Engineering Education strategy

This page outlines the vision, strategy and goals for Engineering education.

“What do we do on a day-to-day-basis? We learn. Why is “learning” a better word than “training”? Training implies passivity; it is done to us. We are trained; we attend training. Learning is active; it is something we do.” (L. David Marquet, Turn the Ship Around)

Mission, Vision & Guiding Principles

Mission

The Engineering Education mission is to get engineers onboarded quickly and efficiently, help technical knowledge flow openly and freely within teams and across teams, provide resources and environments for engineers to continuously grow, and drive a culture of learning and knowledge sharing at Sourcegraph.

We want every engineer at Sourcegraph to feel that they have all the context and technical knowledge they need in order to deliver high-quality work, and feel that they are continuously growing personally and professionally.

Vision

6 month vision

New teammates are excited about, enjoy completing, and tell others about the great onboarding experience they had. They have the necessary technical context or know where to find it.

1 year vision

Knowledge sharing has become a key identifiable part of Sourcegraph’s engineering culture.

3 year vision

Teammates choose to join Sourcegraph because we are publicly known for providing an environment where teammates continuously grow.

Guiding principles

These are the principles that guide the work we do in Engineering Education. Sometimes adhering to one causes us to compromise another, but they guide our decisions on what matters.

  • We prefer clear and concrete communication over abstract words.
  • We encourage innovation and experimentation.
  • Learning is active. It is not our role to train teammates, but to facilitate their learning. We prefer to create learning environments rather than doing top-down training.
  • Learning is collaborative. We encourage and equip others in their journey of educating their peers.
  • We value continuous growth in everything we do.
  • We lead by example by sharing what we’re learning and by teaching others.

Where we are now

  • The Engineering Education was created in September 2021.
  • We’re currently working on:
    1. Improving the Engineering onboarding experience for new teammates.
    2. Creating more opportunities for internal knowledge exchange in Engineering.

Goals

This section is in progress. We’re currently defining our goals and aligning them with Product/Eng and the Enablement org.

Metrics

These indicators help us with knowing whether we’re going in the right direction and where we contribute to our business strategy and vision:

  • Time to first (and subsequent) Pull Requests - This is an overall measure of how quickly someone can ramp up on context and become productive at Sourcegraph. This metric is described here: Time-to-Pull-Request Metric
  • Engagement with the onboarding resources and other learning materials that we create (depending on the tools we use for delivering the content).
  • Participation in the #dev-learn channel
  • Time to first code reviews - This is a metric of how long it takes for engineers to gain the necessary context to contribute to technical discussions about code and implementations. Currently being explored as a future metric.
  • Retention - Lack of career development opportunities is a key contributor in people choosing to leave an organization – https://www.cultureamp.com/blog/biggest-lie-people-quit-bosses