Developers frequently move into new teams or environments across software companies. Their onboarding experience is correlated with productivity, job satisfaction, and other short-term and long-term outcomes. The majority of the onboarding process comprises engineering tasks such as fixing bugs or implementing small features. Nevertheless, we do not have a systematic view of how tasks influence onboarding. In this paper, we present a case study of ABC company (anonymized), where we interviewed 32 developers moving into a new team and 15 engineering managers onboarding a new developer into their team – to understand and characterize developers’ onboarding experience and expectations in relation to the tasks performed by them while onboarding. We present how tasks interact with new developers through three representative themes: learning, confidence building, and social interactions. We also discuss three onboarding strategies as inferred from the interviews that managers commonly use unknowingly, and discuss their pros and cons and offer situational recommendations. Furthermore, we validated interview findings with a developer survey ($N=189$) and a manager survey ($N=37$) and found survey results to be consistent with our interview findings. Practitioners could use our findings to improve their onboarding processes, while researchers could find new research directions from this study to advance the understanding of developer onboarding.