Engineering Onboarding Program
To give you a general overview on a department you are coming to, we developed the Engineering Onboarding Program. As we have over 100 teams in Engineering who work with different technologies and on different products, it is important to get an insight of the overall picture and landscape of Infobip engineering.
Engineering Onboarding Program (EOP) is a set of technical sessions. These sessions are delivered by our experienced engineers ready to share their knowledge and experience. Learning and sharing is a two way street, so you'll be more than welcome to share your own experience and knowledge.
The program started back in 2019. and since then we've been improving it constantly. EOP is hosted once in 2 months, lasting one week live in Vodnjan and is extended for developers two days online. Regarding your role and team you are coming to, depends on which sessions you'll go. What's in it for me, you asked? During the program you'll get a wide picture of engineering specific working methodology and organization structure, processes and techniques, infrastructure, technology and tools in use. More over you'll identify business and requirement areas. Each session provides you with requirement area purpose, scope of work, technologies and tools in use with synthesizing underlying architecture of products and services. You'll realize how the system works and the interaction of its parts. The aim is to present Infobip products with a focus on the underlying architecture and technologies - providing guidance for best practices used in the company.
An overview is great but we all want to start creating something, right? Well, we want to provoke your critical thinking and problem-solving skills which we do during practice(s).
Here's the part where you as a developer will take the wheel, stepping into the guided field on how to develop and deploy your backend or frontend service inside Infobip ecosystem.
Alongside with theory and practice, the program has activities that highlight organisational culture and values we encourage at Infobip, so you can start contributing to that same culture more easily!
We want you to feel more comfortable and secure when starting, which will result in raising your productivity and confidence in the times to come. We'll probably overload you with information but remember the 'Aha!' moment mentioned before? Through learning by doing that moment will come.
Each program has materials you can come back again, when needed. You manage your own learning experience.
Interview with lecturer Josip Antoliš
Hi! I'm Josip and I'm an engineering onboarding program regular. I host presentation of PaaS (Platform as a Service) requirement area projects that generally solve some common problems like service discovery, monitoring, CI/DI pipeline, that sort of thing. Oh, and I host the practice session on the same topic.
I've definitely learned a lot from holding those presentations. For starters, I'm a way better presented now than I was when I began. It also boosted my confidence with Q/A sessions and live coding. It also gave me the opportunity to prepare learning materials that are now available to everyone and can be reused outside of the EOP. That reduced the number of "How do I do x?" type of questions that I get on a daily bases.
I also see it as a big responsibility. One of the benefits of EOP is to put new hires in touch with more senior employees. So I'm not only talking about our tech stack, I'm also presenting Infobip culture here. Am I approachable enough? Am I open minded and inclusive? Am I knowledgeable enough? I hope I am, but that's the sort of questions that keep popping up in my mind.
We in the organization team have struggled a bit with passing the company culture on to new generations. It's hard to do over conference calls and shared screens. Lately we've introduced more group challenges and activities beyond just presentations, and this helps with feeling of camaraderie in the group. That's good, we can see how each month a fresh class of Bippers graduates from EOP, and then they go back to their individual teams and they still keep in touch. They remain each others' contacts in different requirement areas, someone to help out and to share experiences with.
On the other hand, those shared activities and the practice session in particular, they help me as a teacher to evaluate the attendees in more realistic environment. Not only technical and theoretical things that get covered in job interviews, but also stuff like collaboration skills and work ethics.
All in all, I really enjoy my work on engineering onboarding program and I'm grateful for the opportunity to be a part of it!
Engineering Onboarding Program Survey Results
Total of 15 answers, 1 as the lowest, 10 as the highest. (2021-2023)
Program content level
8.84
Trainers performance level
9
Organisation and support overall
9.4
Beneficial to understanding of organisational structure and working methodology
9.12
Beneficial to understanding of Requirement areas, scope of work, technologies and tools in use
9.10
Beneficial in recognising principles and values of Infobip engineering culture
9.4
Beneficial in relating how the system works and the interactions of its parts.
9.11
Beneficial in terms of influencing my future performance
8.54
Feedback about Engineering Onboarding Program
just want to thanks everybody who participated on preparation or presenting materials and also organizators. It is really visible hard work behind it and I really appreciate it. In my 10 years experience with various companies, this is the first time I got such amazing onboarding with a lot of information and now I feel that I am already part of the Infobip family and I can interact with anybody from company and understand Infobip internals. Thank you, amazing job, I mean it! :) just continue with this and all next newcomers will enjoy it for sure :).
Anonymous
The benefit is moving common engineering overview from the team into one common standard way for everybody. For me as Team CI user EW helped to touch Infobip application development workflow in backend practice before start working with this. And also to be familiar with more Engineering Bippers. I’m in touch with some of speakers and participants during my work.
Andrey Losenkov, Saint Petersburg, Russia
Engineering week was a big positive for me. As a newcomer, it helped me realise how my future role as a developer impacts Infobip and the real world as well. That way I was better able to connect on a more grounded level to what I was going to be doing.
By going through each individual area and getting to know the people behind the products, it all became much more real and interesting. We were shown what purpose each area serves and in some cases exactly how to make something similar ourselves.
Which I think is a great way to provide the attendee with a feeling of accomplishment. Encouraging them to develop (pun intended) further.
Andrija Matijević, Zagreb
While we constantly improve the program to make it easier to go through, don't think that the program is a complete piece of cake. It will take you energy and focus as you can see from the feedback of some of our team members. We look forward to hearing your honest feedback so we can see how to make it better.
What Comes Next
After finishing Academy and Engineering onboarding programs, you are further focusing on your particular role and responsibilities.
Your OBP (onboarding plan) again comes in action. You are getting to know your team to a greater extent and finding your way to become individual contributor to team's overall success. Doing activities from your plan with provided mentoring from the team makes it easier for you to become productive contributor. Team will provide you with useful documentation, internal videos, links, use cases, tips and tricks along the way. You are still learning and catching things as you go.
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