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How to accelerate developer onboarding (and why it matters)

Overcome common onboarding challenges, get to productivity faster, and drive long-term retention with these proven strategies.

January 30, 2025 5 min read
George Kichukov
George Kichukov Field CTO

You've hired a new developer for a crucial role on your team. You'd likely prefer not to wait months for that person to become productive — but GitLab research shows this is precisely the situation many leaders face today. Nearly half (44%) of organizations say onboarding new developers takes more than two months.

Of course, getting a new developer up to speed requires more than just providing credentials. They’ll need to learn about project goals, processes, how your applications integrate, and your collaboration culture.

Cutting corners with onboarding can negatively impact your business across the board. It can lead to poor performance, disengagement, and low retention — which means you'll have to start the whole process all over again.

So, how can leaders get it right the first time?

Why developer onboarding takes so long: A closer look

Setup time

When a developer arrives on their first day, there’s a lot they’ll need to learn. Setup can include some or all of these processes:

  • Installing and configuring development environments
  • Getting user access to server-side tools, like version control, issue tracking, CI/CD, and security tools
  • Getting user access to relevant deployment targets and infrastructure resources, including dev, test, and production
  • Taking time to understand project goals, architecture, conventions, processes, and team culture

Developer onboarding time is often called “time to first commit” — how quickly a developer can get up and running and start contributing valuable work. So, what are some of the reasons it’s taking more time for developers to get to their first commit?

Process and systems hurdles

From setting up an ever-growing number of tools to training, developer onboarding can waste significant time and resources, reducing your team’s productivity and output. What’s more, there are a lot of organization- and team-wide inefficiencies that can make this process even slower. If you’re looking to improve your onboarding time, these are the hurdles that may be standing in your way:

  • Too many tools to learn
  • Complex or difficult-to-follow processes
  • Limited visibility into applications and environments
  • Poor documentation of onboarding processes
  • Difficult-to-locate (or nonexistent) application documentation
  • Difficult-to-access deployment environments

These challenges can slow any team down and be especially problematic when ramping up a new employee.

The hidden costs of poor developer onboarding

The ripple effects of slow onboarding are often overlooked. Take security, for example. CISOs need to ensure new developers understand and can apply the organization’s security standards to their work so they don’t inadvertently release applications with vulnerabilities. Do these new hires know all the regulations? The ins and outs of your organization’s licensing? You’ll want to ensure your organization avoids any cybersecurity breach — even if it’s accidental.

This impact extends beyond technical concerns. According to Forbes, efficient onboarding directly influences a company’s growth and long-term viability through employee engagement, increased productivity, and decreased turnover. And the stakes are significant: Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace: 2024 report estimates that low employee engagement costs the global economy US$8.9 trillion, or 9% of global GDP.

Poor onboarding doesn’t just delay productivity — it creates organizational vulnerabilities that can last long after a developer’s first commit.

How to accelerate onboarding

Improving onboarding time takes a multifaceted approach that requires communication with your teams, assessing your tools and processes, and an open mind for change. While the initial time it takes to address these challenges might slow you down momentarily, the return of acceleration — the better retention, developer experience, productivity, and innovative ideas — will be worth it.

Here’s where to start:

Identify the bottlenecks

Many of the challenges mentioned above arise from complexities in tools and processes, so the first thing you’ll need to do is find them. Where are the bottlenecks? Meet with your team to ask where they’re feeling the pressure, or conduct a survey to understand what’s slowing them down. Consider mapping out the complete value stream from idea to production deployment.

Find a platform that simplifies your processes

Finding one integrated application for the entire software development lifecycle means developers don’t need to learn different user interfaces with different idiosyncrasies and data models. This standardization and tool consolidation significantly simplifies onboarding.

Adopt organization-level standards

Using a standards-based approach to engineering projects is beneficial for onboarding as well as when developers transition between teams and projects. Project and issue templates keep projects consistent, and CI/CD catalogs encourage developers to reuse approved and tested components.

Many regulated industries have specific requirements for developer workstations that can make installing or customizing tools difficult. This can be even more challenging for third-party contractors and non-employees. A self-service approach to standardized environment creation and/or access to a pre-configured remote development environment makes it much easier to overcome this issue without compromising your security initiatives.

Establish quality and security guardrails

From implementing code reviews from code owners to testing in lower dev environments, ensure code produced by new developers is free of issues or vulnerabilities before deploying to production.

Use built-in documentation

It’s easy for documentation to become outdated, especially with Wiki tools, since they’re often disconnected from the projects they support. By including Wiki and static pages as part of your projects — keeping documentation close to your code — you can ensure that team members have easy access to the latest information when needed.

Facilitate knowledge sharing, cross-team collaboration, and mentoring

There are many ways to integrate learning-friendly features into your processes. From code reviews to merge requests, these checkpoints keep your teams collaborating, learning from one another, and shipping high-quality code. Research proves that organizations that foster psychological safety have better-performing teams, so the more you trust you can build from the beginning, the better output you can expect.

Use AI

GitLab research has shown that AI can speed developer onboarding. If AI can improve productivity and introduce efficiencies across the entire software development lifecycle, it follows that AI can help developers get up to speed faster. In fact, survey respondents currently using AI for software development (43%) were much more likely than those not using AI (20%) to say that developer onboarding typically takes less than a month.

Here are just a few ways AI can help you get developers onboarded faster:

Speed is only one piece of the puzzle

To build a team that collaborates well and easily welcomes new teammates as they come aboard, you need clear and efficient processes, easy-to-find process and application documentation, and a platform that centralizes your development tools. Put together, this forms a machine that turns ideas into innovative products — and an environment where developers (both new and veteran) will feel like they can do their best work.

Getting Started With AI in Software Development: A Guide for Leaders

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Key takeaways
  • Poor developer onboarding can lead to poor performance, disengagement, and low retention, so cutting corners when welcoming new employees is simply not a path leaders can afford to take.
  • Accelerating onboarding time takes a multifaceted approach that requires communication with your teams, assessing your current tools and processes, and an open mind for change.
  • Integrating AI, using built-in documentation, taking advantage of standardized environments, and using a single platform to centralize your workflows are just a few strategies that can help simplify the onboarding process.