My experience on-boarding as a Dovetail engineer

By Peter Wooden - Software Engineer.

Coming from large and small companies, I haven’t had any on-boarding experience as good as Dovetail’s. The process was well organized and thoughtful. It allowed me to be productive and encouraged me to be part of the team from the first day. If you’re considering joining us (we’re always looking!), read on to find out what to expect in your first few days and weeks.

How I merged three PRs in my first three days

Connecting my personal GitHub account to the organization and our monorepo architecture made it easy to run our app on my laptop with minimal effort. If you’ve ever read The Unicorn Project, my experience is the opposite of Maxine’s. Maxine took more than a month of wrangling dependencies, people, and code to get a running build of the Phoenix project. I went from git clone to running an instance on my laptop in about fifteen minutes — and that’s for our whole app. This involved reading the READMEs to understand the code structure, installing dev. dependencies, and running ergonomic yarn scripts. All this knowledge was version-controlled and in the repo. rather than scattered throughout collective minds in the organization.

Magically, everything worked the first time. Dovetail has an “If something is incorrect, change it” culture. So the README instructions are nicely maintained over time.

Dovetail makes sure that all its engineers have context on the whole tech stack. On day two, I had an architecture overview session with two of our tech leads, exploring our full-stack, from Kubernetes to front-end styling. We later had a session on the database schema to understand how user concepts map to data and common patterns and techniques. These sessions gave me a lot of clarity and helped me be productive quickly.

In my first week, I had someone from my team help me set up. We did some pairing, which gave me familiarity with our toolchain, where things are, and what patterns we are using.

How I got to know my team and the rest of the company

Dovetail is big on making people feel part of a team. One of the first onboarding tasks I had was to set up 1:1s with everyone in my team — other engineers, the designer, the product manager, and the engineering manager. It doesn’t stop there — I also set up 1:1s with the two co-founders!

When you first join, you are encouraged to write an internal blog post to introduce yourself, and you can read everyone else’s too. It’s always a bit scary to write about yourself, but it’s an excellent way to learn exciting things about each other and provides some good conversation starters!

On an ongoing basis, we do a few things to ensure everyone has opportunities to build relationships. We use a catch-up bot called “Donut,” which sets random 1:1 sessions every week with someone new. They are best in person, and we usually grab a coffee or walk around the park for half an hour. We also have a bunch of “clubs,” such as chess club, spicy memes, and run club. I’ve met many people through chess — there are more players here than I expected!

At the core of our work, Dovetail has a concept called HCCF (“highly collaborative, cross-functional”). The culture of collaboration between the triad roles — engineers, designers, and product managers — means that we all work together, so knowing each other is essential! We don’t silo ourselves by function and instead work together across roles.

How I felt part of the same mission

When you join Dovetail, you have an opportunity to make a significant impact. It’s a small, fast-growing company with a mission to solve the customer understanding gap. Dovetail did several things to help me understand the culture and work:

1. Support for a day: as part of your onboarding, you respond to customer support queries for a day. You’ll understand what matters to them and get a lot of operational contexts, like how they make purchasing decisions.
2. Dogfooding: we use Dovetail as a research repository internally, and one of the first things we do is browse stories, insights, and interviews of our customers to build context quickly.
3. Friday demos: every Friday, we have a one-hour all-hands where we give each other shout-outs and share what we’ve been working on during the week. The energy in the room is electric — people from every function participate and celebrate each other’s wins. I was amazed at how inclusive it is. Everyone participates, from engineering to operations to the founders. It’s a great ritual that ensures the whole company is one big team on the same mission.
4. 101 sessions: there are about eight of these sessions. It’s where you learn about all the different functions, even those completely unrelated to yours, from the department heads themselves. The other 101s are about other things important to the company, like our values and a feedback workshop. After these, you understand how Dovetail works.
5. Transparency, transparency, and transparency: wow! There are no secrets in Dovetail. You have complete access to everything from our strategy docs, to our business metrics, across every function. Join every team’s Slack channel, reflecting one of our values — “open by default.” You know exactly how our business is going and what it plans to do next. We are encouraged in our onboarding checklist to check out all these things.

Come find out for yourself!

After my onboarding, I felt productive and knew how I contributed to the bigger picture. I felt welcome and excited to be part of a fantastic team. The onboarding checklist was well thought out and is continuously improving — my cohort of new starters work-shopped some changes with our engineering manager to make it less crowded. Engineers joining now will have an even better onboarding than I did!

Now you know what your first few days and weeks can look like at Dovetail — what are you waiting for? Our careers page is just over here!