Onboarding new developers effectively is crucial for integrating them into a team and ensuring their long-term success. This process involves a blend of strategies that transition a potentially overwhelming experience into a seamless journey, focusing on building smart habits like pair programming, which fosters collaboration and skill development. Pair programming helps newcomers familiarize themselves with the codebase, coding standards, and debugging practices, while also promoting knowledge sharing and building meaningful relationships within the team. New developers should initially tackle small, non-critical tasks to build confidence and a sense of achievement, with guidance to ensure their contributions align with team standards. Effective onboarding also emphasizes ongoing learning through formal training, internal knowledge sharing, and practical experiences, alongside fostering collaboration, especially in distributed teams. This requires adopting an async-first approach to documentation, intentional overcommunication, and creating social bonds through virtual interactions. Investing in the right tools for communication and collaboration further supports the onboarding process, ultimately empowering new engineers to build confidence and competence in a supportive environment.