Why You Need To Invest In On-boarding A New Software Engineer And Not Expect Them To Ship Code On…

Chris Jobst Senior Software Engineer at Pivotal Labs (right) and Poornima Vijayashanker, founder of Femgineer (left)

Interview with Chris Jobst Senior Software Engineer at Pivotal Labs

Have you recently hired a software engineer or maybe a few? Congratulations!

Are you starting to worry that they haven’t shipped any code yet?

Maybe they’re a bad hire…

Seems kinda harsh to think someone is a bad hire if they haven’t shipped code in their first day or week, especially if they haven’t been ramped up on the code base.

But who has time to train a new hire?!

Unfortunately the lack of on-boarding new hires, and seeing it as unnecessary is becoming a pervasive misconception. Instead, teams and companies fault the new hire by thinking the new hire just isn’t self-sufficient if they need to be on-boarded.

But how could someone (even a very seasoned software engineer) possibly review hundreds, thousands, or possibly millions of lines of code on their own? And be expected to know the nuances and decisions that went into writing all of it? Not to mention those notorious monkey patches that lead to bugs that only veterans on the team are aware of!

In today’s Build Tip, we’re going to explore why on-boarding new software engineers on your team is important, and provide you with some techniques for doing it.

To help us out, I’ve invited Chris Jobst, who is a senior software engineer at Pivotal Labs.

As you watch the episode you’ll learn the following:

• How to design a first-day experience for your new hire
• Why making setup a cinch is a good thing and doesn’t mean you are spoon-feeding your new hire
• What to expect in terms of results from your new hire at the end of the first day and the first week
• The benefits your team and company will experience when you invest in on-boarding new hires

Wondering what to do if you have more than one hire? Well, stay tuned, because in next week’s Build Tip we’re going to be sharing some best practices for ramping up more than one new hire at a time!

Listen to the episode on iTunes!

You can listen to this episode of Build on iTunes.

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Check out these additional resources on hiring and managing employees:

• How To Succeed In Your First Remote Working Position
• How To Build A Pipeline Of Technical Talent
• How To Nurture A Team Of Top Performers

Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA.