The Two-Day Onboarding

There is an unspoken rule in IT: the amount of time an employee stays at a company is inversely proportional to the effort it took to bring them there.

This story is a perfect example. We spent months dealing with heavy paperwork, organizing a visa, and sorting out relocation and housing just to bring a new colleague over from the US. When the big day finally arrived, the whole team welcomed our new hire with bright smiles. We even put a small US flag on their desk, right next to their freshly printed badge and ready-to-go laptop.

At the IT desk, everything had been carefully prepared. I walked them through the setup: configuring the laptop, testing the email, checking the VPN, and verifying access rights. The new colleague looked incredibly enthusiastic, smiling and telling me how excited they were to get started.

Then came day two.

Just 48 hours later, very early in the morning, I walked in to find the new colleague packing their laptop into their bag, looking extremely uncomfortable.

“I’ve been thinking… this isn’t for me.”

I was completely shocked. Wait… already?

By the time the dust settled, all that was left was an empty desk with the company badge, the laptop, and the welcome mug still sitting perfectly in place. The rest of the team just stood around in stunned silence.

Our manager finally broke the tension:

“So… that was fast.”

It was the shortest onboarding I had ever seen. Forget uptime metrics or deployment speeds; setting a new company record for an exit in under 48 hours was an entirely different kind of achievement. 😬