I set the first impression with a beautiful welcome letter on their desk. Every time a new engineer joined, I customized their welcome letter, printed it out on high-quality cardstock, and signed it with a pen, “Welcome! ~Medium Engineering.” The letter expressed the team’s enthusiasm at their joining, followed by a beautifully formatted schedule of their first day. I included the name of their onboarding buddy (see the next tip) as well as a pointer to a guide to set up their dev environments to work on in between meetings.
