Developers, from scratch

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

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Why hire?

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

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reasons to hire

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Business needs:

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some coding experience lots of coding experience

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

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little to no coding experience apprentice (barista)

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

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

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

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What about velocity?

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

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

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Semi-technical setup and conﬁguration tasks

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Online account setup

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Time tracking (playing "timekeeper")

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First tier customer support (watching the "redphone")

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Reconnaissance (competitor research, UI research, etc.)

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Vendor / pricing research (and communication, when necessary)

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Hallway usability tests (and proactive human factors testing)

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Organizing the agile board

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

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Nitpicky UX adjustments

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Small things you might never get around to doing otherwise

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Custom forms, validations, modals

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Wireframes

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On-the-ﬂy customer success hacks

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

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Looking up stuff from the database

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3rd party API integrations

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Quality assurance (QA)

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

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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

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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

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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.

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Training apprentices

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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)

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Drills

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Drills

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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)

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Essential tools & expectations

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Thinking like an engineer

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The DOM

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The DOM

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Logic

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Logic

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Logic

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HTTP and the internet

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HTTP and the internet

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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.

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Questions? @mikermcneil