What happens after the interview

I wrote about codebase-first interviews a while back. The idea that letting candidates see your actual code tells you more than whiteboard puzzles. I still believe that.

But I've been thinking about what happens next. You hire someone. They accept. They show up on day one. And then... what?

Onboarding is where the 2/3 pattern hits people hardest. New hires discover which pillar is weak. Usually within the first month. Sometimes within the first week.

The first 90 days reveal what the interview hid

Interviews are optimized presentations. Everyone's on their best behavior. The codebase-first approach helps because at least the code is honest. But even then, you're not seeing how decisions actually get made. You're not seeing how conflicts get resolved. You're not seeing what happens when someone disagrees with leadership.

New hires see all of it. They have fresh eyes and no context for what's "normal." Things that the existing team has accepted as background noise stand out immediately.

I remember joining a company where every planning meeting ran over by an hour. Nobody mentioned this in the interview process. But by week two, I'd noticed the pattern and asked about it. "Oh, that's just how it is here," someone said. Like the meetings themselves were a natural phenomenon, not a symptom of unclear priorities and weak decision-making.

Fresh eyes are valuable. Organizations should use them. But mostly they don't.

Why good hires leave fast

I've seen this pattern repeatedly: someone joins, seems great, leaves within six months. Leadership is confused. "We thought they were doing well. They never raised any concerns."

But they did raise concerns. In their first one-on-one. In a retrospective. In a casual conversation that nobody followed up on. The concerns got absorbed into the system, nothing changed, and eventually the new hire concluded that change wasn't possible.

New hires who leave fast often leave because they saw the weak pillar clearly and decided it wasn't going to improve. They saw the team health issues that long-timers had normalized. Or the strategic confusion that everyone had learned to work around. Or the leadership gaps that were too uncomfortable to name.

Organizations mostly ignore this feedback. Exit interviews happen, but they're often too late and too polite to be useful. By the time someone's leaving, they're not invested in helping you improve.

The real feedback loop should happen during onboarding, not after someone's resigned.

Onboarding as diagnosis

I've started thinking about onboarding differently. Not just as a way to get new hires productive, but as a feedback loop for organizational health.

Every new hire is running a diagnostic. They're comparing what they experienced in the interview to what they're experiencing now. They're noticing gaps that long-timers have stopped seeing. They're forming opinions about whether this place is functional or not.

You can use that diagnostic intentionally. Schedule explicit check-ins that ask: "What surprised you? What's different than you expected? What seems harder than it should be?"

But you have to actually respond to what you hear. If new hires consistently mention the same problems and nothing changes, the feedback loop breaks. Future new hires learn that raising concerns is pointless. The organizational immune system defeats the diagnostic.

What the weak pillar looks like on day one

When leadership is weak, new hires notice immediately. Decisions are unclear. Nobody seems to know who owns what. Meetings end without resolution. "We'll have to check with [person who's never available]" becomes a recurring phrase.

I joined a company once where my first three weeks were waiting for decisions. My manager needed approval from their manager, who needed alignment from a peer, who was out until next month. I spent more time in holding patterns than doing actual work. By week four I was already wondering if I'd made a mistake.

When team health is weak, new hires feel it in the interactions. People are polite but guarded. There's a tension in meetings that nobody acknowledges. The culture deck says "we value direct feedback" but nobody actually gives any. Or worse, someone does give feedback and gets punished for it.

A friend joined a startup that pitched itself as having amazing culture. Within two weeks she'd learned that "amazing culture" meant "don't disagree with the founder." She watched another new hire get publicly criticized for pushing back on a technical decision. She left after three months.

When strategy is weak, new hires notice the drift. Every team has a slightly different understanding of priorities. Roadmaps change weekly. "What are we actually building?" is a question that doesn't have a clear answer. Smart people are working hard, but nobody can explain what they're working toward.

Using the feedback

The best onboarding programs I've seen treat new hires as consultants for the first month. "Tell us what you're seeing. We know we have blind spots. Help us find them."

This only works if there's follow-through. If someone says "the deployment process is chaos" and six months later the deployment process is still chaos, you've taught them that feedback doesn't matter.

But when it works, it's good. New hires feel valued because their perspective matters. The organization gets honest feedback from fresh eyes. And problems that have been festering get named and addressed.

The 2/3 pattern predicts that one pillar is always weak. Onboarding is one of the best opportunities to find out which one. New hires will discover it regardless. The question is whether you use their discovery intentionally or let them leave with the knowledge.

What did you notice in your first 90 days at your current job? What did that reveal about the organization? How did leadership respond when you raised it?