Hello Resilia! How Resilia’s Onboarding Process Prepares Juniors for Success

by Waverley Leung, Software Engineering @ Resilia

Since my first day at Resilia, whenever someone would ask me “How do you feel?”, my response is always “I’m grateful, happy, and having a lot of fun” with my biggest smile.

Coming from a dance and arts administration background, I mainly worked in-person with little to no learning curve. As a result, I wasn’t sure what to expect for an onboarding process, or a remote one at that. Since this is my first software engineering role and I graduated from a coding bootcamp, I also thought that I might need more support in my onboarding compared to someone with experience. That said, whenever I had my doubts or concerns before my first day I wouldn’t let myself dwell on them. Instead I would remind myself of what I learned during the interview process; that I would be working alongside highly skilled, empathetic, and supportive teammates. Having that keep me grounded, I started my first day excited to join and contribute to the amazing people at Resilia.

Expectations and Responsibilities

At the beginning of my first day, I received my 30 day plan that detailed my onboarding process. Naturally, it was a bit overwhelming at first to view but I appreciated having that document to refer to, especially in my first week. The rest of the week was filled with meeting people, being caught up to speed on our product, learning what the team was currently working on, and setting up my local environment. Starting the second week, in addition to continuing to meet people, I began to take on smaller tasks assigned to the pod I was in and participate in the development process. The rest of my first 30 days mainly consisted of gradually taking on larger tasks, actively participating and contributing to team meetings, and being part of other aspects in the milestone process such as QA/VQA and delivering to production.

Open Reflections

What stood out the most to me were the opportunities to meet different department heads, and hear from them what their team does and how it relates to what we’re working towards as a company. Those opportunities reinforced our highly collaborative culture and that each team is aware of the impact they have on each other’s work. I walked away with a deeper understanding from a different perspective about how the work I’m doing contributes to our collective growth and success. In turn, each conversation made me feel even more connected to Resilia, and encouraged me to take pride in and ownership of my work.

Prior to Resilia I never worked with designers or product managers before. Though I wasn’t sure what to expect collaborating with them, I’m happy to say I’ve sincerely enjoyed the meetings when all of us come together. Instead of our discussions focusing on the what, we all walk away understanding the why behind the what. As a group we deep dive into UX best practices and concerns combined with what we as engineers are capable of in order to make decisions. These meetings are always eye-opening to me because I’m reminded that we are driven by our users’ needs and provide me another perspective on the intention behind our work. As we face new challenges together, I look forward to our continued growth and collaboration.

Especially in my first weeks, I often looked forward to pairing and interacting with the other engineers. It was fascinating to observe how they navigate the codebase, debug errors, run the app locally, and in general, how they work. I was constantly amazed by their thought process and problem solving skills, and grateful for their willingness to support me and answer my questions. In more formal settings, like our weekly guild meetings with all of the engineers, anyone can add items to the agenda to ask questions and discuss various technical topics. During these meetings I thoroughly enjoy our discussions on industry best practices, plans and goals for the future, and reflecting as a group where we currently are. I appreciate these opportunities because no matter what our experience level is, we are all encouraged to share our opinions and participate in important decisions. Being part of the engineering team is an amazing learning experience that has encouraged me to speak up and take ownership of the work we do.

As a deep thinker and someone who needs time to process information, my imposter syndrome was definitely present in my first 30 days. When I started, I couldn’t stop comparing myself to the other engineers, feeling guilty that I wasn’t able to work as fast in order to support them. However after opening up during a check-in with my manager, they reminded me that my responsibility is to learn and ask questions now so that I can be where the other engineers are in a year, not focus on my output yet. That conversation helped me reevaluate the expectations I placed on myself; the next day I felt more confident and comfortable in what I was doing. Our conversation also acted as feedback for my manager on how we can improve our onboarding process; since then we have made changes to attempt to address supporting our new engineers more by being explicit about expectations. Again, it reminded me that we as a company embrace diversity and inclusion, and believe in supporting each other to grow together.

Last Thoughts

My first 30 days onboarding experience has been a thrilling journey filled with new faces, a supportive and empathetic community, continuous learning, and joy in the unknown. Though I’m still working on it, over the past few weeks I’ve noticed I’m more confident asking questions and speaking up in general. This is partially because I’m starting to not overthink what I want to say/ask, but largely due to, as I’ve mentioned, the supportive and highly collaborative people here at Resilia. From the beginning, people have reached out and are always open to hopping on a call, there is a perfect balance of meetings and coding so that we’re all aware of each other’s progress, and asking/receiving feedback is encouraged. Though my first 30 days are over, I truly feel ready and prepared for the rest of my journey; Resilia’s onboarding process has laid the foundation for my (hopefully) long and successful career as a Software Engineer. It’s more than I could have hoped for, and like I started this post with, everyday I’m grateful, happy, and having a lot of fun.

Thank you so much for reading! If you enjoyed this post, take a look at the rest of our blog for more on what we’re doing, or for more of my writing visit my Medium blog. You can also check out our careers page for current openings.