Onboarding Unpopular Opinions for Engineers | Generated by AI
Question: What are some unpopular opinions about onboarding to a new team as a software engineer?
Answer:
Here are some genuinely unpopular (but often defended in private by experienced engineers) opinions about onboarding:
- Most formal onboarding programs are mostly theater. Two weeks of HR slides, “meet-the-team” speed dating, and wiki scavenger hunts rarely teach you anything useful about how work actually gets done. Real onboarding happens by shipping code, breaking things, and getting unblocked by coworkers—not by finishing a checklist.
- You should push to production in your first week (or two max). Waiting 2–6 weeks to “learn the codebase” before touching anything real is a smell. The fastest way to learn the real architecture, deployment pipeline, and team politics is to make a small, visible change that goes all the way to prod. Anything less is fake productivity.
- Pair programming during onboarding is usually a waste of the senior’s time. It feels collaborative, but it mostly turns the senior into a slow Google and the new hire into a passenger. Solo tasks with fast feedback loops (and generous “ask anything” Slack access) scale better and teach ownership faster.
- “Read the docs first” is terrible advice. Most internal docs are outdated, incomplete, or wrong. The fastest way to learn the current system is to grep the codebase, read recent PRs, and ask pointed questions. Docs are a supplement, not the starting point.
- Being “blocked” for days is unacceptable and usually self-inflicted. If you’re stuck more than a few hours, you’re probably being too polite or waiting for permission. Good teams expect new hires to ping, @-channel, or jump on unsolicited calls aggressively. Politeness slows learning.
- The “buddy” system rarely works. Assigning one person as your lifeline creates a bottleneck and single point of failure. Better: give new hires a license to bother anyone at any time for the first month.
- Architecture diagrams and onboarding decks lie. They show how someone wishes the system worked, not how it actually does. Trust tests, monitoring dashboards, and production logs over pretty boxes and arrows.
- Imposter syndrome whining is overrated. Most new hires feel lost for 3–6 months—that’s normal, not a personal failing, and definitely not something the team needs to coddle with extra reassurance rituals.
- “No question is stupid” is a lie seniors tell juniors. There are absolutely stupid questions (“Why don’t we just rewrite it in Rust?” week one), but good teams forgive them if you learn fast after asking.
- The best onboarding metric is “time to second PR”, not “time to first PR”. Anyone can fix a typo. The second PR proves you understood the feedback from the first one and can operate independently.
These takes tend to be unpopular because they clash with the current industry obsession with “psychological safety,” long ramp-up periods, and making new hires feel warm and fuzzy. In reality, the fastest-ramping engineers I’ve seen treat onboarding as a full-contact sport, not a gentle orientation.