Simon Willison’s Weblog

What is a good onboarding process for a new employee at a startup?

13th August 2013

My answer to What is a good onboarding process for a new employee at a startup? on Quora

Have them deploy the site on their first day. This ensures they know how to...

1. Set up a working development environment
2. Check code out of your repository
3. Navigate the code base
4. Make code changes
5. Run tests
6. Pass a code review (or at least get some peer review)
7. QA their change beyond just the automated tests
8. Deploy their change to production

If they do all of this on day one, they’ll come in on day two ready to start building and shipping production code.

This also means your team need to have a development/deployment environment that can be set up in less than a day, albeit with a little guidance. This is a very good thing.

If your infrastructure is good enough you can even do this with non-technical employees as well—let them edit the “about” page on your site to add themselves through the GitHub web editor and hit a “deploy” button in Jenkins or similar to deploy the site!