Fast-growing startups tend to hire more experienced engineers since there is a belief that supporting early-career engineers slows teams down too much. This belief leads to teams being "top-heavy" from an IC perspective and contributes to all sorts of sustainability problems for teams later on.

To combat the perception that the only viable solution for a fast-growing startup is to hire experienced engineers, we aim to equip hiring managers and their teams with the knowledge to source, interview, and integrate early-career engineers successfully.

Definition and expectation of an early-career engineer

An early-career engineer is anyone who has no prior or limited (loosely defined as less than 12–24 months) professional work experience in an engineering-focused role. An early-career engineer could be someone who recently entered or reentered the job market, just finished their studies, or is transitioning into a new career.

The initial expectations of a fully-onboarded early-career engineer are defined in the IC1 career level. In addition to these, we also expect all engineers to exhibit our values.

When should a team consider an early-career engineer?

You may want to consider an early-career engineer if some of the following statements apply to your team:

• Your team composition consists of mostly more experienced engineers.
  • We loosely recommend a ratio of 2:1 experienced to early-career teammates.
  • This ensures there are sufficient teammates to support and mentor the early-career teammate.
  • It also allows other teammates to take PTO as needed without the concern of the early-career teammate not having the appropriate support.
• You have a backlog of well-defined work that is ready to be executed.
  • Early-career engineers are focused on learning, growth, and establishing themselves as contributing teammates. It is therefore vital, especially in an async all-remote environment, that work is well-defined.
• You have teammates who want to advance in their careers by providing mentorship to others.
  • Early-career engineers may need additional levels of support in various forms like work definition, pair programming, PR review, coaching, and mentoring.
• You are looking for ways to enhance the diversity of your team
  • Hiring early career engineers increases the pool of candidates you can consider and gives you more opportunities to hire someone who would add to the diversity of your team.

The above statements are guidelines only. It is up to the team's manager to make a correct determination on whether their team is ready to support an early-career teammate.

Making space for early-career engineers on your team

Before preparing to post your job description, it's vital to set up the right environment and expectations within your team:

• Commit to hiring an early-career engineer from a timezone the team can also commit to making themselves available.
• Talk with the whole team in advance to prepare a plan to support the new engineer; consider having another engineer on the team "sponsor" this new teammate beyond the initial onboarding period.
• Create, emphasize, and re-emphasize a culture of blamelessness amongst your whole team.
• Treat learning (for the early-career engineer) and mentorship/pairing/teaching (for other engineers on the team) as 1st class responsibilities of each member of your team for at least their first six months.
• Avoid making restrictions around what domains, responsibilities, initiatives, etc., the early-career engineer can participate in.

Building an early-career hiring pipeline