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I work in a small startup (<20 developers) and the following is what I am doing for my team: 1. A week before their joining, we ship the laptop 2. I'd have a
by avinassh 3y ago
I work in a small startup (<20 developers) and the following is what I am doing for my team:
1. A week before their joining, we ship the laptop
2. I'd have a calendar ready for them, which gives an overview of what they will be doing for the next three months
3. First week goes into setting up the tooling on the machine. Someone from the product team gives an overview and entire product walkthrough. Next, they spend some to play with the product as a user. This week also involves the initial orientation session.
4. We use Golang heavily, however, the people joining might not know it. The second week goes into doing the tour of Go.
5. Third week they spend on onboarding tutorial that shows how to write a small service, generate APIs, build, and deploy it in our infra.
6. Fourth week they will spend shipping a really small feature to the production.
7. Since day one, they'd have assigned a buddy who becomes their go-to person. Buddy also explains them about the culture, how things typical done here etc. The buddy also creates a new slack channel just for them, where they can interact.
8. They pair with the buddy in the initial weeks, where buddy is the driver.
9. First three months, they'd spend working on a feature along with someone which also involves some good amount of pair programming.
- dotancohen 3y agoYou honestly sound like somebody that I would like to work with. When you are next looking for developers, please contact me. My Gmail username is the same as my HN username.
- avinassh 3y agoThank you for your kind words! I will be sure reach out when we are hiring.
- snailtrail 3y agoFirst week is to set up tooling? If the new person does not ship their first PR the second day something is terribly wrong with your plan. It should take 2 hours max to set up tooling.
- tomwojcik 3y agoLol. There's so much to unpack here that I started to suspect it's a bait. It is, right? You're lucky if you got an access to everything you need on day 1, not to mention setup the tooling. You can't improve the product if you don't know it yet and that takes time.
- voidfunc 3y agoIt is an old meme, but that said, a week to setup a dev environment is pretty ridiculous. I try to have folks delivering business value even if very small within a week or two. I find it reduces a lot of new hire anxiety around performance if they can ship _anything_ relatively quickly.
- anonzzzies 3y agoMost of the companies I worked with/for won't even have the security credentials set up in a week to have access to anything. VPN, keys etc. So not much you can do the first week accept sit with others to get tours of the codebase, frameworks, best practices etc.
- oldtownroad 3y agoYou’re probably not working in startups, then. If a new developer can’t push code to production on the first day in a company of <100 people then there’s something wrong. If you’re joining a big corporate with thousands of employees and regulatory obligations then sure, a week or more for security credentials is normal, but in a startup, a week is a terrible sign of dysfunction.
- anonzzzies 3y agoDepends on the business I guess; I work mostly with companies (including startups and massive firms) in banking and gov ; there are companies with 20-30 people who cannot get people to do anything within weeks simply because of all the red tape.
- graderjs 3y agoThis is great! Thank you for doing this. Never change! :)
- UltimateEdge 3y agoWhat are the kind of people your startup looks for when hiring? I would have thought that you'd be hiring experienced developers who would not need to dedicate time to learn things like Golang, and who could hit the ground running.
- avinassh 3y agoWe hire people from different backgrounds and experience levels, from 1 to ~10 YOE. Only some require a week to get familiar with Go, but I have seen senior developers (say 6+ years) requiring time to get the hang of the language and the features. E.g., I have hired Python programmers, and the concurrency primitives, the concept of CSP, and channels are very new to them. Go is simple, but it also has many gotchas. Knowing them also helps. Also, when someone new has joined, the new environment could be overwhelming for them, and I'd like to ease all this and slowly induct them. --- If you are curious, here are the Go onboarding resources (doing them in this order is preferred) - The tour of Go - https://tour.golang.org/welcome/1 https://tour.golang.org/welcome/1 - Go concurrency exercises - https://github.com/loong/go-concurrency-exercises https://github.com/loong/go-concurrency-exercises - Common Go gotchas - http://devs.cloudimmunity.com/gotchas-and-common-mistakes-in-go-golang/ http://devs.cloudimmunity.com/gotchas-and-common-mistakes-in... - Concurrency is not parallelism - https://vimeo.com/49718712 https://vimeo.com/49718712