The company behind the Cheezburger network is very real (http://www.crunchbase.com/company/pet-holdings-inc http://www.crunchbase.com/company/pet-holdings-inc).

The company behind the Cheezburger network is very real (http://www.crunchbase.com/company/pet-holdings-inc http://www.crunchbase.com/company/pet-holdings-inc). They run some very popular content sites. For example, I Can has Cheezburger is being visited by 3.6 million people per month. Their network as a whole is being visited by 12.1 million people per month, according to Quantcast (http://www.quantcast.com/p-75z9nhQwNH4Ek http://www.quantcast.com/p-75z9nhQwNH4Ek). How exactly is this business not "real" ? Now, to the point at hand. Having a new hire show up on the first day, get their work station setup, and complete a round trip of checking out code, fixing something real, and getting it back into the repository is a very real milestone. You might take it as being flippant or process-ignorant, but by getting that new-hire through that hurdle on day one can be seen as a major accomplishment. It may not be right for some businesses, but if you instead got your new hires to submit a change for review rather than for integration into a production build you'd achieve the same effect.