Reflections on Onboarding Practices in Mid-Sized Companies
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
The success of a software company is largely dependent upon the people who comprise the company. Given the pace at which most software needs to be produced, software companies need to make sure that new developers become as productive as quickly as possible when hired. The process of integrating new hires, often referred as onboarding, has been well studied in the context of large companies that have significant resources to bring to bear on the process. How onboarding occurs in smaller companies with fewer resources is less understood. To investigate how smaller companies address onboarding, we performed a case study, interviewing eight developers from a local company with a development team of about 100. We asked the developers what practices they experienced during their onboarding with the company. We found a high reliance on a buddy system and extensive use of code reviews to instruct developers in best practices.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it