Onboarding engineers into regulated environments in under two weeks

In a bank or a hospital, a new engineer's first two weeks are usually spent waiting: for a laptop, for an access approval, for a training module to be scheduled. Nobody defends this — it is simply what happens when onboarding is treated as a sequence of tickets rather than a designed process. It is also entirely fixable without weakening a single control.

Parallelise the paperwork

Background checks, compliance training and access requests do not depend on each other, and none of them depend on a start date. We initiate all three the moment an offer is accepted, with the client's security team briefed that the requests are coming. On a recent banking engagement this alone moved first-commit day from day fourteen to day four.

Give them a real first task

The traditional first week — read the documentation, watch the recordings — produces the illusion of preparation. We assign a genuine, small, low-blast-radius change that touches the build pipeline and the deployment path end to end. The engineer learns the system by moving through it, and the team learns whether the onboarding path is actually intact.

• Day 1–2: environment, access, a running local build
• Day 3–5: one small production change, paired, all the way to release
• Day 6–10: a bounded feature with review from the receiving team
• Day 30: a written checkpoint with the client lead

Pair, do not document

Most regulated codebases are under-documented and the documentation that exists is wrong in ways nobody has noticed. Ten days of pairing transfers more accurate context than any wiki, and it produces a by-product: the pair notices the wrong documentation and fixes it while it still matters to someone.