Ask HN: How does your company train and evaluate their developers?

#1

Post by derision » Wed, Mar 11, 2020, 2:11 PM UTC

I work for a small startup. I have been tasked with organizing some training materials for on-boarding and continued skill development. I have gathered a set of resources like tutorials, videos, and books that the existing developers have learned from.

My question is, how is your company tracking and evaluating performance and participation? I looked at something like creating classrooms in repl.it but the PHP environment does not have any way to add extensions, so setting up Laravel in there won't work. I looked at some other websites like Hackerrank and Coderbyte, but they are focused more on hiring rather than on the job training.

Re: Ask HN: How does your company train and evaluate their developers?

#2

Post by mstipetic » Wed, Mar 11, 2020, 2:38 PM UTC

We at msb.com have been looking at this problem for a while. While we're mainly a k8s training platform, we've been slowly adding more features to make it more like a "developer experience in a box" and one interesting use case we've come up with for companies to put their own internal content that works on our infra (basically their whole ci/cd setup, git practices etc.) for the purpose of onboarding new engineers. We haven't explored it much, but if this sounds interesting it would be great to talk

Re: Ask HN: How does your company train and evaluate their developers?

#3

Post by IpV8 » Wed, Mar 11, 2020, 2:47 PM UTC

We like to encourage developers to go for certifications in the technologies that we use (AWS certifications, Snowflake certifications, etc). Our vizualization folks get Tableau and PowerBI certified. We also have some Tableau admin certified people. This way you have a measurable qualifier that someone is training in a relevant skillset. We allow developers to spend a certain number of hours per year on training, and reward them with raises (500 or 1000 dollars per year) when they achieve their certification. We are flexible about what certs people go after (as long as they are relevant to the business). We also try to send people to conferences hosted by the relevant company once they pass the exam (re-invent for example).

Re: Ask HN: How does your company train and evaluate their developers?

#4

Post by IpV8 » Wed, Mar 11, 2020, 2:52 PM UTC

IpV8 wrote: post #3

We like to encourage developers to go for certifications in the technologies that we use (AWS certifications, Snowflake certifications, etc). Our vizualization folks get Tableau and PowerBI certified. We also have some Tableau admin certified people. This way you have a measurable qualifier that someone is training in a relevant skillset. We allow developers to spend a certain number of hours per year on training, an…

I forgot to answer your other question about tracking employee engagement. We make people track their work down to the 15 minute increment, and make sure they hit specific allocations per project exactly. We also micromanage their tasks in Jira so all of the time tracking lines up to tickets.

For the love of god do not do this. Engineers hate this and flee from it in droves.

Re: Ask HN: How does your company train and evaluate their developers?

#5

Post by derision » Wed, Mar 11, 2020, 2:55 PM UTC

IpV8 wrote: post #4

IpV8 wrote: post #3

We like to encourage developers to go for certifications in the technologies that we use (AWS certifications, Snowflake certifications, etc). Our vizualization folks get Tableau and PowerBI certified. We also have some Tableau admin certified people. This way you have a measurable qualifier that someone is training in a relevant skillset. We allow developers to spend a certain number of hours per year on training, an…

I forgot to answer your other question about tracking employee engagement. We make people track their work down to the 15 minute increment, and make sure they hit specific allocations per project exactly. We also micromanage their tasks in Jira so all of the time tracking lines up to tickets. For the love of god do not do this. Engineers hate this and flee from it in droves.

I'm definitely not interested in micromanaging, I just want to have some way to measure the effectiveness of the program. Certifications makes a whole lot of sense, because there's a required exam.

Re: Ask HN: How does your company train and evaluate their developers?

#6

Post by rj254 » Wed, Mar 11, 2020, 5:03 PM UTC

For on-boarding, we've been working on https://usecodeflow.com, which is a way to create walkthroughs of your codebase for newly on-boarded engineers. We've found that these walkthroughs are very helpful for developers to start asking deeper questions about a codebase.

Feel free to reach out to me at rishabh@usecodeflow.com

Re: Ask HN: How does your company train and evaluate their developers?

#7

Post by MonaroVXR » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 3:42 AM UTC

derision wrote: post #5

IpV8 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I forgot to answer your other question about tracking employee engagement. We make people track their work down to the 15 minute increment, and make sure they hit specific allocations per project exactly. We also micromanage their tasks in Jira so all of the time tracking lines up to tickets. For the love of god do not do this. Engineers hate this and flee from it in droves.

I'm definitely not interested in micromanaging, I just want to have some way to measure the effectiveness of the program. Certifications makes a whole lot of sense, because there's a required exam.

I get it where you are heading, but I'm more a "showoff" person. I can talk about the things I have done and things that I want to learn and definitely need to learn.

If you look at my GitHub, there are some things missing, like CI/CD, MSFTStudy with powershell, AWS and Azure things.

I follow the books that have exams in them, but I don't the exams.