Mentorship and career development in technology

The effort to hire curious, committed, inspired, and inspiring professionals is crucial, but it is only the first step for a technology company. Once talented people arrive, they need to be kept interested and productive to ensure that they stay with the company in the long run. Otherwise, the investment in hiring top professionals is wasted with an early departure, especially in the tech industry, where employee mobility is high, and companies can be aggressive in pursuing the best talent.

Onboarding

Integrating a new employee into the company, a process known as onboarding, is key to their future in the organization. It is the new person’s gateway into the company and how first impressions are made. Several studies show that this initial period of employment affects whether the person stays in the job, as up to 20% of new hires leave within the first 45 days. 

The most well-known part of the onboarding process is also the most obvious: introducing the new person to everything, from the systems in use to the company culture, tools, and processes. Organizations have gotten better at creating good onboarding experiences. Still, there’s much more at stake than giving a lovely gift bag, scheduling one lecture after another, and making the person feel welcome. The first contact with the leadership team is crucial for building a bond and initiating a relationship with each new hire.

The onboarding process in a technology company will only be complete when the incoming team members start to feel productive. For this to happen, in addition to the onboarding process, the new hire should have a person dedicated to mentoring them, and they should be immediately involved in an initial project. This project, often known as a starter project, should last a few weeks and be comprehensive enough to expose them to the development methodology, the code review process, and the systems, tools, and libraries they will be working with daily. 

In this phase, the new hire team will pay close attention to the code that he or she writes, and the code reviews should be done more assertively to teach the company’s best practices. In the engineering lifecycle, employees write code, test it, and submit it along with its tests, allowing coworkers to file comments. It is an iterative process that only ends when the code is good enough to go into production. This process of validating and reviewing code is a learning process, especially for newcomers.

The onboarding process in a technology company will only be complete when the incoming team members start to feel productive.

In smaller companies, the code review culture may be less widespread, unlike in big techs, where it is extensive. For some senior professionals in these smaller organizations, guiding junior people who came into the company after them might not be seen as an important part of their duties, but in big tech, leaders often spend around 60% of their time reviewing code and copying all developers on every review. The detailed comments are a great learning tool. 

For the leaders, code review also shows the less experienced developers:

• Which areas deserve special care
• How to write tests
• What’s the system structure
• The general technical direction for the organization

When a company uses code reviews as a teaching opportunity, the team’s skill level gets elevated, because, along the way, these same people will be capable of conducting constructive code reviews. It’s a way of leveling up the team and an aspect of the engineering culture worth nurturing in organizations.

Senior positions

Even a senior professional can feel lost in his or her early days at a new company. One of the main factors for integration is a team’s vocabulary, something pretty simple at first glance, but that deeply affects daily activities. The new person needs to learn the team’s terminology, the names of the systems, and the acronyms in order to feel like they are also a part of that organization. 

Managers are responsible for ensuring that new hires are mentored and supported until they feel comfortable in their new role. Weekly one-on-one meetings are a good tool for this. Hiring a talent coveted by the market is a considerable investment and a victory for the company, and it can all end up going to waste if the newcomer doesn’t adjust to the role. 

One factor that makes professionals anxious is not knowing where they stand concerning expectations. Leadership needs to be accessible and transparent, as transparency helps to reduce insecurity. All communication opportunities should be used, from internal messages to all-hands meetings. 

Hiring a talent coveted by the market is a considerable investment and a victory for the company, and it can all end up going to waste.

Regular and constant communication can be adapted to the company’s management style. Even if management is much more bottom-up than top-down, frequent communication sets the tone for technical and strategic guidelines. “I’m on board, but I want to know where this ship is heading”—that’s a very fair consideration for those who have joined a new company.

While the new hire gets used to the organization, it is a great strategy to assign them small, concrete projects, so that they get to deliver results early in the role. Employees tend to be happier when they have the space and conditions to feel useful, productive, and valued. This creates a virtuous cycle because when someone feels happy at work, they are willing to create more, mentor other employees, and be role models.