Developers, from scratch

DEVELOPERS, FROM SCRATCH
StarsConf 2018, Santiago, Chile

📺 Watch recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9kH4j74H70

Why hire a developer when you can hire a barista and teach them to code?

Since 2012, I’ve hired and worked closely with many professional developers... but I’ve trained almost as many first-time programmers myself.

It’s going surprisingly well. We’re building higher quality software at a much faster pace than ever before.

In this talk, I’ll show you how we did it. You’ll see how long it takes (at least for us) before “from scratch” developers can be effective on real-world projects, and I’ll share some tips on how to empower them to be productive even while they are still very much an apprentice.

Finally, we’ll take a look at the numbers. Home-grown training takes considerable effort, and it isn’t for everyone. But hiring even a small team of professional, full-stack software engineers is an expensive and time-consuming proposition— and it doesn’t necessarily lead to better results.

Depending on your financials and timeline, certifying some of your own talent could be the right decision for your business, your products, and your users.

Transcript

1. Developers, from scratch
2. Why hire a developer when you can hire a barista and teach them how to code?
4. Why hire?
6. because you can't do it all by yourself not fast enough, anyway
7. reasons to hire
9. Business needs:
10. some coding experience lots of coding experience
11. entry-level developer $$ lead / architect $$$
12. little to no coding experience apprentice (barista)
13. Apprentices capture more and more business value as they gain skills specific to your business.
14. Apprentices can enjoy and learn from tasks that more experienced developers might avoid.
15. Apprentices don't have bad coding habits. (Yet.)
16. What about velocity?
17. Assigning the wrong user stories to apprentices can slow down the whole team.
18. Fortunately, there's a lot of other important work to do.
19. Semi-technical setup and configuration tasks
20. Online account setup
21. Time tracking (playing "timekeeper")
22. First tier customer support (watching the "redphone")
23. Reconnaissance (competitor research, UI research, etc.)
24. Vendor / pricing research (and communication, when necessary)
25. Hallway usability tests (and proactive human factors testing)
26. Organizing the agile board
27. Markup & stylesheets (HTML and CSS, email templates, PDF templates)
28. Nitpicky UX adjustments
29. Small things you might never get around to doing otherwise
30. Custom forms, validations, modals
31. Wireframes
32. On-the-fly customer success hacks
33. Open source support & triage (GitHub, Gitter, StackOverflow, social media)
34. Looking up stuff from the database
35. 3rd party API integrations
36. Quality assurance (QA)
37. The Company Managing apprentices (These guidelines work well for my team -- but every team is a little different.)
38. The Company - Celebrate when apprentices catch bugs and gaps in requirements, even if they seem insignificant. - Decide on a process that apprentices will follow when they run out of stuff to do, and encourage active communication any time they're unsure what to work on next - You might be able to afford to send apprentices to planning meetings that would be too expensive for other developers Managing apprentices
39. The Company - Set clear expectations about code ownership (which files apprentices can change without doing a pull request) - Set clear expectations about when it is appropriate to interrupt senior developers with work questions (e.g. only in the morning before or during the standup meeting) - Empower senior developers to delegate tasks to apprentices Managing apprentices
40. The Company Managing apprentices - Never assign a business-critical task unless you're 99% sure you'll get to say "Nice work!" afterward. - Set an informal time window for "graduation" (e.g. 2 years) - Don't skimp on ahead-of-time training hours-- as long as those skills are sufficiently valuable to your team to be worth your $$$ and time.
41. Training apprentices
42. Kinds of training - Ad hoc (scattered, on-the-job training when you realize you assigned a task that is too hard) - "I'll set this up while you watch" (mostly replaced by video tutorials) - Drills (contrived exercises or low priority tasks) - Theory (interactive lecture / live coding)
43. Drills
44. Drills
45. Things worth teaching ahead of time - Essential tools & expectations (editor, what is the filesystem really?, terminal, GitHub app, node, npm install sails, Heroku, customer service, communication etiquette) - Thinking like an engineer (incognito mode and Chrome profiles, screenshot hotkeys, giphy, Chrome dev tools, the REPL, the terminal, the importance of thoroughness, how to think about edge cases, collaboration) - The DOM (HTML+CSS, and how the browser works) - Logic (&&, ||, v-if, v-else, v-for, etc) - HTTP and the internet (how to read API docs, how to use Postman, <ajax-form>, loading spinners, cloud errors vs. client-side form errors)
46. Essential tools & expectations
47. Thinking like an engineer
51. The DOM
52. The DOM
53. Logic
54. Logic
55. Logic
56. HTTP and the internet
57. HTTP and the internet
58. So does it work? - Yes. But start with just one apprentice - Try to only train one apprentice at a time (for us, that means staggering hires by at least 4 weeks) Background: Since going "all in" with this model last year, hiring first-time programmers as apprentices, it took a little while to warm back up. But today, we ship most features just as fast as we did with a larger and more experienced traditional team 5 years ago.
59. Questions? @mikermcneil