
What New Twitter Employees Do For The First Week - RBr
http://www.quora.com/Twitter-Inc-company/What-is-the-on-boarding-process-for-new-employees-at-Twitter
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phaedrus
My "new hire" treatment as government contractor was so bad I almost quit.
Even though it's a huge organization there's no process at all in place;
you're just thrown to the wolves. Basic things like where and how to get my
security badge and car tags were not covered. I was not given any input about
what was expected of me, but I found out about things I was supposed to do
only when I was getting yelled at for not having them done. Everyone I work
with are of the baby boomer generation, while I am a millennial, and instead
of mentoring me they excluded me. Often I would get in trouble for missing
meetings because the location of the meeting was spread by word of mouth but
no one would come by and tell me. My first project was to port some code
written by a much older engineer, but this engineer believed that he had job
security if he were the only one who knew the system. Our boss told him "You
WILL let him shadow you and read your code," and he shot back, "He will NOT
shadow me and he will not see my code!" For the first few weeks, the only copy
I had of the code I was supposed to port, I got from snooping in his trash
when he threw away a CD (old hacker trick :) ).

Things got better eventually but it was definitely the worst way to treat a
new hire.

~~~
georgieporgie
I did some work for the government while in college. While I'm glad I did it,
as it gave me a purpose and venue for my essentially self-taught advanced
coding, I would never do it again.

~~~
Splines
I did work for the city gov't too while in college. It was a strange
experience, being the only computer intern working for the Dept. of
Agriculture, giving my end-of-summer presentation about JS and Access forms to
a room full of other students who spent the summer hiking around farm fields
taking measurements.

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ck2
How can over 100 people be needed for basically a scaled blog system that
consists only of 140 character titles (not even any article content) and RSS
feeds? It doesn't even have a search feature (past the previous week) or html,
or tags, etc.

Doesn't WordPress.com do it with like a dozen people and their system is way,
way, way more complex?

update: no, wait, in December 2010 they announced it's over _350_ people now

<http://blog.twitter.com/2010/12/stocking-stuffer.html>

What on earth are they all doing?

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tzs
Handling on _average_ something like 76000 status updates per second (much
higher when something interesting happens in the world), each of which must
quickly become available to anywhere from 1 to a million clients.

Wordpress.com is _trivial_ compared to Twitter.

~~~
ck2
Yes but that's handled by hardware, not by people, and I am sure only a few
critical coders handle the software performace.

WordPress.com is not as trivial as you might think
<http://en.wordpress.com/stats/>

Certainly it's just a matter of scaling once you hit a certain level of
volume, you just have to be able to bring more servers online into the grid.

Scaling from 10,000 users to 1 million is probably very hard.

Scaling from 1 million to 100 million, well you better have a pattern down
that works with easy hardware replication (like google does).

~~~
nostrademons
Understand that Google is _continuously_ rewriting their infrastructure to
handle increased scale. That's what they have 25k employees for.

Jeff Dean's rule of thumb is that you should build a growth factor of 10 into
the design, but any more than that and you will probably have to re-architect
anyway. So going from 10,000 to 1 million and 1 million to 100 million are
probably roughly equivalent in difficulty.

~~~
eleusive
How many of those 25k employees _actually_ handle any of the infrastructure
scaling?

~~~
nostrademons
A fairly large percentage of them, and many of the ones whose direct job
responsibility _isn't_ infrastructure (like me) frequently have to deal with
the consequences of building for scale as they develop features.

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aditya
Quite a contrast from the purported Honda "onboarding" process (or lack
thereof). They basically let you figure out where you'd be most useful, and no
one really tells you what to do. It seems to scale well, I suppose.

 _A funny thing happened on the way to the solution. Try and picture this. On
my first day of work, no one told me what to do. On the second day, the same
thing happened, and on the third. That’s as much as I could take. I decided to
meet with everyone I was coming in contact with to find out more about their
individual talents and personalities, and to find out what was going on.
Before I knew it, I was developing a picture of how things really were, and
who needed what, and I became creatively involved in defining my own
participation in relation to the skills I could bring to the table. In the
process of doing this, I had complete access to everyone in the company, from
other newlings to the President. Nothing but open cubicles no higher than 3
1/2 feet. I was allowed to learn, interact, and find solutions to every
problem and need I recognized. I always found something important to do, and
it became natural to provide effective solutions as needed. I am not a very
unique individual, but I am effective because I am allowed to be. I also know
it may be different for some people, experiencing this kind of freedom. I know
that some people are petrified by this kind of freedom, and equate it to
abandonment, and it drives them crazy not knowing what to do. I also know that
even under the best of circumstances, people become sedate sometimes and
settle in to patterns of repetition for false comfort. The answer, then, is to
have them all switch places every few years, no matter how well they may be
doing their job, because it is just as important to let everyone see their own
position from someone else’s position. It also allows for the surprise of
finding how much fun change can be when your creativity meets a new challenge.
See what you end up with. It’s either this, or that._

More here: [http://aditya.sublucid.com/2008/11/20/let-your-employees-
fig...](http://aditya.sublucid.com/2008/11/20/let-your-employees-figure-out-
what-to-do/)

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wildmXranat
My first software dev job entailed building and configuring a LAMP stack. It
wasn't much to deal with: some perl, some bash, some administration, IP
filtering, code deployment, the basics.

On my first day, the person responsible for the project went on vacation and
for next 10 business days, I was told to do research. That's about it. It was
the oddest startup experience I have ever had. Other members of the group,
asked me questions about how everything was going, but couldn't answer any of
mine. So I indeed did research.

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pavel_lishin
Seems like kind of an overwhelming amount of attention.

~~~
robryan
Many people would muddle there way through things trying to work stuff out
that would be easily explained to them. If no one has engaged the person to
explain it to them, they will assume that they should just know it and be
afraid to ask. This ensures everyone gets up to speed early, probably looks
like a lot of time spent at the time but probably saves a lot of time down the
track.

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flashgordon
for some reason this feels a bit skimpy on the details compared to the "first
month at facebook" (or may be 6 weeks) item that came about a few weeks ago...

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dustineichler
What does the engineering onboarding involve?

~~~
x5315
Talks about the codebase, about the system as a whole, also about specific
sub-systems, about how to think through some things and, maybe, about recent
design decisions.

