In general, the "onboarding" I have seen for non-trad hires and new grads at several companies has been absolutely non-existent... they pair these newbies with senior devs who either spend a lot of hours per week pairing and mentoring, or they ignore their mentees who then typically flounder.
It's an enormous wasted opportunity. A proper onboarding curriculum has a tremendous return on investment. While perhaps impossible to measure, you can't tell me that it's not easily 10x or something like that.
I am more of a traditional SWE, not an SRE, so I can't comment on this one directly. But in general, more of this.
1. As an SRE, it becomes even more important to get the big picture of all things that make the a company’s systems and services tick. I’ve been surprised by the lack of high level block diagrams explaining from this perspective. The diagrams are often from the perspective of devs as they build the nitty gritty details. It can be quite daunting for a new SRE, even more so for a new grad. On the other hand, I usually spend my first month documenting everything I learn in the first month as an SRE, and it becomes the guide that gets passed on to future SREs.
2. The thought of preparing educative materials to onboard a new grad(vs an experienced engineer who is expected to only match their experience to the company specifics) is often missing even in highly organised and functional shops. Nurturing and helping a new grad into the company specific things is a lot more rewarding and advantageous in the long run. There are almost always these pockets of tribal knowledge that exists among the senior folks who were there when some problems were solved. It is counter productive to the team as every time someone touches those sections, they seek the review/approval from those that possess that tribal knowledge.
I know this has changed over time, but MIT's CS curriculum used to be really heavy on theory and light on industry-relevant practice (of course, students can choose a lot of their own courses past the core). For example, the intro course was taught in Scheme of all languages.
Thanks for the tip about that Missing Semester course.
One of the things that helped me out going head-long into a platform engineering team right after graduation was a map of our deployment platform's infrastructure and a self-paced guide on deploying an app from A to Z.
The more experienced engineers helped me with clarifying questions as they came up, but were otherwise not busied-out teaching the newbie.
> or they ignore their mentees who then typically flounder
This isn't surprising given the common strategy of replacing senior SWEs with junior ones (who are simply relabelled "senior" after a few years training).
Or shorting senior SWEs by giving them mentoring tasks, while keeping their normal duties - and evaluating them (wrt advancement) primarily on their normal duties.
In general, the "onboarding" I have seen for non-trad hires and new grads at several companies has been absolutely non-existent... they pair these newbies with senior devs who either spend a lot of hours per week pairing and mentoring, or they ignore their mentees who then typically flounder.
It's an enormous wasted opportunity. A proper onboarding curriculum has a tremendous return on investment. While perhaps impossible to measure, you can't tell me that it's not easily 10x or something like that.
I am more of a traditional SWE, not an SRE, so I can't comment on this one directly. But in general, more of this.