HOW WE WORK
Engineering onboarding at Form3
Our number one priority is to ensure that all our engineers feel supported and thrive at Form3 from day one!
Our onboarding process is as streamlined and lightweight as possible. As a fully remote company, we have tailored our working practices and onboarding to ensure that new joiners are up to speed as quickly and painlessly as possible. All new starters are assigned a buddy, who will actively support them during the onboarding process and beyond.
Before the first day
New engineers receive their laptop and essential kit before they start. Your login details will be sent to you, so you can easily log on and meet everyone on your first day.
No need to stress about installing or preparing anything beforehand. Your buddy will help you get up and running during your first few weeks, so just focus on resting up before your first day.
The first week
Starting a new job is always stressful and nerve wracking. This can be even more difficult in the remote setting, where new colleagues can’t meet you for a coffee or take you out for lunch.
As a new engineer, you can expect your typical first week to consist of:
01
Meeting your buddy, your team and our CTO, Steve Cook
02
Attending your first company all hands, which typically takes place every Monday
03
Setting up the all the developer tools and making sure it’s all working locally
04
An introduction to the payment flow, as well as the different payment schemes our platform supports
05
Walking through Form3’s high level component architecture
06
Getting to know the services that your team is responsible for
07
Identifying what technologies are new to you and making a plan to upskill together with your buddy and your team lead
The first 12 weeks
With the initial stress of the first week over with, the focus of the onboarding process shifts to making sure that our new joiners are able to contribute independently and confidently to their team projects.
As a new joiner, you can expect the some of the following for your first 12 weeks at Form3:
01
Pairing with your buddy to deliver your first piece of work 🚢
02
Get comfortable with our monitoring and logging tools, as well as our release process
03
Take on increasingly larger pieces of work with support from your team and buddy, even creating new services from scratch 🚀
04
Begin to take the technical lead on architecture, testing and development
05
Gain the technical knowledge to propose changes to our architecture and processes
The six month anniversary
After six months, our engineers and their tech lead conduct a lightweight and informal progress review.
The process usually consists of:
01
Reviewing all of your achievements at Form3
02
Identifying any opportunities for improvement
03
Discussing the your future goals and career growth
04
Making a plan on how to support you to grow and thrive in the team
Once our engineers have passed this important milestone, they are expected to participate in on-call and recruitment duties. Training and support in taking on these new duties is then provided as they join the on-call rota.
Written by
Adelina is a polyglot engineer and developer relations professional, with a decade of technical experience at multiple startups in London. She started her career as a Java backend engineer, converted later to Go, and then transitioned to a full-time developer relations role. She has published multiple online courses about Go on the LinkedIn Learning platform, helping thousands of developers up-skill with Go. She has a passion for public speaking, having presented on cloud architectures at major European conferences. Adelina holds an MSc. Mathematical Modelling and Computing degree.
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