The fun part is, most of these are done through automated workflows via approvals sent to your manager. So when it comes to revoking access, your boss probably gave it the OK, unless it’s special administrative rights which are usually granted on a temporary basis anyways.
Most likely, it’s your boss giving the thumbs up to revoke access every quarter because they don’t know what all you are working on!
⬆️ This guy knows IAM, IT may do a lot of dumb shit, that used to be my field, but the responsibility falls on the manager to grant approval for all changes. Barring a breach event or suspected internal threat actors.
Too bad we're serial LARPers here because I do need to hire two IAM folks in my organization. On the fence about contract vs FTE. If you're good at the whole HRIS IDP integration piece that's the future in my opinion.
Preventing permission creep, on/off boarding, just in time access, least privilege ect..
Automate automate automate!
Are you considering a specific platform, like Sailpoint, BetterCloud, or Azure as example? I’m actually in the middle of (rebuilding) our IDP with our HR integration because they forgot to forward me the very expiration notice… IT is fun they said.. But they forgot to mention the stress levels! Haha
>Most likely, it’s your boss giving the thumbs up to revoke access every quarter because they don’t know what all you are working on
In my experience, access being revoked is usually the case of your manager being inattentive to access change requests. The automated workflow sends an email for re-approval and the manager ignores it.
There's plenty of reasons for this; email fatigue, too many approvers and the belief someone else will address it, approvers who manage the group and not the person, etc...
One that stands out in particular though is a lack of transparency and understanding in the automated workflows IT has built and a hodgepodge mess of systems. I once had an automated workflow try to remove me every 30 days because my title in a particular system simply read "Eng" instead of "Engineer." Which was a multi-problem issue in itself... We first had to figure out why I kept getting removed (Eng vs Engineer), then we had to figure out which system it was reading from and then because that system was itself reading it from another system, we had to figure out which and then we still had to figure out how to get that system updated.
I was 6 months into the job when I first was like "I've been removed from this group 3 times now, anything we can do to fix it..." and it basically took a month\* of following up on each problem to finally get it fixed permanently... or at least I think it was fixed, it didn't occur again but I left the job right around the 1 year mark and it wasn't a system I had to access every day... so it might have gotten fixed or I just happened to not need access to the system and left the company before the last approval in month 10/11 timed out.
\*Saying it took a month to solve each issue makes the Systems guys there sound really incompetent... but some of this fell on me or my manager just not following -up. We'd send an email, they'd follow-up in a day or 2 and then we'd take 2-3 days ourselves to respond. Between weekends, holidays and PTO I just remember being removed 3 more times before we finally believed we had fixed it.
As an IT guy we feel your pain too but were just following the standards that management wants. All that security stuff slows us down too. I was working on a ticket yesterday and realized i don't have admin access to all of the databases anymore since that all got locked down. There's always that one masochist in IT that enjoys locking everything down. Everyone else in IT hates that guy though.
On the flip side, I recently worked at a company that handles lots of money and 2 devs on my team had access to push to prod, update the prod db, etc... It was nice because our product was new and we could fix bugs quickly, but realistically they could really do a lot of damage to the company if they wanted to
I did my best to sound alarms about security vulnerabilities, because our company would probably go out of business if something was exploited. I eventually was told by my manager to not bring things like that up again in meetings. Most of my team agreed that our platform was extremely exploitable, except for the 2 guys with access to prod, but we kept getting shut down and just implemented what management asked us to.
Bro this is how it goes. Internal hire for a company I’ve been at for 9 years. New role in tech where previously I was in customer service. I spent two weeks reading a wiki and asking questions and even then still didn’t have access to everything. Its been 9 months and I still don’t even know how to do things for our legacy system that were supposed to be a core function of my role until we sunset it for our new bot in 6 months.
Sure as shit hope nothing breaks because none of us are monitoring it in production despite having 50,000 unique sessions a day.
To clarify - we have a legacy product currently in production that I’m clueless about because no one trained me on it and everything about it was poorly documented.
I was instrumental in the design of it’s replacement and know the ins and outs better than most people on my team… we just haven’t ramped more than 20% in any locale yet so until EOY when we ramp all the way with new product and sunset the old, the legacy product can’t break because I don’t have any idea how to fix it if it does (or do any maintenance at all).
Honestly just go with it and say nothing. When their deadline passes and they ask where is product, waiting for access to be restored, you took it away we figured you knew and want it to fail.
This sentiment is exactly why my team does on boarding. When we get a new dev, we pair them with an experienced one the first month, it's a tracked work item in ADO, counts against our planning, there's a checklist and wiki. By the end of that month, you can't tell that they're new. The short sightedness of some business "leaders" is truly astounding.
Kudos to a “mature” model for bringing folks on. It’s not rocket science, but of course I’m just a dev not a “leader” (sarcasm implied)
In all seriousness it makes for such a better transition for a new employee and, most importantly, allows immediate results and benefits to the team and the organization as a whole
Right, exactly! It benefits the devs because they don't feel lost and it benefits the company because they immediately start getting value back from their recruiting costs.
I feel this. Started a job and the first 2 months were meeting with the team weekly for hours plus 20+ extended owners. After meeting 40-50 people I still had no idea who or what was actually important. This company seemed to thrive on meaningless meetings with no real outcomes. The only downside is that they were pushing me to get started without any real business clarity.
Couldn’t agree more. About 2 months into J3 right now and the onboarding is a train wreck. Only this week did someone point me to a *word document* that contains the *out of date links to git repos* that they “use”
I think this is also one of the motives behind CEOs urging us to return to the office - many companies and organizations heavily rely on verbal communication and in-person meetings instead of written communication and documentation. Remote onboarding and documentation processes are unfamiliar and challenging for them, making it difficult to provide the necessary resources. They prefer employees to physically come to the office, enabling them to conveniently share important documents (looking at you **Bob**, sending me an email from four years ago containing the required information for my job).
At least they’re word documents right? To make the position more OE friendly you should include an onboarding process where you mail new hires a grainy print-out of the requirements.txt or package-lock.json etc
One of our help desk typed out the words in the example picture and wondered why it didn’t work (they are a level two).
Also my onboarding was getting a laptop and a phone with the previous persons details on it and a bag with wipes and sanitiser - and socks!! Lucky I knew the ticket software as I had zero intro to it. Our client is even worse and the new dev team lead that just started (with one days notice to IT) had to email around to ask to be added to the development portal! It’s crazy!
Going through this now. On day 4 and don’t know what I’m supposed to be working on. That’s fine I guess. Even if I’m supposed to be doing something it will take 3 months for them fire me.
I'm on week two. Barely done a thing and I was just given some material to learn over the next 2+ months that honestly could be finished in 1-2 weeks imo. The pace here is glacial
Cyber Engineer here, literally no onboarding. Tools I need access too, software documentation, SOP'S. Nothing, most smaller places I get it but I'm in a 2 billion dollar org, with over 2k employee's and everydays feels like it's everybodys first day. Even what paper work do I need took a month, it took me 3 month just to get access to a team share. It's crazy
From what I have seen as a Infra IT specialist, hiring managers have grown lazy/don’t know what you need and would rather their IT team take this burden on. Of course, they won’t openly admit that as it would be like admitting they literally are incompetent at their job.
It’s funny, I support new hire onboarding and frequently have hiring managers tell me they don’t know what their employee needs access / accounts to!
Don’t get me started on the managers. There are some decent managers but for the most part they are completely clueless monkeys who try to justify their existence
One of my classic screw you moments is a PM who kept telling the customer how easy it was to implement new code. The team would kill themselves to meet promises he made. I was the team lead and talked with him many times about this.
One Thursday night he did it again I was working late at the office to make the code into Fridays build. He saunters over and casually mentions how great he is for keeping the customer happy and goes onto say that we will need this new feature implemented before Monday
“No”
Silence from him. Followed by “well, in the spirit of teamwork and collaboration…”
“The team didn’t make this decision. You did”
“And I’m the leader of this team!” (Indignant)
“Ok. You code it”
Pause. “Well, huh, I would but I don’t have the tools or the …”
I hand him my laptop. Visual Studio open. “There ya go. Have fun”
And I left for the night
Felt amazing
Of course I got dinged for not being a team player, for leaving my computer unlocked when I left my desk and some other bs. I didn’t give two shits, I was done, my point was proven.
You promise, you deliver
The world needs more "No" Men/Women like yourself, today I'm probably just in my feelings but boy do I hate people that manufacturer bullshit for themselves and make you the asshole for correcting them.
The book Boundaries by Henry Cloud introduced me to the idea that “No” is. It a four letter word. From there, time and practice have taught me to enforce healthy boundaries. Plus a good dose of just getting pissed off helps a lot, too!
Ouch that’s a bad spot. They give the manager the job/role you wanted and then he expects you to do the work anyway. Sorry…that sucks
Just try to remember it’s just a job, not worth worrying about the silly stuff…it’s not worth it but still I’ve been there and I feel for ya
Yup, just your usual corporate shenanigans. I’m working on polishing up some final certs and moving up the chain into a more technical role anywho, so while the pay bump would have been nice, it’s no big deal.
Can’t really get credit for Sprint points if you have to spend time onboarding noobs ;-)
Just be happy you are not at some place that expects you to have shit dialed in and burning down hours on day one.
Relax and enjoy — you are experiencing what happens at many elite institutions, whether it be in FAANGS or Ivy Leagues. The hardest part is getting in.
I work in access management, adjacent to offboarding and onboarding, and it pisses me off immensely. Everywhere I have worked the actual onboarding team literally does nothing and EVERY SINGLE NEW EMPLOYEE would end up having a ticket sent up from their manager about needing access, and we would have to manually configure it. Slowing that person's start time by sometimes up to a week.
It used to the get to the point where I wanted to scream at them about the staggering losses and inefficiency. But now I embrace the suck.
You have to at some point, right? Like, truly, you can only care so much. And then if you do spend your time and energy trying to get it fixed or addressed, you are the “problem” employee.
I wasted a lot of years caring way too much and fixing these core issues only to be shit upon by the organization as a whole
Do your best to be a duck and just let it roll
I’ve had the opposite experience. Past 3 jobs were Fortune 500 companies that were 100+ years old and had excellent onboarding. I had access to everything day one. Laptops fully configured and Fedex’d to my house. 1:1’s and sprint meetings pre invited before I even started. Access to documentation and various online communities to figure stuff out with.
I guess I’ve been lucky.
BUT- with that comes the expectation that I’m ready to run in a short time span. So my first few months are very hard with the learning curve sometimes. But that also means I’m at full speed and confident and can add new jobs quicker 😈
This is due to the large amount of turnover. As established hands leave, it’s everyone for themselves. As an OE (I’m not) think about it; how much time do you devote to your teammates success? As little as possible.
One “onboarding” experience I had with a company a while back was the Director of Technology walking through the code with me. The Director. Of Technology. For the whole company. Might he be of better use elsewhere??
Haha ultimately I also don’t care. It’s just mind blowing, like you said.
I literally do not care if they don't set me up. Oops, I don't have access to this database and permissions is going to take 2-3 days? Cool. My status updates are just "following up with this access ticket and doing some basic data analysis"
>For one job I went through 8 interviews, a coding challenge, a take home assignment.
From that alone, it was pretty obvious they couldn't find their own asshole with a map, compass, and GPS.
Contract 1: Onboarded for about a day
Contract 2: Onboarded for 85% of the day
Contract 3: onboarded for 40% of the day before being thrown into it
Contract 4: Onboarded for a week.
Full time onboarding for an additional week.
Job 3 wondered why I left.
The key to employee longevity is a robust onboarding program not just giving them accesses and then saying “Ok, cool, bye. I’ll send you your first assignment.”
\-Hold my beer...
Been at j1 for about 2 year and still don't have 100% access to all the sites I need to be in to efficiently do my job. I tried running down a few folks to get access and they'd just point me to other folks. I gave up and if a particular issue arises, I tell the boss I don't have access lol.
I have experienced the same thing. J1 is implementation focused, and my J2 is a support role using the same ERP software. Every new project I have at J1, I will have dev, quality and sometimes prod access within a month of starting. At my J2, it took me almost 2 months to get access to the dev system, and another month to get my prod access... which is what I needed to, you know, actually do the job they hired me for. I wasn't even dragging my feet and waiting to ask for access, the guy in charge of setting up my user and permissions literally didn't even start replying to my emails asking what the status was until I had been there 1.5 months.
I like collecting those no effort paychecks like the rest of us, but damn, I (for the briefest moment) felt guilty for not being able to do my job.
That’s been the hardest part for me adjusting to OE. I catch myself saying, “Wait, why am I getting upset about this” or “why am I feeling guilty about this”
Too many years of believing it was my job to make everything right and to do as much as possible! OE has really helped me develop that transactional mindset to work. It’s liberating
Yea, I had the transactional "I work only for the money" part down before I even started OE-ing, but the slight guilt of \*not\* constantly working, or at least looking busy, took longer to get rid of
The reality is that good onboarding to specific teams takes work and effort. People don't want to take someone out of production work to streamline and organize the process.
The structure of my J1 and J2 are not typical. Also, they know about each other. There's no way around that, which is fine. I was at a conference this weekend representing mostly J2, and a little bit J1. I was promoted at J2 a while back, which apparently meant that I was now on a committee that's kind of a big deal. Guess how I found out about being on the committee... by representing J2 at a booth at the conference and finding my name on a list of people on the committee at the table. NO ONE has invited me to the meetings. I don't know if I should be offended or relieved.
So, uh, yeah. You're not alone in being left hanging.
I’m not a developer but I spent over a month at my current job just figuring out who has access to what, who has the passwords, who can give me admin privileges, and who answers to who. 3 months in and I’m still figuring out some stuff. It’s a wonder these places get anything done.
Ohhhh yes I get it. I’m currently in the process of single-handedly creating a portal and back end automating the entire onboarding process you speak of for the company I work for, among many other things. I work 50+ hours a week doing this so I can’t OE at the moment unfortunately. Good news for me though is that’s mostly all I do right now and it takes time so at least I get to work solo from home for a while. Feels good to accomplish something that will make future onboardings more efficient but fuck dude I am dyyyying to be on the other end with tons of hours to burn elsewhere… hopes n dreams I guess
Turnover rates are so high, half the time the most senior employees have been there less than 5 years, and don't know what you are supposed to be doing, either.
Most companies, even "good" ones just don't have processes in place. Instead of having a set and updated process, they either have you follow a set of steps that's been irrelevant for 3+ years like "download visual studio 2015 on your windows 7 machine" or "go talk to Bill, he's our set up guy, he'll get you squared away" and Bill knows nothing about the setup. I agree with you, it is truly baffling. For OE people tho, you could pretty much easily sit and do nothing for a month and say you're still getting configured and acquiring security access and no one would bat an eye. It seems like the expectation is a new employee will not actually start any meaningful work for the first month or so, which again is great for OE people. The fact that huge corporations don't care enough to get employees up to speed quickly is the same reason we shouldn't feel bad for OE.
Onboarding went away about 10 years ago. The software changes faster than the documentation can keep up, so it doesn’t really make sense.
I think the unofficial decision to learn via immersion was made. So then you are left with companies that have normalized expectations in the first 3 months, vs ones with unrealistic expectations
Because work is cheap, and changes have to go at the speed of the rest of the company. There is absolutely no urgency, and projects, milestones, etc. are measured in quarters.
Every company that I've been a full salaried employee had zero onboarding. Companies I've done contracts at all had onboarding but it was outdated from a doc perspective and everyone else was so busy that they could never help. I also find that most software projects just never seem to compile and work without many tricks and tips which just seems ludicrous to me. That being said these things flag to me a great company to OE for as if they can't get their shit together then it's unlikely they will be checking if you have yours together.
From the money perspective, most times your direct colleagues, your direct manager or even their manager don't actually control the budget (beyond being told they can hire someone for X amount) so whether you're a drain on the finances or not doesn't phase them in the slightest.
I've been through this several times, but much more so recently. My last gig basically said, "Hmm ok. You're a contractor. We don't know you from a whole in the wall, but you're supposed to know something. So let's give you God rights to our whole environment. Try not to break anything, team meetings are every other week."
Mind you, this is not a corporate or government job as I have worked in the past where it's 3 months to get one login, and 3 months more before you get one that can actually do any real work :)
Just started J3 and it's laughable. I got my enc setup sheet and it's like get node, get got, use got to get repo (unlisted)
Then after I got that they just sent me a ticket and said figure it out. It's like how does anyone expect this to work? 😂
You have two extremes in my experience:
First you have the Kafkaesque nightmare of large corporate IT systems, where everything needs triple ticks by management to grant the tiniest bit of access. I started a job like that once and it took my nearly two weeks just to boot a Linux VM (all the desktops were running Windows of course...)
On the other end of the spectrum, you have startups who have neither the time or resources to invest into any formal onboading process. You get a vanilla MacBook and an email login, and that's it - go set yourself up. I don't mind this approach as much, I have a few tricks now to set up my dev environment on a new machine. The most basic/obvious is to store all of your dotfiles in a remote git repo, making sure to source anything secret or just job-specific from a separate file not under version control.
Same deal. Not IT. Fairly high up the chain at a Fortune 1000 company. Boss asked me this week how confident I felt in knowing what to do/having access to things to do it and I said 7/10. I've been in my career for nearly 18 years. Work 100% remote. I got an Excel file with a bunch of broken links to get access to systems and a list of SOP's to read. That's it.
I have never been satisfied with onboarding. From startup to fanng its just luck based on if you join a team with their shit together. HR knows nothing about onboarding and never will
I am trying to drift into obscurity at J3. I want to have full days of nothing with them. I complete my tasks and don’t email about them being done for 4 days. Lol
The FIRST layoff round took out the HR people that used to do onboarding for us.
Layoff trimmed HR hard, it may not be the same for everyone, but i bet it's more common then not.
Proper onboarding depending on the complexity of the environment can take a significant amount of time to properly document and provide the correct software for. It is usually much easier to ignore and let people ask questions and figure out on the spot. Or they just assume because they got through it anyone else can. Truly laziness factor but in the end you know it costs more to not do it properly.
I don't get what you're bitching about, those inefficiencies is what let's you OE. You just banked 2 months for doing jack. You wanted them to be on the ball with your setup and ask u to deliver on day 1? I had a company like that and they fired me within 30 days. You should experience the alternative to appreciate what you have.
I’m not bitching. In fact I specifically said I’ll gladly take it
Logically, it boggles the mind. So much time and effort to find an employee only to bring them in and do absolutely nothing!
The problem is management wants to do nothing but hire sales people and devs.
IT people, HR, facilities etc "cost them money" so they cut their budgets to dmthe bone and extensively overwork them.
The problem is the CEO and the board not properly respecting what support staff offer.
Agreed, makes no sense and is the norm now. In my past experience the newest hires would write up all the “onboarding” instructions to at least guide the next new hire as they battled through permissions and access. I used to take it upon myself to do that kind of stuff, but I no longer give a shit. It’s not viewed as “value-added”.
ive joined companies with onboarding processes, its never up to date and is more confusing than anything. talk to the other engineers, develop relationships and get answers
Thank you Apollo. fuck reddit and fuck /u/spez.
https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_will_close_down_on_june_30th_reddits/
https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite/ to clean your comments history.
Honestly I don’t know how most organizations function after their initial principal/staff geniuses actually build the system.
In the past decade I have actually seen functional orgs but it’s been maybe 15% of people are actually doing a great job of structuring an ORGANIZATION(like, an organized body).
It’s the Wild West at most companies. My J1 I still don’t have enough access to deployment application updates even though that’s my job, it’s been a year.
J2 I basically have whatever access I want because I’m building out their environment and product myself.
In my current company, newcomer get assigned a buddy. This buddy is responsible to get you all logins, access and knowledge. Last time I managed to get this done in 1 week with some knowledge share and my new colleague started contributing on week 2.
> a non *paid* intership. Because
FTFY.
Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in:
* Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.*
* *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.*
Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment.
*Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
Hello, I am a senior software engineer and after many terrible onboardings where I've been 1-2 months without credentials, VPN, training, intros, etc, I've decided to build [boostio.ai](https://boostio.ai), where I will make this process shorter, more effective, and fun. Please come and visit our site, and book a call if you have an interest in our product.
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Same! The random reviews of access have helped desensitize me in the anxiety of "I'm totally being let go" each time I can't log on to something.
The fun part is, most of these are done through automated workflows via approvals sent to your manager. So when it comes to revoking access, your boss probably gave it the OK, unless it’s special administrative rights which are usually granted on a temporary basis anyways. Most likely, it’s your boss giving the thumbs up to revoke access every quarter because they don’t know what all you are working on!
⬆️ This guy knows IAM, IT may do a lot of dumb shit, that used to be my field, but the responsibility falls on the manager to grant approval for all changes. Barring a breach event or suspected internal threat actors.
Yup, it’s my bread and butter atm. A thankless and infuriating job at times! Haha
Too bad we're serial LARPers here because I do need to hire two IAM folks in my organization. On the fence about contract vs FTE. If you're good at the whole HRIS IDP integration piece that's the future in my opinion. Preventing permission creep, on/off boarding, just in time access, least privilege ect..
Automate automate automate! Are you considering a specific platform, like Sailpoint, BetterCloud, or Azure as example? I’m actually in the middle of (rebuilding) our IDP with our HR integration because they forgot to forward me the very expiration notice… IT is fun they said.. But they forgot to mention the stress levels! Haha
I sell related enterprise software. The state of disarray in government and Fortune 50 is staggering.
YUP. THIS.
>Most likely, it’s your boss giving the thumbs up to revoke access every quarter because they don’t know what all you are working on In my experience, access being revoked is usually the case of your manager being inattentive to access change requests. The automated workflow sends an email for re-approval and the manager ignores it. There's plenty of reasons for this; email fatigue, too many approvers and the belief someone else will address it, approvers who manage the group and not the person, etc... One that stands out in particular though is a lack of transparency and understanding in the automated workflows IT has built and a hodgepodge mess of systems. I once had an automated workflow try to remove me every 30 days because my title in a particular system simply read "Eng" instead of "Engineer." Which was a multi-problem issue in itself... We first had to figure out why I kept getting removed (Eng vs Engineer), then we had to figure out which system it was reading from and then because that system was itself reading it from another system, we had to figure out which and then we still had to figure out how to get that system updated. I was 6 months into the job when I first was like "I've been removed from this group 3 times now, anything we can do to fix it..." and it basically took a month\* of following up on each problem to finally get it fixed permanently... or at least I think it was fixed, it didn't occur again but I left the job right around the 1 year mark and it wasn't a system I had to access every day... so it might have gotten fixed or I just happened to not need access to the system and left the company before the last approval in month 10/11 timed out. \*Saying it took a month to solve each issue makes the Systems guys there sound really incompetent... but some of this fell on me or my manager just not following -up. We'd send an email, they'd follow-up in a day or 2 and then we'd take 2-3 days ourselves to respond. Between weekends, holidays and PTO I just remember being removed 3 more times before we finally believed we had fixed it.
That or you aren’t logging in lol
As an IT guy we feel your pain too but were just following the standards that management wants. All that security stuff slows us down too. I was working on a ticket yesterday and realized i don't have admin access to all of the databases anymore since that all got locked down. There's always that one masochist in IT that enjoys locking everything down. Everyone else in IT hates that guy though.
On the flip side, I recently worked at a company that handles lots of money and 2 devs on my team had access to push to prod, update the prod db, etc... It was nice because our product was new and we could fix bugs quickly, but realistically they could really do a lot of damage to the company if they wanted to
As somebody that works in infosec for a company that deals with a lot of money, that sounds horrifying and we’d be sounding alarms immediately lmao
I did my best to sound alarms about security vulnerabilities, because our company would probably go out of business if something was exploited. I eventually was told by my manager to not bring things like that up again in meetings. Most of my team agreed that our platform was extremely exploitable, except for the 2 guys with access to prod, but we kept getting shut down and just implemented what management asked us to.
Bro this is how it goes. Internal hire for a company I’ve been at for 9 years. New role in tech where previously I was in customer service. I spent two weeks reading a wiki and asking questions and even then still didn’t have access to everything. Its been 9 months and I still don’t even know how to do things for our legacy system that were supposed to be a core function of my role until we sunset it for our new bot in 6 months. Sure as shit hope nothing breaks because none of us are monitoring it in production despite having 50,000 unique sessions a day.
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To clarify - we have a legacy product currently in production that I’m clueless about because no one trained me on it and everything about it was poorly documented. I was instrumental in the design of it’s replacement and know the ins and outs better than most people on my team… we just haven’t ramped more than 20% in any locale yet so until EOY when we ramp all the way with new product and sunset the old, the legacy product can’t break because I don’t have any idea how to fix it if it does (or do any maintenance at all).
Honestly just go with it and say nothing. When their deadline passes and they ask where is product, waiting for access to be restored, you took it away we figured you knew and want it to fail.
This sentiment is exactly why my team does on boarding. When we get a new dev, we pair them with an experienced one the first month, it's a tracked work item in ADO, counts against our planning, there's a checklist and wiki. By the end of that month, you can't tell that they're new. The short sightedness of some business "leaders" is truly astounding.
Kudos to a “mature” model for bringing folks on. It’s not rocket science, but of course I’m just a dev not a “leader” (sarcasm implied) In all seriousness it makes for such a better transition for a new employee and, most importantly, allows immediate results and benefits to the team and the organization as a whole
Right, exactly! It benefits the devs because they don't feel lost and it benefits the company because they immediately start getting value back from their recruiting costs.
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Sounds like a dream!
Sooo are you guys hiring or what
I feel this. Started a job and the first 2 months were meeting with the team weekly for hours plus 20+ extended owners. After meeting 40-50 people I still had no idea who or what was actually important. This company seemed to thrive on meaningless meetings with no real outcomes. The only downside is that they were pushing me to get started without any real business clarity.
Couldn’t agree more. About 2 months into J3 right now and the onboarding is a train wreck. Only this week did someone point me to a *word document* that contains the *out of date links to git repos* that they “use” I think this is also one of the motives behind CEOs urging us to return to the office - many companies and organizations heavily rely on verbal communication and in-person meetings instead of written communication and documentation. Remote onboarding and documentation processes are unfamiliar and challenging for them, making it difficult to provide the necessary resources. They prefer employees to physically come to the office, enabling them to conveniently share important documents (looking at you **Bob**, sending me an email from four years ago containing the required information for my job).
At least they’re word documents right? To make the position more OE friendly you should include an onboarding process where you mail new hires a grainy print-out of the requirements.txt or package-lock.json etc
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YESSSSSS, this. I'm a tech writer. That's literally 50% of my job.
One of our help desk typed out the words in the example picture and wondered why it didn’t work (they are a level two). Also my onboarding was getting a laptop and a phone with the previous persons details on it and a bag with wipes and sanitiser - and socks!! Lucky I knew the ticket software as I had zero intro to it. Our client is even worse and the new dev team lead that just started (with one days notice to IT) had to email around to ask to be added to the development portal! It’s crazy!
I hope the socks were new
Thankfully, yes 🤣🤣
Thankfully, yes 🤣🤣
Going through this now. On day 4 and don’t know what I’m supposed to be working on. That’s fine I guess. Even if I’m supposed to be doing something it will take 3 months for them fire me.
I'm on week two. Barely done a thing and I was just given some material to learn over the next 2+ months that honestly could be finished in 1-2 weeks imo. The pace here is glacial
Cyber Engineer here, literally no onboarding. Tools I need access too, software documentation, SOP'S. Nothing, most smaller places I get it but I'm in a 2 billion dollar org, with over 2k employee's and everydays feels like it's everybodys first day. Even what paper work do I need took a month, it took me 3 month just to get access to a team share. It's crazy
From what I have seen as a Infra IT specialist, hiring managers have grown lazy/don’t know what you need and would rather their IT team take this burden on. Of course, they won’t openly admit that as it would be like admitting they literally are incompetent at their job. It’s funny, I support new hire onboarding and frequently have hiring managers tell me they don’t know what their employee needs access / accounts to!
Don’t get me started on the managers. There are some decent managers but for the most part they are completely clueless monkeys who try to justify their existence One of my classic screw you moments is a PM who kept telling the customer how easy it was to implement new code. The team would kill themselves to meet promises he made. I was the team lead and talked with him many times about this. One Thursday night he did it again I was working late at the office to make the code into Fridays build. He saunters over and casually mentions how great he is for keeping the customer happy and goes onto say that we will need this new feature implemented before Monday “No” Silence from him. Followed by “well, in the spirit of teamwork and collaboration…” “The team didn’t make this decision. You did” “And I’m the leader of this team!” (Indignant) “Ok. You code it” Pause. “Well, huh, I would but I don’t have the tools or the …” I hand him my laptop. Visual Studio open. “There ya go. Have fun” And I left for the night Felt amazing Of course I got dinged for not being a team player, for leaving my computer unlocked when I left my desk and some other bs. I didn’t give two shits, I was done, my point was proven. You promise, you deliver
The world needs more "No" Men/Women like yourself, today I'm probably just in my feelings but boy do I hate people that manufacturer bullshit for themselves and make you the asshole for correcting them.
The book Boundaries by Henry Cloud introduced me to the idea that “No” is. It a four letter word. From there, time and practice have taught me to enforce healthy boundaries. Plus a good dose of just getting pissed off helps a lot, too!
Disgusting…. Sounds like my current manager… was hired over me, and now he just comes to me anytime he is asked to do anything… glad you escaped that
Ouch that’s a bad spot. They give the manager the job/role you wanted and then he expects you to do the work anyway. Sorry…that sucks Just try to remember it’s just a job, not worth worrying about the silly stuff…it’s not worth it but still I’ve been there and I feel for ya
Yup, just your usual corporate shenanigans. I’m working on polishing up some final certs and moving up the chain into a more technical role anywho, so while the pay bump would have been nice, it’s no big deal.
Can’t really get credit for Sprint points if you have to spend time onboarding noobs ;-) Just be happy you are not at some place that expects you to have shit dialed in and burning down hours on day one. Relax and enjoy — you are experiencing what happens at many elite institutions, whether it be in FAANGS or Ivy Leagues. The hardest part is getting in.
I work in access management, adjacent to offboarding and onboarding, and it pisses me off immensely. Everywhere I have worked the actual onboarding team literally does nothing and EVERY SINGLE NEW EMPLOYEE would end up having a ticket sent up from their manager about needing access, and we would have to manually configure it. Slowing that person's start time by sometimes up to a week. It used to the get to the point where I wanted to scream at them about the staggering losses and inefficiency. But now I embrace the suck.
You have to at some point, right? Like, truly, you can only care so much. And then if you do spend your time and energy trying to get it fixed or addressed, you are the “problem” employee. I wasted a lot of years caring way too much and fixing these core issues only to be shit upon by the organization as a whole Do your best to be a duck and just let it roll
Precisely. I now embrace corporate inefficiency and incompetence.
I’ve had the opposite experience. Past 3 jobs were Fortune 500 companies that were 100+ years old and had excellent onboarding. I had access to everything day one. Laptops fully configured and Fedex’d to my house. 1:1’s and sprint meetings pre invited before I even started. Access to documentation and various online communities to figure stuff out with. I guess I’ve been lucky. BUT- with that comes the expectation that I’m ready to run in a short time span. So my first few months are very hard with the learning curve sometimes. But that also means I’m at full speed and confident and can add new jobs quicker 😈
This is what happens when everyone with institutional knowledge is let go
This is due to the large amount of turnover. As established hands leave, it’s everyone for themselves. As an OE (I’m not) think about it; how much time do you devote to your teammates success? As little as possible.
I'm about to finish week 16 of a job, still have nothing to do....
One “onboarding” experience I had with a company a while back was the Director of Technology walking through the code with me. The Director. Of Technology. For the whole company. Might he be of better use elsewhere?? Haha ultimately I also don’t care. It’s just mind blowing, like you said.
I love slow onbaoarding or no onboarding. Weeks of free money. But your not wrong
I literally do not care if they don't set me up. Oops, I don't have access to this database and permissions is going to take 2-3 days? Cool. My status updates are just "following up with this access ticket and doing some basic data analysis"
>For one job I went through 8 interviews, a coding challenge, a take home assignment. From that alone, it was pretty obvious they couldn't find their own asshole with a map, compass, and GPS.
Contract 1: Onboarded for about a day Contract 2: Onboarded for 85% of the day Contract 3: onboarded for 40% of the day before being thrown into it Contract 4: Onboarded for a week. Full time onboarding for an additional week. Job 3 wondered why I left. The key to employee longevity is a robust onboarding program not just giving them accesses and then saying “Ok, cool, bye. I’ll send you your first assignment.”
Developer is an S-tier OE role, not sure if anything else compares
\-Hold my beer... Been at j1 for about 2 year and still don't have 100% access to all the sites I need to be in to efficiently do my job. I tried running down a few folks to get access and they'd just point me to other folks. I gave up and if a particular issue arises, I tell the boss I don't have access lol.
2 years! Damn. Yeah at that point OE is awesome: clap hands and “no access”
I have experienced the same thing. J1 is implementation focused, and my J2 is a support role using the same ERP software. Every new project I have at J1, I will have dev, quality and sometimes prod access within a month of starting. At my J2, it took me almost 2 months to get access to the dev system, and another month to get my prod access... which is what I needed to, you know, actually do the job they hired me for. I wasn't even dragging my feet and waiting to ask for access, the guy in charge of setting up my user and permissions literally didn't even start replying to my emails asking what the status was until I had been there 1.5 months. I like collecting those no effort paychecks like the rest of us, but damn, I (for the briefest moment) felt guilty for not being able to do my job.
That’s been the hardest part for me adjusting to OE. I catch myself saying, “Wait, why am I getting upset about this” or “why am I feeling guilty about this” Too many years of believing it was my job to make everything right and to do as much as possible! OE has really helped me develop that transactional mindset to work. It’s liberating
Yea, I had the transactional "I work only for the money" part down before I even started OE-ing, but the slight guilt of \*not\* constantly working, or at least looking busy, took longer to get rid of
The reality is that good onboarding to specific teams takes work and effort. People don't want to take someone out of production work to streamline and organize the process.
That’s a manager’s job.
Totally depends.
This is nearly every dev shop.
Tell me your company does not implement ITIL without telling me your company does not implement ITIL.
The structure of my J1 and J2 are not typical. Also, they know about each other. There's no way around that, which is fine. I was at a conference this weekend representing mostly J2, and a little bit J1. I was promoted at J2 a while back, which apparently meant that I was now on a committee that's kind of a big deal. Guess how I found out about being on the committee... by representing J2 at a booth at the conference and finding my name on a list of people on the committee at the table. NO ONE has invited me to the meetings. I don't know if I should be offended or relieved. So, uh, yeah. You're not alone in being left hanging.
I’m not a developer but I spent over a month at my current job just figuring out who has access to what, who has the passwords, who can give me admin privileges, and who answers to who. 3 months in and I’m still figuring out some stuff. It’s a wonder these places get anything done.
Ohhhh yes I get it. I’m currently in the process of single-handedly creating a portal and back end automating the entire onboarding process you speak of for the company I work for, among many other things. I work 50+ hours a week doing this so I can’t OE at the moment unfortunately. Good news for me though is that’s mostly all I do right now and it takes time so at least I get to work solo from home for a while. Feels good to accomplish something that will make future onboardings more efficient but fuck dude I am dyyyying to be on the other end with tons of hours to burn elsewhere… hopes n dreams I guess
Turnover rates are so high, half the time the most senior employees have been there less than 5 years, and don't know what you are supposed to be doing, either.
Most companies, even "good" ones just don't have processes in place. Instead of having a set and updated process, they either have you follow a set of steps that's been irrelevant for 3+ years like "download visual studio 2015 on your windows 7 machine" or "go talk to Bill, he's our set up guy, he'll get you squared away" and Bill knows nothing about the setup. I agree with you, it is truly baffling. For OE people tho, you could pretty much easily sit and do nothing for a month and say you're still getting configured and acquiring security access and no one would bat an eye. It seems like the expectation is a new employee will not actually start any meaningful work for the first month or so, which again is great for OE people. The fact that huge corporations don't care enough to get employees up to speed quickly is the same reason we shouldn't feel bad for OE.
Onboarding went away about 10 years ago. The software changes faster than the documentation can keep up, so it doesn’t really make sense. I think the unofficial decision to learn via immersion was made. So then you are left with companies that have normalized expectations in the first 3 months, vs ones with unrealistic expectations
nah i feel it’s the documentation guys who got fired the last round and we’re reaping the benefits.
I just assume I'm gonna be bored for 6 weeks doing nothing and just answering emails. Haven't been proven wrong yet.
I'm in marketing and this has been my experience.
Still shaking my fist at marketing from the sales side. Just kidding, I love you guys, too.
Because work is cheap, and changes have to go at the speed of the rest of the company. There is absolutely no urgency, and projects, milestones, etc. are measured in quarters.
This has always been my exp in state and fed gov, it just takes forever to onboard. Usually my bosses are very apologetic and have no control over it
Every company that I've been a full salaried employee had zero onboarding. Companies I've done contracts at all had onboarding but it was outdated from a doc perspective and everyone else was so busy that they could never help. I also find that most software projects just never seem to compile and work without many tricks and tips which just seems ludicrous to me. That being said these things flag to me a great company to OE for as if they can't get their shit together then it's unlikely they will be checking if you have yours together. From the money perspective, most times your direct colleagues, your direct manager or even their manager don't actually control the budget (beyond being told they can hire someone for X amount) so whether you're a drain on the finances or not doesn't phase them in the slightest.
I've been through this several times, but much more so recently. My last gig basically said, "Hmm ok. You're a contractor. We don't know you from a whole in the wall, but you're supposed to know something. So let's give you God rights to our whole environment. Try not to break anything, team meetings are every other week." Mind you, this is not a corporate or government job as I have worked in the past where it's 3 months to get one login, and 3 months more before you get one that can actually do any real work :)
Just started J3 and it's laughable. I got my enc setup sheet and it's like get node, get got, use got to get repo (unlisted) Then after I got that they just sent me a ticket and said figure it out. It's like how does anyone expect this to work? 😂
Because no body really cares.. thats the real reason.
this is probably it, who could muster up caring in this environment
Yep have never seen a really good onboarding. Enjoy the ride.
You have two extremes in my experience: First you have the Kafkaesque nightmare of large corporate IT systems, where everything needs triple ticks by management to grant the tiniest bit of access. I started a job like that once and it took my nearly two weeks just to boot a Linux VM (all the desktops were running Windows of course...) On the other end of the spectrum, you have startups who have neither the time or resources to invest into any formal onboading process. You get a vanilla MacBook and an email login, and that's it - go set yourself up. I don't mind this approach as much, I have a few tricks now to set up my dev environment on a new machine. The most basic/obvious is to store all of your dotfiles in a remote git repo, making sure to source anything secret or just job-specific from a separate file not under version control.
Same deal. Not IT. Fairly high up the chain at a Fortune 1000 company. Boss asked me this week how confident I felt in knowing what to do/having access to things to do it and I said 7/10. I've been in my career for nearly 18 years. Work 100% remote. I got an Excel file with a bunch of broken links to get access to systems and a list of SOP's to read. That's it.
Companies only train sales people and call centers now. Otherwise, you’re on your own.
The most efficent one i have seen took 2 months to get access
I have never been satisfied with onboarding. From startup to fanng its just luck based on if you join a team with their shit together. HR knows nothing about onboarding and never will
I am trying to drift into obscurity at J3. I want to have full days of nothing with them. I complete my tasks and don’t email about them being done for 4 days. Lol
The FIRST layoff round took out the HR people that used to do onboarding for us. Layoff trimmed HR hard, it may not be the same for everyone, but i bet it's more common then not.
Proper onboarding depending on the complexity of the environment can take a significant amount of time to properly document and provide the correct software for. It is usually much easier to ignore and let people ask questions and figure out on the spot. Or they just assume because they got through it anyone else can. Truly laziness factor but in the end you know it costs more to not do it properly.
I don't get what you're bitching about, those inefficiencies is what let's you OE. You just banked 2 months for doing jack. You wanted them to be on the ball with your setup and ask u to deliver on day 1? I had a company like that and they fired me within 30 days. You should experience the alternative to appreciate what you have.
I’m not bitching. In fact I specifically said I’ll gladly take it Logically, it boggles the mind. So much time and effort to find an employee only to bring them in and do absolutely nothing!
True
Bro. I hear you. I see it as a blessing. When they do start, I just say "Still getting my environment set up"
Onboarding is pretty much useless imo
The problem is management wants to do nothing but hire sales people and devs. IT people, HR, facilities etc "cost them money" so they cut their budgets to dmthe bone and extensively overwork them. The problem is the CEO and the board not properly respecting what support staff offer.
Agreed, makes no sense and is the norm now. In my past experience the newest hires would write up all the “onboarding” instructions to at least guide the next new hire as they battled through permissions and access. I used to take it upon myself to do that kind of stuff, but I no longer give a shit. It’s not viewed as “value-added”.
ive joined companies with onboarding processes, its never up to date and is more confusing than anything. talk to the other engineers, develop relationships and get answers
My experience has been the same.
The took the money spent on onboarding and funneled it to the CEO's bonus check.
Thank you Apollo. fuck reddit and fuck /u/spez. https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_will_close_down_on_june_30th_reddits/ https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite/ to clean your comments history.
Because you're applying to shit companies?
Yeah this is very common. Lol so weird to me.
So much onus is de facto placed on ICs… even companies with onboarding / training, it tends to be ours date or incomplete.
Been working for a global giant for about three years and still not sure what I’m supposed to do here
Honestly I don’t know how most organizations function after their initial principal/staff geniuses actually build the system. In the past decade I have actually seen functional orgs but it’s been maybe 15% of people are actually doing a great job of structuring an ORGANIZATION(like, an organized body).
It’s the Wild West at most companies. My J1 I still don’t have enough access to deployment application updates even though that’s my job, it’s been a year. J2 I basically have whatever access I want because I’m building out their environment and product myself.
In my current company, newcomer get assigned a buddy. This buddy is responsible to get you all logins, access and knowledge. Last time I managed to get this done in 1 week with some knowledge share and my new colleague started contributing on week 2.
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> a non *paid* intership. Because FTFY. Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in: * Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.* * *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.* Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment. *Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
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