Cheezburger Network doesn't show new hires the bathroom until they check in code

This is all great and fun, you know, for the cheeseburger network. I am not sure that companies like Microsoft or Apple would ever entertain an idea like this.<p>There is nothing wrong with committing your code to the source control on the first day, but there is nothing to be proud of it either. I personally would like to get acquainted with my team-mates and stuff and go through some company policies before pushing stuff to the production. Please don't make my first day at the job more difficult than it should be. Also, not all code bases are easy to even learn where to modify.<p>&#62;&#62;&#62; The result will be happier, more empowered employees with an attitude of ownership and a focus on productivity.<p>Again, why? What is wrong if you started committing code on the second day?<p>This is just a different approach, not always a better approach. If it works for them, good. There are a lot of situations where this policy will lead to disastrous results.<p>And I hope the title is just link-bait and not actually true.<p>[EDIT: removed the words "more serious" from the second sentence. See comment from Scott below]

I read the OP a little differently than I read some of the comments.<p>Imagine you are brought into a messed up development culture with some authority to make changes. You can't build the product from source, you can only patch it. You can't build a test database from migrations, fixtures, or whatever, there are "magic" development databases. And so on and so forth.<p>You think about things, remember this old post, and institute the following goal:<p>"We must be able to take a workstation from email and appropriate access to checking in a change in one business day. Document the steps, re-organize development, everything so that we can sit down with any new hire and get them to set everything up and commit a change on their first day."<p>It might be empowering for the developer. It might also be a forcing function for fixing issues with your development environment.

More than anything else, I think this article shows how common sense is forgotten in most organizations, and especially in large organizations.<p>The idea that people like to be productive and hit the ground running on their first day is not new, exciting or bold. Yet, it's still noteworthy when it happens.<p>I would have loved procedures like this when I started my current job. After the HR benefits lecture, I was sat down at a computer and told to read outdated and often wrong documentation for a week. My login account wasn't active until two days after I started.

Where does the title of the article come from? The article doesn't say that at all.<p>All the article says is: "On Day One, a new employee is still trying to figure out the location of the bathroom, for goodness sake!", so they assign new employees a mentor to help them with everything.<p>EDIT: typo

I'm sure they are joking about withholding bathroom access (you can get sued for that).<p>But it does seem to me that doing this seems to serve the author's interest more than the devs.<p>"How does it <i>feel</i> to commit on your first day?"<p>"So, why was it awesome to do that? There’s something about that which feels????"<p>It sounds like person would be excruciating to deal with.<p>I'm sure it's just me, but how much he glorifies his policy of first day commits speaks to some larger issue.<p>I hope this doesn't offend (but I'm not sure how it cant) and I intend no malice. But if my boss said that to me I would probably start looking for a new job that night.

Committing on day 1 at IMVU is also a really important part of our culture. We want to make sure that new engineers hit the ground running and feel like they have the ability to contribute right away. We celebrate it, because it's an important first accomplishment. And new engineers who come from other places (like Yahoo!, where I worked before) are thrilled to see a change on a production cluster that has hundreds of servers, without having to go through some lengthy release process. It's exhilarating.

Our entire induction process takes less than half an hour. Is it rare to try and have everything set up for the new hire before they start?

Sounds like a suitable way to get junior developers started. As a senior developer, it would never work for me. A document telling me how to set up my development station, step by step? I'll find out how to set up my development station and if I want to use vim instead of Eclipse, that's my choice.<p>Ofcourse, I'm not desperate for a job either, and I am used to setting the terms revolving my development environment and the way we work, as opposed to the other way around.

This is a bit silly in my opinion. On my first day at the past two companies I've worked at I spent most of it setting up my computer and development environment to adhere to the necessary things I needed for my role.<p>I don't think I actually started any real development for a few weeks to be honest, those first few weeks were spent getting up to speed with the software platform and framework I'd be working on, plus meeting a bunch of folks from different departments etc.

I am all for empowerment and making devs productive, but taking it to an absurd level (<i>making</i> devs push code to production one day one) is not good.<p>Making employees feel empowered is much more than one day show. Hopefully, its going to be a marathon, not a sprint.

sounds like a military bootcamp approach. It has been 200% proven to be successful in producing effective soldiers. It may also work for young hires, puppies, and it would serve as an effective way to filter out older ones who are much harder to mold.

Even if it is not the first day, I think the point is well taken that this needs to happen ASAP. I have worked as a consultant at large corporations and have seen developers go months without ever checking in code.

<i>I’ll let you be the judge, but it sounds like developers enjoy being productive on their first day.</i><p>Actually, I'm not sure those conversations prove the conclusion that you're drawing from them. What I believe those quotes illustrate is that those particular developers told the boss (boss' boss?) who came up with the policy that they enjoy it. This is the way that conflicts of interest work, and <i>even if</i> Cheezburger has a well-established tradition and culture of telling the Emperor he has no clothes, newbie employees are not really the best source of that kind of information.

What a coincidence, they don't show you funny cat pictures until you check out 100 ads. Didn't their site used to have content?

Best Cheezburger practices. What's the thing you do with the palm of your hand... no not that one... I mean making contact with your forehead.

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So Cheezburger Network is holding their new hires hostage until they get some work done? This must be demoralizing, and I imagine it would leave a bad taste in the mouths of new hires who expect an introduction to the work environment first.