It seems like poor design that a meeting with such severe consequences for missing it isn't repeatedly mentioned and cautioned about, or at least participants warned about the consequences.
They make extremely rare exceptions for delayed flights, family emergencies, etc but it means they basically have to hand-hold you through a 1:1 orientation to get you caught up, which would be unsustainable if more people missed the first day. A big part of day #1 (and the first orientation in particular) is learning the social rules and seeing example of them in use, and they have a hardline policy against allowing people into the chat system, physical space, and forums until they've learned the social rules thoroughly.
If I had to guess I'd say this policy is mostly for the protection of other attendees and discourse in the internal communication streams. They don't want people going all loose-cannon on the internal Zulip until they're made aware of the rules and their responsibilities to abide by them.
It's hard to understand the impact of granting exceptions and cutting people slack until you've been on the organizers' side of this situation.
It sounds harsh, but drawing a strict line in the sand results in a better situation for everyone. Once you go down the path of catering to everyone's exceptions or oversights, you start allocating disproportionately large amounts of time to the people who can't follow schedules or manage their time. A 1:1 catchup meeting is far less efficient than a 1:20 orientation meeting. Do just one of these 1:1 meetings and you've doubled your time commitment.
Ironically, the person who didn't read their e-mail gets individual 1:1 attention and has more flexibility on the scheduling. It's almost like rewarding those who fail to follow the rules.
When I handled onboarding/orientations, I thought cutting people slack for missed meetings and deadlines would build rapport and encourage them to be more considerate next time around. Instead, it has the opposite effect. Once you start signaling that meeting obligations are semi-optional and that deadlines are more suggestions than cutoffs, a lot of people start taking advantage of the situation. Sort of a broken windows theory for time management.
On the other hand, if the rules are strict and the consequences are clear, people start paying attention, prioritizing organizational order, and reading their e-mails. You do a lot less hand-holding, and you can spend your time focusing on catering to those who follow the rules instead of doing 1:1 meetings with the people who can't or won't read their e-mail.
Don't let the tail wag the dog. Set clear expectations and stick to them. Grant exceptions when people communicate in advance (e.g. can't get a flight, flight delayed) or have truly unpredictable exceptions (car accident), but don't set the precedent that reading e-mail is optional because you can count on someone else to fix it for you later.
Your claim that a single 1:1 meeting doubles their time commitment is incorrect considering the number of other time commitments involved. Indeed, it seems that they already organized 1:1 meetings that occurred before this. And they had multiple 1:1 (or worse, n:1) interviews. And so on.
I've witnessed other organizations go through this process in the past, where a new policy was initially lax with many exceptions granted, then as the consequences of the exceptions become more apparent over time (claims of unfairness, uneven enforcement, lower attendance, etc.), they eventually make the policy stricter and draw explicit lines in the sand, even if it makes a small minority of cases more painful when exceptions aren't granted.
Have you ever been frustrated when your boss stops by your desk and asks "Can you just take 5 minutes and do this simple thing for me?" without any regard to all of the other work you have to do, or the fact that the task is really going to take 1-2 hours once you consider all of the nuance and downstream consequences?
This is the same situation. It's a "can't you just..." expectation of the organization without any regard to the other people or the consequences for the rest of the organization.
And like nikisweeting said, it sets a precedent. Once you start granting exceptions for not reading an e-mail to one person, you'd better be prepared to grant that same exception to everyone, otherwise you're going to end up with accusations of unfairness or prejudice very quickly.
Now that you're granting exceptions to everyone, multiply that 30 minute disruption across all of the people in the organization, and then multiply that across all of the different items on your schedule. Before you know it, you're spending half your time working with the people who can follow the rules as a group, and the other half of your time doing 1:1s with the people who would rather match the schedule to their personal convenience because they know doing so doesn't have any negative consequences.
It doesn't just sound harsh, it is harsh. Maybe you have to be harsh because of time/resource constraints or because you want to build a strict, rules-oriented culture—but you should still be honest to yourself about that.
> broken windows theory
"Broken windows theory" is an empirically dubious argument that's consistently used to advocate for abusive policing policies—seems like a poor inspiration for any kind of welcoming social culture.
Hard to say from the outside, but it seems they kind of failed at that. I'd suspect that's also something lost in the switch to online: I can easily see how this would be a lot more obviously important for the in-person program than online, where if I interpret the article correctly even some self-organized things happened even earlier in the day and it quickly becomes just another meeting they missed the crucial reference to due to being busy with clearing their schedule for the program.
EDIT: From what other comments have written about it (it primarily being about teaching rules and customs), it also feels like something that doesn't need 1:1 time with staff to replace, but a "go watch this recording now, and understand we are being nice about this now". An intense get-to-know-each-other thing would be a lot harder to replace (because it'd probably require extra 1:1 time between the attendees individually, which remotely is tricky)
Generally, if everyone else manages to show up on time but one person does not, I wouldn't assume that the organization is at fault. Even the author admits that it was his own fault for not reading the e-mail.
I was once denied entry to a $350 class (with no refund or chance to defer), because the address for the company on Google Maps (it was out-of-date) differed from the address on their website linked in the scheduling email.
They had a similar no-exception policy that missing any of the class meant you had to pay again and start over. When I pointed out the mistaken address they also said "everyone else managed to show up here".
This kind of thing does happen sometimes by mistake, or due to reasonable lapses in communication, but the punitive feel of the organization's response made me never want to do business with them again.
It seems like this puts organizations between a rock and a hard place, because on the one hand they cant make exceptions all the time, but on the other hand it alienates people much more in the few cases where honest accidents did happen.
I have no conclusion or argument to make here, other than to say maybe it's an opportunity to make the docs even more explicit so that such a mixup is less likely to happen in the future?
But of course I'm just an outside observer reading a one-sided account of things, so maybe there's more to it, or that's just how they prefer to run things which is fine too I suppose.
It's the same reason we have "Are you sure?" dialogs for destructive or irreversible actions in software.