Developer onboarding at Dandy
There are a tons of concerns to keep in mind when scaling an engineering org: recruiting the right people, maintaining velocity, adding process, logically organizing teams, and much more.
One of these concerns that can easily fall through the cracks is developer onboarding . When you’re shipping rapidly (hopefully you are!), it’s easy for docs and processes to get out of date. This is a shame because onboarding is a new hire’s first impression of their new job and team. We believe it should be an exciting time that sets a positive tone for their Dandy career, not a slog through stale docs and broken setup scripts, so we’ve invested a lot in improving our process.
For much of our early growth we simply hosted live onboarding meetings for everything from product tours to dev tools setup. This was great at the time because it ensured the knowledge we shared was up to date, but we quickly outgrew this approach. There were too many new hires to do individual sessions 1 by 1, so we started batching them for groups of new hires that started around the same time.
This seemed like a good idea, but it resulted in some of our new hires waiting around longer than necessary to learn about key systems. We soon took the next logical step in the progression, which was to record all of the sessions and share them with each new hire in a Learning Management System.
In addition to this recorded library of engineering sessions, the company-wide DandyU onboarding sessions are also scheduled for everyone’s first week. This serves as mechanism to provide all of the industry-specific and Dandy-specific knowledge, unrelated to development.
With these refinements the onboarding process in mind, we decided to take some time to check-in on a few new hires for honest takes and to see how it’s been. Read below to hear about their experiences joining the Dandy Engineering team.
Jenny
How was your interview experience and why did you choose to join Dandy at the end?
My interview process at Dandy was very unique. I wasn’t actually looking to move companies, but was doing a reference call for a previous colleague and in that call Dandy became intrigued to who I was. After the reference call I stayed in touch with Dandy and ended up talking to a bunch of different people who worked there. Through talking to everyone I realized there’s a highly talented, smart and kind team driving Dandy’s success. That was enough for me to decide to go through the interview process. And as the cliche goes the rest is history.
How has your onboarding experience been and overall experience so far at Dandy?
The general onboarding process at Dandy that everyone goes through regardless of team is the best onboarding I have ever done. You are enrolled in Dandy U, with a “class” of all the new people that joined the same week as you. It felt like college in the sense that you traveled through the onboarding with your “class” and was very fun. It was great meeting people from all different departments that you may or may not interact with in your day to day with your job.
Once through onboarding you hit the ground running because Dandy is moving at such a fast pace, which is very fun and exciting. Dandy employees are always willing to help so it’s easy to learn and get into the groove relatively quickly. I was at my previous job for four years, so before starting at Dandy I was nervous about the unknown, but I’ve been here a little over a month now and it feels like I’ve been here for much longer. It is truly great.
Tyler
How was your interview experience and why did you choose to join Dandy at the end?
When I started Dandy’s interview process I had next to no interest in dental technology. I found that my interviewers all expressed the same thing. However, it was very clear very quickly that Dandy already was having a massive positive impact for dentists and their patients. In addition, all the engineers I talked to were either self-taught like me or otherwise valued the difference in perspective that comes with an informal education in software engineering.
I ultimately chose to join Dandy because the work was something I could be proud of and each of the engineers I had met was someone I wanted to work alongside.
How has your onboarding experience been and overall experience so far at Dandy?
My onboarding experience has had a lot of contrast. Components like DandyU, our engineering onboarding sessions, and the wealth of knowledge documented in Notion have all been thoughtfully put together and immensely helpful. In comparison, systems onboarding has had big gaps and inconsistencies in documentation that pretty regularly push me to read source code to divine what’s actually going on. As an engineer on Platform, this is probably fine and points to a lot of places where I can meaningfully contribute improvements — our engineers working on customer facing features deserve better and I’m looking forward to when we deliver that for them.
JR
How was your interview experience and why did you choose to join Dandy at the end?
The interview experience was fairly typical compared to other companies. What stood out to me were the people I interviewed with. Throughout the process I was struck by how genuine everyone was and how excited they were about the dental world. Originally it wasn’t a space I had considered, but after the interview I felt I understood better why it was an exciting opportunity and how modernizing dental practices would help solve many real world problems for dentists and patients.
How has your onboarding experience been and overall experience so far at Dandy?
It’s been a lot of fun getting to learn a space that I knew very little of. We have awesome videos that helped me better understand the dental world, its terminology and processes. I also got to meet with real dentists to go over the products they use and learn about the things they care the most about.
After onboarding was done and I got my first task, I had plenty of time to explore the systems around the feature I was working on. I also got a chance to pair with co-workers to get to know them and get more context on the features they were working on. I have really enjoyed how everyone around me is collaborative and willing to help.
My overall experience has been everything I was hoping for when I joined Dandy, and I’m super excited to be a part of the team here!
What’s next?
Our onboarding process, like every system at Dandy, is something we are continuously improving. Up next is a whole host of incremental improvements that we hope will continue to help all of the great folks we’re hiring:
- More dedicated time and hires to work on developer tooling
- Improving our automated test coverage and build-system so new engineers can make changes with confidence
- Dedicated mentorship and ramping sessions (aka Bootcamp)
- Documentation for each team’s cross-functional team members, points of contact, and roles
- Revamped code ownership system, so it’s clear which team can answer questions about a particular system
