Onboarding

How do people join your team? How long until they can do a build and run some tests? I'm not talking about understanding things well enough to submit a bug-fix PR or add a new feature, just build the code as is and run all the unit tests?

Our repo is hermetic, so that's good, it doesn't rely on having the right version of the compilers and libraries installed on dev machines. but what about the rest of dev tooling? IDEs are pretty common these days. Does your team have a supported one or two? Are there a set of plugins/aliases that are commonly used to improve your daily work? How are they shared/made available? What security groups/lists/permissions are needed? What websites does your team use to share things? What's your on-call policy, if you have one, and how do folks get added?

And this doesn't just apply to new hires or people onboarding to your team. What happens when you get a new laptop or need to re-image your current one? Get pushed to a new version of the OS? Find yourself helping out a coworker on their machine and try to use one of those tools?

And what if something changes? How do you tell the rest of your team? How do you add new capabilities without breaking things?

None of these things are insurmountable, and individually they might not take that much time, but overall they're things that slow you down, take you out of the flow, and generally detract from happiness. So think about how you can make things better for everyone.