Onboarding as an architecture exercise

Teams treat onboarding as an HR problem. It's actually an architecture diagnostic. Every painful step a new hire hits is a signal about a coupling, an undocumented assumption, or a setup ritual that shouldn't exist.

The clock starts at offer signature

If shipping the first meaningful change takes three weeks, that's three weeks of architectural feedback you're getting for free. Don't waste it. Have the new hire keep a friction log; review it monthly.

Common findings

• Local dev needs four manual steps that nobody documented because "everyone knows."
• The first feature touches six services that should be one.
• Critical knowledge lives in one engineer's head.
• The test suite is faster to skip than to wait for.

Your onboarding time is your architecture's report card. Read it.