Most companies say that it takes three to six months for newly hired engineers to fully ramp up. Engineering leaders know it’s impolitic to admit that it takes their team longer than three to six months to onboard new engineers, so that’s what they say out loud, but they generally believe it takes longer for a new engineer to become fully productive. They also know that their most impactful engineers are still becoming more productive after years with the company.
Running engineering onboarding is optimizing two closely related problems:
Done well, it excites new hires and raises the floor for success. Indeed, in rapidly hiring companies, effective onboarding is the highest-value investment you can make into engineering productivity, but somehow it’s often dismissed as a secondary concern. Fortunately, like many oft-forgotten processes, you can go from no onboarding to rather good onboarding in short order.
To get there, we’ll walk through:
By the end, you’ll have a plan for incrementally improving your current onboarding, and a clear perspective on when to move from ad-hoc efforts to a structured onboarding program.
This is an unedited chapter from O’Reilly’s The Engineering Executive’s Primer.
A structured onboarding process comes down to staffing a handful of roles are filled (especially your role as the executive sponsor and someone to orchestrate onboarding), and deciding on the specific curriculum to include in your onboarding.
What this specifically looks like varies a bit across implementations, so I think it’s helpful to start with a few concrete examples of real-world engineering onboarding. Two caveats as we talk through these particulars. First, these often omit significant efforts around company-scope new hire onboarding, to focus specifically on engineering onboarding. Second, every company’s onboarding process evolves over time, any static description like those above can only capture one specific iteration, and all of the companies described below have evolved their onboarding beyond the specific approaches described here.
Examples of engineerin gonboarding programs:
Digg: I showed up, got a company branded t-shirt and a laptop. My manager introduced me to the two other members of my team. They tried to issue me an integration environment, but the one engineer who knew how that worked had recently quit, so they told me to take over another recently departed engineer’s environment instead. With that, the onboarding was complete.
It’s a bit messy, but a surprisingly large number of startups have effectively no onboarding beyond showing up, getting a laptop, and getting pointed to team mates who can help
Facebook: Facebook runs a six week Engineering Bootcamp, attended by every new engineering and engineering management hire, with a focus on facilitating team selection between new hires and Facebook’s teams, and teaching new hires Facebook’s approach to development. They work directly on Facebook’s software, often fixing bugs, and are supported by dedicated Facebook engineers who review their pull requests, run office hours, and so on.
Facebook’s Bootcamp is the most frequently mentioned model of high-investment engineering onboarding. When considering copying components, keep in mind both the volume of engineers going through Bootcamp (10s and later 100s of concurrent new engineers), and that it solves for both onboarding and team matching, which is atypical of most companies’ hiring processes