Reflections on Onboarding Practices in Mid-Sized Companies
Giovanni Viviani, Gail C. Murphy · 2019
The success of a software company is largely dependent upon the people who comprise the company. Given the pace at which most software needs to be produced, software companies need to make sure that new developers become as productive as quickly as possible when hired. The process of integrating new hires, often referred as onboarding, has been well studied in the context of large companies that have significant resources to bring to bear on the process. How onboarding occurs in smaller companies with fewer resources is less understood. To investigate how smaller companies address onboarding, we performed a case study, interviewing eight developers from a local company with a development team of about 100. We asked the developers what practices they experienced during their onboarding with the company. We found a high reliance on a buddy system and extensive use of code reviews to instruct developers in best practices.