My team’s most recent engineering hire shipped to production 3.5 hours after opening their laptop for the first time. Every new software engineer at TrainHeroic deploys code to production on their first day.
Every interaction you have with your team is an opportunity to send a signal about your engineering culture. Shipping on the first day is an opportunity to send a lot of positive signals to new hires about your engineering culture:
- We’re doing this together. You’re not just deploying code on your own, we’re on video chat or in person together and if something goes wrong we’ve got you back.
- Deploying code is to be celebrated not feared
- We’re not going to throw you into the deep end. We’re going to start out small, no matter how senior you are because we know how difficult starting a new job is.
- We deliver customer value as early as possible. We don’t work on a weekly, monthly, or any other fixed release schedule. When the code is ready, ship it so customers can start experiencing the benefits.
- Everyone here deploys to production
- Every improvement counts, even small ones like text or style fixes that a new engineer can do on day one. Quality is a journey of continuous improvement.
- We have strong automation systems – the kind you need if your goal is to ship a thousand releases per year to production.
- You are part of the team now. You’ve already contributed to the success of our product.
Culture is what you celebrate and tolerate. Celebrate your new engineer’s first day with their first deployment.
