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New Hires

One unanticipated side effect of this team environment was its effect on new hires. Over the course of one year we quadrupled the team size. Such drastic growth under extreme project and business pressure has been the death of several start-ups over the years, yet we didn’t find it to be that big a deal.

        Our most difficult new-hire ramp up occurred after we had fully adopted our process. The new employee had never before programmed in C++, nor had he ever heard of functional programming or performed OOP. We performed heavy template metaprogramming throughout our code base and had a system of around 600 classes at the time.

        Furthermore, the new hire had a lot of enthusiasm, but wasn’t very technically adept. He wasn’t good at analysis and didn’t really understand data. We hired him because he had a good knowledge of our customer’s domain and a strong mathematical background.

        The first week after we hired him, our velocity dropped, as expected. The second week, our velocity was back to where it had been before the hire. By the end of the third week we had improved our overall velocity, and the new guy could do any task on the board. He could sit down with any of the rest of us on a part of the system he hadn’t seen before, figure out how it worked and contribute. He’d pretty much figured out both functional and OO programming and could read a template metaprogram — commonly considered to be one of the most difficult aspects of C++.

        In the fourth week, he was pairing with our next new hire during that hire’s first week. He was confident and skilled enough to take any task off the board — even in a part of the code base which he’d never seen — and teach the new guy how it worked. Furthermore, the rest of the team had sufficient confidence in him to have no qualms about him taking on this challenge. No one even bothered to monitor his pairings with the new guy.