Onboarding

The importance of properly onboarding an engineer to a remote team can not be understated. The majority of talent found on Upwork is used to working on small projects that last 1-3 months at the most. To ensure that a new hire is set up to hit the ground running, and be able to maintain that velocity, a number of steps need to be taken to acclimate them to valuable, contributing member to a remote team for an indefinite period of time.

The steps for onboarding a new engineer are:

1. Increase their hours in Upwork to 40
2. Create email address in format of <firstname>.<lastname>@durolabs.co
3. Add email to appropriate Google group (front-end, back-end, qa) so that GCP permissions are set

4. Invite engineer into Slack using their new @durolabs.co email as a multi-channel guest with access to the following channels:

   Public

   • #dev-bugs
     • Dev-bugs allows for alerting high priority/urgent bugs and functions as a place to discuss them in a lower latency way.
   • #dev-prs
     • This channel is where all of the engineers will place their PRs that are ready to be reviewed by their fellow engineers. The engineers that are reviewing their PRs can give comments on the posts that are in this channel to further expedite the reviewing process.
   • All alerting rooms e.g. #alarm-*, ci-*, git-*, jira
   • #support_zendesk

   Private

   • #check-in-$name
     • Each engineer gets a 1 hour 1-on-1 or "Check-In" with a manager. These can be scheduled at any point of the week with the engineer. Please see Weekly Check-Ins for more information.

5. Back-end engineers need to be invited to these supplemental Slack channels:

   #dev-backend

6. Invite to them GitHub with their email address, giving them access to the relevant repos (add license to GitHub if necessary)

7. Contact Engineer through Upwork to let them know they can start accessing the accounts that have been set up for them

   The following sample message can be used:

   Hello, <firstname> I’ve created an email account for you:
   email: <firstname>.<lastname>@durolabs.co password: changeMe! (prompted to change on login)
   
   Sign-in link: https://gsuite.google.com/dashboard
   A few initial things when you log in:
   1. Enable 2-Step Verification (important!)
   2. Check for an invite to Github and our company Slack.
   3. Create a GitHub account with your new @durolabs.co email in the style of <firstname>.<lastname>-Duro
   4. Add a photo of you as your profile picture to your Slack and GitHub accounts.
   
   When you have finished the above please message me on Slack.

8. Add them to Jira
   

9. Add them to Standuply

10. Follow the Access Matrix

11. Start communicating with the engineer on Slack
    Start a conversation between the engineer and their management team. This is where a number of topics are discussed at different intervals as the engineer is slowly integrated throughout their first day. The following onboarding script can help with facilitating this Slack conversation and includes: