At my current company, I am in charge of hiring and engineering management. We are a small startup that is doing some very interesting but technically difficult

At my current company, I am in charge of hiring and engineering management. We are a small startup that is doing some very interesting but technically difficult things. After my own on boarding process and casually quizzing the rest of the team, I started to realize that everyone on the team, from their perspective, worked at almost a totally different company than everyone else. I don't think this is too uncommon, especially in the early days of a thing, but we had a team member leave us so I asked if I could do an exit interview. The candid perspective I got from him was invaluable. He had a very similar experience to my own, where from day one expectations felt like shifting sands. I spent a few weeks really thinking about it and came up with this on boarding plan that we are using now. I broke it out into 3 months. I then talked to our CEO and head of development about what they would like someone to know and be exposed to in our company. I then broke that out into two separate on boarding plans. One was focused on learning about our customer experience, and the other a technical track. Then I took a look at our stack and documentation, and started an overhaul to put easy to read and find docs in a single place and make sure that on their first day they could type one command and run everything they would ever touch. On your first day at you start with us I provide the outline of what you can expect over the next three months, the customer experience track is actually pretty fun and by the end of month two you are working on an independent study with our data tools. The technical stuff is pretty light weight, but covers some of the stranger parts of our system. You're given plenty of time to learn and ask questions. The first month mostly working just with the developers and figuring out communication patterns and stuff. The second month you'd take on a small feature as a champion and work directly with design and product, and you're encouraged to explore through improving our docs/tests or building one off prototypes that you think would be neat with our product. By the third you've been exposed to everything in our universe and hopefully if we've done our job right, everyone feels like they have agency, know's who to talk to, and is really excited to work on some interesting and challenging stuff. The dual on boarding curriculum are in a git repo broken out by subject and month and tied right to our knowledge base. I personally think creative agency is one of the most important things for getting the most out of new hires and setting the tone. So that was kind of the focus of the scaffolding I put together. You can squash a fantastic asset by being aloof, having confusing practices, or in general just not being sensitive to how people learn and being reactive to it.