How to Ensure a Crappy Developer Onboarding Experience

Pizza courtesy of Pizza for Ukraine!

Last Updated On: 2025-09-01 04:31:52 -0400

Have a README on the source code repo that doesn’t actually work and isn’t even current (i.e. has things that are significantly deprecated in your application framework / no longer exist).
Have zero written documentation on something EVERYONE has to do like “set up the VPN”.
Have a network admin send out links to the VPN client that DO NOT EVEN WORK.
Make certain that multiple, multiple slack conversations are needed to get required credentials.
Make certain that the network admins don’t understand their own credential system enough that after credentials are issued, they simply don’t work (hence the multiple slack conversations).
Have errors in required source code processes like database migrations NOT be tied to specific actions like “Fix credential X in location Y” or “Connectivity error; start your VPN”.
Make certain to ignore day 2 feedback about things that are against industry best practices (i.e. you may have done it this way but it’s now longer how it is done). New hires always bring more modern best practices with them because they aren’t locked into “we always did it this way”.
Deliberately decide to ignore security issues both simple and complex i.e. “just shut up and solve a ticket”.
Make sure that other developers on the team ignore slack questions related to initial code questions that they literally have to know. This is all the worse when the developer was just talking to you and simply stops responding when you ask something.

The reason this stuff matters is two fold.

In all aspects of life, first impressions always, always matter. My bozo bit for this environment has been pretty firmly flipped. Any enthusiasm I had is now sent to /dev/null and I’ll view anything these people say with suspicion.
Any developer hire is expensive. The general rule of thumb for fully loaded cost on a software engineer is 1.5 to 2.0 times salary so a $150,000 / year engineer costs you at least $225,000 to employ. You can only legally assume 40 hours per week * 50 weeks per year (generally; vacation policies vary) or 2000 hours per year.
This gives you an hourly rate of $112.5 per hour. Let’s say that a crappy onboarding experience took an extra 8 hours so that means you took 8 * $112.5 or $900 and LIT IT ON FIRE. If you, as an engineering manager, aren’t willing to light $900 of your own money on fire then you shouldn’t be willing to do it with the company’s money.
Looked at another way, this is roughly the cost of a low end iPhone. Can I take a brand new iPhone and smash it ? That’s the implication of a crappy developer onboarding experience – you are throwing away a brand new iPhone.
Please note that the above numbers ignore opportunity cost i.e. what the engineer could have been doing instead.

ATCE matters. https://twitter.com/fuzzygroup/status/1577038214799716354