from Hacker News

What New Twitter Employees Do For The First Week

by RBr on 2/8/11, 3:11 AM with 66 comments

  • by phaedrus on 2/8/11, 4:32 AM

    My "new hire" treatment as government contractor was so bad I almost quit. Even though it's a huge organization there's no process at all in place; you're just thrown to the wolves. Basic things like where and how to get my security badge and car tags were not covered. I was not given any input about what was expected of me, but I found out about things I was supposed to do only when I was getting yelled at for not having them done. Everyone I work with are of the baby boomer generation, while I am a millennial, and instead of mentoring me they excluded me. Often I would get in trouble for missing meetings because the location of the meeting was spread by word of mouth but no one would come by and tell me. My first project was to port some code written by a much older engineer, but this engineer believed that he had job security if he were the only one who knew the system. Our boss told him "You WILL let him shadow you and read your code," and he shot back, "He will NOT shadow me and he will not see my code!" For the first few weeks, the only copy I had of the code I was supposed to port, I got from snooping in his trash when he threw away a CD (old hacker trick :) ).

    Things got better eventually but it was definitely the worst way to treat a new hire.

  • by ck2 on 2/8/11, 3:58 AM

    How can over 100 people be needed for basically a scaled blog system that consists only of 140 character titles (not even any article content) and RSS feeds? It doesn't even have a search feature (past the previous week) or html, or tags, etc.

    Doesn't WordPress.com do it with like a dozen people and their system is way, way, way more complex?

    update: no, wait, in December 2010 they announced it's over 350 people now

    http://blog.twitter.com/2010/12/stocking-stuffer.html

    What on earth are they all doing?

  • by aditya on 2/8/11, 5:32 AM

    Quite a contrast from the purported Honda "onboarding" process (or lack thereof). They basically let you figure out where you'd be most useful, and no one really tells you what to do. It seems to scale well, I suppose.

    A funny thing happened on the way to the solution. Try and picture this. On my first day of work, no one told me what to do. On the second day, the same thing happened, and on the third. That’s as much as I could take. I decided to meet with everyone I was coming in contact with to find out more about their individual talents and personalities, and to find out what was going on. Before I knew it, I was developing a picture of how things really were, and who needed what, and I became creatively involved in defining my own participation in relation to the skills I could bring to the table. In the process of doing this, I had complete access to everyone in the company, from other newlings to the President. Nothing but open cubicles no higher than 3 1/2 feet. I was allowed to learn, interact, and find solutions to every problem and need I recognized. I always found something important to do, and it became natural to provide effective solutions as needed. I am not a very unique individual, but I am effective because I am allowed to be. I also know it may be different for some people, experiencing this kind of freedom. I know that some people are petrified by this kind of freedom, and equate it to abandonment, and it drives them crazy not knowing what to do. I also know that even under the best of circumstances, people become sedate sometimes and settle in to patterns of repetition for false comfort. The answer, then, is to have them all switch places every few years, no matter how well they may be doing their job, because it is just as important to let everyone see their own position from someone else’s position. It also allows for the surprise of finding how much fun change can be when your creativity meets a new challenge. See what you end up with. It’s either this, or that.

    More here: http://aditya.sublucid.com/2008/11/20/let-your-employees-fig...

  • by wildmXranat on 2/8/11, 2:13 PM

    My first software dev job entailed building and configuring a LAMP stack. It wasn't much to deal with: some perl, some bash, some administration, IP filtering, code deployment, the basics.

    On my first day, the person responsible for the project went on vacation and for next 10 business days, I was told to do research. That's about it. It was the oddest startup experience I have ever had. Other members of the group, asked me questions about how everything was going, but couldn't answer any of mine. So I indeed did research.

  • by pavel_lishin on 2/8/11, 3:56 AM

    Seems like kind of an overwhelming amount of attention.

  • by flashgordon on 2/8/11, 3:56 AM

    for some reason this feels a bit skimpy on the details compared to the "first month at facebook" (or may be 6 weeks) item that came about a few weeks ago...

  • by dustineichler on 2/8/11, 4:07 AM

    What does the engineering onboarding involve?