So how did the onboarding experiment go?

As I mentioned previously - we had a new team member join recently, and I wrote an extensive onboarding checklist that tried to capture every little thing they needed to get operational.

So, how did it go?

Very well!

After two days, they had access to all of our systems, was in all the right Slack rooms, and had cloned the repos for our major applications. And had those applications up and running locally - which is no small feat.

By the end of the third day, they had filed their first pull request.

By the end of the week (it was a four day week due to a holiday) they had done their first production push!

In my book, this was an unqualified success.

Oh, and because of the checklist, even in those first two days they needed a small amount of face time with me. When you have a new hire, as a manager, bringing on a new person can mean a lot of time directly communicating with them and helping them figure out stuff. The checklist got them going - and they were able to do most of it on their own.