Ramping up to an Expert. Faster.

For the past 2 years, I've been working with Codigy to help ship software, faster.

One of the problems we are working on is helping newly hired engineers become experts. It has everything a geeky product designer will love - problem scale, complicated processes, knowledge sharing between people, stress ??

Engineers and managers report that it takes 3 to 9 months to be fully ramped-up. During this time, new hires work below their peak efficiency and can affect the productivity of the existing team.

Let's dive in, see what exactly is happening and what can be done about it ??

Newcomer's point of view

Let’s assume that everyone wants to do well, boost their teams and get recognition for it. For this to happen, an engineer needs to:

1. Understand your product and the codebase;
2. Learn your processes;
3. Connect with your team and understand their expertise;
4. Get a grasp of your values and behaviour expectations;

That last bit is important. It might be obvious to you, but the newcomer doesn’t know if you value speed with higher risk or prefer things to move slower but safer. 

Everyone has their own definition of a good engineer, there is no world-wide standard.

Team perspective

?Software, faster - is a paradigm natural for co-founders & managers. Your team is with you on this one. Everyone likes results and no one likes to soak in slow bureaucratic juices. So there are two challenges:

1. Minimize the energy used by the team to ramp-up a newcomer;
2. Reduce the ramp-up time to gain a productivity boost faster;

At Codigy, we've built tools that help your new hires level up to an expert faster and reduce the pressure on your team??

Experience of the newcomer, with Codigy

We believe transparency helps. An engineer can learn all basic standards you expect, through a dashboard or contextual notifications:

• The maximum recommended PR size;
• Branching strategy;
• Focus expectations (i.e. your policy on Multitasking);
• Task idle time;
• Reminders to close a branch & other tools that help to stay on schedule & keep the workspace productive;

Benefits for your team:

It takes time for a newcomer to get a grasp of things. Lead's can get frustrated when they have to message daily about the basics.

Codigy is never tired. Handy, contextual notifications and a dashboard with a transparent policy will help your engineers adjust to your culture.

This will free-up some time for your Lead's to focus on a high-level training.

What about more complicated nuances of knowledge sharing?

We can’t expect a new engineer to know who knows what on your team. Or can we? Codigy’s Confidence Map pinpoints experts for a consult or review:

As an extra bonus, Engineers can see their growing confidence in the codebase, right there - on an interactive map.

Benefits for your team:

Generalized knowledge-sharing events and mentors are great. But it's impossible to cover everchanging topics that are needed for the task at hand.

Codigy promotes a peer-to-peer connection between experts and newcomers. With on-demand expert knowledge, an engineer can ramp up to an expert faster and start boosting your team.

Codigy is out of the lab, and we are testing efficiency of our solutions. If you want to try it out with your team - send me an email, message or join our Discord community ??