Splunk’s Engineering Enablement and Engagement team realized that their onboarding program was too generic and didn’t cater enough to the specific needs of engineers. Given that Splunk’s engineering organization is very large and distributed, the Engineering Enablement team saw onboarding as an area they could focus on to meaningfully improve productivity and long-term retention.
Splunk identified issues with their onboarding process when they observed that engineers, despite being proficient in their specific roles, struggled to connect their work to the broader company ecosystem. This disconnect was highlighted through feedback from recent hires, indicating a need for a more tailored onboarding approach to help engineers better integrate and understand the larger organizational context.
The hypothesis behind the new onboarding program was that by tailoring the process specifically for engineers, Splunk could improve their integration into the company. The focus was on providing a comprehensive understanding of Splunk’s technical environment, which was expected to reduce ramp-up time, enhance engagement, and ultimately contribute to building a world-class engineering organization.
Time to First Merge Request and Time to 10th MR: At the outset of the project, the team started tracking metrics like Time to First Merge Request and Time to 10th MR by connecting to their GitLab instance. These metrics served as a proxy for “ramp-up time,” with the goal of reducing them as much as possible. They focused particularly on the 50th percentile for Time to First MR and Time to 10th MR for all developers who onboarded within a given month.
NPS and Confidence score: Another primary goal of the bootcamp was to make sure new hires felt confident in their roles within the first 90 days. Splunk had already been running a survey at the end of every onboarding session for employees, asking them to rate the quality of each session and give feedback on what could be improved. However, the Engineering Enablement team noticed that participation in these surveys was low, so they decided to make a few changes:
The latter “confidence score” question is used as a top-level metric for measuring how well the onboarding process is working. They pair this alongside their Time to First and 10th MR metrics.
Splunk’s Engineering Enablement team started by gathering feedback from developers who had gone through the generic, company-wide onboarding process. They also sat down with developers who had just finished onboarding to hear firsthand what they felt was missing. This feedback shaped the first version of their solution: a week-long engineering bootcamp designed to address the gaps identified by gathering feedback from developers.
The engineering bootcamp is a week-long program for developers during their first week at the company. Here’s how the bootcamp works:
Here are some examples of the sessions included in the bootcamp:
Splunk’s Engineering Bootcamp was launched gradually, adjusting based on feedback from new hires. The team fine-tuned the program over time, incorporating both live and self-paced learning to accommodate different needs, including during the pandemic. With consistent feedback and improvements, the bootcamp evolved into a core part of the onboarding process, ensuring engineers felt integrated and aligned with Splunk’s goals.
Since iteratively rolling out the engineering bootcamp, the EE team has observed some improvements:
Listen to Splunk’s full story here → How “instructional engineers” improve developer onboarding at Splunk