[jedinix]

At my first job out of college, I volunteered to put together a formal training program for new hires. I did so because my onboarding was an unorganized disaster, and I (somewhat naively) thought I could spare future new hires the same experience.

A couple of lessons I learned:

1. You need clearly defined processes and documentation. If you can't clearly define your processes, you can't expect a new hire to learn them. And if you have nothing written down anywhere, your new hires are going to be perpetually lost.

2. You need buy-in from the team, especially managers/leads. It takes time to define processes and write documentation. And it takes time to actually onboard and train a new hire. Managers should recognize this and ensure these responsibilities are distributed across the team.