Engineering manager onboarding

Welcome! We are so excited to have you join the team and we want to do everything we can to ensure you are successful. This document contains all the outcomes that we think will lead to a successful onboarding. As a manager, you have the ownership and autonomy to figure out what the best way to drive these outcomes is. If you aren’t confident that you are on the right path, just ask for help from your team and/or manager. Every person is unique, so if you have any feedback along the way on things that aren’t working for you, or if you have ideas about what would be helpful for you to better be successful, please share.

These timings are approximate, and you are welcome to reorder these outcomes based on input you receive and your intuition on your team’s specific needs.

Week 1

  • You have completed the engineering setup.
  • You have scheduled recurring 1-1s with your team and ensured that you are invited to (and made the calendar owner of) all of your team’s recurring meetings.
  • You have made 1 commit or PR to our codebase (for example: a trivial bug fix) so you are familiar with our development flow.
  • Get Recruiter access for LinkedIn.
  • Get Set up with Brighthire. Invite will be sent by a memeber of the recruiter team.
  • Activate your Greenhouse account and be assigned any open roles on your team.

Month 1

  • You have confidence in the team’s high level goals, and can explain them if they are challenged.
  • You are able to describe the individual work that each person on your team is doing, answer questions about that work, and explain why that work is important for the team’s stated goals.
  • You are able to describe the career aspirations of each teammate, where they are struggling, and where they are thriving.
  • Your manager, your peer managers, and your teammates report that they are happy and relieved to have you on the team because you have already had a positive impact.
  • You understand who your stakeholders are and have met with them to understand their priorities.
  • You have read either Turn the Ship Around or Orbiting the Giant Hairball and shared your thoughts with your peer managers during a team sync.

Month 2

  • You are the credible voice and point of contact for the team. You are directly responsible for the team’s success.
  • You have a written forecast of the work the team is going to do over the next ~3 months to make progress toward their goals.
  • You are accountable for your team’s hiring process.
    • You understand what the team’s hiring needs are (for example: skills, values).
    • You have confidence that our hiring process is calibrated to measure what we are looking for in an efficient and unbiased way (if not, you have proposed improvements).
    • You conduct the hiring manager screen calls for candidates who would be joining your team.
      • You can pitch Sourcegraph as a whole, the part of the product your team works on, and the team itself.
  • You have read both Turn the Ship Around and Orbiting the Giant Hairball and shared your thoughts with your peer managers during a team sync.

Give feedback on your onboarding

You should be discussing your onboarding progress every week with your manager. At the end of month 2 at Sourcegraph, spend one hour summarizing your onboarding experience (what has gone well, what was challenging, what would help you moving forward). Write down your thoughts and discuss them in your next 1-1 with your manager. Take your time to answer thoughtfully—your answers will be very important to make sure our onboarding process is even better for future hires!