I worked at a tiny self-funded startup once where we required new hires to update the documentation and processes to fix the problems they encountered during onboarding. That worked great with 12-15 people; not sure how it scales.
I worked at a MegaCorp, and we required all new hires to (1) teach the next hire our architecture, core user journeys, etc and (2) the new hire had to present their learnings to the team, standing with their (quiet) teacher.
Both of these steps were crucial. The presentation serves a ton of purposes, it ensures both the student and the teacher learn the material enough to present with a whiteboard, and the team can catch any mistakes or misunderstandings at a time when they'd have the most sympathy towards ignorance. It also is a good low-stakes way to force someone to present and get used to the team and talk to everyone in a formal setting. We also always ordered pizza + beer after too make it a "fun" (or at least casual) environment that wasn't too serious.
I do this as a freelancer who onboards with new teams pretty regularly. I've only had positive feedback from sending PRs that fix or improve the documentation on my first days with a project.
I tried to do this when I joined a new company. Problem was there were four other guys on the team, all of whom thought the correct process was different, not just from what was documented, but from each other's, and would go back and re-"correct" things after me.
I spent the whole 3.5 weeks I worked there starting fights and noped right back out.
Similar problem here. Basically they ask me to give feedback, they seem super interested in improving. Oh but when I give feedback... They start to get defensive. Apparently they only wanted small feedback, like fixing a broken link, when I started to point at foot-guns in their docs and in their code they started to get mad at me. I was just trying to inform everyone so we all had the same information or to at least be corrected if I was wrong, nope, suddenly I am "asking too many questions" and I should be "spending 1 to 2 hours before posting a question to the slack channel". Yikes. At the same time they would gaslight me about how I didn't communicate enough of what I was doing.
IME this blog post sounds like a fairy tale that someone tells themselves about how good a job they will do, because they haven't actually lived the experience.
