Onboarding

Onboarding sets the trajectory of the engagement. It is critical to set the correct tone and expectations for your engineer. This page will acquaint you with the steps needed to get your engineer fully integrated into their work environment.

At a high level, the steps of onboarding are:

• Updating the contract in Upwork
• Proving access to your company's tools, services, and platform
• Setting the tone of the engagement with assigned reading and exercises
• First assigned issues/tickets

Update The Upwork Contract

On Upwork there will already be a contract open for the Simulation Challenge. Once we're ready to onboard, the only change we need to make is to increase the weekly hourly cap to 40 hours.

Providing Access

The first step to providing access (e.g. to Slack, GitHub, etc...) is to provide a work email address to your new engineer. Depending on the access that is automatically granted to email account holders on your root domain (e.g. @outlier.org) you may consider creating email addresses on a subdomain (e.g. @dev.outlier.org or *@engineering.outlier.org) to provide some authorization segregation.

Add the engineer's email to appropriate role (group).

Ensure that groups are assigned to the new email before moving forward with the onboarding process.

Information regarding groups can be found in the email administration document.

Use the engineer's new @engineering.outlier.org email it to invite them to:

• Slack

  • Invite them to the necessary channels and create their private weekly check in channel. Once you invite them to Slack, all future conversation will take place there instead of Upwork.

• GitHub

  • Give them access to the relevant repos (add seat to GitHub if necessary)

• Standuply

  • Add them to the weekly and daily standups

• Add them to the Engineering Department's Google Vacation Calendar

• Add them to Airtable (read only access to the production tables for Admin and Course Video Control)

• If the new hire is a BE engineer, (and if applicable) create DATO CMS Access Token for them.

Move the conversation to Outlier Slack

Once you have given the engineer sufficient access to be able to login to the Slack organization and view the repositories they will be working on, you should move the conversation from Upwork into your company's Slack. Here is a message that has has been very useful to us for this purpose:

I’ve created an email account for you.

Email: $engineerEmail

password: $generatedPassword (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 our Github organization in your mail

3. Check for an invite to our Slack organization in your mail

4. Sign into GitHub with your new @engineering.outlier.org email, name your account in the style of firstname-lastname-Outlier

5. Sign into our Slack

6. Add a photo of you as your profile picture to your Slack and GitHub accounts.

7. Once you have created your Github account with your @engineering.outlier.org email, please log into zenhub.com with your Outlier GitHub account credentials so I can get you on ZenHub’s radar. Don’t worry if you can’t login completely. That’s all you need to do at the moment.

When you have finished the above please message me on Slack

Once they message you on Slack, utilize their private weekly-check-in channel. Start a discussion where a number of topics will be discussed at different intervals. The engineer will slowly be integrated throughout their first day. The following onboarding script can help with facilitating this Slack conversation.