Adding an external engineer to your team is a bet on speed. You're paying to skip months of hiring. That bet only pays off if the person becomes productive quickly — and in our experience, onboarding quality matters as much as the engineer's skill.
This is the plan we agree with clients before a dedicated developer's first day. It works equally well for your own new hires.
Before day one
- Accounts created: email, chat, code repository, project tracker, documentation and any cloud consoles they'll need.
- A named buddy on your team who answers questions for the first two weeks.
- A short written brief: what the product does, who uses it, and what this engineer will work on first.
- Three to five starter tickets selected — small, real and touching different parts of the codebase.
Days 1–2: context
Resist the urge to hand over a big task immediately. The first two days are for understanding: a product walkthrough from someone who talks to customers, an architecture overview from a senior engineer, and getting the project running locally.
The goal for day two is simple: the engineer can run the product, run the tests and explain the main parts of the system back to their buddy.
Days 3–5: first contributions
Work through the starter tickets. Each one should result in a merged pull request, reviewed by someone on your team. Early reviews are where engineering conventions are learned: naming, testing expectations, how commits are written.
Days 6–10: a real feature
Move on to a feature-sized piece of work from the actual roadmap, ideally with a clear owner to discuss requirements with. The engineer should join all team rituals by now — stand-ups, planning, retrospectives — as a full member, not an observer.
Day ten: a short review
- What has been shipped, and how did reviews go?
- What's still unclear about the product or codebase?
- Is anything slowing them down — access, environments, unclear ownership?
- What should the next month focus on?
What good looks like at thirty days
By the end of the first month, a senior dedicated developer should be picking up work from the backlog independently, contributing in planning and reviewing others' code. If that isn't happening, raise it early — with us and with them. Most problems at this stage are fixable, and all of them get more expensive to fix with time.
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DevTechnology Delivery