Founders

Ideal outcome for a new engineering hire: shipping code by the end of their first day.

- emphasizes culture of urgency & shipping
- forcing function to improve documentation and dev tooling such that new eng’s can get onboarded quickly

cma.xyz. Founder /paragraph, ceo /mirror, previously at Google & Coinbase 

a jiraffe on the internet • nf.td/morereese

I don’t think they’re contradictory. I think any good engineer should be able to write basic documentation on getting a dev environment set up; and I also think it’s a low effort task that wouldn’t consume much time from shipping

Have you found #1 & #2 are semi-contradictory?

In my experience (as a product person working closely with engineers), 10x engineers that meet the first criteria typically suck at writing documentation because they are bad at translating the code to words in self-service docs and/or bc they prioritize shipping over taking the time to write docs

We did this when I started at PowerDNS in 2017. I failed but another hire succeeded in this a while later.

It says maybe more about your company's development environment than about the new hire.

True. 

Balancing the need for immediate productivity with the importance of thorough onboarding and support for new eng hires is crucial!