Would you like a strong developerteam? Better your time to productivity

Career AdviceWorking Life

The speed at which new employees are integrated has a direct impact on the performance of an engineering team - and therefore also on how quickly your product can be delivered.

After a product is established in the market, both the CEO and investors will accelerate growth. This means many, many new hires, often in the product and development teams.

When things are heating up during the hiring process, CTOs often try to improve one of the most important but hard to quantify metrics in their teams: time to productivity.

Startups need to follow important metrics while building a team and preparing to bring a product or service to market. But how do you know what you need to drive forward? And more importantly, why?

Given that the time to productivity of developers has a direct impact on the speed of a development team - which in turn has a direct impact on how quickly a product can reach the market - it is essential to learn how to measure and improve this metric. The alternative can lead to headaches at best: The company builds up, tries to keep pace with demand, and then the speed of the engineering team drops sharply just when it should be increasing, as new employees come on board.

The time until productivity is often the hardest to grasp and quantify - or at least one that is not well understood. We can't have numbers for everything, but we can see what works and what doesn't work by simply paying attention to a few key metrics.

There are many ways that people try to measure the time until productivity, but many of them look at the wrong metrics, which can be misleading or demotivating. Counting lines of code is a pretty well-recognized form of quantifying speed, but there's an inherent flaw: more code isn't necessarily better.

What doesn't work?

A historical perspective makes it difficult to determine precisely what causes productivity to decline.

• Is it a young person, that should be replaced by an experienced engineer?
• Is it just a bad culture fit?
• Is the proper onboarding missing?
• Is it everything at once?

It is often argued that this problem could be fixed by hiring better, smarter employees. However, this could also lead to an unhealthy, unusually homogeneous team, as people would rely on their direct networks and connections instead of opening up to a larger pool of talent. Additionally, this could also lead to bad engineering practices, and ego-driven engineers who do not work well in a team setting.

So what can we do to accelerate productivity? The answer is simple, but requires building the right infrastructure for success. That means better onboarding, more effective communication, and better documentation.

The dark state of the industry

If onboarding is directly linked to time-to-productivity, it is important to recognize the poor state of onboarding across the industry. The average churn rate for software engineers is around 15 percent, and attrition due to onboarding is, for example, a problem in the manufacturing industry that is estimated to cost $22 billion in the US. A third of engineers are looking for an alternative job before onboarding is complete. The average tenure for a software engineer is 18 months. It's dark to express it in such stark terms, but that's where the industry stands.

How does your company handle onboarding? According to a 2010 study, a successful onboarding program can lead to greater job satisfaction, lower turnover, and higher performance. Therefore, it is necessary to develop better onboarding systems.

To bring software engineers up to speed, a lot of information is required. Oftentimes, it is the case that teams take seven to nine months to get new members up to speed. This harms the team's speed. If new members can be brought up to speed in one month instead of seven, the teams are happier and healthier - and they deliver better products much faster. Here are three things you can do to speed up productivity.

1. Developer-onboarding

It is almost impossible to get a new employee up to speed quickly if you do not have the framework or learning model in place to support them as they adjust to new concepts and expectations.

Consider this: The onboarding process, which is often unfairly left to human resources departments, must cover four distinct areas:

• Product
• Process
• Tools
• Professional expectations

HR and L&D are usually not able to provide the right context at the right technical level for a function- and developer-centered onboarding, to build and maintain it.

Having a buddy system in place for new employees can help with communication and setting expectations for processes and goals. A successful onboarding experience for new members directly correlates to their likelihood of learning quickly, feeling comfortable, and staying with the company longer. You want to avoid your new employees leaving while they are still getting acclimated.

2. Dynamic documentation

When was the last time you updated your company's documentation? If you're like most companies, it's probably been a while. It's quite natural for documentation to become "out of date" because things in technology change quickly and it can be difficult for engineers to remember everything or find the time to keep everything up to date. Internal documents often take a back seat to more exciting tasks like sprinting to a product launch. Dynamic documentation enables constant changes by integrating the underlying code into the documentation—rather than vice versa—and ensures that documentation is always up-to-date when changes are made—or to the code itself.

New ways of thinking about automatically updating documentation help development teams build scalable processes like onboarding to get their team up and running quickly. The plus side? You only have to create dynamic documentation once, with standard documentation becoming outdated the moment you hit publish.

3. Asynchronic communication

Office culture is undergoing profound changes. As technology companies adopt remote and hybrid workplaces, developing new communication styles between team members is critical. Remote-centric communication processes and systems can help foster a strong sense of culture while helping teams maintain the healthy pace they need to get up to speed quickly.

In remote team management, communication is more deliberate than in office team management, because when you work in person, communication happens differently. But in remote teams, communication is more purposeful. You don't accidentally end up in someone's Zoom room for a five-minute chat that results in real problems being solved.

Learning effective communication without constant video chats or real-life meetings helps teams normalize communication and keeps everyone on the same page. New employees can easily get caught up spending hours hunched over their keyboard. Therefore, it is essential that we focus on the big picture and not on daily tasks.

If you want to promote a positive, empowering work environment, you need to create a social structure. We're adapting to asynchronous communication, but that's not our natural state—it takes practice and requires a shift in corporate culture, but it bridges the gap between engineers who feel isolated and those who are successful as part of a team. Mastering asynchronous communication can keep everyone on the same page, communicating happily, and avoid burnout from too many distracting Zoom calls.

The Takeaway

The time until productivity is the key to ensuring that there is no loss of speed when introducing a product or service. If a lot is at stake, you need to understand what you want to improve before you can improve it.

Optimizing the onboarding process for developers, incorporating dynamic documentation, and mastering asynchronous communication are three of the most successful ways a company can shorten the time to productivity and build a team that is not only more efficient, but also happier, healthier, and more likely to stay for the long term.