Background

Hiring a top talent is hard, same as hiring and growing in-house which also takes a lot of time and effort to mentor, but once they become top performers, another challenge kicks in which is how to retain the talent. So, over years of experiences we hit these challenges quite often as early stage startup we were always budget constrained and not satisfied with contractor or junior engineers performance. This time lets look at problem from different angle and try a concept called Microengineering.

Microengineering

So, when building high-performers team what are the options we have?

• Hire top of market

  • Pros:

    • Less time to onboard/speed up

    • Less/No mentorship

    • Less/No guidance needed

    • Depth/breadth of knowledge

    • Doing things right, doing right things

  • Cons:

    • Costly

    • Hard to retain

    • Long Hiring Process

    • Lack of company brand & reputation awareness

    • Lack of will to mentor and guide junior engineers

• Hire low of market

  • Pros:

    • Less costly

    • Easy to retain

    • Short Hiring Process

    • Look for experience and mentorship

    • Has more time to commit

  • Cons:

    • More time to onboard/speed up

    • Extensive mentorship in all aspects

    • Guidance and a bit micromanagement needed

    • Lack of knowledge and experience

    • Doing things mostly wrong, stuck and no idea how fix or ask right questions

    • Risk to retain once upleveled

• Microengineering

  • Pros:

    • Less costly

    • Easy to retain

    • Short Hiring Process

    • Look for experience and mentorship

    • Lower time to commit

    • Less time to onboard/speed up

    • Less mentorship in few aspects of the role

    • Less guidance and a low micromanagement needed

    • Knowledge and experience gained fast via ownership of few technologies

    • Going over training program, 10 weeks heavy learning, uplevels communication skills and ownership of limited scope and task

    • Risk to retain once upleveled is lower, because of pipeline, instead of 1-2 interns, time is spread across 8 interns which can resists of 50% churn. And due to limited scope, they become productive even before developing full skillset for the role they picked.

  • Cons:

    • It increases the coordination and administration(onboard, offboard) overhead on a team

    • Need uplevel written communications in engineering

      • Asking questions over slack

      • Engage more collaboration between interns

      • Clear tasks distributions and deliverables

      • Clear performance review

      • Clear status updates

Develop maturity

• Presentation

  • Demos: clarity, sticking to time allocated, deepness of understanding

• Collaboration

  • Meeting other peers and showing more pairing contributions, sharing overlap concepts

• Writing

  • Well organized and valuable blogs

• Learning

  • Structured

  • Consistent

  • Sticking to weekly goals

  • Pass track checkpoint exercises

• Transformation

  • Apply learnings to Use cases

  • Asking good questions

  • Initiating technical or process improvements

  • Deliver predictable and accountable results

  • Thought leadership approach, going beyond program scope

  • Not miss deadlines

• Public presence

  • Build growing social presence

  • Credibility in domain specific communities

  • Sharing outcomes of program publicly

• Communications

  • punctual to meetings

  • active in slack

  • respectful in communications and peers

  • seek continuous feedback

  • open to constructive feedbacks

  • growth mindset mentality

  • honest

  • humble

  • you say, you commit