The first few days or weeks of a new hire in the company can be critical. What they say about first impressions, surely applies in this case as well – this initial time period, where an engineer needs to understand ‘how things are done here’, is important.
As Outbrain is scaling its engineering R&D group, it became evident that the current new hire training program is lagging behind. A new hire usually went through an extensive onboarding frontal lectures, where each subject was lead by a more veteran employee with the proper knowledge. It would usually take a month or so to go through all the lectures, not because there were so many of them, but because they were scattered and opened only when there were enough people (otherwise, it could inflict an unacceptable pressure on the employees giving them)
Hands on stuff, such as how to write a standard service, how to deploy it, what is the standard way to add metrics to you application etc, AKA – the important stuff, was usually taught in an informal way, where each team leader did the best they could, under the usual tight time constraints. As this method served us well for quite some time, the recruitment scale – and, in particular, the large number of new hires in a short time – forced us to re-think this process.
What we envisioned, was a 2 week bootcamp, that each engineering R&D new hire will have to undergo. We considered 3 basic approaches:
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A frontal lectures class, opened once a month, with people from various teams. This will not be efficient, as new hires rate are not consistent, and the learning is not by experience. the load on the instructors is huge, and they don’t always have the time or the teaching skills
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A by-subject self learning, consisting of a given list of things to study and learn. As this scales better than the first approach, it still lacks the hands on experience, which is so important for understanding such a diversified, dynamic and multilayered environment.
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Tasks-based bootcamp, consisting of a list of incremental tasks (where each new task relies on the actual implementation of the previous task). The bootcampee ends up creating a fully functional, deployed service. The service is a real service, in the sense that it is actually deployed to production, uses key infrastructure systems like any other service etc.
Our choice was the tasks-based bootcamp. in the course of a few weeks, we created a plan (documented in the company’s wiki), consisting of 9 separate units. Each unit has its own page, consisting 4 sections: the unit’s overview, some general notes, the steps for the unit and a section with tools and applications for this unit. We added a big feedback link to each page, so we can get the users feedback and improve accordingly.
The feedback we got is very promising – people can work independently, team leaders can easily scale initial training and the hands on experience gained was proving to be extremely important. The bootcamp itself is also used a knowledge source, where people can go back to and understand how to do things.
Our next steps, other than constantly improving the current bootcamp, are identifying other subjects that needs to be taught (naturally, a more advanced and specific ones) and building a bootcamp program following the same lines – hands on, progress on your own, real world training.