How European Companies Should Onboard Georgian Developers

Prepare the access path before the start date.

Create identity, repository, ticketing, documentation and communication access before day one. If security approval requires several teams, make one onboarding owner responsible for moving the request through the organisation.

Before access is granted, separate the accounts that can be prepared automatically from those that need human approval. This prevents a new engineer from spending the first days waiting for cloud roles, VPN access or repository permissions while the rest of the team assumes onboarding is complete.

For higher-risk environments, define a staged access model: enough access to build and test on day one, then production or privileged access only after the engineer has completed the relevant security orientation and the technical owner has confirmed the need.

Give context before tasks.

Explain the product, users, architecture, release process, major risks and how the team makes decisions. A developer who understands why the system exists will make better trade-offs than one who only receives tickets.

Use a first-week production path.

Choose one low-risk task that exercises the real delivery pipeline: local setup, branch, CI, review, testing and release. The purpose is to uncover organisational friction early.

A useful first task should be small enough to finish but real enough to expose the operating system around the code. If the task cannot reach review or a safe deployment because of missing permissions, undocumented dependencies or unclear ownership, that is an onboarding problem worth fixing immediately.

Set the distributed-team rhythm explicitly.

• Core overlap hours
• Daily async update format
• Decision-record location
• Review and approval owners
• Escalation channel for blockers
• Expected response times for incidents vs normal work

Review the first 30 days as a system, not only a person.

Ask what blocked the engineer, what documentation was missing and which approvals were slow. Fix those issues before the next hire.

Collect feedback from both sides. The new engineer can identify missing documentation and confusing approvals; the engineering manager can see where expectations were not clear. Turning those observations into changes makes each later hire faster and safer.

Create a 30-day onboarding map.

Write down what the new engineer should understand and accomplish by the end of week one, week two and month one. Keep outcomes realistic: environment working, first reviewed change, architecture orientation, ownership map and one meaningful contribution.

Avoid measuring onboarding by the number of presentations attended. The goal is the ability to navigate the system and deliver safely.

Introduce people through dependencies, not an org chart.

Explain who owns product decisions, architecture, infrastructure, security, QA and release. Then schedule short conversations with the people the engineer will actually depend on. A 50-person company directory is less useful than knowing the five people who unblock the work.

Explain unwritten engineering rules explicitly.

Every team has implicit norms: when to open a design document, when to ask for synchronous review, what “urgent” means, who can approve production changes, how incidents are discussed and what level of test coverage is expected.

Remote hires cannot absorb these norms by overhearing office conversations. Document or explain them.

Include security without turning onboarding into a wall of policy.

Give the engineer the controls relevant to the work: device expectations, password/MFA rules, data classification, production access, incident reporting and prohibited storage/sharing patterns. Pair policy with examples from the actual development environment.