Onboarding a software developer is very different from onboarding someone for general management, operations, or a sales and marketing role. A software developer needs lots of support and training initially because the job requires a lot of technical skills than any other skill. Many organizations fail in picking up this crucial factor and skip the training or provide training for a brief period which is not effective. Then, they realize they have to change their strategy and provide better training so that the employee can perform better. By this time, all the time and efforts of the employee and the organization go in vain.
Most of the managers shout and yell at their newly joined junior developers for all the mistakes they make. A new developer doesn’t have the clarity of what to do and he/she may inadvertently clear the production database or do some other random stuff only to be blamed by the manager. All this is not just the fault of the developer but also the manager and the entire organization. It is fundamentally a failure of the onboarding process.
Not only the small and mid-sized organizations but many mishaps like loss of production data and other technical issues happen due to the poor onboarding process of the new developer. So, organizations need to ensure they address these pitfalls in the onboarding process at the earliest so that the employees can be productive and avoid such silly mistakes. To help you better with this, we have listed down a few ways through which you can offer a smooth onboarding process to your newly joined employees.
1. It should start with hiring
Although the hiring process does not come under onboarding, it is still an essential part to ensure you get quality developers onboard. Check their portfolios, the projects they have done on repositories like GitHub or SourceForge. Their past work will give you an idea of their technical expertise and the kind of work they are looking for in your company. Through this, you can find the genuine interest of the employee and try to assign them to a project that they are comfortable with that can help to avoid mistakes in the beginning.
2. Documentation
Your new developers should be equipped with the information they need to perform their jobs effectively. Document everything from user guides of commonly used tools and organizational charts to SOPs, common bugs in a workplace setup, software tutorials, and much more. To ensure you handle all of this smoothly, you can make use of IT onboarding software. Awareness about the project with the required amount of training for the same is crucial to get the best output from your new developers.
3. Coaching and mentorship
Guidance of senior developers and managers is very important in the initial stages of your new developers. Ensure you assign each of your new developers to a knowledgeable and highly skilled developer so that they can reach out to them for any help. This will help your experienced team of developers to enhance their technical and leadership skills.
4. Communication is the key
Once your new developers join the company, ensure you add them to the official communication channels of the company like Slack or Microsoft Teams. Let them get comfortable with the communication workflows. Updates for the regular meetings, work schedules, and everything can be known through these communication channels.
5. Feedback
Feedback should be the key parameter to evaluate the performance of your new developers. Programming-related tasks can be done on Github so that everyone can have access to it and suggest changes. For non-coding tasks, Google docs can be used. Build a good feedback system so that your developers can learn and grow more quickly.
Conclusion
To wrap up, onboarding a technical team can be a little difficult. With a proper process and structured workflow, you can guide them without any errors. We hope this article helps you to find out the ways to onboard your technical team effectively.
Useful Resource: How to Make a Good Software Project
Salman is a prolific environmental writer, and has authored more than 500 articles in reputed journals, magazines and websites. He is proactively engaged in creating mass awareness on renewable energy, waste management, sustainability and conservation all over the world.
Salman can be reached on salman@cleantechloops.com
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