Welcome to engineering bootcamp

Co-authored with Darcy Manderson

At Carta, we’re experimental and unconventional in the way we work. This is what makes it exciting to be an engineer here. Not only have we grown our customer base quickly, but we have also grown our technical stack. Nothing is “status quo,” and we’re always learning and sharing.

One of the biggest challenges many scaling companies face is hiring the right people. Carta sets the bar high; we don’t settle. We also want new engineers to make an impact early. But we have a complicated product — both from a business perspective and from an engineering perspective.

Let’s take a look at one of the ways Carta’s R&D team tackled these problems

The challenges

Our philosophy is to have every engineer deeply understand our product, which can be challenging if you’ve never worked in private equity or financial technologies. Other complicating factors are the geolocation of top talent and the size of the engineering organization as we grow. Carta is now a large company spanning several locations and time zones, which can get in the way of learning and understanding. Even before the pandemic, there was no longer the opportunity to walk down the hall to a coworker to talk through a problem or ask for help.

Scaling can be a challenge for seasoned engineers, so we knew that our newer engineers would struggle with finding the right knowledge unless we did a better job introducing them to R&D in a more impactful way. As our organization grew fast, we realized that new hires would be far more successful if they really understood right from the beginning what we do, how we do it, and who to go to for answers when stuck.

First impressions are everlasting. So we introduced the Carta engineering bootcamp to teach new hires about our product, to our business and to the ever-changing technology infrastructure at the leading edge in our industry.

Unlocking the problems

Stage one: gather insights

We knew we could make our current process better. We surveyed the team and talked to hiring managers, seasoned individual contributors, and recent hires. This unlocked a lot of insight into who and what we would need to start tackling this opportunity. In true Carta fashion volunteers from every corner of R&D raised their hand and offered to help. We began by looking at three key areas of improvements.

1. Products and feature, from an engineering perspective
2. Infrastructure, to provide a better understanding of our environments and frameworks
3. Tools and best practices: What is available to new hires? What do they need to know about Carta’s engineering culture?

Stage two: crush out content

These insights showed us a clear need to focus on two things: improving our documentation and adding demo recordings of core product workflows. This, as you can imagine, was a daunting task — but it turned out to be very valuable.

We divided teams of bootcamp volunteers and asynchronously started to consolidate and improve what we had and create content that we didn’t have. It was important for us to narrow down what we would focus on, such as:

1. What’s missing?
2. What is most valuable for new engineers when they join Carta?

Stage three: create and deliver

From there, we started building presentations, videos, and exercises. We delivered our first pilot session in less than two months after the initial workshop — not an easy task, considering that we’re all very busy and the people delivering the sessions are part of our product and platform engineering teams. This is the most exciting part. The entire organization was committed to creating value and accelerating the impact our new hires make to Carta in a meaningful way.

When you join a company as an engineer, you want to create value and you want to learn. We know that one of the best ways to do this is by meeting those that do the work and making connections with your peers. Our engineering bootcamp program includes three days of focused learning and meeting people you wouldn’t usually meet. Within the first week on the job, our new engineers get to collaborate with people they otherwise wouldn’t have worked with until they “needed” to.

Coming together as an entire organization, no matter what product or platform you’re working on, creates a much stronger sense of belonging. To me, this is just as important as pushing your first line of code to production. And a culture of belonging is part of Carta R&D. People strive for excellence always, while at the same time making every effort to support you. Being helpful is not an option for this team — that’s why you’re here.

We’re still piloting new sessions almost every two weeks. Every time we deliver to a new cohort of exceptional people, we learn something. We adapt and evolve, and we discover new ways to make it better — just as we do in our day-to-day work. I’m excited to see what this looks like in a year from now as our organization continues to grow.

But is it working? A question we ask ourselves regularly, and one that’s very important to us with everything we do at Carta — is, “Is it working?” Yes. Feedback has been positive, and we see the comfort level we see in new hires growing faster than before. Carta has always hired top-notch engineers, so we were already seeing early impact, but it’s improving faster since we launched the bootcamp.

If you think Carta sounds like a place you’d like to work, you should check out our careers page to see what positions we’re looking to fill.