Comment by hinkley
11 hours ago
Nobody talks about SEI anymore but their Capability Maturity Model informed and/or aligned with how I approach new-to-me projects whether that 'new role' is internal or a new employer.
CMM says that an engineering team whose processes aren't written down is level 0, and writing them down, even if they are batshit, gets you to level 1. Which leads to a fun bit of catharsis with the older employees where they get to say things like, "and then a miracle occurs".
Also writing things down gives someone else a peek into what's going on in your head and they can correct bad assumptions you have before they get cemented and take more effort to dig out of your thought processes.
So I always start with fixing the documentation, the runbooks, the CI process. It's a deliverable you can engage in without breaking production, it demonstrates mastery, it fixes a pain point that the more professionally mature members of the team care about, which gets you brownie points with the right sort of people. And it makes it easier to onboard the next person, or pick back up a project that has been on the back burner for several quarters.
TODOs emerge from the documentation or get explained away as unnecessary or wontfix. By the time you're touching something you have a better idea of why things are like they are, so you make up for 'lost' time.
It's also, inevitably, the newest people who are often the best at fixing basic documentation — because they're the ones who don't already know it.
Yes, the curse of knowledge. The new person only has industry jargon that everyone else will have and so they will describe any new concepts that way instead of with the circular logic the team has established. And that is often something I have to explain to the new person when they look dubious at the notion that they have any right to be touching the docs at all. They have more right than just about anyone.
It takes a really good teacher to be able to explain as easily to an intern as to a principal, and often the intermediate people have to take the beginners aside and reframe your explanations anyway. Whether you witness it happen or they do it where you cannot see, it happens.
I do the same. You work your way around the edges and get a genuinely good feel for the workflow while improving on it as you go.
I also repeat the process with people that I'm responsible for onboarding. But it becomes my responsibility to compliment their contributions to the project in those early days so that it quells their nervousness about me tapping the brakes on their Bias Toward Action.
This is action, just not action that can tarnish both of us by shipping bugs to production.
Edit to add: I used to take ex coworkers out for coffee or beers around their last day and ask for a rundown of all the reasons they left. What you generally find if you let them keep talking is that they will run through the problems in reverse chronological order. The last thing they will mention is almost always what a joke the onboarding process was.
Last straws are the most recent thing that set the person off. All the straws before it add up, and if a person is already questioning the maturity of the organization on day 2 on the team, then I believe that multiplies your turnover rate. The longer you can go before a new employee says "what the actual fuck", is a multiplier on how long they will stick around.
Effectively, I think "the first 100 days" rule of thumb goes both ways. You get 100 days to show you're useful as an employee, but everyone already on the team is being held to the same yardstick by new employees. And if you're hiring at a high enough rate, having 20% of the team think the old employees are a waste of oxygen is not good for consensus building.
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