Cloud Foundry Summit North America 2019

Pivotal Cloud Foundry has hundreds of engineers working on Open Source Cloud Foundry and PCF, but the majority join us with no previous experience working in this project space. It is challenging to design an effective and empathetic onboarding program for engineers who are new to platform development, but technical onboarding is one of the most critical components for building an inclusive engineering culture, at home and within the larger Open Source community. In this talk, we will provide an overview of Pivotal’s “Onboarding Week” ritual, and showcase how we implement various Extreme Programming practices to facilitate learning, feedback, and continuous improvement.

At the core of all of these practices is psychological safety: a critical component for creating an environment where it is completely safe to fail and explore. By the end of this talk, all attendees -- whether they are engineers, managers, leadership, or somewhere in between -- will learn how to assess the effectiveness of their current onboarding practices and gain some new insights on how to design empathetic onboarding programs.