Bringing Life to New Software Engineers

I read with disappointment Melissa Mcewen’s essay, “Who Killed the Junior Developer?”

It is a troubling trend if the world’s global GDP is growing significantly, most companies indicating that they are struggling to fill open software engineering positions, and if Melissa’ accounts that graduates from schools and attendees at an industry technology event were “having trouble getting their first job.”

Whether we label people, “entry-level”, “junior”, or “new”, they are all essential to the success of any software group, whether a commercial company like the one I run at WSO2, or a software team within another organization.

Organizations that do not maintain a healthy balance across individuals of varying skill sets are not adequately diversifying and ultimately limiting their ability to adapt to changing market conditions.

Fundamentally, people who are new to a career are more open to the universe because of their ability to see everything with childlike amazement that leads to insights and innovation not possible through institutionalized group think. The youth and vitality of an organization must be kept fresh.

This applies to every department within a company whether it is software engineering, support, financial operations, or sales.

At WSO2, this year we will make more than 100 new hires, with about half of them in technology positions and the other half in business. Roughly 70 people will be entry-level hires. We will rotate another 50–75 short-term interns from local universities and also participate in university programs such as Google’s Summer of Code. We keep track of an average age graph of our employees at WSO2, and as we have aged and grown, the average has remained a steady 31 years. If this trends too far in one direction or another, there may be an emerging imbalance.

Software Is Like Making Movies

The software industry’s closest cousin is the movie business. Making software is a creative business. Each release is an opportunity for a software product to reinvent itself to discover whether it’s utility matches up with the interests of a community of users.

Photo by RhondaK Native Florida Folk Artist on Unsplash

Like the movie industry, software follows many parallels:

Releases are made periodically, similarly to a movie release that is pushed to theaters or streaming distribution at a point in time.
Releases of software fade in their applicability, requiring a refresh (new release) or altered direction to continue having an appeal to their user base. Movies also follow a similar pattern where interest in the movie fades after it has been available for a period of time.
Making software requires creative individuals including product managers (the movie director), financiers (publishers), product marketers (promoters), engineers / UX (actors) and so forth.
Movies and software products are managed similarly, on time tables, with lots of project management and coordination across diverse teams.

Like movies, not all software products are successful. A quality movie may sell poorly at the box office. The same can happen with software. But when a software product has strong execution, a clear vision, an amazing team of sales, marketing, engineering, and support resources around it, magic can occur causing a product to have global and commercial success.

Success of a software product is not formulaic, or every software company would equally be profitable. This is the same with movie making. It’s for these reasons why the most successful movie and software businesses are run by creative individuals.

The world’s most famous software company’s have been started and run by the visionaries — which is a polite way of identifying someone in being creative. Think of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Marc Andreesen, or Elon Musk. It’s not that the geeks are ruling the world, it’s that they creatives are ruling it. Creative types must be in charge as the best creativity leads to the products generating the most impact.

Hiring senior engineers only serves to limit your company’s creativity pool. Senior people tend to approach new problems using old techniques, limiting the potential outcomes. It’s only when a company has a continual blend of senior and junior people working on hard problems can diversity of solutions truly exist.

The WSO2 Farm System

More than 70% of our 2018 hires are entry-level, which typically means this is their first job within this career field.

For successful recruiting, we build programs and philosophies:

We have a 6 month training and rotational program, which varies by the job function performed, that immerses individuals into a variety of mini projects designed to expose them to every day tasks for their job. For engineers, we hope that they can accept their first customer call in a standard support rotation by the end of these nine months.
The training and rotational programs are overseen by HR and training executives that exist within each function of the company.
To avoid individuals feeling overwhelmed, each person is assigned their own company buddy, HR representative, (and soon) career buddy so that there is a 1:1 space for an individual to ask questions about how they are supposed to just get stuff done and behave when working with 500 other employees.
Immediately upon joining, every individual is put on a project team or given a business assignment that is substantial and complicated. There is little value in having individuals only own small piece parts where they cannot understand the scope of their contributions. So wherever possible, we assign substantive, meaty projects to everyone that joins so that they can quickly become acclimated to what it’s like being part of the software industry.
To create an environment of fun, every individual is also assigned to a company “house”, for which we have four, that are used to align people for social outings, competitive sports, and company events.
We have a “move up on performance” philosophy for all new hires where it’s our main objective to get each person promoted twice within 4 years. Some people get this double promotion as quickly as 3 years. This third “tier”, if you will, is our company’s level for indicating that someone has achieved “journeyman” status where we have transferred the core skills onto the individual that allows them to operate independently while continuing to grow through self-learning and exploration. We have had some superstars within the company reach Director status, an executive leadership role, within 6 years of joining us out of university.
We provide quarterly performance reviews instead of annual. Our performance reviews are focused on providing an open and constructive dialogue about how an individual is working to align their commitment with the values of the company, their team’s objectives, and growth to their career. Frequent and ongoing dialogue is a great way to ensure that people get the most out of their experiences working with us.
Company-sponsored graduate study program (34% of our employees have multiple, masters, or PhDs, many of which were not pursued until after they joined WSO2!). We allow people to take time from work to pursue studies and lectures.
We will help anyone, anywhere, anytime help them achieve their career goals, even if that objective is outside our company’s interests. Often times this means helping people pursue their graduate degrees while leaving the company. In other cases, people want to transition out of their department or out of software entirely. We hope that people will stick with us and continue to give back with the skills that they acquire, but the best way for us to grow is to have people who leave us evangelize our commitment to their own success.

Photo by Christian Bisbo Johnsen on Unsplash

The consequences of this approach are profound. Including myself, only three of our 20 VPs have been hired externally — the rest were promoted from within. A number of our top leaders began as individuals contributors as part of our farm system. Many of their contributions are not only significant, but are based upon life experiences that have fundamentally altered our business model or product offerings in ways that we could not envisioned.

The statistics for our leadership group, which is another 55 people in the company, are even more stark, representing 100s of innovations, patents, new product directions, content generation, new forms of customer relationship management, and new modes of distribution. Less than 10 of these people were not promoted from within the WSO2 farm system.

We are not perfect and we do not always get this right. Having strong programs that are committed to ongoing recruitment and retention of entry level individuals is essential to any company’s success.

If you are a graduate (in any field) and you are thinking about a career in the software industry, you should get in touch with us. We are growing like weeds and we are a place where your learning curve is nearly infinite. You can write me direct: tyler@wso2.com.