Associate developer onboarding program

Hiring juniors creates better team workflows

Are you struggling to find senior developers or have a cap on renumeration because you're a start up? Hiring junior develops can have many benefits to an organisation with the right program in place. We can help you develop an onboarding program that focuses on sustainable growth and provide on the job training with real applications. As a result, organisations and teams benefit from improved performance, productivity and diversity.

The benefits

Save costs of hiring senior devs
Reduce the senior dev time needed to train juniors
Gain reliable well-trained developers that know how the team and company works, and feel loyal to the company for investing in them
Diversify the engineering team with regards to gender, background, and experience
Introduce fresh perspectives and ideas
Invest in the engineering team and encourage ongoing growth
Remove the fear of hiring a junior
Have a larger pool of candidates to choose from
Grow and retain mid-level developers

Apprenticeship is... training in an art, trade, or craft under a legal agreement that defines the duration and conditions of the relationship between master and apprentice

For more specifics, read Elle’s post on her work with the Qantas Hotels Engineering Academy and her write-up of a conference talk on starting your own.

Elle joined Qantas Hotels to help us establish what is becoming a very successful Engineering Academy. The process of assessing needs then designing and delivering the programme was incredibly thorough; from the interview process to the thoughtful curriculum which is tailored for Qantas Hotels and is full of sound engineering principles and practices.
Stu Liston, Head of Engineering, Qantas Hotels

Who are you?

A company owner or engineering manager at a Ruby and/or Rails shop who wants to build a talent pipeline to grow the company. Senior management support is vital to ensure you spend the time and money consciously.

A small to medium size startup or company, with an engineering team who is dedicated and invested in the success of the program.

An enterprise organisation that is establishing your developer apprenticeship or internship program for graduates or workforce re-skilling.

You have 1-2 mid-level developers who are interested in working with and mentoring juniors. Alternatively, you can either hire a mid-level developer as part of this program, or we can provide our own developer to join your team for three months at an additional cost.

The process

We work with you and the team to define what success looks like for you and for the new hires.
You find and hire the candidates you want to work with.
We help the team prepare to welcome and work with the new developers.
Before they start with the team, we work with the new developers for one week, to introduce common development team workflows.
Following this week, the new hires are embedded into your development team, and participate in usual team practices and development processes. They report to their respective team lead(s).
We work with the new developers for 20% of their work time for 12 weeks.
The new developers attend weekly Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions with their team leads. They also have weekly personal one-on-ones with their team leads to ensure they are on track based on their learning and development goals.
We have regular check-ins with the engineering manager to ensure the program is going according to plan.

The cost

Training fee to Blackmill of 20% annual salary of the Associate Developers

This program adds up to four competent loyal developers to your team at a comparable cost to headhunting a single senior developer. It diversifies your team and improves retention. The structure shapes your development team environment to be more supportive for new developers, mitigates the costs of integrating them, and lets everyone do better work, write better code, and create better products.