Simon Willison’s Weblog

What are the best practices for onboarding new software engineers?

14th November 2012

My answer to What are the best practices for onboarding new software engineers? on Quora

I’m a huge fan of “deploy on the first day”—which forces the issue in getting all of their accounts set up, their development environment ready, showing them where source control is, how code review works and so on. Even if it’s just adding themselves to the about page or humans.txt file, it means they can come in on day two ready to get real work done.

I can’t say how well that would scale up to Twitter/Facebook, but for a small startup like ours it works extremely well.