Onboarding juniors: what actually helps
A first pull request stalls on setup, not on skill. Pair for a week, ship something small on day two, and finally write the README you keep meaning to.
Every team believes its onboarding problem is about knowledge. It is almost always about environment. The new person is not stuck on the domain model; they are stuck on a build step that three people know to run twice.
If a new starter cannot get a change onto a branch by the end of day two, the problem is your setup, not their experience.
Ana Fielding, performance engineer
- Day one: they ship a typo fix.Whole loop, start to finish, with somebody sitting next to them.
- Day two: they fix the README.Every rough edge they just hit is still fresh. Nobody else will ever see them as clearly.
- Week one: pair on real work.Not a training task. Something that is on the board and would have been done anyway.
The README step is the one people skip, and it is the one that compounds. The fourth new starter arrives to a document that four people have already sharpened.