The Most Effective Way to Onboard a New Developer on Your Team

Introduction

A new employee’s career at your company can be determined, to a reasonable extent, by how well their onboarding goes. The first few months of an employee's tenure determine the direction of your interactions with them and whether or not this journey will be fruitful for both parties.

In this article, I will show you ways to make the process of a new developer's immersion into the team smoother. I’ll also tell you what to pay attention to and what not to do.

First of all, this article is suitable for integrating experienced specialists into a team, but it will be helpful for beginners too. You need to add more time for learning. Again, this instruction will be more beneficial for companies where a person is integrated into the team, not the whole company, like Google.

Onboarding plan

Before a new employee goes to work

Before you go to work, and ideally even before you start searching for a candidate, describe the desired results of the employee in the first few months. From now on, we will assume that for successful onboarding, it is enough to be in close contact for three months or 90 days.

So, even before a new employee’s faith is decided, we should understand what they will do. It may not be a specific task, but at least a service or a product.

Also, even before the employee arrives, the equipment on which he will work must be decided, as well as all the necessary accounts. It is optional to create them in advance, but if they aren't made, please ensure that everyone is ready to create them when needed.

Please tell the team before the new employee arrives that there will soon be an addition. This will allow you to gather any of the new person’s added requirements

First day

It would be ideal if you were the one to welcome the new employee to the company or if you were one of their first contacts there. To do this, please ensure you are part of the welcoming meeting. If you won't be there on the day of the release - could you make sure that you have delegated everything necessary to a colleague and described what needs to be done and said to the newcomer?

So, the person has received the technical information, and you've made sure they have the necessary accounts in corporate systems and, most importantly, email and corporate messenger. Next, meet in person or call - in the case of remote work. Give basic information about the project to be handled and with whom. Share a pre-created plan and schedule periodic meetings with the candidate. The suggested meeting frequency is a few meetings in the first two weeks and weekly meetings after that. Schedule meetings during and at the end of onboarding that include HR. It will be helpful because it will require you to provide clear and understandable feedback to the candidate, which all stakeholders will be aware of.

On the first day, you can introduce the new employee to the team and ask them and their colleagues to share a little about themselves. If you are working offline - have lunch together or ask one of his colleagues to have lunch with the newcomer without you. It will allow him to immerse himself in the team faster.

Often HR has activities for newbies - let it happen. It will be helpful.

Afterward, could you allow the employee to digest the information they have received?

What should be in the plan for the first few months?

It would be beneficial if the plan had a list of people the employee would benefit from meeting with, indicating the topic of conversation.

Who should be on this list?

All members of the team in which the employee will be working must be present.

What to talk to them about besides general topics?

About their areas of responsibility and the processes adopted by the company. It is also worth adding all the roles with which the newcomer may interact. Expect them to remember only some of what they are told, but they will develop a rapport with many of the necessary people.

• Developers need to talk about how they write code and the services they are responsible for.

• QA engineers will talk about how the quality of the product is determined.

• Project managers will talk about processes and artifacts in the calendar/bug tracker within the team.

• Product managers can talk about the business value of the product and plans within the company.

• Team lead, that is, you should talk about the culture of the team and company and your expectations.

• Architects can talk high-level about the company's IT architecture and technical plans.

• Designers can talk about the design system.

• Analysts can tell about data flow in the system.

• DevOps will share knowledge about the infrastructure.

• If you think someone else should be on the list, please add them.

  
  

It is helpful if you do not set these meetings but allow the employee to arrange them himself.

The meetings may take a week or more, but that does not mean that the employee will only absorb information the whole time. It is crucial that, if not from the first day, but at least from the second day, there is already some activity on the development.

To show how the entire process works, ask them to make the first deployment of the functionality to production during the first week. Let it be the bare minimum - change Readme, fix a typo or the most specific bug, but let the newbie go through the whole process of value delivery.

Let him write tests, let his colleagues review his code, let the continuous delivery system run, and let his code get to production, where he will see a message about it in the logs.

Having tasks in the plan helps the employee get familiar with access rights/incident systems and escalation tools. It is often challenging, and it will be better if he has experience in a quiet environment.

Give the employee a service to improve and own. Let him analyze the code, look at bugs in the tracker, and suggest something himself. Please allow it to be implemented, and don't push, let onboarding go smoothly.

Experienced employee or not - he may need to be more familiar with all the technologies used on the project. Please include tasks for familiarization and use of these technologies in the plan. If the company provides compensation or has its courses available, prepare them or get the necessary approvals to purchase them.

In the first weeks, the employee is incredibly observant of various bugs and flaws in the existing system - could you ask him to correct the description in the data storage system or description of services, if necessary?

Even though the first weeks of onboarding are similar for different employees - leave some leeway in the plan for the second half of onboarding. This is so the employee can get started on tasks explicitly prepared for them. Although they are generally known, their details become known only after a while.

Who is responsible for the onboarding?

A new employee's supervisor is responsible for his adaptation, but it's worth involving the entire team. After all, it is with the team that he will have the most interaction, so it would be great if every team member took an active part in the adaptation. Delegate to them as much as possible.

Not necessarily, but it is possible to have a mentoring or buddy program for the employee undergoing onboarding. This will develop employees who want to build that way and give the newcomer a sense of elbow, making them more confident.

Involve HR in onboarding. They have a lot of experience with it and can tell you how to do it better.

Errors in the process of onboarding

A common mistake is unmanaged onboarding. Many companies give a person a task, and he has to do it independently. They don't tell him about expectations, provide feedback, and sometimes forget about the new employee. This is a big mistake because, after a lengthy hiring process, stopping caring about the employee wastes resources.

Onboarding too short or too long is also a common problem. Of course, when resources are scarce, there is often not enough time for a whole process, but working with people should be prioritized first. Dressing the immersion into actual work is also not a good idea. Otherwise, the employee might get bored because he came here to bring value and develop, not to sit around in meetings.

Conclusion

After reading this, It should be clear how to smoothly join a new team. These steps can be used by leaders of groups where new employees join and by newcomers themselves. If the team you joined doesn't have such a plan - develop one yourself and share it with the team.

It will help the team leader to be more objective in evaluating the results of the probationary period if there is one.

A sample 90-day plan is shown below:

## Main outcomes
1. Implement specific features (list of features) for leading service of the company
2. Fix bugs in the authorization service
3. Become a tech owner of necessary processes (list of processes) in the company

## First day
1. Get equipment (laptop/desired licenses)
2. Conduct meetings with the manager and HR. Agreed about the 90-day plan. 
3. Perform basic setup (email/slack)
4. Set up meetings with the manager and HR.

## First two weeks
1. Intro with every team member (developers/QA engineers)
2. Introduction with necessary colleagues (PM/PMO/Data Scientists/DevOps/Designers/Architects)
3. First deploy to production (Fix README in notification service)
4. Receive all necessary accesses from list <link_to_list>
5. Onboarding with HR (the day offs, vacations, sick days)
6. Get familiar with the team's services. 
7. Get familiar with the team's slack channels (list of channels)
8. Read the <For Newcomers> page in Confluence.
 
## First month
1. Get familiar with the duty routine
2. Conduct two shifts on duty in shadow mode
3. Fix linter errors and README in owned payment service. 4. Add Facebook authorization to the authorization service

## Second month
1. Conduct two shifts on duty
2. Fix bugs in the authorization service (list of bugs)
3. Add remaining authorization ways to the authorization service
4. Intermediate performance check

## Third month
1. Become the owner of the process of monthly client notifications (know it, document it, lead it)
2. Leftovers from previous periods.