On November 23, I joined Embark Studios as an Intern remotely from India. Getting into Embark, a game studio with big focus on open source was more of a dream and I am blessed with the opportunity 🧡

Throughout my first week and a half as a new hire, I have noticed that Embark’s onboarding process has made me feel quite welcoming, happy, and a positive environment around me.

Ari, my reporting manager and mentor also mentioned to me they expect from me to ask lots of questions, and I can see how positively they gives me feedback, and it’s an important part of knowledge sharing.

Everyday there is new brainstorming, challenging projects, and an incredibly open transparent culture. I was (am) hell scared as well as happy to do something out of my comfort zone.

In order to ease my onboarding experience, Embark has done really promising work and I want to share with you all through this blog post. I also hope that it motivates other companies to embrace a similar approach so that the new hire feels confident in sharing their opinions and becomes a valued addition to the company’s culture.

1. Onboarding Buddy

On my first day at Embark, I was assigned an onboarding buddy (Louis), he discussed with me the projects on which he’s currently working, answered my most of the questions that came through, and helped me immensely to go through everything on the very first day.

Starting a new job as a developer is overwhelming. There is a lot of information to process, new faces to see, and projects we want to get up-to-speed with as soon as possible.

It's good to have someone on starting day as they are already familiar with everything in the company and how the things are running inside the company.

2. Team Introductions

During my first week, several meetings were organized dedicated to introduce me to the rest of the teams. This was extremely helpful. One of my favourite parts was at the Studio Update & Show & Tell call, how everyone expressed excitement about me joining the team, and I totally loved it 🤎

3. Onboarding tasks

Onboarding can be huge as there are many tasks to complete, new account setup, videos to watch and massive documentation to read. To ease it down, I was provided with notion pages, neat and concise, divided into various columns of “Onboarding guide for new Embarkers”, “Mission for the first week”, and a place to discuss any questions or queries.
Embark is pretty good in documenting everything for new joinees.

Setting up an efficient and effective onboarding process for new technical hires is crucial to make sure new team members feel welcome and can get them productive as soon as possible. And I really liked the onboarding process at Embark Studios.

If you are new to the open source world and looking for stabbing your first bug, feel free to take a look here. If you have any questions don't feel shy to ask in our discord community.