Just some red flags. No big deal. Just ignore them

I really wish companies would start asking for anonymous, unbiased reviews of this process. I&#x27;ve had a few companies come close, but they made it clear the answers were (or seemed to be) heavily filtered.<p>Their onboarding processes all sucked.<p>Please stop with the cute HR nonsense. I&#x27;m not a kid. I don&#x27;t need your cute program. We don&#x27;t need someone reading 10 pages from your legally unenforceable handbook from a projector. Keep your gift bag; the squeeze ball is stupid and you didn&#x27;t pick the pen. (Have you ever given a gift?) If you&#x27;re going to lean into the sterile corporate decor, then at least hand me a clipboard and let me fill out paperwork just like I&#x27;m at the doctor&#x27;s office.<p>If it sounds salty; it&#x27;s supposed to. I hope a C-level, or business owner, takes it to heart. I&#x27;m not trying to beat you down. This first-impression is important--I took 10 minutes on a Saturday at 2:50AM to let you know. I&#x27;ve seen your &quot;all-hands&quot;, your quarterlies, your launches, and your totally-not-Christmas parties.<p>You already know how to do better.

It boggles my mind how companies do not take onboarding seriously.<p>This is the best opportunity you have to set your people up for success, bar none. Plus, many of the things your company should do to build a great onboarding experience can also be leveraged to make it easy to do things like &quot;move people between teams&quot;, &quot;expand into a new office&quot;, and &quot;hire great people&quot;.<p>Done properly, this is <i>cheap as hell</i>.

The process described here is one that would honestly have me walking out the door. I don&#x27;t say that from a place of &quot;this isn&#x27;t worth my time&quot; or a similar feeling grounded in self-worth and healthy ego--the aimless, direction-less, utter lack of structure or clear direction on how to proceed while being deluged in busywork would leave me so anxious and adrift that I know I wouldn&#x27;t be able to return to that place. The concept of &quot;working&quot; for three days before my direct supervisor even noticed my presence is so foreign to me that I truly have no idea how I&#x27;d function, unless it was to sit in a corner and panic about not knowing how to start doing the job I was (supposedly) hired for.<p>As someone trying to figure out how to turn my diploma into a job despite intense impostor syndrome, this tale is absolutely harrowing.

In my experience the first few days of onboarding is the only time when it&#x27;s easy to meet new faces in a company. You will always remember the couple of people that onboarded together with you. Looks like going through a bunch of nonsense together successfully bounds people.<p>That&#x27;s the only real benefit of those onboarding few days. I usually roll my eyes through most of the high level presentations that are full of Koolaid, politically correctness or even straight up made up as you typically discover after a couple weeks&#x2F;months.

How many people opt-out of this kind of culture and become self-employed?<p>The theory of specialization and collaboration increasing productivity is fine, but look at all of the time lost for this nonsense. Imagine paying the salaries of these disaffected employees as they Svejk their way through the workday.<p>Think of the overhead for the office space, medical and paid leave for all of these people. I also wonder about the value of those who are compliant and obedient. Not sure that those qualities go hand in hand with innovation and critical thinking.<p>Solo-entrepreneurship limits the kinds of problems you can solve, but the ones you do select can be low maintenance, passive income situations. After building up a portfolio like this, there is no need to build resumes, learn buzzwords or tolerate the nonsense described in this article. Your surplus of free time can be invested in creating more revenue streams.

She&#x27;s getting a lot of flak on here, but I kind of sympathize with her. Multiday onboarding programs, unfamiliar (bad?) IT, and inflated expectations aren&#x27;t particularly fun to deal with.

This post is actually written in retrospect with bitterness, so I&#x27;d avoid reading too much into it: either as red flags on the author or the company. Memories and lived experiences get colored in hindsight by what happened after. For example, there must have definitely been positives that attracted the author to the company, but they are diminished in memory, crowded out by bitterness.

Instead of bugs per LOC or anything else, the single biggest metric a CEO needs to watch is <i>employee gripes per work day</i>. Goes up in a particular area - get in there and fix something. It&#x27;s like metal on metal for a engine operator, CEOs need to listen for that grating sound.<p>And as such I will defend to the death an employee&#x27;s right to moan and bitch about working conditions.

Rachel comes off as someone with vast chops who is better suited to a start-up than a large corporation.<p>I had a somewhat similar experience of being at a consultancy that is great for people right out of college.<p>Made me feel a trifle old and ready to get to a place that was more work-horse and less show-horse.

&quot;... You start feeling very old ...&quot;<p>I hear you calling me.<p>And oh, the ringing gladness of your voice!<p>And on my career’s grave the mossy grass is green:<p>At the stand-up, do you behold me? Standing here,<p>Hearing your voice through all the corporate hell between.

The first days in a company can really mark everything. I can feel her. Last time I felt like that I ran out after 3 months and ended up freelancing ever since. Maybe she should try that.

&gt; You&#x27;re making lots of mistakes, despite having decades of typing experience at relatively high speeds.<p>It’s amazing how small a keyboard difference can throw you way off.<p>I had an Apple Magic Keyboard and could type on it high speed with high accuracy. I wanted a numeric keypad and bigger arrow keys so got an Apple Magic Keyboard with Numeric Keypad.<p>The latter is pretty much the former with extra space on the right for the keypad. The letters and punctuation keys are the same in size, location, and feel. If you are just banging out text or code, there should be virtually no difference between the two.<p>In reality, I could barely type on the keypad version. It took a couple days to get decent on it. Even after a couple weeks I was having trouble with punctuation, making coding slow.

I dunno, most of it didn&#x27;t sound that bad. I guess anything becomes stressful under time pressure.

the curious thing about such flags is that they are obvious in retrospect but somewhat imperceptible when you needed to notice them

I also think this shows a few red flags of the author. Definitely not a team player, runs from boring stuff (instead of challenging it or trying to fix it), and then hides in a corner a few days instead of actually talking to the manager (who thought the person was busy a few days with the onboarding, so naturally didn&#x27;t show them a desk yet).

&gt; You&#x27;re making lots of mistakes, despite having decades of typing experience at relatively high speeds<p>In Japan it was a duty of samurai to bring a sword to the service. For last 10 years I&#x27;m bringing my own keyboard and mouse to every new job.

This sounds suspiciously like the onboarding experience I had at my company.<p>In particular, Duo for 2 factor and LastPass, and the curl command to start downloading a bunch of stuff.<p>FWIW I thought it was pretty streamlined, better than what I&#x27;d had in the past.

I should probably stop reading her posts when they are submitted (I think I skipped the last few). Invariably I agree with portions of what she says, but it&#x27;s always couched in what I view as a very poor attitude. I get it. She&#x27;s a jaded bay area developer. I sure hope it&#x27;s mostly just a persona for her blog, because otherwise why put yourself through such misery? She obviously doesn&#x27;t respect anything about the companies she&#x27;s working for, if her writing is anything to go by, and she&#x27;s obviously in demand enough to get jobs at big companies. I think she would be happier if she looked for a different class of employer. If that&#x27;s hard to find here, move somewhere else. Do what you have to to be happy.<p>&gt; As for why I didn&#x27;t recognize the CEO: I had just started, and it&#x27;s not like I memorize names and faces of these people. Hello, stalker-ville or ass-kisser-ville, and I am neither.<p>That&#x27;s just great. I&#x27;ll just be over here, being a &quot;stalker&quot; and &quot;ass kisser&quot; because I want to know who I&#x27;m working for before I join a company. But that&#x27;s just me, I&#x27;m sure I&#x27;m being overly cautious. It&#x27;s not like a bunch of developers have joined horrible companies helmed by horrible people that have instilled a horrible corporate culture before because they didn&#x27;t pay attention to that... Right?

So this is Lyft?

I felt so stressed reading this.

If the author didn&#x27;t want to do the work to learn the ins and outs of the company she&#x27;s being hired by (and yes, almost every company has a few quirks in their internal systems), why did she even apply?<p>Did she ask for a non-terrible laptop? Was she rejected? The article doesn&#x27;t mention this.<p>Did she _ask_ for a desk? If they&#x27;re onboarding many people at once, there&#x27;s always a chance something can get missed.<p>I think a lack of communication was the main problem here.

On the other hand this is being done soooo badly across the board there must be a saas opportunity here :-)

Who is this person, why is their weird holier than thou writing constantly upvoted? Did they secretly invent the internet?

A story of entitlement and expecting a job to work like a kindergarten classroom. No matter how far companies go to cater to their privileged tech hires they get ridiculed, taken advantage of, discarded. Ask why these ridiculous onboarding processes exist in the first place.

I can&#x27;t believe how casual and normal &quot;there was a dog in this room&quot; is made out to be in American work culture.<p>I have a potentially lethal dog allergy, so that&#x27;s a room, a floor, an office I could not be in at all. Maybe I couldn&#x27;t even take the job, so that the pets could have my spot in the company directory. I realize I have almost all the other privileges but this really doesn&#x27;t make me feel welcome in a workplace, and I don&#x27;t understand how pets in the office isn&#x27;t considered an anti-inclusive practice.<p>I guess it doesn&#x27;t matter now. Previously: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;FiloSottile&#x2F;status&#x2F;1116418872519929859" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;FiloSottile&#x2F;status&#x2F;1116418872519929859</a>

More context for the OP:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rachelbythebay.com&#x2F;w&#x2F;2020&#x2F;02&#x2F;29&#x2F;poof&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rachelbythebay.com&#x2F;w&#x2F;2020&#x2F;02&#x2F;29&#x2F;poof&#x2F;</a>

&quot;CEO&quot;. &quot;These people&quot;. Fortunately I have questions in my developer interviews that filter out the snarky techier-than-thou types in favour of those who actually take an interest in the business whose success their tech skills are supposed to be supporting.

What an attitude :(<p>If you don&#x27;t like a company, you have 3 options: 1. Try to change it, if that doesn&#x27;t work -&gt; quit without complaining. It is not your company 2. If you don&#x27;t wanna change it 2.1 quit 2.2 accept how it is<p>You should not complain and complain and complain. You only make it worse for people who either like their jobs (for whatever reasons you can&#x27;t see or understand) or they have, in comparision to you, no other choice.<p>I&#x27;m not perfect in this, i&#x27;m more the &#x27;i complain and start changing things&#x27;.<p>Really shitty old git hosting solution, 6 weeks later it was replaced by me with gitlab.<p>Onboarding procedures might be shit, but you should be smart enough to handle situations like this. Do i care if i have a desk at the first week? No, i will just work less efficient and if the sitatuion doesn&#x27;t change i either ask around and take care of it or i quit. And with quitting i don&#x27;t mean rage quit i mean &#x27;hey so yeah super sry about this but i have the feeling that we are not a good match.&#x27; quit.

I don&#x27;t care how many years you have on the job, not knowing the CEO&#x27;s face&#x2F;name of a company you&#x27;re just joining is weird.

Although it might feel weird as onboarding, as developer you should get used to use commands like curl or be able to set your development environment by typing in the console.<p>Those who rely only on simple installers are the one classified as red-flags