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Continuous learning describes a concept in which businesses encourage and assist in the professional development of their employees. The senior developer can provide the junior developer with useful advice and a backlog of personal experience that will help your new hire settle in. https://g-markets.net/software-development/working-across-time-zones-pros-cons-and-best/ Plus, this will give the rest of your software development team a chance to get to know who they’ll be working with. Do this by fostering a sense of trust and amiability among your employees. In the context of onboarding, you should announce your new hire to the rest of the team.
- “In shipping something small, a new engineer experiences our typical git workflow, the code review process, and a production deploy.
- A recent study done at Microsoft2 looked at the onboarding of new developers arriving or moving from one team to another.
- During an interview, you can ask various types of questions, such as behavioral, situational, competency-based, fact-based, skill-based, and technical questions, among others.
- During this part of the process, you may review resumes, portfolios, cover letters, and repositories to ensure that you only got to candidates who meet the minimum requirements for the role.
- This one is as much for you as for the developer you are onboarding, as you want to pick their brain about their first-week experience.
- One way to promote continuous learning is to create a learning plan for your employees.
This will give them a feeling of involvement and a belief that their role makes a difference. Employees who are engaged with their employer and believe they have a role to play in helping their company move forward are more likely to be committed to their roles and stick them out to fruition. No matter how carefully you crafted the job description in the posting or how carefully you tried to explain it during the interview process, there are undoubtedly details and nuances that got left out.
Maintaining the Guide
As part of our quest, we create numerous tools that can inspire companies to create and structure their new hire journey. You will see that all activities included in our software developer onboarding checklist respect these best practices. When onboarding developers and software engineers, there is a strong focus on training and product and project understanding. It is unrealistic to expect a developer to start writing code immediately. The larger the project, the more time you will require to understand its complexity. You can expect spending a considerable amount of time during training.
Be sure to get the technical stuff out of the way beforehand by providing them access to the company’s project management systems, chat apps, email, and learning management systems. New developers need technical documentation to determine the best practices and eliminate pain points related to your project. Otherwise, they won’t have a frame of reference to appraise it effectively.
End The Week With 2-Way Feedback
For senior developers it can be a matter of a few weeks, while for more junior developers it can take four months — or more. Founded on the insight that newcomers are afraid to ask ‘stupid questions’, this two-week program takes engineers through the organizational structure, core technologies and programming practices. Senior engineers What Is a DevOps Engineer? How to Become One, Salary, Skills deliver live lectures on Google practices and culture during which they share the “engineering perspective” and answer questions of every newcomer. Equip them with the tools they need to do their jobs well, assign them their tasks for the first few weeks, and collect feedback to continually improve your onboarding process.
You might take your new developer out for a “virtual drink” with the team during one of their lunchtimes or at the end of their first week. This gives everyone a chance to get to know each other in a social setting and is a great opportunity for team bonding. Non-native speakers can also benefit from seeing written materials ahead of meetings, so start getting your team into the habit of circulating agendas and reports at least 24 hours ahead of any meetings. This way, your non-native speakers have a chance to familiarise themselves with the content. Finally, if you have the budget, consider sending a physical Welcome Package before the developer’s first day, including a letter from the team or CEO, branded merchandise, and personalized gifts. The beauty of this task is that it forces the new employee outside of their comfort zone with a low-stakes task that will force them to interact with people in the company, move around and ask questions.
Beyond The Zero-to-Deployed Guide
One of the best ways to do this is to require new employees to push out an actual piece of code within the first week of being hired. Do everything you can to make the practical aspect of onboarding seamless, efficient, and even fun. If there is a way to gather information from the employee before their start date, even better. That controlled impact also takes part in bringing confidence to the newcomers.
When onboarding goes well, you’re more likely to retain the talent you brought in and develop an effective, fruitful working relationship. Inefficient or ineffective onboarding, however, can cost you time, money, and perhaps even your new team member. Before your new developers arrive, it is wise to prepare all the tools they’ll need for the job. This includes setting up their desk and computer and also all the accounts and logins for the systems they’ll be using. So, which member of your team would be the best choice for an onboarding buddy? It used to be common practice for a senior developer to introduce new ones to the job.