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SRE/DevOps/infrastructure team – what's your onboarding experience like?

2 points by jollyjellie ↗ HN
Just being curious, what's your or your team's onboarding process like? It has been one of the hard tasks to onboard as a new hire myself and to train a new hire, and was wondering what other people's experience and opinions are like. Any positive experience so far?

Thank you all!

2 comments

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verdverm
DevOps is inherently harder because it is broader. We have lots of show them around time, have them do maintenance or tech debt tasks at first, and save some smaller pointed enhancements so they can feel like they are making progress. Also have them own a major new enhancement relatively early. Take lots of time on PRs and generally be patient at first.
yuppie_scum
Ultimately success in DevOps/SRE is not about knowing everything in a company but about knowing how to track down the necessary information and/or learn it. So you should build a map of this info to the best of your ability. I put together a cheat sheet describing most of the infrastructure patterns as much as possible, links to the various tooling (ci/cd, observability, authentication) and links to spreadsheets listing all where generally to find clusters and cloud regions. I also put a brief summary of who owns what products or at least who I usually go to for the information. For early projects I try and find a low stakes project for the trainee that will touch as many different moving parts of the best practice infrastructure as possible.