Mike McNeil: Developers, From Scratch

Transcript

1. Developers, from scratch
2. Why hire a developer when you can hire a barista and teach them how to code?
3. Why not? ≤ $3,500 per month $7,000 - $11,000 per month
6. Why hire?
7. because you can't do it all by yourself not fast enough, anyway
9. 1099 contractor Studio W2 employee
10. reasons to hire
12. Conventional wisdom
13. Business needs:
14. some coding experience lots of coding experience
15. entry-level developer $$ lead / architect $$$
16. little to no coding experience apprentice (barista)
17. Apprentices capture more and more business value as they gain skills specific to your business.
18. Conventional wisdom
19. Apprentices can enjoy and learn from tasks that more experienced developers might avoid.
20. Apprentices don't have "bad" coding habits. (Yet.)
21. Conventional wisdom
22. What about velocity?
23. Assigning the wrong user stories to apprentices can slow down the whole team.
24. Fortunately, there's a lot of other important work to do.
25. Semi-technical setup and configuration tasks
26. Online account setup
27. Time tracking (playing "timekeeper")
28. First tier customer support (watching the "redphone")
29. Reconnaissance (competitor research, UI research, etc.)
30. Vendor / pricing research (and communication, when necessary)
31. Hallway usability tests (and proactive human factors testing)
32. Organizing the agile board
33. Markup & stylesheets (HTML and CSS, email templates, PDF templates)
34. Nitpicky UX adjustments
35. Small things you might never get around to doing otherwise
36. Custom forms, validations, modals
37. Wireframes
38. On-the-fly customer success hacks
39. Open source support & triage (GitHub, Gitter, StackOverflow, social media)
40. Looking up stuff from the database
41. 3rd party API integrations
42. Quality assurance (QA)
43. The Company Managing apprentices (These guidelines work well for my team -- but every team is a little different.)
44. 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
45. 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
46. 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. And only after the apprentice has already been initially exposed to the concepts you're showing them, in practice.
47. Training apprentices
48. 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" (setting up your dev environment) - Drills (contrived exercises or low priority tasks) - Theory (interactive lecture / live coding)
49. Drills
50. Drills
51. 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)
52. Essential tools & expectations
53. Thinking like an engineer
57. The DOM
58. The DOM
59. Logic
60. Logic
61. Logic
62. HTTP and the internet
63. HTTP and the internet
64. So... does it work? - Yes. But start with just one apprentice - And try to only train one apprentice at a time (for us, that means staggering hires by at least 4 weeks, even if your backlog or budget might make it feel like you have to hire more quickly)
65. PERCEIVED VELOCITY QUALITY x WITH APPRENTICES x WITH SENIOR DEVS
66. So... does it work? - Since going "all in" with this model two years ago, 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.
67. Questions? @mikermcneil