As you scale engineering teams…
Thoughts expressed in my blog posts are my learnings, the knowledge I gathered via books, connecting with leaders, and articles.
While working on a product, you may start small and build your engineering team from the ground up. As years pass by and business is going well, you may end up with more senior engineers across, and you need to scale & grow your product strategically, i.e., you are more accountable to scale. This is when you must assess balancing the team and hiring entry-level talent or junior engineers.
Hiring Interns and junior engineers is a tremendous strategic implementation — you will be able to improve the tech stack, excite your overall team, reduce burnout, and see excellent outcomes shortly, but if your team is lucky, then immediately.
But, Junior engineers may need time to learn & settle, and that is super ok.
Entry or less experienced engineers need more time to onboard and learn; you don’t expect them to start building rockets and solve significant problems day-1. Nowadays, with NoCode/LowCode platforms, and ease of software engineering, things are pretty easy to understand, and engineers onboard in a week. It would be best if you gave junior engineers enough time to settle, build the right connections, learn things well, and you need to keep coaching them with an empathetic 7-30–60-90-day enablement plan. Once you have a proper enablement plan and develop a sense of ownership in them, they deliver exceptional outcomes to business goals and enable building a future, happy team.
Ensure your Senior engineers are enabling your Junior engineers to be successful, and you (Engineering leaders) allow both to be successful.
Are your Senior engineers playing Senior roles?
It is essential to define what engineering position expectations are for that level. Sometimes your engineers may be focused on building features and capabilities and don’t notice a difference in the role they play, that's ok, but if that is consistently happening, then it is time to assess and define the role clarity.
While Junior and mid-level engineering build features and capabilities with advice from the tech decision makers (your Seniors), the Senior engineers should also focus on thoughtful decisions about architecture, practices, platforms, etc. Seniors need to inspire their fellow engineers, not only experts in coding but coaching junior engineers to do things right.
Avoid Heroics, Be strategic!
Heroics are primarily a result of reactive needs/planning. While you are launching critical capabilities that are business-impacting, some teams organically build heroics due to some conditions. Heroics are those “engineers with a magic wand” fixing things on a Saturday at midnight, working 12+ hours a day, i.e., things that need to be delivered as soon as possible. It is a common expectation that speed becomes an important aspect. There is a high need for you to think proactively. If you keep reacting then organically, things will lead to heroics.
The best way is to hire entry-level engineers who are accountable and quickly adapt to technology, learn new things, and are ready for challenges. This will enable you to lessen the heroics and build a healthy team.
When an engineer resigns, Did you ever hire a replacement without thinking, “What's your current and future need”? Keeping challenging your biases, improving, and strategically aligning your hiring needs is essential.
Accountable & Happy engineers deliver excellent business outcomes
Engineers love solving problems, they love tech stack, want to explore areas and solutions. Engineering leaders must balance business and engineering excitement and ensure engineers find fun and joy at work. When Engineers are happy & love their work, the outcomes are the best! — Yes, 100%!
Scaling engineering teams is not one size fits all, and These are some good questions to ask yourself as Engineering leaders.
