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