> And yet the company had a painful/useless onboarding process.
I believe I have participated in the same onboarding process as the author. (Based on timeline and other hints, not 100% but pretty sure).
In my experience it was fine. Besides the usual basics like setting up accounts and making sure we had access to what we needed it also included a session where everyone made a small change to a service, testing it, PR-ing it and deploying it. Which is more than I can say about my onboarding experiences elsewhere.
Regarding equipment I am not a fan of the touchbar either (or Macs in general) but it was very easy to get an X1 running Linux (and keep the Mac as well). All I had to do was to ask and have my manager approve.
Overall I felt that there was a genuine effort to try to make sure that newhires had a good initial impression and smooth onboarding. The company was growing very fast at the time with a ton of people coming onboard every week so I thought that it was impressive that they managed to do as much as they did.
I believe I have participated in the same onboarding process as the author. (Based on timeline and other hints, not 100% but pretty sure).
In my experience it was fine. Besides the usual basics like setting up accounts and making sure we had access to what we needed it also included a session where everyone made a small change to a service, testing it, PR-ing it and deploying it. Which is more than I can say about my onboarding experiences elsewhere.
Regarding equipment I am not a fan of the touchbar either (or Macs in general) but it was very easy to get an X1 running Linux (and keep the Mac as well). All I had to do was to ask and have my manager approve.
Overall I felt that there was a genuine effort to try to make sure that newhires had a good initial impression and smooth onboarding. The company was growing very fast at the time with a ton of people coming onboard every week so I thought that it was impressive that they managed to do as much as they did.