> Everyone who has to go through it isn’t going to fix it,
Why not?
> because they’re new and have their actual job to get to.
No, they don't. Their job right now is to get up to speed. Part of my job is to get them up to speed. If anything, a minor diversion to spruce up the onboarding docs a little bit is one of the more concrete contributions either of us can make. And importantly, they don't have tribal knowledge crudding up the works, and if they manage to say something that is completely wrong, then that means they didn't understand something important and there is no better time to fix that than right now.
If you let an awful experience stand as it is, you aren't a neutral party, you're complicit.
Nobody is going to make the onboarding process awesome instead of getting down to coding, but it should be better every time you run through it. If not before (due to entropy), at least after.
They're also new enough where its often unclear if the docs are wrong, or they are wrong.
Obvious mistakes, by all means fix them, but for more complex things its often a net negative for a new person to try and fix before they have context.
Do you guys just dump people in the docs and abandon them?
How’s your turnover rate?
Restating facts as you have heard them is a valid form of consensus building. If they don’t match, then everyone is better off if that is corrected before you act on them. If I unload a bunch of information on you and you just nod along, I have absolutely no idea what’s going on in your head, I just have my own narrative which could be anything from wow this is going awesome to wtf is wrong with this bobble headed jackass. Unless you articulate, I won’t know which it is until you’ve done a number of things incorrectly and we finally challenge you to explain yourself.
If you think the docs are wrong, and propose a fix that is worse, then a conversation about that will save us days, weeks, or even months later on. And that will also save your standing with the team. But if you’d rather fashion a pretty necktie out of all of this rope then I can’t really stop you, but I sure am going to heckle you while you do.
Why not?
> because they’re new and have their actual job to get to.
No, they don't. Their job right now is to get up to speed. Part of my job is to get them up to speed. If anything, a minor diversion to spruce up the onboarding docs a little bit is one of the more concrete contributions either of us can make. And importantly, they don't have tribal knowledge crudding up the works, and if they manage to say something that is completely wrong, then that means they didn't understand something important and there is no better time to fix that than right now.
If you let an awful experience stand as it is, you aren't a neutral party, you're complicit.
Nobody is going to make the onboarding process awesome instead of getting down to coding, but it should be better every time you run through it. If not before (due to entropy), at least after.