Onboard a new teammate without drowning them

Introduction

What to hand someone in week one, when to give them a real ticket, and the small rituals that make asking questions feel safe.

The uncomfortable middle

Most advice here is written for the extremes: brand-new teams and enormous organizations. Real teams live in the middle, where the pragmatic answer is rarely the textbook one.

Notes from the middle

• Process is what makes a bad day survivable, not what makes a good day efficient.
• The person who writes the summary owns the decision — so rotate it.
• “We should” statements rot; dated commitments don’t.

Questions worth asking

1. What would we do if we had half the time?
2. Which part of this would we defend in an incident review?
3. What are we pretending not to know?

Closing

Disagree, commit, and put the date on it. Then move on to the actual work.