IT industry has one of the highest turnover rates, and we know it can take up to several months for a new developer to be fully productive. How to succeed in offering a great onboarding experience for software developers ?

1. How to boost onboarding of software
developers ?
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Intro
CEO co-founder
@Promyze
CTO co-founder
@Promyze

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(1) https://www.linkedin.com/business/talent/blog/talent-strategy/industries-with-the-highest-turnover-rates
(2) https://devskiller.com/true-cost-of-recruiting-a-developer-infographic/
The software industry has one of the highest turnover rates in the
world, 10-15% on average in past years (1)
It can take about 7 months for a new programmer to reach optimum
productivity (2)
Onboarding can’t be ignored

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💘 A great onboarding favors retention
(1) Source: Digitate
(2) Source: Allied
New employees who go through a structured onboarding program
are 58% more likely to be with the organization after three years(1)
Organizations with poorly-handled onboarding are twice as likely
to cause new hires to seek new opportunities in the near future(2)

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But still….
(1) Source: UrbanBound
(2) Source: Harvard Business Review
35 % of companies spend 0$ on onboarding(1)
22% of companies have no onboarding process(2)

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✨ We look for efficiency during onboarding
We need a process that includes both
… human interactions (developers need to feel integrated)
… tools to automate tasks (when possible)
And which can be repeated (every month or every week in some
scale-ups)

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What a developer needs to learn during the onboarding
The company
● The business, customers, history, …
● Its cultural values , structure and organization
The project / team
● The goal, core business, …
● People and responsibilities
● Development workflow
● Next key milestones
● Business vocabulary (our ubiquitous language)

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What should be ready for day 1 ?
📄 Paper stuff that should be signed
💻Laptop should be ready
Access to all tools you’re using should be created
👭👬 People available to spend time with the new hired
📒 Procedures on how to get started should be up to date

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⌨️ Discover the technical culture of a team
During the onboarding process, a developer should get familiar with:
● the codebase and its architecture (DDD, CQRS ?)
● how to set up a dev environment, build and run the app
● the development workflow (TDD ?)
● how tasks are managed (agile framework ?)
● how to get sensitive data (credentials, …)
● the CI/CD process (the “DevOps Big Pic”)
● the test strategy (if there is one)
● the coding standards and best practices

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💬 Learn best coding practices from other developers
Engineering practices
● Pair/Mob programming
● Code review
● Mentoring
Having social interactions is great to get more familiar with
colleagues and feel integrated in the team
May require huge effort in time, need to find a trade-off to avoid
business impacts

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💡 Tips during the onboarding process
Reading code with no intent to update the code is boring
Don’t show the code base for 1 week
Up-to-date tests in the codebase adds an extra layer of confidence that
a new team member can have when modifying intricate parts of the
code
Keep your expectations low at the beginning: Give developers small
projects they can be successful on to create early successes

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📔Learn best coding practices from documentation
Technical documentation (Wiki)
Requires energy to be kept up-to-date
Static content (no interaction or practice from the developer)
Not integrated in the developer ecosystem
Developer can be overwhelmed by the quantity of information

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💬 🛠🛠 Boost onboarding on best practices
● Include developers in regular meetings dedicated to best
practices definition in the team
● Set developer’s environment to get automatic feedback when
best practices are not followed
● Run interactive challenges to learn and discover the best
practices repository of the team
Here comes