Future-Proof Your Company by Effectively Scaling Engineering Teams
Jennifer Wadella
Jennifer Wadella
@likeOMGitsFEDAY
- Director of Angular Development at Bitovi
- Angular GDE
- Panelist on The Angular Plus Show
- Kombucha brewin' crazy plant lady
This talk may contain strong language, harsh truths, and serious passion.
Goals for This Talk
- Survive the Senior Hire Frenzy
- Learn to Quickly Spot Skill Gaps
- Create a Growth Environment
(without overloading your few senior engineers)
🔥 Survive the Senior Hire Frenzy 🔥
Current Hiring Landscape
"Just above 50% of engineers accepted job offers for those roles in the first quarter of 2021 — 171 of 320 offers — compared to a median above 65% in 2020. "
Facebook's hiring crisis: Engineers are turning down offers, internal docs show
Where are all the Senior Developers?
Senior Salaries May Not Get You Senior Talent
- 3-4 years = senior
- In reality, you can have 3-4 years of experience on your resume with writing very little code.
- This will only get worse as frantic hiring continues
- "Senior" means something different everywhere
- Most applicants have built applications in a framework, but can't tell you much about how their code really works.
Years of Professional Work Experience
Daily Time Spent Searching for Answers/Solutions
For a team of 50 developers, the amount of time spent searching for answers/solutions adds up to between 125-250 hours of time lost per week across the entire team.
Entering the "senior hiring frenzy" may not yield the results you're hoping for.
Open the door for hiring more junior candidates. It may be the only way you survive.
👀 Spot Skill Gaps Quickly 👀
Fix Your Project Management
You cannot tell true productivity of engineers until good project management is in place.
Onboarding
Create an onboarding system.
- Can they answer what the vision of the product is? Who the users are? Why certain technical decisions have been made?
- How quickly should someone be able to set up their environment?
- Do they know the process from getting assigned work to getting the code for the deployed?
- How quickly should someone be able to submit their first PR?
Ability to Find Information within their Organization
"Interactions with team members and managers aren't enough to help developers as more than half (53%) of developers agree or strongly agree that they are slowed down at work waiting on answers."
"In a new question this year, we asked if people feel like they have what they need to quickly understand and work on any area of their company's code. About half of developers say they have what they need, which means that the other half don't feel confident they have what they need to quickly understand and work on a new area."
Frequency of Productivity Frictions
Create a Culture of Vulnerability
Promote & encourage asking questions in public
Don't shame questions, the quicker people ask questions when they are stuck, the quicker they can get the education they need.
Use PRs for More Than Just Merging Code
Make WIP PRs the Standard
Enforce a process of opening work-in-progress PRs as soon as work starts on an issue.
- Encourage committing code at end of every day
- Can spot code quality issues faster
- Facilitate pair-programming more easily
Use PRs as Documentation
- Bookmark PRs that showcases repeated issues + conversations
- Copy PR quote into wikis for documentation around codesmells and best practices
Use PRs as Coaching Mechanisms
If a PR requires more than 5 comments, encourage jumping into pairing sessions to discuss issues.
Make Your PR Review Sessions a Positive Environment
If you struggle to get people volunteering to share PRs for code reviews, you have created a culture problem. See "Create a Culture of Vulnerability" 🙃
⚠️ ⚠️ ⚠️
Do NOT wait for a PR to
be submitted to start coaching
Because by then it's too late.
⚠️ ⚠️ ⚠️
🌦️ Create a Growth Environment 🌦️
Why Is A Growth Environment So Critical?
It's easy to put project success in hands of one capable developer. There are short-term speed gains that can blind to long-term inability to maintain.
Understand Team Member Limitations
Are you working with a few seasoned team members? Brand new team? Coming into an existing team?
Your Number One Priority Should Be Knowledge-Spreading
You must carve out time from feature delivery and deadlines for team members to focus on mentoring.
Create KPIs
Team members should have motivation to prioritize mentoring/knowledge sharing alongside code-delivery. Praise collaboration and question answering.
Onboarding | Documentation | PR Review process | Team Style Guide
Slack != Documentation
Set Up Mentoring Practices
Passive mentoring - activities like PR reviews, answering questions in Slack
Active mentoring - activities like leading knowledge sessions, offering pair programming.
See One, Do One, Teach One.
Learning Sessions
Schedule weekly learning sessions for knowledge-sharing, and make them mandatory.
🌱
Can start topic based (5-15 minutes), if people don't volunteer, assign research topics.
🌱
RxJS Operators ● Remix ● Vite ● Compound Component Patterns ● TypeScript Generics ● GraphQL
Solicit Feedback
Ask your team how you can help them scale up team members. Take their ideas and transform into policy.
Summary
- The senior talent bidding war is brutal
- Create systems to spot skill gaps
- Prioritize facilitating growth & mentoring
This is Hard, Hard Work.
It requires dedication, vigilance, and continuous pushing.
Questions?
Slides available at:
ScalingEngineeringTeams.jenniferwadella.com
Need help with 
? Work with me! jennifer@bitovi.com