paige331•1mo agoMost Upvoted

Question about onboarding new hires at a bootstrapped startup

I recently tried doing a full week of structured training for a new developer at my small SaaS company here in Austin, after years of just throwing people into the deep end. The structured week actually worked way better - they were contributing code by day 5 instead of floundering for two weeks. Has anyone else made the switch to a formal onboarding process and seen a real difference?

3 comments

3 Comments

mason_lopez1mo ago

We switched to a 3-day structured ramp at my last place and it cut the "wtf do I do" period down like crazy. Day 1 was just walking through our codebase with a senior dev pointing out the hot paths. Day 2 was pair programming on a tiny bug fix. By day 3 they were pushing real PRs. The key is making the training super specific to your stack and not trying to cover everything at once. We also had them shadow support tickets for an hour to see what users actually break. That one change saved us like a week of handholding per hire.

betty_kelly91mo ago

Shadowing support tickets on day 3? That's nuts but genius. Most places make you wait six months before you see how users actually mess things up. Bet it makes the onboarding way less of a guessing game.

jade5171mo agoMost Upvoted

That structured approach mirrors something I've noticed in construction too. New guys get thrown a set of plans and a hammer on day one, waste half a week trying to figure out which wall goes where. The crews that walk them through the whole job site, point out where the plumbing runs and show them how the foreman likes things done, those guys are framing walls by lunch on day two. Same with cooking honestly, dropping a recipe book on someone's counter and saying "make dinner" just leads to burnt pans and salty tears. Showing them the exact stove settings and where the salt lives cuts the learning curve way down.