Solving the cold-start problem for new Engineers

In January of 2022, I started working at Event Temple, the leading CRM tool for Hotel and Event management spaces. Just like with any firm that has been around for a while, (8 years in this case) I expected them to have a fairly large codebase & I was not surprised looking at a fairly large backend infrastructure written in an unfamiliar language!

Different companies approach the cold-start program for new hires differently, I’ve seen approaches like “let us assign easy tickets and slowly ramp them up to harder ones” fail miserably because this assumes two things

1. The developer has “some” context as to how things are laid out, to even know where to find relevant code
2. The developer has familiarity with the language in question

While 2. could be true, if you only hire folks with past experience with the language that you use, this isn’t an optimal solution since now you reduce the candidate pool for hiring.

The “ET” Approach

Day 1 at Event temple, I’m greeted by my manager, ready to take on some simple tickets, but they had a solid plan in place!

The “Pet” Project

At Event Temple every new developer gets assigned a “Pet” project, and don’t let the name fool you — it’s not a side project you build for the system. It’s quite literally time given to you to add “Pets” as an entity in the system.

This might sound weird at first, but has some real strong upsides to it

1. You’ve to pretty much touch each and every part of the system in order to make a change as big as this, lending you with some “rough” idea as to how things are laid out
2. Since this is a huge entity being added, you’d have to understand how features are supposed to be implemented and how files are laid out
3. You implement CRUD in their backend language (Assuming you weren’t familiar with it, to begin with, this is a solid learning opportunity)
4. You implement the front-end too, making yourself familiar with that side of the code-base + giving you a solid understanding of how communications are taking place between BE and FE.

Some other considerations at play

The pet project approach can very easily backfire if you don’t have senior resources to help guide the new-joiners, since even this requires some amount of backdrop provided to the new engineer.

Ramping up from the Pet project, the new joinees are then greeted with an approach similar to the one many companies follow — i.e. assignment of easier tickets to then slowly ramp up the developers to speed. The upside here is the fact that on subsequent tickets these new engineers have a solid backdrop of the system already, as a result, the integration can take place rather smoothly.