The Price of Everything

The Wrong Way:

I vividly remember my first experience in the corporate world after college.  I was hired by an enormous engineering firm to program some small subsystems for a multimillion dollar simulation of a power plant in Canada.

I was pretty excited.  I had a cool job for a respected company where I could learn a lot.  Plus, they paid me an adult salary. 

After my first day at my new desk with a multicolor employee manual, corporate vision statement, and new stapler, I was still raring to go.  But the next day, I was assigned to investigate the “library”, a small office filled with various piles of disorganized correspondence about the project.

I spent weeks in that room.  My eyes wore grooves in the paperwork as I read and reread - trying to make sense of the project and my part in it.  I bulled my way through it and eventually, the project engineer let me out of the room.

I organized the mess so no one else would needlessly suffer.  I created a thermodynamic heat balance so our 30-engineer team could work effectively together.  Then, I created a paper-based version  of the distributed control system (the video game the operators control the power plant with) so everyone could see who was working on what - and where the holes were.

I hated being the new guy.  Turns out, the experience stuck with me. 

The Right Way:

We just brought on a new developer, Sergey.  He’s only a few weeks in and already extremely productive.  I made a few mistakes, but things generally proceeded quickly.  Here’s what we did:

1. Hire someone outstanding - yes, everyone is outstanding in some sort of mushy, Lake Wobegon way.  But I’m not talking pablum - you need to beg, borrow, steal (or wait) to get great people.  Find some trick (flexibility, connections, etc.) to get the right team. 

   Sergey ranked in the top 0.1% of independent coders, has a master’s in applied mathematics, and is just a generally sharp guy.  And nice.  We knew all this by farming out a project to him before hiring to find out how good he really is. 

2. Pay well - a salary boost will help motivate people through the annoyances of the first weeks.
3. Document everything in a wiki - make it easy for people to find what they need to be productive
4. Mentor for an hour a day -  you hired the right person.  You don’t need to teach them the job, just how to be effective with your systems.  Screen sharing and chat are amazing for mentoring.

   One place where I goofed: We tried spending many hours/day with Sergey, but this only mothered him.  Once we pulled back to an hour per day, we got more done each day and Serg progressed much faster. 

5. Assign lots of small tasks - there is plenty of time to work on the hard stuff, but the first priority is getting the new guy comfortable in the new system.  Once he makes meaningful progress forward through a number of cases, he knows where to look for information, who to talk to, and how the team communicates.
6. Work through the standard systems - answer any questions possible by referring to the wiki.  Assign work through the issue tracking system.  The goal is not to answer his questions, but to show him how to find the answers for himself.
7. Quick feedback - everyone makes mistakes, especially at first.  A careful check shows what mistakes are important.  This is also an opportunity to demonstrate that errors are ok - what’s important is learning from the mistake.  Best of all, Sergey quickly found out that most of his fixes worked perfectly.

Sergey’s already pulling his own weight.  Right now, he’s handling the time-consuming, but simpler cases.  He’s cleared up so many cases that the entire release schedule has been dramatically affected.  Eventually, we’ll get Serg’s mathematical expertise focused on our core issues. 

The most important indicator?  Sergey has already moved from being the new guy (with lots of smart ideas that are not too related to the actual project) to an old hand (suggesting pragmatic improvements that can only be made through experience).

Starting employees the right way applies to banks every bit as much as to software companies.  Hiring and keeping great people will make or break the organization. 

Some issues banks face are different than software organizations.  Banks are in retail - they need a lot of people to staff branches.  But the essentials are the same: hire the best and get them effective quickly. 

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