Scaleable Developer Onboarding

How long does it take for a new developer on your team to be productive? If you’ve not thought about this question, or you don’t know the answer, you’re likely wasting time and money.

The best engineering organizations focus maniacally on making things easy for new team members because it has a massive impact on not only productivity but team energy.

Here’s a list of things you need to have in place prior to hiring your next developer:

• Access to all the key systems on the day they arrive. Source control, ticketing, etc. Everything they need to do their job and understand how your team works
• A README or wiki that has all of the details for setting up a new developer environment from scratch. This should contain all of the details on prerequisites, such as database access, tools they might need, etc. as well as the full instructions to get the system running locally on their machine
• A list of bugs / simple fixes to your product that are easy to do but get the new developer into the guts of the application
• A mentor / specific person to help the new developer when they have questions. If they have to wander around and bounce between five people, you waste their time and everyone else’s
• A full set of automated tests and continuous integration. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know this is something we talk about all the time. You can’t scale engineering without automated testing

What does this process look like when it’s working well?

Your new developer:

• Is fully operational with their local environment within a couple hours
• Commits their first bug fix within 48 hours of starting with you
• Makes a meaningful contribution to a new feature within the first week

If you’re not seeing these kinds of results, you need to invest the time now to figure out where your issues are and resolve them. The ripple effect of rapid onboarding is a scaleable, highly functioning development organization.