When I started at Netscape (the social news site, not the browser), I spent my first two days doing QA on the application, and I would heartily recommend having

When I started at Netscape (the social news site, not the browser), I spent my first two days doing QA on the application, and I would heartily recommend having new hires do this. I got acquainted with all the aspects of the site, I didn't have to deal with other people's code (yet), and I gained that admiration and respect of my new co-workers by submitting a long list of bugs and XSS vulnerabilities that I found for them to fix. (Not really on that last part, but I don't think there were any hard feelings.)