Last year a new engineer told us it took her eleven days to merge her first change. Not because the change was hard, but because she spent a week and a half figuring out where things lived. We decided that was a product problem, not an onboarding problem.
Start with a single first-week project
Every new hire now gets one small, real task that touches the whole release path: a ticket, a review, a deploy and a release note. Finishing it teaches more than any wiki tour.
Write docs where the work happens
We moved setup guides, decision logs and architecture notes next to the projects they describe. If a doc isn’t linked from a task, it doesn’t exist.
A day-one checklist owned by the hiring manager
A buddy who reviews the first three pull requests
A 15-minute check-in on days 2, 5 and 10
The result
Median time to first merged change dropped from 14 days to 3. More importantly, new teammates told us they felt useful in their first week — and that feeling is hard to put a number on.
