My experience is that the best onboarding processes (at least for devs) basically boil down to getting you to have a real PR merged by the end of the first week

My experience is that the best onboarding processes (at least for devs) basically boil down to getting you to have a real PR merged by the end of the first week. The period could be longer for more complex orgs, but the time from logging in to first merged PR can be consider the metric to measure the success of your onboarding. Basically: 1. Here's how to get the dev environment setup locally. 2. Here's your first task. 3. Here's the people that will be most helpful in solving that task. Once you can submit a PR and have code review (and ideally have it merged), you're effectively onboarded. After this it's time start worrying about the culture/philosophy/meeting people/etc. Needless to say (hopefully), the new hire should not feel pressure to get a PR up quickly, the process and guidance should be set up for success.