Engineering Onboardings rambling

I took December off from blogging, but I continued to reflect on my career. I thought about the various hiring and onboarding processes I have gone through.

From messing up my company email password on the first day (I blame the AZERTY keyboard) to spending my first week at a new company doing customer support. That last one was the best onboarding experience I have ever had. It allowed me to work with a team that was not my team, but that I was going to work very closely with, and it also helped me navigate this new product and code base, I was going to work with every day more in-depth.

This onboarding was back in 2016 at Travis CI. Usually, the onboarding there consisted of some weeks of Engineering onboarding, and then on the third or second week, you would get the customer support onboarding. In my case, because of time constraints, I did it in the first week. It was the best way I could have had it; once I was doing my engineering onboarding, I already had many questions about the code and architecture and a better idea of the company and team structure.

At the time, customer support was important at Travis CI. There was even a customer support rotation for engineers to spend a week helping with highly technical tickets. This rotation was controversial amongst engineers because, for sure, it took time from your engineering tasks, and we were shipping slower. Still, it gave us a better vision of what customers needed. In the end, we were building a tool for other engineers.

I wonder if doing customer support onboarding directly when you join a company could be done (and be helpful) in all companies or just in companies building technical tools. It can give you a pretty good idea of how the company is doing and give you a broader view of the business. I enjoyed doing it, and it gave me a break from coding, but it wasn’t easy. Debugging errors on builds or understanding what the customer needs was challenging. Customer support folks need to be appreciated more for their work.