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Onboarding Responsibilities for Mentors of New Hires
How to be an effective mentor of a new hire

Mentorship at Artsy

Why Mentor

We are proud of our engineering principles and team culture, from its commitment to excellence in software development to its impact on the wider software engineering community. Of course, no culture is static; rather than a one-time goal it is something that takes work to curate, maintain and protect. We recognize that all of these ideals require intentional work and iteration between people to make them reality. One way we work to maintain and grow this culture is through mentorship.

Mentorship and professional development occur in many forms and contexts, but this doc is focused on mentoring for new engineering hires.

The Onboarding Mentor

Each new engineering hire is assigned an Onboarding mentor by their manager. Onboarding mentors are not managers or teachers, but exist to help new engineers - regardless of level - become confident, comfortable members of the team. An onboarding mentor acts as a new hire's perhaps most consistent peer (and non-manager) throughout the sprint rotation process. As an onboarding mentor, you are expected to:

  • Support and guide your mentee at least through the first 3 months. Expect that this will take a bit of your time, at least 4-8 hours per week.
  • Schedule at least one meeting per week to check in with your mentee
  • Be an available pair when your mentee gets stuck
  • Provide a safe space for sounding other questions and concerns (though not as a replacement for People Ops or the mentee's manager)
  • Be a source of consistency throughout their onboarding team sprint rotations

How to be an onboarding mentor

The role of a mentor is purposely different from that of a manager or technical lead, and that role shifts to accommodate the needs of a team member. It's up to the mentoring pair to find what works best for them and to ensure the relationship evolves over time to remain useful.

What to do?

Meeting 1:1 is one way to support them, but the overall goal is to help them feel comfortable and productive on the team. Keeping in mind that every new engineer brings their own package of skills and past experiences, here is one sample itinerary:

The first day

  • Keep tabs on your mentee's schedule. Their first day will be full of paperwork and meetings with People Ops but some good tasks for a mentor:
    • Introduce yourself
    • Set a time for an introductory coffee or tea
    • Get in touch with the mentee's manager
    • (Re-)familiarize yourself with people resources across the company that will be important to your mentee:
      • Point people in Workplace & People Ops
      • Their manager
      • Their team lead
      • Artsy atlas, calendars, benefit websites, mail filters, Jira and Github management tools...

The first meeting

Get to know each other. This can be a nice, casual conversation. Focus on active listening.

  • Talk about your own history at and before joining Artsy
  • Where are they coming from?
    • If they will be remote, where are they from? What is it like there & what works for them in terms of remote work?
    • Are they new in town? Where do they live, for how long? Just have a normal conversation.
  • Prior experience with our technology stacks (and others)
  • Other relevant past experience, particularly 'soft skills' that might seem orthogonal to writing code
  • Are they using the 🔒 onboarding checklist? If so, check in on where they are and offer to be a resource on things there. Some tasks might stand out as good things to do in between People Ops meetings, while working nearby each other or to pair on.

The first week

  • Check in to make sure your onboardee is moving forward in their checklist. Common stumbling areas include stale steps in the developer setup and getting invited to myriad organizations, lists and websites (slack, jira, github, notion, heroku, aws, hokusai ...)
  • Look for chances to pair or work alongside one another throughout the week.
    • If their early work hasn't exposed them to artsy/gravity, consider pairing on something trivial or just setting it up, breaking and fixing a test.
    • If they haven't set up hokusai yet, consider pairing on that.
  • Try to have another meeting towards the end of the week. Revisit things you talked about in the first meeting and check in to see how they are doing.

The first few months

  • New hires usually begin with a sprint-by-sprint rotation through our teams, a process that can last upwards of 2 months.
    • Check in with your mentee during this time and to help unblock them if necessary.
    • Rotations tend to introduce new product areas and systems, and those are natural opportunities to provide a code tour, product demo, or informal history/background.
  • Attend a meeting together:
    • office hours
    • an engineering practice
    • peer learning working group
  • Consider reaching out to other mentors as well
  • Periodically check in with yourself on what you think you know about your mentee:
    • How are they feeling at work? It's good to be aware (if you can) of comfort level, new technologies and how they are getting situated at Artsy.
    • Are there any opportunities to pair together (or for them to pair with someone else) on a new technology or domain area?
  • When the mentee joins their first full-time team, check in with them through the first few sprints. How is their ramp-up going? Are they feeling productive and safe within the team? Encourage the mentee to bring up these topics with their manager if you think it would help.
  • Many mentoring pairs continue scheduling semi-weekly coffee chats in the weeks and months going forward. Share and discuss relevant articles or collaborate on a blog post; As the relationship becomes less formal these can be great to keep in touch with a team member you have a special relationship with!

Footnotes

Additional Context

Simple answers to common questions

Some common (but certainly not stupid) questions that mentors are well-positioned to address

  • Setup step x didn't work
    • Try to work through it together with them- then create an issue or PR a fix if possible
  • What meetings are 'mandatory', 'encouraged' or just open to folks who are interested?
    • Calendar invites and new notification grooming seems to be one of the trickiest parts of the onboarding process, especially through team sprint rotations, but it's important to make sure that each new hire feels fully included as soon as possible. Consider showing off your own processes (and helping make sure they are getting all the right invitations)
  • When should I show up?
    • Use your judgement, but communicate your availability when working remotely via slack and the OOO calendar.
  • How/should I take vacation?
    • Yes. Talk to your manager and make sure it is on the OOO calendar.
  • How long until I am fully onboarded/up to speed?
    • Aside from the team sprint rotations we dont have a firm number for this. Keep in touch with each other and, work together to set longer-term goals- encouraging them to work with their manager as well.
  • Who should I talk to or where should I post in slack about x?
    • Answer varies- when in doubt, ask your mentor. For lots of questions when getting started with a new technology our tech learning document is a great start!