company to give a shit about its employees, y'know? It's the little things that make us feel appreciated. (Little things like "somebody telling us how to get work done in this company") It doesn't even have to be formal documentation if there's at least an introductory training that explains it.
Now imagine pulling the same crap upstream, have your boss and his HR hangarounds click through hours of shitty made up or outdated intranet trivia about you and quiz them on it while leaving them hanging on the impact of the answers or the result.
At least some aren't even pretending; what really rubs me sideways is when they pay lip service to caring _while_ wasting your time, makes me want to punch someone.
Given that different teams tend to work on different projects, can onboarding really be scaled across the company like that? Maybe the HR stuff, but your team might maintain a repo all on its own.
I think it's doable. Teams can keep setup instructions with their repos, and commonly repeated docs can be kept in one place and linked to. Each team can create one page that links to all their setup instructions, and each team manager can add their team's page to a single engineering page. Docs that are relevant to the entire engineering org need to be created by someone assigned by an engineering VP. If nobody tells people to do all of that, it doesn't get done.
I think it’s totally doable. Even if teams work on different projects they most like will follow similar processes, use similar tools and interact with other stakeholders in similar ways. At my company I notice people that even after years don’t really understand how things work or the bigger context of their work. A weeklong introduction into the products of the company, the different roles and common processes would be extremely helpful.
I think part of the issue here is “a company” isn’t a particular human being or team that is specifically incentivized to “give a shit about the employees.”
What this looks like from my vantage point is: anyone who is a director (manager-of-managers) or up is assuming that the line managers (managers-of-non-managers) has it taken care of - their team, their plan, and they can speak up if they need guidance.
The line managers, OTOH, probably don’t individually onboard terribly frequently, even though as a cohort it’s probably constant. So the feedback loops / improvement cycles for a given team are all slow, and there’s no inherent incentive for those managers to try to boost the overall experience. Unless they’re the sort to go “hey, maybe my peers know better plans,” they will all individually toil at this and create an overall sucky picture.
Being perfectly honest, I was in that boat myself until this article appearing this morning prompted me to ask my fellow EMs what they’re doing, and whether we could find a way to improve it overall.
Even if we do though, it’s still going to suffer from tragedy of the commons a bit, unless we deputize some “onboarding improvement” project team to actually drive towards a clearly stated objective.
tl;dr - what feels like “this entire company doesn’t give a shit about me” could just be “my manager is doing what they think is the best possible, given limited resources, and having little-to-no support or awareness from the rest of the organization - and that little bit just isn't enough for me to feel understood and cared for."
I just want a company to give a shit about its employees, y'know? It's the little things that make us feel appreciated. (Little things like "somebody telling us how to get work done in this company") It doesn't even have to be formal documentation if there's at least an introductory training that explains it.