The "First Week Metric"
Over the past 20 years, from my time as an engineer to now leading engineering teams, I’ve read countless articles on what new employees should focus on during their first days or weeks. While advice like meeting the team, understanding the company culture, and reading documentation is valuable, I believe there’s a single, critical metric that indicates how successful your new engineer's first week is and, more generally, how effective your engineering processes are:
how quickly a new engineer can deploy a valuable change to production
Getting a new engineer to deploy something valuable—no matter how small—reveals the actual state of your development environment, processes, and organisational efficiency. If it takes too long to reach that point, it’s a sign of deeper issues in your system that can impact the entire engineering team over time.
Slow Setup Times Lead to Daily Frustrations and Bottlenecks
If it takes days—or worse, weeks—for a new engineer to set up their development environment, you’ve already given them a frustrating experience. The complexity of getting their local environment ready to contribute to the codebase highlights a more significant issue that affects your entire team, not just the new hire.
An inconsistent or cumbersome setup process is a productivity killer for the new engineers and every other developer. If it’s a struggle to onboard, it’s likely your existing engineers are experiencing small, daily inefficiencies that slow down the flow of work. A slow setup process contributes to longer flow times, increasing the time it takes for developers to move from starting a task to delivering value to customers. If an engineer spends more time configuring than coding, that’s a red flag for your engineering processes.
Investing in a smooth onboarding process, where new engineers can quickly get up and running, sets the tone for efficiency and shows that you value developer productivity from day one.
Long Code-to-Deployment Cycles Extend Feedback Loops
Once a developer is ready to write and commit code, the next challenge is how quickly that code moves through the system into production. If your code-to-deployment cycle takes too long, your feedback loops become stretched and less effective.
Feedback is crucial for engineers. The shorter the time between writing code and seeing it in production, the faster they can validate their work, learn from it, and iterate. Delays—whether in the QA process, code reviews, or the deployment pipeline—force engineers to juggle multiple tasks and wait for results. This context switching is costly in terms of cognitive load and the time lost refocusing on work.
When changes are delayed, the lead time for delivering value to customers increases. Your engineers are left in a holding pattern, waiting for feedback, which slows the entire team’s innovation ability. The faster your feedback loops, the more agile your engineering team can be, and the more rapidly they can respond to customer needs.
Automation in Testing Is Key to Efficiency
Manual QA absolutely has its place, particularly for complex edge cases and exploratory testing where human intuition is invaluable. However, repetitive tasks that require consistency and high fidelity are better suited to automation. Automation becomes indispensable when a test suite must be run across many environments or cover a wide range of scenarios at speed.
Relying heavily on manual QA for repetitive checks can introduce inefficiency. Even with the most skilled QA engineers, manual processes are prone to human error, variability in execution, and slower turnaround times. Investing in automated testing, especially in your continuous integration (CI) pipeline, ensures that your test suites run quickly and consistently, catching regressions early and giving developers fast feedback.
Automation also scales better. As your codebase grows, the number of tests that need to be run increases significantly. Automated tests can handle large volumes and provide real-time feedback, allowing your QA engineers to focus on more complex, high-value tasks such as edge-case analysis and exploratory testing. This improves both the speed and the quality of your development cycles.
Onboarding as a Reflection of Your Development Process
The onboarding process is not just about integrating a new engineer into the team—it reflects your development processes' complexity. How quickly a new engineer can contribute value reveals the hidden inefficiencies in your system. When your onboarding is fast and streamlined, it shows that your team has invested in removing obstacles and has prioritised smooth, efficient workflows. When onboarding is slow and full of friction, it often indicates that your dev process is laden with complexity, handovers, and unnecessary steps, which will slow down new hires and your entire engineering organisation over time.
Conclusion: Investing in Onboarding Benefits Everyone
At the heart of a well-functioning engineering team is the ability to quickly and safely deliver value to customers. The faster a new engineer can go from onboarding to making a meaningful contribution, the more efficient your engineering processes are. By focusing on the right onboarding metric—how fast they can deploy something valuable—you’re ensuring that your systems, tools, and workflows are designed to remove friction, shorten feedback loops, and enable flow.
Investing in your onboarding process is more than helping new hires settle in. It’s about building a system that delivers value sooner, safer, and happier for the entire team and customers.