How to Improve Developer Onboarding

Starting a new job as part of a development team often comes with feelings of uncertainty and inadequacy, as new employees, termed "The New Person™," may struggle with understanding the product, team processes, and unwritten norms. To address these challenges, managers and teams aim to enhance the onboarding experience by focusing on a metric called "Time to First Commit," which measures the time it takes for a new hire to make their first code commit. At Prismatic, this process is optimized through comprehensive documentation and automation, ensuring new employees can quickly become productive. Documentation is divided between stable information stored in a wiki and more fluid content alongside source code, while automation tools like Terraform, Docker, and Git hooks facilitate rapid setup of development environments. These efforts have successfully reduced the "Time to First Commit" to just a few hours, making the onboarding process more efficient and reducing stress for new hires.