Developers, from scratch

DEVELOPERS, FROM SCRATCH
StarsConf 2018, Santiago, Chile

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
   

   View Slide

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

   View Slide

3. View Slide

4. Why hire?
   

   View Slide

5. View Slide

6. because you can't
   do it all by yourself
   not fast enough, anyway
   

   View Slide

7. reasons to hire
   

   View Slide

8. View Slide

9. Business needs:
   

   View Slide

10. some coding experience lots of coding experience
    

    View Slide

11. entry-level developer
    $$
    lead / architect
    $$$
    

    View Slide

12. little to no coding experience
    apprentice
    (barista)
    

    View Slide

13. Apprentices capture more and more
    business value as they gain skills
    specific to your business.
    

    View Slide

14. Apprentices can enjoy and learn from tasks that
    more experienced developers might avoid.
    

    View Slide

15. Apprentices don't have bad coding
    habits. (Yet.)
    

    View Slide

16. What about velocity?
    

    View Slide

17. Assigning the wrong user stories to
    apprentices can slow down the
    whole team.
    

    View Slide

18. Fortunately, there's a lot of other important work to do.
    

    View Slide

19. Semi-technical setup and
    configuration tasks
    

    View Slide

20. Online account setup
    

    View Slide

21. Time tracking
    (playing "timekeeper")
    

    View Slide

22. First tier customer support
    (watching the "redphone")
    

    View Slide

23. Reconnaissance
    (competitor research, UI research, etc.)
    

    View Slide

24. Vendor / pricing research
    (and communication, when necessary)
    

    View Slide

25. Hallway usability tests
    (and proactive human factors testing)
    

    View Slide

26. Organizing the agile board
    

    View Slide

27. Markup & stylesheets
    (HTML and CSS, email templates, PDF templates)
    

    View Slide

28. Nitpicky UX adjustments
    

    View Slide

29. Small things you might never get
    around to doing otherwise
    

    View Slide

30. Custom forms, validations, modals
    

    View Slide

31. Wireframes
    

    View Slide

32. On-the-fly customer success hacks
    

    View Slide

33. Open source support & triage
    (GitHub, Gitter, StackOverflow, social media)
    

    View Slide

34. Looking up stuff from the database
    

    View Slide

35. 3rd party API integrations
    

    View Slide

36. Quality assurance (QA)
    

    View Slide

37. The Company
    Managing apprentices
    (These guidelines work well for my team -- but every team is a little different.)
    

    View Slide

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
    

    View Slide

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
    

    View Slide

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.
    

    View Slide

41. Training apprentices
    

    View Slide

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)
    

    View Slide

43. Drills
    

    View Slide

44. Drills
    

    View Slide

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, ,
    loading spinners, cloud errors vs. client-side form errors)
    

    View Slide

46. Essential tools & expectations
    

    View Slide

47. Thinking like an engineer
    

    View Slide

48. View Slide

49. View Slide

50. View Slide

51. The DOM
    

    View Slide

52. The DOM
    

    View Slide

53. Logic
    

    View Slide

54. Logic
    

    View Slide

55. Logic
    

    View Slide

56. HTTP and the internet
    

    View Slide

57. HTTP and the internet
    

    View Slide

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.
    

    View Slide

59. Questions?
    @mikermcneil
    

    View Slide