Engineering Onboarding at SquadStack 👁

Coming Up 📚

  • What is onboarding and why should I care?
  • Why now?
  • Onboarding themes
    • Technical
    • Managerial
    • Cultural
  • Reading Material

What is onboarding?

The action or process of integrating a new employee into an organization - Oxford Dictionary".

**googles**

What is effective integration? 🧐

  • The employee should learn - what is expected out of him her, and how to actually perform her job.

  • The company should learn - what the employee's needs are, and do its best to fulfill them.

Why should I care? 🤔

Why it matters now?

Treat everyone as remote.

How do we go about it?

Key themes/Modules

  1. Technical Onboarding
  2. Cultural Onboarding
  3. Managerial Onboarding

Technical Onboarding

I know what is expected
out of me as an IC.

  • Pick a mini-project, ideally.
  • Have a well-laid out 30 days plan with day-wise planning.
  • Discuss that plan with person being onboarded on Day 1.

I know about tools & processes..

  • Have an internal wiki/playbook in place.

  • A quick note on the playbook: your employee handbook doesn’t have to be a horrid-looking PDF or printed binder that nobody wants to read. Make it useful and approachable.

Manager Onboarding

Manager Onboarding

  • Dedicate first 1-1 to get to know each other very deeply.
  • Get to know each other's working styles, set expectations for them while working in a team - over-emphasis on what has been working for us.
  • Schedule weekly 1:1s and discuss career progression, etc.

First 1-1

  • Share stories...
  • How do you spend your weekends?
  • What are your goals in life?
  • What does your old team/project do that we should definitely NOT do here?
  • What does your old team/project do that we should definitely do here?
  • What does your ideal day look like?
  • .......

Share your working style

Culture onboarding

Culture Onboarding

  • Create informal bonds
    • Have a channel for people to rant/discuss anything and everything.
    • Have a strict no-work meeting WITHOUT any agenda.
  • Do pair programming or pair walkthrough sessions.
  • Make them part of every discussion which affects the whole engineering - even if they've no idea about it.
  • Ask open ended questions....

End result?

Way ahead.....

  • This is still FAR from perfect, and we'll keep on iterating on it.
  • One of the key results for any new engineer being onboarded is to suggest changes in this whole process and we're tracking it via a form.
  • Another key result is if they find anything which was hard to understand make sure the next engineering does not face similar issues and we keep on improving.
  • We know there are still broken pieces in here - like setting up a local environment takes time, etc and we're working on it async.
  • Capture NPS for this process ^.

Reading Material

  • https://refactoring.fm/p/the-three-levels-of-onboarding-
  • https://refactoring.fm/p/the-pyramid-of-engagement-
  • https://vimeo.com/showcase/7882845/video/488034691
  • https://zapier.com/engineering/engineer-onboarding/

And heavily copied from :P 

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