15 Aug 2023
During my time as a director at New Relic, I founded the company’s internal mentorship program and ran it for about three years. Before that, I benefited from many mentorships, myself, on both sides of the relationship. Mentorship is one of the best ways you can improve your own skills - as the mentor or the mentee! - and also helps raise the skills of those around you. An effective mentorship program is an invaluable way for an engineering organization to improve its bench strength and build a sense of community.
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10 Aug 2023
This is the third and final post in a series on running New Relic’s Ignite program. In this article, I’ll be covering the final steps of an engineer’s journey through the program and discussing some of the organizational aspects of a program like this. If you aren’t already familiar with Ignite, you may want to start with Part 1, about hiring or Part 2, about onboarding and rotations.
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25 Jul 2023
This is part 2 of a series on running New Relic’s Ignite program. First, I’ll go over the onboarding process for new hires. Then, I’ll describe how we ran the various team rotations and activities that comprised the bulk of an engineer’s time in the program. If you haven’t read Part 1, about hiring, you may want to start there. This article will be somewhat less broadly applicable than the post on hiring, but some of this material could still be applied generally.
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10 Jul 2023
This is part 1 of a series of blog posts about New Relic’s Ignite program,
which I designed and ran for about five years. Ignite was an incubator team for
early career engineers. We hired folks into what was usually their first
software engineering role, gave them the extra support and training they needed
to be successful, and then placed them on engineering teams throughout the
company. While the program was eventually closed down due to overall economic
conditions (if you’re not hiring, you can’t really run a hiring program), it
was extremely successful by every measure we we looked at - reported candidate
experience, engineer performance and promotion rates, manager satisfaction,
employee retention, candidate diversity, and so on. It was easily the most
satisfying and also the most impactful work of my career to date. My hope is
that sharing these methods will help other companies who would like to run a
similar program, though you could also apply most of the material in this post
to any engineering hiring pipeline.
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2023