43:["$","title",null,{"children":"Scaling & Onboarding: A Quantitative Approach | George Spingos | Observable"}] 4b:[] 47:{"id":"72ce36254e124aec","slug":"scaling-onboarding-quantitative-approach","title":"Scaling & Onboarding: A Quantitative Approach","thumbnail":"ca49f4b611df2d4571e856a41321a89747750cf1ec1f33f4f3b3129381e61d49","access_level":"public","create_time":"$D2020-11-24T09:06:19.747Z","update_time":"$D2022-03-15T10:59:32.185Z","view_time":null,"first_public_time":"$D2020-11-24T14:03:40.285Z","has_unpublished_edits":null,"fork":false,"stars":1,"starred":false,"owner":{"type":"team","id":"b691801b27e53ea3","login":"gnsping","name":"George Spingos","avatar_url":"https://avatars-next.observableusercontent.com/ad1f518e0fde6c3da86c197b280b599db0aee97e2f58ccd1adb6353b8326658e","tier":"starter_2024","bio":"","followed_by_you":false,"follows_you":false},"version":273,"publish_version":null,"role":null,"authored":false,"authors":[{"type":"individual","id":"a10328e148ba30db","login":"gnsping","name":"George Spingos","avatar_url":"https://avatars-next.observableusercontent.com/ad1f518e0fde6c3da86c197b280b599db0aee97e2f58ccd1adb6353b8326658e","tier":null,"bio":"","followed_by_you":false,"follows_you":false}],"members":[{"type":"individual","id":"a10328e148ba30db","login":"gnsping","name":"George Spingos","avatar_url":"https://avatars-next.observableusercontent.com/ad1f518e0fde6c3da86c197b280b599db0aee97e2f58ccd1adb6353b8326658e","tier":null,"role":"editor"}],"comments":[],"custom_thumbnail":false,"trashed":false,"lapsed":null,"subscribed":null,"forks":0,"collection":null,"type":"notebook","body":{"titling":"auto","title":"Scaling & Onboarding: A Quantitative Approach","cells":[{"id":0,"value":"md`# Scaling & Onboarding: A Quantitative Approach`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","tool":"$undefined","providerMetadata":"$undefined","attachments":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":5,"value":"md`---`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","tool":"$undefined","providerMetadata":"$undefined","attachments":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":13,"value":"md`## The Scaling Challenge`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","tool":"$undefined","providerMetadata":"$undefined","attachments":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":15,"value":"md`\nThe challenge Scaling engineering teams comes down to how quickly new engineers can ramp up to self-sufficient productivity.\n\n> ### Doubling head count every six months takes six to twelve months to ramp up.\n\nThe scenario we should actively try to avoid is one in which untrained engineers increasingly outnumber the trained engineers. \n\nThat leads to each trained engineer devoting much of their time to training a couple of newer engineers with sever impact on their productivity.\n`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","tool":"$undefined","providerMetadata":"$undefined","attachments":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":10,"value":"md`\nUse this notebook as a tool to understand the potential impact that scaling can have on a team/organization.\n`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","tool":"$undefined","providerMetadata":"$undefined","attachments":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":24,"value":"md`\n### Hiring & Onboarding\n`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","tool":"$undefined","providerMetadata":"$undefined","attachments":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":31,"value":"viewof training_hours = slider({\n min: 2, \n max: 40, \n step: 1, \n value: 10, \n format: \"\",\n title: \"Number of training hours required (weekly)\", \n description: \"The number of hours that a senior (trained) engineer will be spending training and onboarding new hires.\"\n})","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","tool":"$undefined","providerMetadata":"$undefined","attachments":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":39,"value":"html `Trained engineers are only ${productivity_drop_per_week(training_hours)}% productive while training others.`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","tool":"$undefined","providerMetadata":"$undefined","attachments":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":87,"value":"md`\n### Productivity of new hires:\n`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","tool":"$undefined","providerMetadata":"$undefined","attachments":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":47,"value":"viewof untrained_productivity = slider({\n min: 0, \n max: 1, \n step: 0.01, \n format: v => `${Math.round(100 * v)}%`,\n description: \"How productive are untrained engineers in our ecosystem?\"\n})","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","tool":"$undefined","providerMetadata":"$undefined","attachments":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":55,"value":"md`\n\n#### Assumption\n\nThe best-case scenario ratio of **two-untrained-to-one-trained engineer (2:1)** is the one found to be the most productive both for new engineers to get the maximum attention of their trainer and for the experienced engineer to be able to meaningfully contribute to BAU.\n`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","tool":"$undefined","providerMetadata":"$undefined","attachments":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":58,"value":"html `For those three (3) people, the productivity output is *only* ${prodctivity_sum(productivity_drop_per_week(training_hours) ,untrained_productivity)}.`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","tool":"$undefined","providerMetadata":"$undefined","attachments":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":82,"value":"md`---\n\n## Time Spent on Hiring\n\nFor doubling team headcount every *6 months*, and *~ 10%* of candidates undergoing phone screens eventually join, then *10* interviews per existing engineer are required in that time period.\n`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","tool":"$undefined","providerMetadata":"$undefined","attachments":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":92,"value":"viewof recruitement_hours = slider({\n min: 0, \n max: 12, \n step: 1, \n title: \"Recruitement Hours (weekly)\",\n description: \"Number of hours required for interview preping, perform and debrief.\", \n})","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","tool":"$undefined","providerMetadata":"$undefined","attachments":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":95,"value":"html `Each engineer in the team is expected to spend ${recruitement_hours} hours doing hiring-related work per week.\n

Keep in mind not every senior engineer can or should be interviewing candidates.

\n`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","tool":"$undefined","providerMetadata":"$undefined","attachments":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":107,"value":"html `A trained engineer is now down to ${productivity_drop_per_week_plus_interview(training_hours, recruitement_hours)}% weekly efficiency.`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","tool":"$undefined","providerMetadata":"$undefined","attachments":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":137,"value":"md`---`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","tool":"$undefined","providerMetadata":"$undefined","attachments":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":123,"value":"html `For those three (3) people, the productivity output now is *only* ${productivity_sum_plus_interview (productivity_drop_per_week_plus_interview (training_hours, recruitement_hours) ,untrained_productivity)}%.`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","tool":"$undefined","providerMetadata":"$undefined","attachments":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":140,"value":"md`---`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","tool":"$undefined","providerMetadata":"$undefined","attachments":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":133,"value":"md`\n### Other Factors in Play\n\n- For every ~10 engineers, you need an additional team, which requires more coordination.\n- Each engineer means more commits and deployments per day, creating load on your development tools.\n- **Most outages are caused by deployments, so more deployments drive more outages, which in turn require incident management, mitigations, and postmortems.**\n- Having more engineers leads to more specialized teams and systems, which require increasingly small on-call rotations so that your on-call engineers have enough system context to debug and resolve production issues. Consequently, relative time invested in on-call goes up.\n`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","tool":"$undefined","providerMetadata":"$undefined","attachments":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":183,"value":"md`\n### Ops & On-Call\n\n#### Assumptions\n\n- Only your trained engineers can go on-call. \n- On-call rotation per engineer is one week a month\n- Each engineer only contributes 50% of the time to BAU when they are on-call. \n`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","tool":"$undefined","providerMetadata":"$undefined","attachments":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":191,"value":"html `The weekly productivity of a senior engineer that is actively training new hires, participates in the hiring process and, is also part of the on call rotation would amount to ${productivity_drop_per_week_plus_interview (training_hours, recruitement_hours)*0.5}%!\n`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","tool":"$undefined","providerMetadata":"$undefined","attachments":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":211,"value":"html `For those three (3) people, the productivity now output is *only* ${productivity_sum_plus_interview_plus_oncall (productivity_sum_plus_interview (training_hours, recruitement_hours) ,untrained_productivity)}%!`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","tool":"$undefined","providerMetadata":"$undefined","attachments":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":222,"value":"md`---`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","tool":"$undefined","providerMetadata":"$undefined","attachments":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":143,"value":"md`\n### Conclusion\n\nThe above demonstrate that there exists a mathematically sound argument that **“hiring maybe slowing us down”**. \n\nAt high enough rates or with very weak onboarding process, the marginal added value of hiring gets very slow.\n\n> ### Sometimes very low can mean negative!\n\n`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","tool":"$undefined","providerMetadata":"$undefined","attachments":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":245,"value":"md`---`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","tool":"$undefined","providerMetadata":"$undefined","attachments":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":238,"value":"md `\n### You can also interactively evaluate the model as a guesstimate here: @: https://www.getguesstimate.com/models/17421 \n`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","tool":"$undefined","providerMetadata":"$undefined","attachments":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":28,"value":"md`---\n#### Code Appendix\n`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","tool":"$undefined","providerMetadata":"$undefined","attachments":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":29,"value":"import {slider} from \"@jashkenas/inputs\"","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","tool":"$undefined","providerMetadata":"$undefined","attachments":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":154,"value":"import {emoji} from '@asg017/emojis'","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","tool":"$undefined","providerMetadata":"$undefined","attachments":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":36,"value":"function productivity_drop_per_week(training_hours)\n{\n return ((40 - training_hours)/40)*100\n}","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","tool":"$undefined","providerMetadata":"$undefined","attachments":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":50,"value":"function prodctivity_sum(productivity_drop_per_week,untrained_productivity)\n{\n return 2 * untrained_productivity + 1 * productivity_drop_per_week/100;\n}","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","tool":"$undefined","providerMetadata":"$undefined","attachments":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":109,"value":"function productivity_drop_per_week_plus_interview(training_hours, recruitement_hours)\n{\n return ((40 - training_hours - recruitement_hours)/40)*100\n}","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","tool":"$undefined","providerMetadata":"$undefined","attachments":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":116,"value":"function productivity_sum_plus_interview(productivity_drop_per_week_plus_interview , untrained_productivity)\n{\n return 2 * untrained_productivity + 1 * productivity_drop_per_week_plus_interview /100;\n}","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","tool":"$undefined","providerMetadata":"$undefined","attachments":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":215,"value":"function productivity_sum_plus_interview_plus_oncall(productivity_drop_per_week_plus_interview , untrained_productivity)\n{\n return 2 * untrained_productivity + 1 * productivity_drop_per_week_plus_interview /100;\n}","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","tool":"$undefined","providerMetadata":"$undefined","attachments":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"}],"files":"$W4b","stdlib":"1"}} 42:null