The 4 areas of learning for a developer joining a new company

When we talk about hiring a new developer within a company, we talk about recruitment, onboarding, process, skill development, but without going into enough detail.

This is also the case for external service providers, with a few minor differences.

But in reality, what are the important points on which the company must support newcomers so that they integrate perfectly into the company?

There are 4 essential areas of learning and improvement, without which the newly hired person will be unable to do proper work, contribute proposals, or gain autonomy...

The 4 areas

Technology

Obviously this is the first one that comes to mind, because it's very rare to join a company where you already master 100% of the technologies used.

This can be both the area that takes the longest to master, and paradoxically the simplest for the company to support, because there are dozens of trainings for each technical topic (even hundreds for English speakers).

It's also one of the areas that, unlike the other three, requires less effort the more experience you have, because even though technologies evolve, you very often find concepts that repeat themselves!

Business domain

The business domain is everything related to the company's business, the ecosystem, the vocabulary, the habits, the typical users, the regulations, etc.

There are business domains that are easy to grasp, because they're familiar and less complex to us, retail for example.

Some domains are familiar on the surface, but in reality very complex internally and highly regulated, such as insurance and banking for example.

And there are also unknown and complex domains, such as health insurance in countries like the United States.

Still, even though knowledge of the business domain is acquired gradually, it's up to the company to ensure a rapid ramp-up right from hiring to acquire the minimum basics!

Product

Just because you know enough about the business domain, doesn't mean the projects and products developed are easy for everyone to understand and grasp.

When working on software whose primary purpose and theoretical intended behavior you don't fully know, it's very easy to drift from that objective and cause major problems.

Since some products have been designed over decades, for domain experts, and are sometimes extremely complex, it's normal for product knowledge to take months, even years to master sufficiently before being able to make improvement proposals yourself.

Way of working

No two companies work the same way. And thankfully so.

Company culture is the sum of the values of the people who work there, and it's somewhat the same for processes, methods, and habits.

Even though many companies try to follow project management methodologies, management practices, etc., there is often a huge gap between theory and practice.

So it takes time, and support to discover this, and this should actually be concern #1 during the onboarding phase for newcomers!