Onboarding Junior profiles in Hyper-growth
A software engineering team is made of professionals from different levels of expertise and onboarding junior profiles is critical for the continuity of your team and your company. How can we do this?
I’ve written some issues already about Hypergrowth in tech companies. In the current issue, I want to add another dimension to this concept: onboarding junior profiles. The seed of this question comes from one of the questions, and the follow-up conversation, that I had during my talk at Codemotion Madrid 2023.
This was a challenge in every team I participated and having the right strategy, based on the person, will help for successful onboarding. It is true that, as in many things in this life, the same rule does not apply to all cases, but it is true that, from my experience, for companies in hypergrowth, there is a pattern for onboarding junior profiles.
Don’t mistake, a failed onboarding for either a Senior Engineer or Junior Engineer profile has an impact on your company, the fact below applies as well for junior profiles.
Before jumping into the strategy, I want to dedicate one paragraph to re-emphasize the importance of hiring the right people and, once again, this applies also to Junior profiles.
Well, how do I onboard Junior profiles for my dev teams? The graph below tries to illustrate the cycle I’m used to use.
My first step is to have a 1-1 with the person. On that 1-1, my goal is to understand what is her/his motivations/drivers, in deep, for working in my team and in the company. I want to understand the drivers for this person. Open questions, “what” questions, are the ones that will help you, as Tech Lead or Enineeger Manager, to make this person be open and start sharing those drivers with you. Remember to use the role of 80/20 conversation (you talk 20% of the time).
Junior profiles tend to provide not deep answers. Sometimes they say “I want to improve my skills in TypeScript” or “I want to code microservices”. This is normal and even expected. One of my favorite answers, which I believe will really help the career path for a Junior profile, is “I want to try everything”; this is for me indicative that the person is really motivated and sees your team, and the company, the right place to be at this moment on her/his career.
A Junior person, sometimes, does not know “where” wants to go. It’s your job as manager to scratch (hardly) the surface and deep in the conversation, in order to find some clue or direction on which the person wants to go. It is not a problem if you do not find the long-distance goal, but at least the short-distance goal.
It could take more than one 1-1 session, sometimes the passing of time transmits more confidence to the Junior person to be more open-minded, for you to find the drivers for this person. However, we are in a hypergrowth company, so, move fast.
Once I understand the drivers I consider my strategy ready to move to the next stage.
My second stage is about setting the right expectations and goals. Most likely, it’s the first (or one of the few) time that this person interacts with a manager. Also, the person might be nervous. Because of this, you have to be extremely clear and stick to the point. You want that the Junior person has cristal clearly in his/her brain what you, as manager, expect during the onboarding process and, also, in the immediate future. Short and direct sentences use to help, and keeping some seconds between sentences as well, so the person is capable to process (or even annotate) the message you deliver.
Think about goals that are achievable by the person and set them in a time frame. If you do not set the time frame, the person will not understand properly how to handle these goals among the rest of the priorities and commitments. Those goals should be designed based on the motivations you found in the previous stage.
The last stage I consider in the onboarding is the exposure to situations. Usually, I do this after a couple of 1-1s with the Junior profile, and also seeing that the person progresses and achieves the goals we set together in previous sessions.
[…] Put the junior person within your team, together with the rest of the team members, no matter the level of seniority […]
That was my answer to the question I got in my talk at Codemotion Madrid 2023.
Exposure to situations is the fastest and most solid way I know for a professional to grow in her/his career path. Do not get wild with the exposure though, and always keep a safety net under her/his shoes. One of the things I do with my Junior people is let them fail, but in a secure way, and, of course, I communicate this. The analogy I use to say is: If I see you will scratch your skin because of the decision you made, I’ll let you fail; If I see you will break your leg, I’ll stop you before failing.
From here, I use to loop this “3-stage cycle” based on the time frames set for each goal and exposure.
What do you think about all this? I’m wondering how you guys/gals are onboarding your Junior profiles in your developer teams; drop a comment in this issue so we all can read it!
Great post Marcos. Super important to start by understanding the other person's motivations and build that relationship in 1:1s.
Even if the junior profile is at the surface level with wanting to learn some particular technology, peeling the layers of the onion one can see where they set themselves in the spectrums such as:
- "fear of failure" vs. "excitement of success"
- "direct and fast negative feedback" vs. "indirect and sugarcoated negative feedback"
...
We usually treat everyone as we like being treated, but we have to speak our audience's language. Cultural and personal backgrounds create radically different meanings of the same message.