The single best metric for onboarding quality is time to first merged PR. Not time to complete a training module. Not time to attend all the introductory meetings. Time to ship real code into a real codebase.
At Dropbyke, we got this down to day two for most new hires. Not because we had some elaborate onboarding program. Because we had a checklist, a buddy system, and a backlog of small tasks tagged “good first issue.” The new engineer’s first PR was reviewed and merged before they finished reading the architecture docs. That’s the order it should happen in. Ship first, context second.
The real problem with onboarding
Most onboarding programs are designed around what the company wants to communicate, not around what the new hire needs to be productive. Day one becomes a parade of slides: company history, org chart, values, benefits, security training. The engineer sits through hours of content they won’t remember, and by the end of the day they still can’t push to the repo because their access request is pending.
Every hour spent in orientation that could have been spent writing code is a signal that the company values process over output. New hires pick up on that fast.
What actually matters in week one
Access on day one. Laptop, accounts, repo access, dev environment – all of it should be working before the engineer opens Slack for the first time. If access provisioning takes more than a day, your onboarding is already behind. Automate it. Test the automation quarterly by running it against a clean machine.
A real first task. Not a tutorial. Not “read the docs.” A real bug fix or small feature that touches the production codebase. It should be small enough to finish in a day, scoped enough to not need deep context, and assigned to a specific reviewer who will prioritize the review.
The first merge matters more than any presentation. It proves the workflow works, the environment is set up correctly, and the engineer can contribute. Everything after that’s momentum.
A buddy, not a babysitter. The buddy answers the dumb questions. “Where do I find the staging URL?” “Who reviews changes to this service?” “How do I get a test database?” The buddy isn’t responsible for the new hire’s career development or performance evaluation. That’s the manager’s job. Keep the roles separate.
Stop over-documenting, start pairing
I’ve seen teams spend months building elaborate onboarding wikis that nobody maintains. They go stale within a quarter. A 30-minute pairing session where the buddy walks through the deploy pipeline is worth more than a 20-page document about the deploy pipeline.
Keep documentation focused on what changes slowly: architecture overview, service map, on-call runbook. For everything else, pair. New hires should be encouraged to update docs when they find gaps – fresh eyes catch stale content better than any scheduled review.
The 30-day check
By the end of month one, a new engineer should be able to pick up a ticket, implement it, get it reviewed, and deploy it without asking how. If they can’t, something in the onboarding failed. Treat it as a systems problem, not a people problem. Did they get enough context on the codebase? Was the first month’s work well-scoped? Did the buddy actually check in?
Measure this with two signals: time to first solo PR (without buddy assistance on the workflow) and the new hire’s own confidence level. Ask them directly. “Do you feel productive? What’s still blocking you?” The answers will tell you more than any dashboard.
Onboarding isn’t a one-time project. It’s a system that compounds. Every new hire who has a good first week becomes someone who can onboard the next person. Every broken onboarding creates someone who spends their first month confused and frustrated, and that frustration echoes through their entire tenure.