8 min read
What we tell new hires on day one, and how a curated Threadseam board cuts time-to-first-PR in half.
Our shortest onboarding was three days to first merged PR. Our longest was eleven. The difference was almost entirely how well the new engineer could search Slack, and whether the right person was online when they got stuck.
What we tell them on day one
- Your biggest mistake will be waiting too long to ask. If you've been stuck 20 minutes, ask. In public.
- Our documentation is in Slack and Threadseam. Threadseam first — it has the ratified version. Slack if Threadseam doesn't know.
- Nobody will think less of you for a search that turns up nothing. We will think less of you for not searching.
The curated board
New hires get a Threadseam board that's a curated subset of the knowledge base — the thirty entries we think a first-week engineer needs. Deploy process. On-call playbook. The three services most likely to break their local setup. The style guide. It's not search; it's a reading list.
That one thing cut our median time-to-first-PR from six days to three. We measured, because we were as skeptical as you are now.
NO
Nadia Okafor
CEO & co-founder