2 posts tagged with "onboarding"

A newly hired VP of Engineering has three things the org watches closely: what they cut, who they keep, and how fast they announce a plan. Get the sequence wrong and credibility is gone by week 4 — the org decides you're either a reorganiser or a lame duck before you understand the codebase. Michael Watkins' The First 90 Days is the foundational reference, but it's written for general executives. Engineering orgs have specific traps.

The counter-intuitive move: announce less in the first 30 days than you think you should. Not "listening tour" theatre — an actual measured pause while you read the org's calendar, incident history, and deploy pipeline.

You've just hired a senior developer. They start Monday. When will they be fully productive?

HR says "30 days." The hiring manager says "a few weeks." The developer themselves says "give me the codebase and I'll be fine."

Reality is different. Coding activity data tells a more honest story about what new developer ramp-up actually looks like — and it's longer than most organizations plan for.