How We Onboard New Engineers (Part I)
Transitioning to remote
In part one, we share the story of how our onboarding processes evolved with the transition to remote work. Later in the series, Brandon Campbell-Kearns, Engineering Manager of Learning & Development, will be sharing more of the work we're doing to make sure all new engineers joining Checkr have the tools and knowledge they need to build software as we scale.
For Checkr developers who joined the company pre-2020, their onboarding experience likely involved sitting near their teammates, being able to ask impromptu questions, and maybe socializing at a lunch or happy hour team event. There was ample opportunity to get unstuck if needed, gain context, and build #connection. From March 2020 and until offices in San Francisco, Denver, Orlando and a few other cities begin offering increased in-office availability next month, Checkr has been a remote-only company.
During this remote-only period the R&D organization grew the overall team to 265, adding 120 teammates, sometimes a dozen+ developers in a month. The organization consists of many teams, and not all teams do onboarding exactly the same. Nonetheless, here are some team practices for onboarding remote developers.
Making people feel welcome
Gabe Westmaas, SVP of Engineering, in particular focuses on making new-hires feel welcome. During the monthly Research & Development (“R&D”) all-hands, he introduces those who have joined since the last R&D all-hands, and asks everyone else to “light up the chat” with welcome messages.
Engineering managers and other developers focus on this as well. Engineering managers will often arrange a welcome event for others to learn more about the new teammate, to hear their experiences, interests, hobbies, etc. Sometimes developers who have been at Checkr since 2016–2017 reach out. Many teams also employ an “onboarding buddy” to make sure the new-hires’ onboarding experience goes smoothly.
First Merge Request
It’s nice to be able to hit the ground running. The MR in the new hire’s first few days often includes an easy “starter” MR task like renaming a function or adding a new function parameter. It mostly reflects on Checkr’s preparedness — was GitLab access pre-provisioned? Did the automated dev setup provisioning script download all the right dependencies? Or if the new hire prefers the manual dev setup approach, are all the instructions well documented in Confluence and READMEs? Did continuous integration and continuous deployment (“CI/CD”) quickly get the new code merged, tested and deployed to the Staging environments? Two-thirds of backend PRs are to microservices, so if necessary, were the services able to run together locally easily?
The first MR can be in the first day, the first week, or whenever the new-hire is able to get local-development setup. The goal is to enable devs to hit the ground running.
New hires are often asked to make at least one update to the documentation to make it easier for the next person. There has been a strong focus on making the dev-setup process as smooth as possible.
Engineering onboarding
The next step is to help build an understanding of Checkr’s engineering architecture, infrastructure, and tooling. This is currently done through a mix of live presentations, recorded presentations, pairing, and documentation.
There is a focus on active “hands-on” experience; for instance, rather than just reading about the Checkr API, the new-hire will hit the API endpoints in the Staging environment. For async questions, some teams set up a dedicated team onboarding slack channel where teammates can chime in with support, links, etc. — one benefit of this is that all new-hires benefit from one new-hire’s questions, and sometimes new-hires can best answer other new-hires questions!
Checkr Onboarding
The Checkr Onboarding Bootcamp helps new employees learn the values, attitudes, knowledge, and behaviors to help them to be successful at Checkr.
In addition to the engineering-specific onboarding, Checkr once a month hosts a three half-day company onboarding bootcamp. It covers Checkr’s vision, product, mission, and organization. It also helps new-hires build an understanding of the industry, including the Fair Credit Reporting Act (“FCRA”), Title VII of Civil Rights Act, and “Ban the Box” fair-hiring initiatives. On the last morning new-hires complete the FCRA Basic Certificate Program.
JIRA starter stories
Development teams often utilize a “starter” or “good-early-commit” JIRA label for identifying stories that are good for new developers. The goal of these stories is help new developers build velocity, fix bugs and build incremental features, and feel good about their work. This helps build context and experience as new-hires acclimate into Checkr. Therefore, the last step in onboarding is what all developers like to do best, commit code!
As mentioned, Brandon recently joined Checkr and will be leading the charge in further building out this program for new-hires. This investment in engineering onboarding helps the R&D organization scale with less overhead for individual teams and in a more collaborative way. 🚀
