Episode transcript

Edit transcript

Ryan Burgess
Hello everyone and welcome to episode 36 of the front end Happy Hour podcast at some point or another, we all have to start a new job. It's never easy but having a good onboarding process can make the world of a difference. In this episode, we'll be talking about our experiences with onboarding processes and talk about things that we've found helpful. Let's go around the table and give brief introductions to the episodes panelists, Augustus you want to start it off?

Augustus Yuan
Yeah, sure. My name is Luca Sassoon. I'm a front end engineer at Evernote.

Ryan Anklam
I'm Ryan, a club software engineer at Netflix.

Stacy London
I'm Stacy London, a front end dev at Atlassian.

Ryan Burgess
And I'm Ryan Burgess. I'm a software engineering manager at Netflix. I'd also like to mention that in a future episode, we'd like to do an AMA episode where we'll be answering any questions from our listeners. So go visit front end, happy hour.com/ama to leave us a message. And if your question is selected, we will put it on the episode and answer it. It can be anything from coding questions to career questions to even personal questions that you want to ask an individual on the podcast

Augustus Yuan
ask Ryan embarrassing questions.

Ryan Burgess
Yeah, you can. You can ask me anything. Well, hopefully it's not too bad. In each episode of the front end, Happy Hour podcast we'd like to choose a keyword that if it's mentioned at all in the episode, we will all take a drink. What did we decide today's keyword is setup setup. So if any of us say the word setup throughout the episode, we will all take a drink does that

Ryan Anklam
one or two words is that actually count is one word you type it here is two words. So

Ryan Burgess
depends on which program you're writing. And I have noticed that sometimes you'll get autocorrected to

Augustus Yuan
two words or one word. Imagine a dash in between.

Ryan Burgess
setup. I don't like the word front end front end is do you put it as one word two words hyphen in between

Stacy London
dash sorry, Dash? There's no question.

Ryan Burgess
I don't know I go one word. I don't like one word I actually don't like it. I either like two words or the dash. Alright, let's get started right off the hop. What kind of processes do your companies have for onboarding new hires?

Augustus Yuan
So yeah, so I ever know we schedule a bunch of new hire orientations. And we essentially just kind of walk through them the history of Evernote and each orientation sessions, it talks like a little different thing like some security basics, like how to set up we have like a standard or engineering setup already. Know, we have a standard orientation for engineering and getting them bootstrapped to want to say it again with their dev environment. The onboarding process at Evernote was really hectic a year ago, and people would have to manually set up everything. And we have to set up all these config files and stuff.

Ryan Burgess
Cheers. But

Augustus Yuan
no, he chose the wrong word. But someone came in and wrote a script that just does it all for you. So it's a like a local MySQL database. That's a local Tomcat, everything and just brew installs.

Ryan Burgess
Yeah, that's helpful. I just having something that automatically does that. I know sometimes they'll have machine with already that's built on like an image that they can just throw on to all the different machines as you start, which is pretty helpful. Right?

Stacy London
Right. Right. Do you guys use Docker at all for setting up?

Augustus Yuan
There's gonna be a fun episode.

Ryan Anklam
There's gonna be a memory episode all over

Ryan Burgess
again. I hope not.

Augustus Yuan
We've been talking about Docker a lot. But we're not there yet. So we haven't used it yet. But we everyone is kind of like the way you should use Docker and like, Yeah, but you haven't yet started laughs

Stacy London
and so I'm fairly new still, I mean, five months in,

Ryan Burgess
but the so it's fresh in your head, it's

Stacy London
fresh, it's fresh. I remember it very clearly, there was the first day was sort of like two thirds of the day was in a room with all the other new hires because they had hired like 15 different new people from different departments. And they were all in one room. So that was kind of cool. Seeing, you know, it wasn't just like you and your team, you actually got to meet some people from other areas. And then just an overview with someone who's like dedicated to doing like new hire onboarding. So you got a bunch of swag you got like your backpack and all the Atlassian stuff, and then introductions to like, benefits and just reviewing all that kind of thing, which was really nice. And then the latter half of the day was meeting the team that you got your laptop, you got set up with some things, but at that point, it was kind of like, meet the team and then just go home, like, you know, relax, like don't worry about trying to set up your development environment and get going like the very first

Ryan Anklam
day onboarding is exhausting, right?

Ryan Burgess
It can be well it's also nerve wracking to is your first day on the job. You're taking in all this information. You want to get started. You want to have a good impression. It's tough now that it's very tiring. It's probably one of the most tiring days of your job. For sure. I know Netflix very similar to we have Have a bit of an orientation that's fairly small, I wouldn't say it's like a big process, but you meet with like IT and HR. And same thing. It's like a bunch of new hires all at once, or at least a handful of people. So it's not just you by yourself, which is nice. You get to meet new people that are joining the company, it's important to like meet your team. And we do usually get you starting to set up your machine. Cheers. That is one thing that we do early on another thing that I thought was really cool. later down the road, we do have a employee like new employee college thing that's like a full day where they like walk through different things on Netflix, I thought that was really good, too, because you get started for a while. And then there's all these open questions that you may have. But they slowly get answered during that time. So I thought that was really cool. Another thing that you do down the road too is you actually meet with the CEO, Reed Hastings. So you meet with him and get to like, ask him questions. And it's a small group, maybe like 10 people that meet with him. And you get to ask him some pretty interesting questions, which I thought was really, really cool. Because how many times you actually get the opportunity to sit with a CEO of a large company in hospital rare? Yeah, I thought that was really

Augustus Yuan
does that this Atlassian? Dude,

Stacy London
no. Well, I mean, I guess they could have flown me to Australia.

Augustus Yuan
Oh, that's true. That would be amazing. That'd be amazing. That'd

Stacy London
be like the best onboarding ever. No, no,

Augustus Yuan
actually, we only recently started or Yeah, fairly recently started doing like, people got to talk to Chris O'Neil, our CTO, but I guess Netflix has been doing that for like, since they've been doing it

Ryan Anklam
for a while, right. And I got to meet with a small group as well. But it's changed a lot since I started four years ago. I mean, when I started it was, I think my onboarding was me. And Chris, my manager, we sat down, he gave me a PowerPoint that had, like things you should do in your first week, your first month, your first day, it was really neat how he kind of had an outline like that. So you kind of knew exactly what to expect for the whole first month, you were on board. And then you got pushed off to your onboarding, buddy. And he kind of walked around and showed you everything you had meeting set up with, like key business partners, but it was very unstructured back then. Right? It was kind of just go in and whatever your manager wants to do for onboarding, but I think it's a little bit more structured. Now. A new employee college was tiny. For me, I think there was 15, maybe 20 People in my new employee College. At the time. Yeah, huge tents outside and formal lunches, setup and everything.

Ryan Burgess
I would say it's still fairly unstructured, because well, I totally stole that idea from Chris two is I love that the new employees that join my team, I give them a slide deck that shows you, you know, this is kind of what I expect in the first week, this is like week two, basically up to like three months, these are kind of some of the things that you should think about, it sets you up for success, knowing, oh, this is what's expected of me. I don't necessarily have to do this right away. But these are things down the road that I'll have to do. It's really nice that way to just kind of have some sort of structure. So I've totally stolen that idea. And I've used that many, many times. But I do think it's a lot. A lot of it is up to the manager, there's those things like new employee College, and like the IT and HR orientation. Those are done like those are done, the manager doesn't have to do that. But why don't remember having it HR HR orientation. I do think they started that a little more. I had a little bit of that, but not really I've noticed it more with new people that have joined Netflix in the last little while that they've had that a little more structured. Yeah. So I think that's even kind of cool is that companies can adapt and change as they do, like even gusta, sane Evernotes kind of done a little more process driven, even for how the devices are or sorry, machines are set up set hours, cheers.

Stacy London
We had a 90 day plan thing. I think that's fairly common. Yeah. Last thing that your manager comes up with a 90 day plan, they sent that to me, before I started so even knew like before it came out here, like what, what was expected of me, which I thought was kind of awesome. So I could ask questions, if I, you know, was confused about something or whatever. And in then on the first like, week, it was like, first few days, get your development environment going, you know, de, you know, in the next like two weeks, do some pull requests and get the go through the whole process, like, pick off like they filtered the backlog to pick, put labels on UI fixes that were kind of small, like maybe just a couple CSS, lines of CSS that might actually fix this thing. So they weren't overwhelming from a technical perspective, but it gave you the opportunity to see the entire flow from beginning to end of going something going to production. I

Ryan Burgess
like that. That's like a lot. It's so nice. It's there's no pressure. There's not like date sensitive. No, it's very small. But you actually go through the process of making the fix committing something getting a PR done, actually seen it hit production and go okay, these are the steps to actually doing it. I like that

Stacy London
a lot. Yeah, that was really nice. Yeah.

Ryan Burgess
Do you think it's like should be something that's done like really early on, like you said week or two that you had to do that? Is it something like I know, I've seen some companies want you doing it like in a first day? Yeah,

Stacy London
I think first few days is like a little maybe aggressive. And might especially if you don't have something like Docker or some tool that makes the setting up of your environment, just choose choose one, one click or whatever it took me a couple days because it was individual installations and like 1200 command line things just to get going. And it was some things didn't go right, you had to ask your teammates for help. So I feel like in the first few days is a little, a little much.

Ryan Anklam
It was at least a full week before we had our DEV environment setup back in the day, because we are that's when we were running the full website on a local dev server. Full Java austrack. struts. Yeah, it was just a pain to get set up.

Augustus Yuan
Cheers. Cheers. Yeah, that was the same for us. It would take like a week minimum to get set up. But ever since we had bootstraps. But after this engineer named Patrick, he basically took our old blue CLI commands and made it a script. It takes maybe two days, Max, assuming permissions are all figured out, which I don't know. I don't know about you guys. But sometimes we've run into that issue. It's like, Oh, oops, we forgot to give you stash access. And you spent Yeah, it's been like, I don't know, like an hour or two, like, I'm trying to login. But wrong password or some useful

Ryan Burgess
here. Yeah, that is always frustrating, because then you think you did something wrong. And then you keep trying to debug it. And really, it was just someone forgot to add you to a certain like, list your missions. That's actually one thing to at Netflix that I love is when we kick off a new employee. It's like I have these defaults that I can select for them to like, as they're starting, they need access this, this and this, and it's all taken care of for them. As right when they start now everything's set up. It's actually set up early. Like I know, I always joke when people join yoga, how many? Do you have 400 emails? First day like holy shit, I definitely had, I think it was about 404 10 or something. And some of them are useful probably in the last like day or so. But most of it is just a good way for you to set up a bunch of filters, because you'll get a lot of like prod alerts and fill builds all that kind of stuff that you don't necessarily need. Well, maybe you do, but you put it in a folder that you don't have to check all the time DC you'd brought up Docker, what is Docker

Stacy London
containerization tool, I guess I'm probably not the best person to like fully describe it. Because I'm not one, I've never actually set up an environment. I've, I've used them I've used I've used Docker to my last place, they had the entire back end environment encapsulated into a Docker container. So I didn't have to manually install Postgres and mainly installed like, all the services like rabbit and rabbit MQ and all these different nice sets.

Augustus Yuan
Yeah, yeah. You're on? You're

Ryan Burgess
on a roll.

Stacy London
Yeah. So you basically it's just press a button, it fires it up. And then you have all these things going already for you, which is I think it's it's really slick. And then the front end piece of it was running locally. So I had like, Node running my gulp scripts, or whatever it was like that was all local, not in a container. But all the backend stuff was containerized, which was really

Ryan Burgess
cool. Which is nice, too, because then even on your front end, like if you have Node running, you're just npm install, I'm sure. And then you're running, which is great.

Stacy London
Yeah, my current team and the bucket they are, there is a docker instance, to get going. That's kind of a newer thing. And they're still iterating on it to make it better and get all the things necessary into it. So it's super easy to get someone going. The front end pieces are just I think the last kind of we need to figure it out a little bit better to make sure that we can do development locally, easily.

Ryan Burgess
Very cool. Ryan, you mentioned having a buddy I think Stacy might have mentioned that, too, that like an onboarding, buddy. Is that something that companies should do? Do most companies do that? Do you find that useful when you start?

Ryan Anklam
Yeah, I really like to have an onboarding, buddy. You're the sort of someone you could lean on, because I had tons of questions and even just like, hey, where's the bathroom? For somebody that's kind of like, you know, I'm definitely a little bit shy, and it takes me a little while to warm up to people. So having a buddy, someone that you've spent most of the day with, that you're already comfortable with and warmed up to makes you much, much less hesitant to ask a question when you have it. So you know, for someone like me, it was great.

Ryan Burgess
And you know, they're assigned to answer those questions. They're like, that's part of your job.

Augustus Yuan
Yeah, we're out of curiosity how long does alright maybe it's like an indefinite thing, but yeah, good because I guess for us how long is what having an onboarding but he or I guess I guess it goes with how long it's expected for you to be on boarded.

Ryan Burgess
I don't know if we have a set timeline. That's an interesting question. I don't think we've ever said like, you know, it's a good question,

Ryan Anklam
though. He asked me questions for the first birthday.

Ryan Burgess
Yeah. And then you're done. I think as you go, you start to learn you meet other people too and know that there's certain people to go ask questions for because I think that's one thing that is really tough when you're onboarding is just knowing who to ask the question to, because there's always gonna be someone in the organization that knows something more than the other person. And I think it's always like, Who do I go to ask this question to? And so eventually, I think you just naturally move away from just having one buddy, because you start to learn and meet other people that that may have a better answer.

Augustus Yuan
Yeah, it's interesting, because since intern seasons kind of starting, like a lot of interns are coming into companies, like for our intern program, we have a dedicated mentor. So they always ask them questions. But I guess for our new hires, we don't have an onboarding, buddy, which actually sounds like maybe a good idea. We just like kind of expect, you know, the team is oh, you should feel comfortable asking anyone on the team, but I think make like really good points, like, especially on your first day, yeah. can be really intimidating to like, you know, you don't even know who to ask.

Stacy London
Yeah, I think it's important to give Yeah, just have that one person, you know, is like, available to you. Because, like, if you're if you don't get assigned anybody and like, you look around, and everybody's got their headphones on coding away. It's like,

Ryan Burgess
just tapping them on the shoulder

Augustus Yuan
interrupt. Yeah. Exactly.

Ryan Anklam
Which person is the least likely to bite my head off?

Ryan Burgess
If I seriously, no one should be an asshole. Right? Probably not good.

Ryan Anklam
We are engineers are very known for being very friendly and welcoming, are we?

Ryan Burgess
I was thought, sir, no. What about companies providing documentation? Is that something that most of your companies do? Do they have like a large repo or like a readme, some sort of documentation, whether it be getting the dev environment put together? Or yeah, clutch, those clutch? Or just even understanding like org charts and things like that? Is that something that's provided to you?

Augustus Yuan
Yeah, actually, for us, we just started doing this where we have like this gigantic kind of package that you come when you come in, and it just has links to everything like Carola builds big links here, the whole the repo links. And this is all for, like permissions and information that you have or you need. And so yeah, that's all provided, at least for us. And we only charge of that to like owning that. So actually, we have an awesome engineer Santiago, who just kind of owned it. He was like, we need to fix this. And he's the and he worked with our VP of engineering to kind of get that set up. But it's kind of oh, well, he worked with HR to kind of get that all set

Ryan Burgess
up. Nice. Cheers. I mean, I think that's, it's nice seeing someone champion that though, too. Exactly. Especially at a startup, you're not always gonna have every process set up right away. Cheers.

Stacy London
Cheers. For Atlassian or like, Bitbucket I'm sure each like product is different at Atlassian. But for Bitbucket, there was so Confluence product at Atlassian. Document. You need to use Confluence. Yeah, to use Confluence. Right. So there's, like copious amounts of documentation, almost like overwhelming amounts of documentation, which is, which is cool in some respects and other specs for like, I can't find anything I don't there's like 700 pages. But there was a developer setup guide that every time a new cheers, cheers.

Augustus Yuan
Which is a great word.

Ryan Anklam
You're going real hard this time.

Stacy London
Yeah, hard cider. So there's the developer setup guide, I highly

Ryan Anklam
feels inadequate next year, hard cider.

Stacy London
And then from that guide, there was links to like, like comm similar what you were saying like links to each build environment, links to how to test how to do all the things. So that was fairly well done. And then each new person that started so like, when I started, I went through it had no one had gone through it in several months. So there were some things that were a little bit out of date that didn't get updated so that I, you know, maybe you were I might have run into an issue and then I updated it right then in there, too. So it kind of keeps it keeps it going.

Ryan Burgess
I think that's actually a good one too, is fine. Having the new person update the documentation, because that's the tough thing is how do you keep it up to date? Well, the next person that looks at if something's wrong, fix it.

Augustus Yuan
Yep. And surprisingly, that happens via

Ryan Anklam
coding tasks, like find something that's out of date and the documentation,

Ryan Burgess
it'd be so easy documentation is always out of date. It's never good.

Ryan Anklam
That's the worst part of our documentation. It's yeah, immediately out of date.

Stacy London
Yeah. Did you guys do you guys have like an internal I don't know. Wiki recovered

Ryan Anklam
basically all of it with Confluence. Right. We had said ton of confluence like I think we've done a good job of consolidating it now for like the we have a goal link, just for stuff specific to our team where you can go find all the stuff relevant now, which is really helpful. I use it all the time. Still, even the other thing that's super helpful and Netflix when you get started is we have a page of just acronyms, because there's so many acronyms, and the first day you get thrown so many things and you have no frickin clue at anyone's Talking about. So you go back and look at this go acronyms page. And it's I mean, it's huge Oh,

Ryan Burgess
it's huge and it is so useful. I know my first like couple weeks I spent a lot of time on there. Because also at Netflix, I know this is like one thing that said a lot is when you start they'll be like, just ask questions like, if you don't understand something in a meeting, interrupt, ask question like because you know, especially if it's an acronym or a project name, we have a lot of code names. So not everyone's going to know it. But I think that's really difficult to expect people to do that as a new employee, because even Ryan, you said you're like a little nervous at the start your take some time to warm up to people to ask those questions. So even though everyone's like, no, no, just ask questions. And I'm guilty for it. I say it all the time. I'm like, make sure you interrupt, speak up in you know, like, say, what's that? And ask questions. I think that's really tough to do. So I think having some place that you can at least go to write down that acronym and go quickly look it up after and go, Oh, that's what that means.

Ryan Anklam
And gives people confidence, ask questions, right? If you actually know a little bit of context, what you're talking about, exactly. You

Ryan Burgess
don't feel stupid asking what one little term is. And yeah,

Augustus Yuan
we're gonna steal that idea. I'm gonna champion this. Like, it's actually Yeah, well, well, I know we yeah, we have so many acronyms, that it's just a nightmare to remember them all. Oh, it's even

Ryan Burgess
hard. Once you're there, too. There's times when I'm like, what does that acronym mean? Again, and I have totally gone and looked it up again. So it is. Yeah, like that. You can put it in Evernote, you could have a notebook for onboarding or something.

Augustus Yuan
Yeah, actually, we do. I forgot that since you mentioned confidence. But yeah, we do. I just have like Evernote notebook where it's like onboarding, which makes sense.

Stacy London
One of the the other pieces to the onboarding was on the 90 day plan, it was like, you know, go find this person, set up a meeting with them and have them review X. And it was like, meet with the product manager, have them review the product meet with someone from DevOps to have them explain the infrastructure to you. And each like personally met with like, some of them had predefined stuff, because they do that all the time. So to have like, diagrams, and you know, a deck to like, go through with you. Other people just like would go through like ad hoc, we know what they know about a particular thing. But I thought that was kind of awesome to get names. Because like, you start and you have like, there's so many people. Yeah, like who do I ask who is anybody you know, there's just a ton of new names and new faces. So I thought that was cool to like, go talk to x Person X and have them explain their, their role to you and what they do. Yeah, definitely

Augustus Yuan
feels feels a lot more personal rather than just being here's an orientation session. Yeah. And whoever, whoever it is available, because this, I might steal that.

Stacy London
It maybe it doesn't scale. And like the team gets really big and might be tough for like, that's that one person to be, like, bothered over and over and over again, to like, do setup stuff. But I mean, the team is small. I think that's No, yeah,

Ryan Burgess
yeah, I think it's actually that's something that we've done all the time to, we'll have people listed out even in that dock that we're talking about or that presentation, it's like expected in your first three months, or whatever, to go and meet with certain people that you'll actually be working with not just your team, but maybe it's product managers, maybe it's designers and actually meet with them and kind of understand what they do. And they can answer some questions. I know one thing I always do with new hires, too, is on a whiteboard, draw the org chart for like UI engineer, yes. Because I think that's really important to really understand. How does my organization actually look? What does it look like? Who What is the reporting structure? Who do I go to? For what like, if it's talking about something for the iOS app? Who do I go talk to? So I try and build out a bit of an org structure to at least show them that within the first couple of weeks, I don't think it's mandatory on the first day or something like that

Stacy London
pictures, I think are really helpful, too. There's not enough diagrams and pictures, like being a visual person, when when someone describes like the development environment, or how things get deployed or whatever, I have a hard time wrapping my head around anything that doesn't have like pictures and flows and how this all fits together. So I think, maybe not all people need that. But I think that's really helpful to have, like, diagrams that you can show people how things fit together

Ryan Burgess
like that. How long should an onboarding process be? How long should we take time before we're contributing back to the code base,

Augustus Yuan
at least for us, we actually try to get people like contributing as fast as possible, whether that's like, and like we just make them kind of do like the smallest thing actually, one thing we're starting to do now is like, so they get comfortable with Git and committing to the code base, we just have them update documentation. And granted, so we actually have an intern who started and I just had her like, delete some white spaces or something, but it's like a really like trivial way. It's not like really harmful but it gets them started seeing the actual flow to control exactly exactly what happens when you like push and like how it builds out and stuff.

Ryan Burgess
That makes a lot of sense. It doesn't have to be something major, but I think goes back to Stacey's point of just getting something out there to really see what it does. Exactly. And to actually see that development process. How long is each year development environment setups? Take your companies. Cheers,

Stacy London
cheers. I think I talked about it a bit already. But yeah, a few days I think was what it took me to get going. And then, with a Docker setup, it should just be a pretty much a day. Some people got set up faster. I mean, it depends on what your familiarity is. So like, I'm not Postgres wizard, or Python wizard, or Django, like those things are not like, I don't have specialties in those areas. So like, when something did go wrong, I was like, I don't know. Whereas other people on the team came on the team, maybe with that skill sets.

Ryan Burgess
And they set that up all the time. And they're a little more used to that environment. Yeah, exactly.

Ryan Anklam
When we went to node, our setup, time has gone way down, I think we can get someone set up in a matter of a couple hours. If it takes more than an hour. I think

Ryan Burgess
it worries me when it's over an hour, and we have run into those issues. I've helped enough people get set up on it. Cheers.

Augustus Yuan
So we've started kind of breaking things out. But we still kind of have this monolith repo. So you have to kind of set up the whole thing if you want to, like get any things working. So that's something that we've been trying to tackle. But so I know these days, you are experienced you talk about

Ryan Anklam
it's so nice when went to micro services. Now we just load up this tiny little node app. And

Ryan Burgess
yeah, no, it's huge. And you're only worried about if there's something not working, it's this one little thing and you kind of that can be a pain sometimes trying to find which micro service isn't working. But usually it throws a

Ryan Anklam
Yeah, it's not working for a new persons usually not working for everybody and someone's on it.

Ryan Burgess
Exactly. Someone else will fix it someone else's problem, not the newbies problem at that point, which is good.

Stacy London
Yeah, I think our process will get easier to once we're away from that kind of big. Yeah, we both like, all the things are required before you can even do a CSS change. You're like, Ah,

Ryan Burgess
I just want to CSS change. I should not need all this back end services, right?

Stacy London
Yeah. And we're getting there. Like it's we're moving towards like a single page app architecture. And there's the new bucket flavor that is just, you know, npm install done. Nice, which will be nice.

Augustus Yuan
To clarify. I when I speak I speak about my team, there might be other teams? Oh, absolutely.

Ryan Burgess
Yeah. That's the hard thing is

Augustus Yuan
imagining like someone from Evernote is like, it's like what

Ryan Burgess
Michael build is completely different than Yeah, this guy. We've talked a lot about positive things for starting a new job and what a good onboarding process should be. Does anybody have any onboarding horror stories, or even success stories that they would like to share? But I'm really interested in the horror stories.

Augustus Yuan
Have you guys read that Reddit thing that happened very recently, like a few days ago now. So only this person like went to see us career questions subreddit and talked about how he just got fired on his first day? Because he deleted all the production data at a startup. And he was talking, he was looking for legal advice or like advice in general, like, am I screwed? What do I do? So basically, what happened was in this onboarding document, which is extremely questionable, they had like, some information on how to set up your local dev environment and arson dash

Stacy London
RF, or, yeah,

Augustus Yuan
to clarify local dev environment, but also, in the documentation, there was something about how to set up like to connect to the production level database, whatever. And part of the setup process is to inject like fake data into your local database, but he was pointing at the production one, and for some reason, he has access. I don't know why. But he injected his and I guess the way the script works is like, let's drop everything and inject the fake data. And so yeah, I can actually add as a link Yes. Because it blew up and, and naturally, the, you know, a lot of people thank goodness, they commented and said, Hey, listen, like this isn't your fault complete? Like, I mean, sure, you cleared the database. But why is on the onboarding document like production? Why do you have access? Why do

Ryan Burgess
you have access to do or why is there not failsafe measures that

Ryan Anklam
verify that script should be like if we're not doing this in prod? Yeah,

Ryan Burgess
yeah. Why are you talking about production and also injecting something in a test environment? It just seems weird that the documentation is putting that together it's 4% of

Augustus Yuan
poor Yeah, I hear that's on the company. Like yeah, I can't wait for you guys to read. It's it's like his just reading it if he sounded devastated. He's like, I don't know what I'm gonna do. Like, I'm, this is my first I think it was an internship where I can't even remember but

Stacy London
bad company to fire like, especially if it's an internship like yeah,

Augustus Yuan
he said, What he said was the CTO was just like, just don't come back and legal might talk to you.

Ryan Burgess
The messed up thing is how many people have screwed something up in production like I have, it looks like, you know, you try not to do it, but it totally happens. We make money stakes were human. And that sucks that it was on his first day. But that doesn't mean that it's going to be that every single day. Yes. If you continue to make those same mistakes over and over again, okay, well, maybe let someone go at that point. But one mistake, that's that's terrible. Person also the company needs to have ways to prevent that from happening. Oh, yeah.

Augustus Yuan
Or like back up or tow Right. Like some cyber failsafe? Yeah, I don't know too much of the after, sorry, because I read that was like, Whew, I'm done with the internet today.

Ryan Burgess
In case that happens, I'm so glad that's not me. Any other horror stories that people have personally to them, you don't have to mention the company or anything. But

Ryan Anklam
so when I worked with Stacy back in Wisconsin, in my first week, there I met someone that was, so the company was very structured, and they had a very, a lot of red tape and a lot of levels of management there. And so one of the, I guess, an upper level architect came up to me in thing was my first week and I had no clue what I was doing. And I was looking at putting in I found what I was trying to do, I think I tried to put in some a warning banner or something. For one specific situation, this guy came up to me, he's like, No, you're doing it wrong. Like I didn't even meet this guy before. That was the first thing he said to me. He's like, I want this huge red banner on top of the page, just take up the top 30 Half of the user screen, and there's no way to get rid of it. I was like, Who are you? And here's the so dogmatic about this. And there's no changing his mind. And it was like the worst. This is like the worst taste in my mouth after meeting this person. I never want to work with them again. And I was like, I wonder if everybody in the companies like this, like, is this gonna happen all the time? Now?

Stacy London
First impressions are so yeah,

Ryan Burgess
it's a great point. Yeah. Cuz you're, you're setting up someone's scared to go ask that person. Now a question. I think that's good advice, too, is like remembering that when you are at a company, which, you know, we're even Stacy, you're fairly new at Atlassian. But you're now been there for a while. And so when there's new employees coming on, it's like, it's good to remember that, hey, I started out somewhere to like, helping people is a good thing. Don't treat them like shit. Yes, just because they're new and don't know something. We all had to start there. I still sometimes that Netflix, find them. Like, I did not know that. And like, I learned things all the time, which I love. But you have to feel that humility a bit, too, is like these people are starting out to

Ryan Anklam
Well, the first impression I got then right was that I have all these opinions. And I have a lot of ideas to make this product better. But nobody wants to know you're scared to share. And it's gonna. Yeah, just give me I told you so answers. And that was getting nothing more than that's the way I want it. I told you. So I don't know, I you know, ask, Well, why is there a better way? Can we think this through? Can we? No, this is how I want it. This is how it has to be done. And I mean, the first weekend in a place, and I was like, Alright, I'm not sure what I can contribute here, you know, because, you know, I don't want to just, no one just wants to sit there and sling code and do whatever exactly the toe because we I mean, we we've done this before we've been through this. And we want to have we have opinions, we have ways we think we make products better. And if that's not valued right off the bat. Yeah, your voice should be very, very bad precedent, right?

Stacy London
Yeah, I think it's really important, like within the first few weeks, to always ask someone who's new, what can we have done better? Is there anything that you're still confused about to like, check in and it doesn't even have to be the manager. It's just like, I'll go out of my way to do that with new people. Because I remember what it was like, to me nude, it's like, intimidating. So just be like, hey, you know, is there anything we can do better? Are you confused about anything? Still? Can we? You know, can I show you something that you've been wanting to ask but haven't haven't yet that kind of

Ryan Burgess
thing. Even when we have new people start? We'll ask them feedback on, you know, how was the onboarding process? Or, you know, what would you change? Because it's important as they're just going through that fresh, and they'll have opinions or hopefully have opinions if there's something wrong? Yeah, sure. That's great. Like

Stacy London
someone should have checked in with you to be like, you know, how are you feeling about your first few week experience? And I'm sure Did anybody ever like check in with you to be like, Can we do anything better?

Ryan Anklam
No, I don't think that was in the company's charter. What can we do better?

Stacy London
One of the jobs several jobs back were my first few days I didn't have a laptop or a computer of any sort. Whoa,

Ryan Burgess
how did you do your job as a software engineer with no laptop?

Stacy London
I was like, Wait, what am I gonna do? There's some documentation that you can print out you can read. It's like, Wow, do I not have a computer my first day?

Ryan Burgess
That is okay. That is the most important thing. You do need a computer your first day. That's important. Yeah. So how long did it take to actually get one was two days. That's so long. What are you supposed to write your code on a whiteboard or on paper?

Stacy London
Thankfully, they're pretty laid back. There was no like, why haven't you contributed any code yet, but it's in my moleskin. I wrote it, wrote and wrote it my moleskin

Ryan Burgess
Take a photo of it and then upload it somewhere. There you go. That's awesome. Before we end the episode, is there any advice that you would give to someone starting a new job? Or maybe it is advice, like we talked briefly about people who already are working at the company that can maybe make it easier on someone starting the new job? What are some advice that you would give to our listeners?

Ryan Anklam
So I would say my advice would be to people that have already been in the company and that are, you know, have new people onboarding is, just remember that you were once in that situation, and you had lots of questions, and you were confused. So you know, reach out to new people and ask them if they have any questions how they're doing, or you know, just go anyway to say hi to them and make them feel welcome, if you can.

Augustus Yuan
Because I'm entering an intern, she was kind of telling me some of the onboarding feedback. And one thing that I heavily recommend is consider doing like a pair programming session. Especially Yeah, it was like, super invaluable for her because she was struggling, even she didn't know how to do debugging in the Chrome console, because she comes from a Java, like, kind of so she was like, I know how to do it in Eclipse, but I don't know how to do it. I was like, I'll show you. And she's like, Oh, my God, I was like, how are you debugging? Before this? I was just like, you know, console logging. And it's like, oh, pair programming

Ryan Burgess
is really cool. Even just when you've been really experience, like you're talking to even an intern doing that, but like, even just looking at other engineers on how they do things, you will see Yeah, I'll sit with someone and go, Oh, wow. That's a faster way of doing it. Yeah. Yeah.

Augustus Yuan
It's you learn a lot of cool tricks by watching someone code. Exactly, exactly. So yeah, I heavily recommend that. And I also really, like I think, you brought it up six, you just having an onboarding, follow up, like, what did you like about this? What did you not and you know, just do that. And you can constantly make the onboarding process better.

Ryan Burgess
As someone who's joining a new company, I always recommend, like, we talked about the meeting with different people. But I think a good question for everyone when you're meeting with them is how do I work with you? Like what is, you know, what does that look like? What are things that you need for me to really understand what their expectations are view of you are? Early on, I think that's really important too, because everyone's going to expect certain things from you. But if you don't really get that up front, you may not deliver properly, it's really good to just ask that question right up front and really understand that. So I think that's always an important question to just ask people that you work with, what do you expect to me? How do we work together?

Stacy London
I think, sort of similar to that, like, what are you expected me also like? What do you like, tell me about the process that you have for developing software here? And why is it like it is, because sometimes you come from somewhere else, and you have, like, a way that you like to do things or way that you think is, you know, a very efficient way to do things. And the new place is different, but maybe it's different on purpose. So instead of just being like, I think we should do it this way. Like maybe there's a reason and getting that history from, like, new co workers is really interesting to me. Like, why is the process the way that it is

Ryan Burgess
historical stuff is the best of really understanding? Why did we do it this way? Because then you'll at least understand that because some things don't make sense until you really get that historical data. As we wrap up today's episode, we like to share pics of things that we have found interesting or thing like to share with our listeners. Let's go around the table and share pics for today's episode. I guess this you may as all started off, okay. Yeah.

Augustus Yuan
So I have two picks. One is the stream called stock stream. Are you guys familiar with Twitch Plays Pokemon?

Stacy London
No to general but not so bad. Okay,

Augustus Yuan
so basically, back in the day, well, Twitch has like an API. And so you can like crawl like commands, chat commands. And so what this guy did was like, Hey, let's stream a game, take the chat. People are saying, as commands and then we'll make it do something in the game. And so they actually were able to have like, people on Twitch play Pokemon, and they beat the game. And like they did like this really clever thing where it's like, people vote on what move to do. I'll just do that move one by one. And it's all to an API. Yeah, yeah. It's all through an API, or like, they have like a bot that hosts and like, well, like, crawl all the chat commands that comes in, like submit it, and then like, says, Okay, this is the command that everyone voted on. And they'll do that command. And it took, like, I think, like, a couple of weeks or month or something, but they eventually beat Pokemon. So that was pretty cool. But so what this is, this guy was like, Huh, that's pretty clever. So he basically put $50,000 and is having people vote on what stock to buy. And so he's been running it for a couple days now. So it's pretty interesting. I'm not sure how it's gonna go. But he invested 50,000 bucks. So that will be interesting to see. Yeah, he was like saying like, yeah, you know, hopefully, I just don't lose it all. But we'll see what

Ryan Burgess
happens opens our stock.

Augustus Yuan
So yeah, but so that's cool. So check that out if you're interested. My second pick is this thing called scrim Baba? Basically, it's, it. It's an interactive screencast to for teaching coding, and I think the way the person did it It was he has like a guy voicing over and you actually see like, what he's typing. And he has like a little preview image of what they're building in real time. So I think it's like a pretty interesting way of like teaching like people coding over the web stuff.

Ryan Burgess
Interesting. Let's cool. Ryan, what do you have for us?

Ryan Anklam
So my first pick is a playlist on Spotify for Sam helps felts house party. It's just a great mix, listen to your coding or doing work around the house or whatever. So that's my first pick. And my second pick is a blog post on the yarn blog about yarn determinism. And there's some really interesting nuggets in there. One of them that I found really interesting was you can get different versions of all of your packages based on what version of yarn you're running. So if different members on your team are actually running different versions, things might resolve differently

Stacy London
that hit us this week. And I actually, like started updating our documentation for everybody to like, lock on to a particular version of yarn, because people were like, I didn't even change anything in the yarn lock files different when I run yarn. And I was like,

Ryan Anklam
Yeah, cuz they hoist differently, different versions, or something like that.

Ryan Burgess
Very cool. Stacy, what do you have for us

Stacy London
two pics? Let's see. So first one is a medium blog post called a unified styling language by Mark Dalgleish. I really don't know how to pronounce his last name. But that's a tough one I thought was a really great post about the state of CSS and why CSS and JavaScript. Maybe he can make sense for the for many reasons. And I think it's just a really well done blog post. I still get those like that like teeth, quench like SCSS, summer jobs squirt, kind of kind of reaction. So I just I thought it was a really well done article. So check that out. And then the other pic is outgoing society by shed, just like a German techno producer. The music, I would describe it as lush atmospheric techno with maybe a twinge of dub.

Ryan Burgess
That's very descriptive. You just made a new genre of tech. All right. So for my first pick, I have an interesting new podcast that's put together by Reed Hoffman, who's the co founder of LinkedIn. It's called masters of scale. It's an interesting podcast because they interview a lot of people in Silicon Valley, and talk about growing a startup. So in some of the past episodes, he's spoken with like Sheryl Sandberg, and Mark Zuckerberg, I think there's a few other ones like there's only a few episodes so far. But so far, it's really, really interesting and hearing them talk about their stories and where they've come from and how they've built these companies. So I highly recommend checking that and listening to masters of scale. My second pick is a San Francisco specific weather app. If anyone's visited San Francisco or lives in San Francisco, they'll completely understand why this is a useful app. But the app is called Mr. Chilly. And it plots out all the different areas of temperature because San Francisco has so many little micro temperatures, you can be in one area of the city and it's like really warm out and the others like clouded over and super windy and very cold. So this app just nicely lays all the different temperatures out by the areas in San Francisco. So definitely a really cool one. It's really nicely done. Simple. I like it. Yeah. There's not much to it. It really is like you can swipe between the hours of the day and it will change throughout but that's about it. You don't do much else you just see the areas of the map and that's it and the temperatures. I like it.

Ryan Anklam
That's insane coming up here from the South Bay. I think the temperature changed almost 20 degrees today. I'm sure degrees down in my house.

Ryan Burgess
Yeah, and what is it today like probably like 66

Ryan Anklam
When I got here before we end

Ryan Burgess
the episode let's go around the table and let people know where they can get in touch with you.

Augustus Yuan
I guess this Yeah, you can reach me at on Berto Aug bu R to tweet me dogs, because that's what Jem says. But I'll say it to you know, I'm actually I actually like dogs to

Ryan Burgess
Ryan.

Ryan Anklam
I'm bitter sweet Ryan, on Twitter, GitHub. Cool.

Stacy London
Stacy Stacy Londoner on Twitter.

Ryan Burgess
And I am Burgess D. Ryan on Twitter. Thank you all for listening to today's episode. Make sure to follow us on Twitter and Instagram at @frontendhh. We also have Facebook, check us out on there. And don't forget to ask us some questions for AMA episode at front end. Happy hour.com/ama Any last words for this episode other than setting up your machines? Cheers.

Ryan Anklam
I think one of the onboarding things we should kind of make up is put everyone in the room with a bunch of NutriGrain bars and just let them go crazy.

Stacy London
Someday we'll explain this in show fingers