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Comment by gwbas1c | Hacker News Reader

The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It (Michael E. Gerber)

What it taught me is that effective organizations invest heavily in training newcomers how to do their jobs / processes. I see this everywhere; when I walk into a business and something's "just off," it's almost always because management is dropping the ball on training newcomers how to do their jobs.

In my specific case, I was having trouble getting good bug reports, and my teammates were struggling with poorly written tickets. I had to take the time to explain what the process was for handing off work from QA to developers. Things moved much more smoothly after that. (IE, I had to explain that all tickets needed steps to reproduce, except in very specific circumstances.)

https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses-About...

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My first question for recruiters is always about how a company trains/mentors employees. I have gotten maybe 5 good responses out of the 100's of times I've asked that question.

It's shocking to me. Every employee you hire is going to have to be trained on SOMETHING that is new to them or specific to your company. Why dont companies spend more time developing onboarding and training programs that actually work?

Because companies prefer offloading the cost of education onto society but then endlessly complain on how formation is too broad, that is not catered specifically to their needs while not be willing to pay for it. Ok I (hope I am) exaggerating but there seems to be something like that going on in my country

While your question itself is good, it's unfortunately quite likely that the recruiters won't actually know the answer. So their answer isn't a good signal.

Separately, in larger companies, there will be significant variance between the onboarding process of teams/orgs.

Sure. Recruiters wont know the answers to a lot of questions. Especially things that are not talked about often or focused on at the company. If a company is proud of their internal training program they would highlight that to potential employees and anything a recruiter can use to sell the company they will.

It's true that a recruiter might not know about a companies training program and that program may exist and actually be good. But its much more likely they wont know because one either doesnt exist or isnt formalized at all and isnt a focus for the company.

Do you have any tips or guides for creating good training programs? I find it challenging to think from a newcomer point of view and I significantly underestimate their challenges. Consequently I feel the learning curve I set for the team is either too steep or too shallow.

This happens to me irrespective of whether I went through the painful learning curve just recently or several years in the past. Once I am comfortable with a topic, I cannot approach it from a newcomers perspective.

So I think having a systematic approach to KT and training will help.

One issue I've seen is: assign the job to someone with experience as a instructor/mentor.

A friend recently told me the story of a very predictable train wreck at his company... management knew he had the background to do a good job with the training, but that wasn't the priority I guess.

End result estimated to be ~3 person years wasted because of a lack of good training/process onboarding/mentoring. The newcomers weren't incompetent, but they needed more than they got.

That is incredibly common. The company will write it off as the employees fault when often more support early on could save both sides a lot of issues.

what counts to you as a good response?

"Hey! Yeah we actually have a 4 week 'bootcamp' that all our new hires swe go through that covers some of the basics of the technology we use, like (name xyz tech), and how we do sprint planning yada yada. You'll also complete a small project with your 'bootcamp' partners in week 4 before being onboarded to your new team."

That is probably the best that I've seen.

Also at a smaller company something like:

"The first week all new hires go through insert specific industry training so you have a good understanding of the lingo and terminology we use here. This will also help you understand our business better and how your work impacts that. After that you will be paired with a mentor, separate from your actual manager, who can help answer any questions as the get up and running."

Even if all of that is nonsense and a waste of time it shows that a company cares and is trying and thinking about onboarding and training. Most companies are not, or at least are not in any formalized way.

100% agree with this... it's very strange. The younger the business I've worked at, the more they assume incoming talent has the skills. And its exactly the opposite.

You can't train people if you don't standardize first! This could be as simple as deciding what elements a big report should contain, or as complex as a multi-page standard operating procedure (SOP) for a knarly process.

I think the problem is that most people managing organizations don't see the value in processes.

It's a cultural thing. I've seen it in California companies, but not in Massachusetts companies. (In MA, people will talk about SOPs all the time.)

> In my specific case, I was having trouble getting good bug reports,

I just had to avoid the word "process."

What I've also observed is that some people in the startup scene think processes are restrictive. That's usually a sign of a company / leader that's too immature to effectively manage through high growth. (You can't have exponential startup growth without processes.)

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