Onboarding

Joining Akeneo as a Software Engineer

Joining a new company and onboarding teammates properly is a mutual challenge, both for the company and the newcomer. The first day and…

Didier Caroff

Dec 9, 2020 — 6 min read

Joining a new company and onboarding teammates properly is a mutual challenge, both for the company and the newcomer. The first day and first month are crucial when you should follow the new teammate closely and ensure you get all the right materials. It’s a whole new life that opens up, and there is a lot of unknown, like:

What is the real company’s culture?
How is the company organized?
How is my team organized?
What kind of rhythm does the company have?
What is the company currently working on?
… and so on

Fortunately, the Akeneo onboarding process helps to ensure this follow-up, and we want to believe that it gives the best chance to succeed. Still, and as usual, this is something we regularly update when we are getting feedbacks from newcomers.

Before your first day, the HR team sends a message in Slack with your badge. All teammates at Akeneo have a picture of you, a name, your department, and your job title.

This is your first introduction to Akeneo. This is a fun and friendly welcoming where you will find people who will call you by name on Day 1. The reference to this “Magic The Gathering” card comes from a game jam organized during the ASS 2017 (Akeneo Summer Session). The team created a card game, and it’s still used today.

Your first day at Akeneo 🥳

Usually, you come with a group of newcomers from various experiences at 10 am. They can be engineers, sales, or support, often on Monday. Before you come, your accounts will have been created, and the recruiter or the office manager will have prepared your desk with a computer, the Akeneo jacket & goodies, or everything is shipped to your home in these times of coronavirus.

The Sempai, your dedicated pilot, welcomes you on Google Meet or, at the office. Their main role is to welcome you, make sure you feel supported, comfortable, and answer all of your questions. The Sempai sends you a recap email of all the useful links we use at Akeneo as well. On your first day, you show your desk, give a tour of the office, and briefly introduce all the teams, communicate about our main tools and general information such as where to eat. This day is mainly dedicated to setting up the laptop and checking that all your accounts are well set. Of course, you meet with your manager who will send a welcome message on Slack with a bit more context.

When we are on-site at Nantes or Boston, we often have a beer to introduce the newcomer to the famous Chaquip’ or the Barkingspider in Boston.

And in the best part, we introduce our Marie & Therese chickens.

Your first week at Akeneo 🆕

You get your very own and unique onboarding todo page, gathering company onboarding as well as engineering onboarding. Here, you’ll find a checklist of what you should be doing. Onboarding checklists help you get settled in the company. The same document is shared with the manager to follow your first steps. During your first week, you meet the team and install your first PIM CE https://www.akeneo.com/download/ in the very early days.

During those days, we will have the opportunity to present and talk to you about our Akeneo values.

🤗 Humility: we want to become better at what we do, and we acknowledge that we are not there yet,
💡Innovation: it’s not only about technology, but how we address any problems or challenges we’re facing, and to think out of the box,
🤝 Benevolence: we believe everyone is doing is very best and we commit to helping each other in a friendly way,
🧠 Openness: openness is not only about open source code! We share everything within our organization, and we enjoy enriching ourselves with different points of view or opinions,
🍻 Beer: we do serious business without taking ourselves too seriously, we love to gather and celebrate our successes and our failures.

During the first 2 weeks, you will get 10 onboarding sessions in your calendar to discover the different departments such as HR, Finance, Product, Sales, or Support. You will for sure merge your first PR during your first 2 weeks 🚀

You get the first lunch with your team during the first week as well, this is a good moment to introduce yourself and talk about anything and everything (hobbies, cats, beers, pokemon, whatever you want).

Your first month at Akeneo 💼

One of the most important things you can do during your first month is to ask as many questions as possible. As a newcomer, you will have a million questions that will range from the documentation to how you deploy in production. Several people fear that asking questions will lead to making them look incompetent, naive, but you have to remember that everyone knows that you have no experience in our PIM domain, in our platform. You should keep in mind that teammates actually enjoy helping people, really. The reason why questions are so powerful in your first weeks is that you can benefit from the effort, the knowledge of others. Your teammates may have already spent X hours on a certain problem, but it only takes 1 minute for you to ask what caused the issue and for you to explain the solution found. We love people with curiosity, determination to learn, and we value a lot the fail-fast approach.

It’s also a good idea to take notes as you will be receiving a huge amount of information during your first month. Even though you think that a simple piece of information is easy to remember, you will be surprised by how fast you can forget something.

Another thing is to be open to review. Letting other people see and tear apart your code is a necessary step that you should quickly get used to. It will allow you to quickly benefit from their experience, knowledge that no new code will break the current functionalities or introduce a regression. This is also your time to learn first hand how people with years of experience write code as they will see errors and improvement possibilities where you might see clean code. Don’t be afraid of being bombed by comments in your first PR. This is totally normal and a way to learn.

In the Akeneo culture, we are committed to providing feedback daily. You don’t need to ask your manager for feedback after each week, you will receive it regularly and without delay. Feedback gives insight into how others view your work and what you could improve next.

We collaborate daily with product management, and UX designers to craft the best elegant solutions to answer business problems. After a few months, you should more easily perceive the “big picture” and understand how various codebase parts interact.