Ask HN: What is the best onboarding experience you have had?

[anualvis]

Interested to know what is the best onboarding experience you have had when joining a new company. It would help to tell whether it was your first job or you joined as an experienced hire. What made it tick?

Background: We are considering defining onboarding processes in our start-up and want to know the best practices out there. This is particularly important now that we are forced to a do alot of remote onboardings. How can we make it work for the team and our new members?

[zwayhowder]

When I joined Puppet Labs they had the best process I've come across (I'm a consultant so I've been onboarded several dozen times over the past 20 years).

  Day 1:  
  * I wake from a good nights sleep having flown into PDX two days before to allow for Jetlag to clear.
  * A shiny new laptop (It was a MacBook Pro because I didn't think to ask for a ThinkPad). 
  * All my accounts and access are already setup.
  * Someone assigned as my buddy to help me navigate, but the whole team made an effort.
  * A wiki article about starting that clearly laid out the expectations for my first day and first two weeks. 
  * A puppet repository to setup my MBP for the work I was doing. One command everything installed and ready to go.
  * Met with other new starters and run through HR and other policies.

  First two weeks:
  From the wiki article I knew what I needed to organise including:
  * Meeting key people around the business.
  * Doing a demo to show I understood the product.
  * Staff photo
  * Organising cadence for return to head office for training and team socialising.

[anualvis → zwayhowder]

What role did you join for?

[zwayhowder → anualvis]

I was a technical solutions engineer (pre-sales).

[zx14]

I joined a fintech in London (as a contractor) and the first couple of hours were roughly:

1. A couple of intro meetings with other new contractors or joiners. We were shown around the office and what not. We were told whom to contact in what situation.

2. I logged into my machine, where everything was already installed and set up. I git pull'ed the code and hit F5 (Run in Visual Studio) and the application started and it just worked, no scripts needed to run, nothing to config. To be fair their products were pretty simple, however they took great care in making sure that you were able to run the code with minimal to no subtle prerequisites. There was a README file there, but I don't think I used it too much because everything was intuitive.

Shortly after I joined a company with exactly the opposite environment. It took me at least two weeks to set up my machine so I could run most of their applications. By the time I left (over one year later) I was still not able to run at least two of their major products. I had given up many months earlier.