Optimising a Developer’s Onboarding for Future Success

The technology industry has an incredibly high turnover rate. A LinkedIn survey of industry professionals reported that tech companies have on average an employee churn of 13.2%, which can be as high as 21.7% for software engineers. Hence, it is imperative that developers are onboarded quickly and their performance is optimised as soon as possible in order to ensure that they, their team, and project succeed. In this report we will discuss several ways to optimise a new joiners performance, specifically via the:

Time of year that they are onboarded
Number of repositories they are working across
Varying their exposure to files types

BlueOptima’s Global Benchmark, consisting of over 400,000 software developers across more than 30 countries, shows that most new hires take place in January with 67% more hires in January than in February, the next highest month. The reasons for this are intuitively clear and are well documented:

Summer and winter vacations in both the northern and southern hemisphere put extra stress on teams who put off hiring new employees.
Many countries adjust their budget at the end of the year and are looking to reorganise.
Individual employees will tend to begin new endeavours at the start of the year and thus free up positions for job seekers.

Enhance Productivity by Onboarding Early in the Year

However, there are also other additional reasons why a hiring manager should target onboarding developers for the start of the calendar year. The BlueOptima Global Benchmark shows that January joiners are at least 14% more productive during the first six months of their tenure than developers who joined in April, July, or October.

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‍Caption: Figure 1: This graph shows the productivity of developers during their first six months of employment. Productivity is defined as the total amount of coding effort divided by the total number of developers. Each colour represents a different month that the developer joined.

BlueOptima’s Global Benchmark has consistently shown, year-on-year, that December is the least productive month of the year, across countries in both the northern and southern hemisphere. New hires who join in the first half of the year will not experience the December holiday season during their first six months of employment. This means that they have less downtime and more time to focus on their role. This is especially important because learning new technologies and technical skills can be much more difficult to absorb if there is a sudden pause in work. For example, we can see in the data that developers who joined in October had a decrease of 12% in productivity during December and July joiners had a decrease of 17% in December.

Figure 1 shows the productivity level of new developers in their first six months, and how it differs depending on which month they were hired. January joiners are the most productive in their first six months, compared to those who joined in the first month of each quarter of the year.

All new joiners will experience a productivity drop in December. If new hires are scheduled to join in October, this will be in their third month. If they join in July, it will be their sixth month. This is partly why it is better to onboard developers in the first half of the year. They are likely to contribute faster, reach optimal productivity sooner (due to an uninterrupted onboarding) and contribute a higher level of productivity during the holiday season because they are fully onboarded before the December downtime hits.

Optimising a New Joiners Performance Through the Quantity of Repositories

In their first six months of employment, some developers will only ever work on one code repository, while others will make changes to tens of repositories in the same time period. If the assumption is made that different repositories represent relatively independent components, then one might question whether it would be better for new hires to start off working on one repository and only take on additional responsibilities once they become more comfortable. Alternatively, is it better to expose new developers to a larger diversity of components from the get-go?

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‍Caption: Figure 2: The graph shows the maintainability score of developers working on one repository (purple line) versus developers working on multiple repositories (orange line) over the first three months of their employment. The horizontal (grey) lines demonstrate the maintainability scores and the coloured (purple and orange) lines represent the distribution of the scores for each group.

Figure 2 depicts the maintainability score of developers within their first three months of tenure. Showing that developers who worked on multiple repositories also tended to write more maintainable code, while developers working on one repository had more volatility in that they did not tend towards maintainable code as much.

The BlueOptima Global Benchmark data indicates that new hires who work on a variety of components in their first three months tend to write more maintainable code. Something very crucial to know for onboarding processes and quite a contradiction to what many would consider the ‘traditional’ linear approach. Hence, managers should not hesitate in giving recently onboarded developers the opportunity to work on multiple projects if they wish to do so, because we have found that it has no negative impact on maintainability or productivity, and in fact is positively correlated. The BlueOptima Global Benchmark data suggests that better performing developers may be working on varying projects and repositories in their first six months of employment, and that there is no harm in doing so from a productivity and maintainability perspective.

The idea of new developers working across different projects during their onboarding falls in line with research recently conducted on the successful onboarding of new employees via clarification and connection. For software engineers, it is important that they understand the importance of their code to the estate’s ecosystem as well as have the opportunity to work with a variety of people across the organisation and projects. This in turn ensures that a developer has more opportunities to strengthen and diversify their skills. Additionally, they are able to see different examples of code and gain a better understanding of what is expected and the culture of the company. All of which can be achieved through developers working on multiple repositories.

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‍Caption: Figure 3: The horizontal axis shows the productivity score for developers during their first three months of employment. The purple line is for developers working on one repository (repo), whereas the orange line shows developers working on more than one repository. The mean, standard deviation and developer count for the two distributions are given in the title.

Varying a Developer’s Exposure to File Types

New developers come into an organisation with many different backgrounds and abilities. Similar to the findings on the effect of working on multiple repositories, the BlueOptima Global Benchmark shows that if a new hire develops in a variety of file types (languages), it does not have a negative effect on the maintainability of their code.

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‍Caption: Figure 4: The figure shows the maintainability score for developers working on five or less file types (blue line) versus developers working on six or more file types (orange line). The horizontal axis shows the maintainability scores and the coloured lines represent the distribution of the scores for each group.

Figure 5 shows the maintainability score of developers based on their first three months at a new organisation. We have divided the new hires into two groups, group one uses six or more unique file types in their first three months, whereas the second group uses five or less unique file types. Developers using more file types tend to write more maintainable code and preserve a more consistent score.

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‍Caption: Figure 5: This figure shows the maintainability score on the vertical axis and the horizontal lines axis the number of repositories a developer works on. With each additional repository, the maintainability score increases.

Overall, new hires are subjected to so many new concepts within their first six months that it might feel unintuitive to be working on many different file types too soon. However, if new developers are comfortable with multiple file types and would like to utilise the full range of their skills in during their onboarding, the BlueOptima Global Benchmark dataset suggests that this will not negatively affect the maintainability of code they are writing, and that those developers tend in fact to write more maintainable code.

How to Hire and Onboard Top-Performing Developers?

The BlueOptima Global Benchmark data shows that the decreasing performance of new joiners is a result of rushed and ineffective hiring processes as well as onboarding practices. The process to improve a newly joined developer’s time to productivity as well as their long term performance, starts with assessing and identifying the right candidates to join your teams. Companies that deploy hiring processes with the intention of predicting if a candidate will perform well as an employee, are more likely to hire right the first time. Without a reliable indication of a candidate’s future performance, a company’s hiring process can pass through the wrong candidates and filter out potential outstanding performers.

Are you looking to optimise your hiring and onboarding processes for developers? Reduce your time to hire and ensure that the right candidates are accurately identified for a quick follow up action with BlueOptima’s Predictive Assessment tool. Predictive Assessment helps objectively assess the best performers for your business, decreasing a company’s costs and set your business up for the future. Measure the success of your hiring approach and improve the productivity of your developers during their onboarding by speaking to us today about our Developer Analytics tool. Developer Analytics provides object transparency across your software estate so that you can optimise processes and newly onboarded developers with accuracy.

Who are BlueOptima?

We provide a SaaS technology that objectively measures software development efficiency. Our core metrics for productivity and code maintainability allow executives to make data driven decisions related to talent optimization, vendor management, location strategy and more.

Predictive Assessment

Goal: Go beyond standard coding assessmentsDescription: Make faster and more reliable decisions about high performing developer talent with the world’s first AI-powered coding predictive assessment tool that projects a candidate’s future workplace performance.

Contact Us

Phone: +44 207 100 8740
Email: [email protected]
Website: www.blueoptima.com

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Optimising a Developer’s Onboarding for Future Success (PA)