A first-week checklist worth stealing
What a new engineer should be able to do by Friday, and why it matters more than a perfect onboarding deck.
General edition. , or use the switcher above.
The first week sets a surprisingly durable impression of how a team works.
The point
- A working development environment on day one, with the setup steps tested by the last person who joined.
- One small change, however trivial, reviewed and shipped by Friday.
- A named person to ask “silly” questions.
- A written list of how decisions get made here, and who to ask about what.
None of it requires a budget. It requires someone to treat onboarding as a product, with a user (the new joiner) and a feedback loop (ask them what broke).
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