  The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the way that software development teams
onboard new hires. Previously, most software developers worked in physical
offices and new hires onboarded to their teams in the physical office,
following a standard onboarding process. However, when companies transitioned
employees to work from home due to the pandemic, there was little to no time to
develop new onboarding procedures. In this paper, we present a survey of 267
new hires at Microsoft that onboarded to software development teams during the
pandemic. We explored their remote onboarding process, including the challenges
that the new hires encountered and their social connectedness with their teams.
We found that most developers onboarded remotely and never had an opportunity
to meet their teammates in person. This leads to one of the biggest challenges
faced by these new hires, building a strong social connection with their team.
We use these results to provide recommendations for onboarding remote hires.
