What do you need to do when mentoring a new graduate? [closed]

Well I have been THE junior developer in a small team for several years. Now, there is a new fresh graduate so I have become the not-so-junior-developer and have been asked to mentor him.

But I have no idea what to do since I have always been kind of a “figure-things-out-on-my-own” person and didn’t receive much mentoring.

So, what do you need to do when mentoring a new graduate?

A lot of these items are similar for anyone new to the team, not just a new college graduate.

Introduce the new team member to your team’s:

code versioning system
code style standards
work item / defect tracking systems
general project layout and structure
SDLC approach and documentation
system documentation (whatever it may be)
other members, and give an overview of their knowledge domains

Help them get their workstation setup and configured with the standard packages that your team uses. Help them pull down a copy of the source that they may be working on.

Set up some times to meet every other day for a few weeks and then start spacing out those meetings. The idea is to help them get up to speed with their assignments and point them in the right direction.

During those meetings go over the things that are necessary for team development but don’t get emphasized as much in college. Adherence to code standards (and why); documentation of design; updates within your work item tracking system; etc..

At a very broad level, think of the basic things you need on a day to day basis and help them get started with those. Then follow through and make sure that you help show the way as the particulars come up with their first assignments.

You are probably looking for Onboarding process in software development companies.

We have onboarding process and buddy assignment in our company to welcome a new employee. I think it is very important to address any questions and provide new employee with company culture, regulation information.

My best experience with new grade students is to have them work side by side with a stronger developer who is welcome to share (a bit talkative and friendly) his experience. Some people have a harder time learning on their own. I guess this is called mentoring….

It is also true that success of your onboarding process will be reflected on new employee’s productivity and project’s success in long run.

We also have a SharePoint wiki page for each project that new person may use to get information on project(s) and related documentation (after given access permissions of course).

To improve onboarding process the HR personal generally conducts a survey to get feedback from new employee after there first day or week.

I would explain, both in summary and in detail, the full domain of the system

I’ve worked on systems where I had no idea what the system was supposed to do, and also no context for where the system fitted in with other systems. While I expect my job to involve reverse engineering, some context goes a long way to ease the process

Those were systems where the staff would expertly only reveal slightly less than the minimum amount of information to get any one particular task done (probably for their own job security)

Filed under: softwareengineering - @ 13:24

Thẻ: junior-programmer

Thiết kế website giá rẻ

Danh mục

What do you need to do when mentoring a new graduate? [closed]