Playbook: Self-Onboarding

Onboarding a new developer is traditionally one of the most time-consuming and expensive processes for an engineering team. It can take weeks, or even months, for a new hire to become a fully productive, contributing member of the team. During this time, they are heavily reliant on senior engineers for answers, creating a drag on the entire team’s velocity.

This playbook shows how Sequa turns onboarding into a fast, self-driven experience, freeing up your team and empowering your new hires from day one.

The High Cost of Traditional Onboarding

The traditional onboarding process is broken. A new engineer arrives, eager to contribute, but is immediately faced with a wall of fragmented information:

• Out-of-date README files.
• A sprawling, untrustworthy wiki.
• The unwritten knowledge locked in the heads of a few senior developers.

The result is a slow, frustrating cycle of questions and interruptions that hampers productivity for everyone involved.

The Sequa Solution: A Virtual Senior Engineer

With Sequa, a new hire has an always-on, patient expert to guide them. Instead of interrupting a colleague, they can simply ask Sequa. Sequa provides the context and answers they need, when they need them.

This transforms their first few days:

1. Environment Setup: The first major hurdle is getting the development environment running. A new hire can ask Sequa directly.

   • Question: “What are the steps to set up the 'api' and 'worker' services to run locally?”
   • Answer: Sequa synthesizes information from READMEs, internal scripts, and even past chat conversations to provide a clear, step-by-step guide.

2. Architecture Exploration: Once the environment is set up, they need to understand how everything fits together.

   • They can explore the self-maintaining docs that your team has created to get a high-level overview.
   • They can ask specific architectural questions like, “Show me a diagram of the services involved in the user signup process.”

3. Understanding the Code: When they encounter a specific piece of code, they can go deeper than just what it does.

   • Question: “Why was this caching logic implemented here?”
   • Answer: Sequa connects the code to its Git history, associated tasks (e.g., from Jira or Linear), and pull request discussions to explain the why behind it.

Benefits for the Whole Team

How to Implement This Playbook

You can set up a self-service onboarding system in a few simple steps:

1. Create an Onboarding Doc: Use Sequa to create a self-maintaining pages titled “Getting Started” or “Developer Onboarding.” Prompt it to explain the initial setup and link to key architectural documents.
2. Document 1-2 Core Services: Create Live Docs for your most important services. This gives new hires a foundational understanding of your system’s core components.
3. Invite & Empower: When a new hire joins, make Sequa the first tool you introduce them to. Encourage them to ask Sequa any question they have, before interrupting a teammate.

By making Sequa the central hub for onboarding, you create a scalable process that benefits everyone.