Onboarding

This Martin Fowler article identifies onboarding as a critical bottleneck for scaling organizations, detailing how ineffective processes leave new employees unable to access tools, feeling orphaned without guidance, and taking too long to become productive. The piece provides comprehensive solutions including creating clear onboarding paths with company mission understanding, implementing technical practices like pair programming and automated environment setup, and treating onboarding as a key business process requiring deliberate investment. Engineering leaders will learn to recognize signs of onboarding dysfunction and build systematic approaches to accelerate new hire productivity.