The Complete Onboarding Guide For Software Engineers
Onboarding is the critical period when you first join a new team or company. The impression you create in the initial months has an outsized impact on your future opportunities. The best engineers leverage this time to put their careers on the fast track, while poor engineers miss expectations and end up PIP'ed or terminated.
There's a lot to do as you ramp up: learn the codebase, build relationships, and start working on impactful projects. So it's no surprise that joining a new company can be overwhelming and stressful.
This course presents a roadmap to ensure your success while onboarding. We cover the importance of onboarding as the foundation for your job and career, why companies generally suck at it, and the correct mindset to adopt when you're new.
We'll then share tactics around three key pillars for Software Engineering onboarding:
- 🧠 Asking for help
- 💻 Learning the codebase
- 🙋🏽 Building relationships
Most importantly, this course will share the principles behind the advice so you can navigate any situation you're in.
We'll also cover specific tips for success in common situations:
- Junior engineers
- Senior engineers
- Joining a small company (whether VC-backed or indie business)
- Joining a large company
Here's what you'll gain by the end of the course:
-
✊🏽 Build serious respect with your manager + team
-
⌛️ Quickly become productive in a new codebase
-
👨🏽💻 Learn from coworkers (even if they’re not helpful)
-
❌ Understand failure modes (+ prevention)
If your anxiety is coming from looking for a job instead of onboarding into a job, you're in luck! Take this course and come back when you're gainfully employed: [Course] Ace Your Tech Interview And Get A Job As A Software Engineer
Watch the full course or go through the parts that are most relevant for you. The Complete Onboarding Guide For Software Engineers: Succeeding When You're New is designed to give technical employees to increase your impact and reduce your anxiety.
Rahul has been "the new engineer" seven times in his career: four internships and three full-time jobs. He's been an engineer for most of his career and directly shaped the onboarding experience for new engineers on his teams as a manager. Most recently, he worked for 4.5 years at Meta as a Staff Software Engineer and Manager.
Rahul: The Frequent Noob
Rahul has personally onboarded across a variety of companies and levels of seniority. His first job after university was as a founding engineer (employee #3) at a Stanford startup. Onboarding in this company was as simple as "Here's your laptop, good luck!"
This startup was acquired by Pinterest, which was a Silicon Valley darling undergoing hypergrowth at the time with ~400 employees. Pinterest had more process than the startup, but the product and company were changing rapidly. The onboarding was frequently incorrect or outdated.
Rahul then onboarded as a senior engineer at Facebook (now Meta), the classic Big Tech environment with tens of thousands of employees. Facebook is famous for a very structured approach to onboarding through Bootcamp: a multi-week program to get engineers up to speed.
This doesn't count the "mini-onboardings" that happen within a company: switching teams or moving around due to a re-org. The tech industry today moves incredibly fast, so the ability to adapt and ramp up quickly is essential.
Years Of Learning In 3 Hours
Rahul is now the cofounder of Taro, designed to accelerate career growth for engineers. In this capacity, he spoke directly to 100s of engineers who have onboarded at dozens of companies. This course condenses the collective wisdom from these engineers about the successful (and unsuccessful) traits of new employees.
Connect with Rahul:
This course should be mandatory training for all new hires. Even as a tenured person in my company, so many of the ideas here were extremely valuable.
This course is comprehensive and well-made. I got a thorough onboarding doc, but the firm told me to do tons of reading, which I don't think is the best way to learn. So I'm trying to read through the docs efficiently while trying to meet expectations around impact.
The idea of asking for feedback in one-on-ones was really powerful for me. My manager is hands-off so I didn't think they'd have feedback, but it turns out they actually had lots of great insight.
I also loved the "respect what came before" topic. It helped me understand the need to moderate my feedback of things that could be improved (which I see a lot of as a Senior).
This course helped me go above and beyond in my time onboarding at my new job, get quick wins and get great feedback from my manager in my 1st few months. The concepts also apply to any new job, even if you're not a software engineer
Thank you for building this course!
I recently started in a remote role about 2 months ago. I was nervous about onboarding, so I took your course on The Complete Onboarding Guide For Software Engineers and really enjoyed it!
The tips you shared were something I wished had been taught to me earlier in my career. I struggled with onboarding, and through your course, I did things I had never done before to prepare myself for my new role.
Using what you have taught in the course, my lead told me that I was doing a great job and was glad to have brought me into his team. I was surprised to hear that from him because I was not used to hearing any feedbacks or positive feedback.
Thank you for making onboarding less intimidating, stressful, and overwhelming.
I finished my first Taro course about onboarding; it was awesome. I went into this work week feeling energized and eager to apply your tips, thank you!!
.jpg?alt=media&token=e948c0ca-13fe-4806-b3f7-be796d7f7b50)
As someone who just joined Pinterest as a Senior Engineer, this course was extremely relevant and helpful. You can tell that the strategies that Rahul outlines are battle-tested, and I had never considered many of the ideas and tools presented.
I highly recommend this course for any new engineer.
As my first course on Taro, I found it extremely helpful! I was so stressed out about starting my new role as an SDE2 at Amazon, but this course really helped me lay out a plan to onboard into my new team and to ramp up as quickly as possible.
