The Young Guns program
Pipefy started the so-called Young Guns program in 2017. The initiative allowed recent graduates and young professionals the opportunity to kick off their careers at Pipefy, a global SaaS company.
Due to its success, the engineering team always intended to continue with the program but struggled with the reasoning. How would we bring fresh tech talents and still provide proper guidance in such a challenging environment? If that does not sound challenging enough, let’s add a globally distributed team on top of it.
Similar initiatives had been successful across other areas of Pipefy, so — despite the big questions and challenges we faced — the time seemed right for the engineering team to embrace it.
This article provides a brief description of the Young Guns process, and my experience with the program after being selected as one of the mentors for it.
Starting it off
In September 2020, Pipefy’s engineering team, along with the other areas, kicked off the first Young Guns Tech Program. Many doubts were raised, but the decision was already clear: We will make this happen.
So it began! We designed the program’s guidelines and defined the initiative’s timeline. The idea was to open the application period, start the selection process, conduct online tests and then culture fit and technical interviews , send out offers and, finally, have our new engineering members join us at the beginning of January 2021.
We had over 1,000 candidates and many factors were taken into account, especially diversity factors and their willingness to learn. Out of all the people willing to join our efforts, we selected 11 Young Honey Badgers.
We were excited to have set up the program and have it working, but having these new people join us just wasn’t enough — we also had to define an onboarding process. This is when we decided that the program should have mentors who would be the reference person for the trainees, help in decision-making processes, assist with their challenges, and show different ways to deal with their daily activities. We also had people helping with specific areas, such as mobile, front-end, backend, QA, data, and architecture and infrastructure. And here is where my journey along them begins.
So it begins
By that time being, I was not only focused on the backend matters. I had actually joined the SRE team in order to further develop my skills as an engineer. Considering this context, I then started as one of the general mentors for the Young Guns Tech Program. I was responsible for assisting with backend, data and also a bit of architecture/infrastructure areas.
During this time, some of the Young Guns reached out to me in order to further understand not just tech details about our platform, but also how our domains were structured. In all of those discussions, their willingness to learn something that was beyond their current squad/team responsibilities always caught my attention. So something pretty interesting started to cross my mind: They haven’t joined Pipefy to solely act as developers and assist their teams. They have already built the mindset to engage as problem solvers!
After some time, I gladly accepted becoming a mentor that was directly responsible for one of Young Guns. What an opportunity! We had really nice tech discussions related to Pipefy’s platform, and each of those conversations brought a lot of cheerfulness. What an inspiration to make my days even better.
After a while, more great things started to happen. The Young Honey Badger I was mentoring and others started to ask me the same question: What does it feel like to have a developer background and work alongside the SRE team? What an interesting question, right? Especially during a time when the importance of DevOps culture is being brought to the table.
Their interest in other areas — such as infrastructure, data, and architecture — had grown to the point that talking with them individually wasn’t enough. They were already engaged enough to have some recurring meetings regarding those topics. And, well, guess what? They were actually the ones responsible not just for scheduling the meetings, but also for actively bringing up the topics to our discussions! I can’t find words to explain how happy we were when we received the following questions from our trainees:
- “How are microservices connected to the core platform?”
- “What should I keep in mind in my day-to-day as a developer regarding the architecture?”
- “How is Pipefy served in many world regions?”
- “How do we make use of asynchronous processing? How do we act when we face incidents related to it? Can’t we prevent such from happening?
And here is to the future
After a really challenging year, the Young Guns Tech Program finally came to an end. Not a sad ending though, as they’ve all joined our teams as fully prepared members — enough to say, truly Honey Badgers!
This not only means that they are totally capable of dealing with their daily activities, but are also fully prepared to assist others and also prepare to become the next mentors for future Young Guns.
Keep being an inspiration to everyone, my friends! May your willingness to learn and improve our company never end.
Keep rocking!
“You step into the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.” — J.R.R. Tolkien
Rafael Dias — Staff Software Engineer (Young Guns Tech mentor)
