Ask HN: What's the best way to train/onboard new programmers?

After working at my current position for nearly two years (having been a programmer now for nearly four) I am frustrated with our lack of onboarding and training. To their credit, my supervisors have heard my complaints and want to meet with me to talk about improving (or implementing at all).

I'm looking for ideas and experiences from people on what's worked to train programmers and what you've liked. Not necessarily on teaching Python basics, for example (although that's always helpful too) but more about the day-to-day business specific stuff.

For me, I feel like I waste hours or even days trying to figure out a problem or using some new technology or third-party software, and I feel like there are already people on my team who know how to do it and could both save me the headaches as well as making me a more productive member of the team. While they're quick to provide feedback/criticism when I make a mistake, there's not so much before-the-fact assistance to help me do it right the first time. I'd like to work on improving this but I'm not sure how.

Sadly, while question-asking is encouraged, question-answering is not. I can't count how many times I've asked something--to the group as a whole or to an individual--and it's just been ignored.

Do you find the "sink or swim" the best technique, or just the way it's done?

You’re totally justified in your frustration, most people think about onboarding in terms of signing forms and getting added to a payroll database when really, it should take you from day 0 to 90 to the end of your tenure. In short, its about getting you up to speed.

Even when companies have an onboarding program, they often fail to relay the ​​tacit​​ information a new hire needs -- like the tech or third party software you describe. That's partially because tacit knowledge is hard to record and transfer, but its also a because no one thought to create a knowledge base or make it easy to transfer that knowledge.

If you're looking to improve the training, I would strongly suggest recording the way you use tools on a day to day basis. That way its not overwhelming if you have to explain or write everything down for a new hire. Using giphy/screenshots/videos is a more engaging strategy for demonstrating how to use an application. If you record processes every once in a while, pretty soon you'll have a compendium of your workflow or a living operations manual. While you could use a cloud storage platform for this, something like https://tasytt.com/, let's everyone collaborate and has features like account provisioning, analytics (for compliance), and more fluid access than Google Drive.

We're a small team, but just today I was in the middle of a Slack chat with someone and told him I was lost, but never got a response.

Being a noob, after asking several "dumb" questions, I was given a link to Eric Raymond's "How To Ask Questions The Smart Way"[1]. You need to learn to ask questions the proper way.

Ask your supervisors to organize pair-programming sessions. That way you'll learn a lot.

[1] http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html