Personal anecdote: Started in a developer position a couple years ago to work on an internal corporate app on an isolated network.
Week 1: Get to the desk; meet my neighbors; submit request for necessary network account; and start on mandatory security training for the systems.
Week 2: Finish the mandatory training; ping the network owners a few times about the account request; start reading up on unfamiliar parts of the stack.
Week 3: Continue pinging network owners about the account request; ping my own manager about the account request; stare at the workstation that I cannot log in to; ask around, "Is this normal?" "Yes."
Week 4: Do some more newly assigned mandatory training; ping network owners and manager again.
I spent around three days trying to get the 802.1x wired ethernet authentication to work* at one organisation and felt completely useless for that period. I'm not sure I'd have coped well not having any network access for five weeks.
*It turned out the ports I'd been directed to use hadn't even been patched in (in hindsight I should've figured this out a bit quicker from my EAPOL frames seemingly going into the void!). IT eventually figured out what was going on, seemed surprised I was surprised the port wasn't even active, and said they never patched more than 1 port per cluster of desks...
Having contracted at many big corps, I know this situation very well. The worst issues are the fact that nobody really knows what you're supposed to be requesting, the systems you have to use for requesting them are a complete maze, and a lot of the time, you have to request one thing before you can request the next thing (waiting for those tickets to be serviced sequentially, with their multi-day SLAs).
But don't stress over it. Your manager definitely knows how bad their onboarding is, and isn't expecting you to be able to do anything about it.
Our onboarding is a hot mess but if I can’t get you at least the source code by the end of day 2, you get an apology. That’s the part I can control, a bit.
Pro tip: collect all of the accounts one needs into a Wiki page, ordered roughly by how soon you need them. This page looks like it’s for you, but really it’s for the person doing your onboarding, so they can go poke people before you even know you need the account.
It can be alienating. When this happens to me I try and think “this is their money, if they want to set it on fire it’s their prerogative, I get paid either way”. But yeah easier said than done.
We started a contract and they gave us Windows laptops with 2GB of RAM. For coding Java. I probably should have run at that point but I was new. I’m fairly sure 2GB is either an IDE or running the app. We could use our own hardware though, or the contracting company could cough up a few.
I had just upgraded my personal laptop and my old one was 16GB of RAM and 2nd Gen SSD so you’ll never guess what I did.
I just... What did you even do in that time? (Sincere question; if I started a job and didn't have a machine I don't think I could work, and I assume a financial place won't let you BYOD)
That's the crazy thing actually, virtually the entire company is BYOD with Citrix access to a Windows VM hosted in a datacenter. Only software developers need a specific machine.
I spent the whole time watching compliance training videos, no joke.
Week 1: Get to the desk; meet my neighbors; submit request for necessary network account; and start on mandatory security training for the systems.
Week 2: Finish the mandatory training; ping the network owners a few times about the account request; start reading up on unfamiliar parts of the stack.
Week 3: Continue pinging network owners about the account request; ping my own manager about the account request; stare at the workstation that I cannot log in to; ask around, "Is this normal?" "Yes."
Week 4: Do some more newly assigned mandatory training; ping network owners and manager again.
Week 5: Finally get the network account!