Developer onboarding process 101: Checklist & more

Before you start crafting your onboarding process, think back to your first few days at the organization. What did you expect and how did you feel? Software engineers in this position will be feeling excited, nervous, confused, mistaken, eager, and a range of other conflicting emotions. Good onboarding gets them from this state to feeling psychologically safe and part of the team.

Developers are the engine room for many organizations, and the importance of coding standards, frameworks, architectures and technical documentation makes employee onboarding more demanding, and more important, than for other company roles. It goes beyond first impressions: Glassdoor found that a strong onboarding process led 49% of employees to contribute to their new team in the first week. Equally, poor onboarding can kill your startup, so getting onboarding right is financially and strategically important.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through several important steps to successfully onboarding a developer, as well as offering an onboarding checklist.

What is developer onboarding?

Let’s start with a definition. Developer onboarding is the process of integrating new developers into a company, providing them with the knowledge, tools, and resources necessary to become productive members of the team. Good onboarding helps developers to feel welcomed, supported and equipped to contribute effectively, making it necessary for a good developer experience (DevEx).

The important elements of onboarding include the below:

Company

• Ensure that new employees understand and align with the company's mission, vision, values, and cultural expectations
• Educate new developers on process, workflows, communication styles, team dynamics and best practice to ensure smooth integration into the software development environment with a reduced learning curve
• Explain the company's organizational structures, highlighting key departments, leadership roles and points of contact

Team

• Clearly define the new role, responsibilities, goals, and key performance indicators (KPIs)

• Facilitate introductions and interactions with new team members, mentors/buddies and key stakeholders
• Maintain high levels of engagement through interactive training sessions, regular check-ins, and feedback mechanisms

Technology

• Guide new hires through the development environment and tech stack, including setting up and configuring tools and apps
• Help new developers to understand the existing codebase, architectures and coding standards. will require walkthroughs, documentation and code reviews
• Familiarize new hires with the company’s products, services, and codebase, including architecture and coding standards

Why is successful developer onboarding important?

Good onboarding makes for good DevEx, which benefits your new developer, their team, and your company as a whole. Making developers feel accepted, equipping them with the right tools and processes, and minimizing friction, all unlock a number of benefits. These include:

• Increased confidence: Successful onboarding makes developers feel valued and welcome, building confidence and enabling them to engage more effectively.
• Accelerated learning: By offering a structured onboarding, new developers will have the context and guidance needed for an improved learning curve. This allows them to quickly get on top of workflows and add value.
• Improved job satisfaction: Onboarding should instill feelings of pride and maybe even excitement. This leads to better overall job satisfaction and eliminates ambiguity about the role.
• Increased productivity: Psychological safety is central to productivity, and the best onboarding prioritizes this with clear results. For example, developers who report a high degree of understanding of their code feel 42% more productive than those with low or no understanding.
• Improved retention: Given the cost and frequency of employee churn in the first months of a new job, getting onboarding right can make a massive difference to retention and the bottom line.
• Better developer experience: All of the above adds up to better DevEx, which is evident in some crucial metrics.

High performance organizations invest massively in their onboarding programs. Google famously takes a comprehensive approach that involves extensive pre-boarding, training, orientation, one-to-ones and a project to kick off right away. The results speak for themselves, with 77% of Google hires considering onboarding a positive experience and new hires becoming fully effective 25% faster. Microsoft also emphasizes the value of pre-boarding as a means to incentivize higher performance and retention. The Redmond company even recommends site templates as supplements to onboarding covering pre-boarding, corporate onboarding and departmental onboarding.

Developer onboarding checklist

Onboarding should be flexible and subjective based on the culture of your company and engineering team and the seniority of the hire. That said, large parts of the onboarding experience have defined best practice, and the best way to implement these consistently and effectively is using a checklist.

This should be a living document subject to review and influenced by feedback data.

First day

• Detailed agenda: Lay out in advance what developers can expect on their day one, including introductions to team members, company policies, and an overview of the development environment
• Welcome the hire: Schedule a welcome meeting with HR and the development team, and announce the new hire to the wider group.
• Onboarding document: Share a single onboarding document that points the developer to relevant technical documentation and the extended knowledge base.
• Assign a mentor or buddy: Assign a mentor or buddy to guide the new developer through their first day and answer any questions.
• Set up accounts and access permissions: Ensure access from the first day to necessary accounts for development tools and systems, including:
• Source code
  • Database
  • Dependencies
  • API keys and credentials
  • Sample data
  • Test suites
  • Deployment credentials
  • Development notes
  • Dashboards and monitoring tools

Within the first 30 days

• Quick wins: Assign straightforward initial tasks or projects with short deadlines to help new developers get hands-on experience with the company's codebase and development processes.
• Regular check-ins: Schedule regular check-ins with managers, buddies and mentors to provide feedback and address any challenges or concerns.
• Knowledge transfer sessions: Schedule sessions that give a comprehensive understanding of the codebase and product, over and above training.
• Team meetings and activities: Encourage participation in team meetings and collaborative activities to foster a sense of belonging, inclusion and integration.
• Establish feedback loops: Set formal and informal ways channels to share and receive feedback, including thoughts on the onboarding process.

Within the first 60 days

• Shadowing opportunities: Provide opportunities for new developers to shadow experienced team members and learn internal processes and best practices for coding, debugging, and problem-solving.
• Additional training: Offer additional training and resources tailored to the new developer's specific skill gaps, role or areas of interest.
• Performance expectations and review: Set clear expectations for performance and progress, and conduct a mid-point review to assess development and address any issues proactively.

Within the first 90 days

• Evaluate progress and performance: Evaluate the new developer's progress and performance against predefined goals and benchmarks that are objective and clearly defined.
• Solicit feedback: Solicit feedback from the new developer as well as their peers and managers to identify areas for improvement in the onboarding process.
• Celebrate milestones: Demonstrate appreciation for your developer by celebrating milestones and achievements to reinforce a positive and supportive company culture.

By following this structured checklist, companies can ensure a smooth and effective onboarding process that helps new developers integrate quickly, feel supported, and contribute to the team's success.

Remote vs on-site developer onboarding

Everyone remembers how COVID forced companies to work out how to operate remotely in real-time. While we are not nostalgic for the days of swabbing our tonsils and upper nostrils, we are grateful for the best practices that emerged for onboarding developers, especially for remote-first companies like Cortex.

It's important to start by saying that remote onboarding should be identical to in-person onboarding in many ways. Developers prosper when they are able to do uninterrupted deep work, which is often easier when working remotely. The focus should be on addressing pain points that remote work can exacerbate, in particular around communications and culture.

Your remote onboarding should clearly explain communication norms within the team, and how remote workers engage with any in-person teams. It should also address challenges around time zones, as well as public holidays or cultural differences for developers based overseas.

Some considerations to address directly for remote workers include:

• Equipment delivery: Ensure timely and secure delivery of all necessary equipment (laptops, monitors, accessories) to the new hire's location before their start date.
• Remote access: Provide clear instructions and support for setting up remote access to the company's network, work environments, and all essential tools.
• Virtual team building: Proactively set virtual team-building activities to help build relationships and make the developer feel integrated into their new team.
• Virtual/on-demand orientation sessions: Introduce company policies, culture and processes using virtual sessions that engage the developer and allow flexibility based on their time zone.
• Welcome packs: Send personalized welcome packs to remote developers, including company swag, essential documents, and a handwritten welcome note to make them feel valued.

For a deeper dive into effective onboarding strategies in a remote-first world, check out this article.

Best practice tips for an effective developer onboarding experience

Designing onboarding programs, just like undertaking them, can seem like a daunting task, maybe even an overwhelming one. Given the cost of churn and the opportunity cost of slow time to value for new hires, we are sympathetic to anyone who feels nervous.

The good news is that there is defined best practice even for this subjective assignment. By using these as your building blocks, tailoring onboarding to your organizations needs becomes a lot easier.

Personalization and flexibility

Your onboarding experience should be tailored to the culture of your team as well as the individual needs of each developer. Consider your new hire's role, seniority, and prior experience to provide a personalized and flexible onboarding plan that addresses their unique requirements and learning pace. While designing onboarding be clear and unwavering on the skills, processes and culture that you're imparting, but flexible on the methods that you use to impart this knowledge to new developers.

Clear goals and expectations

Engineers love clarity, so it is vital to set expectations using clear goals. Outline what they should aim to achieve, using milestones like the above 30, 60, and 90 days. Clarity provides reassurance, with minimal risk of overwhelming the developer. This transparency sets the stage for future success, and two-way clarity fosters trust while reducing ambiguity.

Structured learning resources

Structure is the bedrock of a good engineering culture, and taking a structured approach to sharing resources facilitates a smooth onboarding process. Because the range of potentially useful resources covers everything from coding styles guide, best practices and code samples to internal documentation, knowledge repositories and tutorials, all the way to fantasy football details and lunch recommendations, structure becomes important. Be comprehensive and methodical when structuring your onboarding to get joiners up to speed quickly without overwhelming them.

Continuous feedback

To build an efficient and psychologically safe environment schedule regular check-ins and one-on-one meetings that provide timely support, address any challenges, and adjust the onboarding plan as necessary. Consider extending this to technical feedback with peer code reviews or pair programming sessions, enabling real-time feedback on coding practices, problem-solving approaches, and adherence to team standards. As well as being effective operationally, two-way feedback ensures that onboarding remains an evolving process rather than becoming an outdated monolith.

Culture and values alignment

Aligning your work with a wider mission helps with performance and job satisfaction, whether you're building B2B software or a cathedral. By incorporating activities that exemplify your organization's mission and principles early on, you secure buy-in and improve DevEx. Consider workshops, social events, interactions with the wider team, or even using a cultural ambassador from elsewhere in the business to demonstrate and explain culture and company values.

Leverage modern tools and technology

A big part of good DevEx comes down to using tools and technology effectively, and you should practice what you preach when onboarding new developers. Virtual training environments and interactive coding playgrounds are useful for minimizing setup time and facilitating collaboration, but the tool with the most utility for supporting onboarding is the internal developer portal (IDP). By centralizing access to resources and documentation, formalizing goals and targets through scorecards and enabling flexible ways to engage with tools and data, an IDP helps to ensure best practice across the onboarding process.

Review and iterate constantly

Onboarding is a journey and not a destination, and as Winston Churchill and Frank Underwood like to say, to be perfect is to change often. You should be continuously reviewing and iterating on your onboarding process based on data and changing priorities. Track time to value, feedback from new developers and retention rates to make sure that you are providing the best onboarding possible.

How can Cortex improve developer onboarding?

Internal developer portals make onboarding best practices a breeze, and Cortex's IDP is used by large companies known for excellent onboarding such as Adobe, Tripadvisor and Grammarly. Using an IDP provides new hires with access to tools, processes and documentation, while giving management and HR greater insight into how they are integrating with the team and settling in.

The Cortex Catalog provides access to documentation and visibility into dependencies, ownership and other information that new developers need to check frequently, including external documentation. Using the Catalog allows developers to become independent more quickly, and saves them having to make requests and feel like a newbie.

Another way to help developers fit in is by clarifying expectations for their role using Scorecards. These define expectations and responsibilities on short-term and long-term goals, and can be tailored with targets specific to onboarding as well as team-wide objectives. Clarity alone can be a form of inspiration, especially for those starting out in a new environment and eager to prove themselves.

To deliver on these goals, developers can avail of Workflows, which enable self-service for common developer tasks and flows, reducing context switching and time spent waiting on approvals. This feature integrates with all of your existing tools to provide templating, permissions, and actions in adjacent solutions.

Onboarding developers varies by team, seniority and culture, but one thing we consistently find is that everyone is grateful for clarity, transparency and efficiently. If you are interested in finding out how Cortex can support you in onboarding developers and building software, feel free to book a demo today.