Is This a Good Idea? New Hires Write a Todo App?

Let New Hires Write a Todo App by Stephan Schmidt

Here’s the pitch:

You let the developer write a todo app for the first weeks. No really.

The todo app is written with your companies’ technologies, Django, and React. It is deployed to the cloud with your pipeline and quality tools in place. With Kubernetes. It uses your Git repo. So it doubles as onboarding to your tech stack.

I like the spirit of this if the new hire has claimed full proficiency in the tech stack your company uses. I don’t know how common that is — as it’s not uncommon to hire an engineer and provide on the job training so they can learn the systems of the company.

Ignoring that this presumes that the new hire was placed into a front-end role, what do you think? Would this work at your company?