Effective Onboarding Practices for Elixir Teams

Andrew Ek's talk at GigCityElixir 2024 focuses on the importance of structured onboarding for new Elixir developers. Ek highlights the challenges new hires face, such as learning legacy codebases, team practices, and business processes. He criticizes the common but ineffective strategies where new hires are left to self-direct their learning. Instead, he advocates for structured onboarding that builds specific capabilities through guided practice and detailed checklists. Ek emphasizes the benefits of such programs: faster integration into productive work and the ability to broaden the pool of hirable candidates. He also notes that well-structured onboarding can reduce overall cognitive load and improve team efficiency. Ek concludes by addressing the limitations of AI tools like chatGPT for this purpose, asserting that human-guided learning is more reliable for novices.