Turning a newly hired developer into a fully efficient, contributing team member requires a concerted effort.
Your new employee needs to be introduced to the codebase, brought up to speed on the project management workflow, receive code reviews for continual improvement, and weigh in on other people's code reviews to build a voice on the team–all an investment in the employee's career and work with your company.
As team leads, our first instinct can be to rush through all of those steps as quickly as possible to get a return on the hiring investment sooner than later. But, as with many team operations, sometimes we need to slow down to speed up.
One final aspect of onboarding that contributes to quality code and efficiency is pair programming.
Pair programming is valuable for the new hire and the team as a whole, but it does raise some considerations when managing your team members and their contributions to the team and the project as a whole.
Benefits and Value
Even when accounting for variance in team member makeup, we can establish a culture in which pair programming brings value to new hires for a few reasons:
The new employee gets face-to-face time with other team members.
This allows for organic team growth, establishes camaraderie with the new member's involvement, and builds a bedrock of shared experience.
The new hire doesn't know what they don't know about the code.
Getting up to speed will take some time. We ask them to drink from the firehose when introducing the codebase, but building experience by doing increases confidence quickly.
Pairing a more senior-level developer with a new hire will increase the team's code IQ level.
The senior dev can help introduce concepts like architecture, testing, or frameworks that wouldn't normally come up in team conversations, thus orienting the new dev to the team’s coding culture.
For pairing to be the most valuable to the new hire, they need to drive the session, not the more senior dev.
While that can feel intimidating, the new dev must get a feel for making code decisions in that codebase. The senior may need some coaching to understand that pair programming is a team confidence-builder.
Considerations
Personality Differences
Pair programming can be a touchy subject. Some developers enjoy pairing all the time, but others feel like it slows them down intolerably.
While we might be tempted to pigeonhole the latter category as "not a team player," we would be better positioned to respect and understand personality differences.
Resistance to Criticism
What if a developer doesn’t accept criticism of their code? Ideally, that should have been addressed specifically in the hiring process.
If you have reached the onboarding stage only to find this out for the first time, you'll need to watch the team’s dynamic closely.
Balancing Team Profitability and Satisfaction
If your company bills by the hour, trading time for money, you're not going to win popularity contests with clients by doubling the bill.
Conversely, you can only eat so much unbillable time before the profitability of the new hire just doesn't make sense. How useful pair programming is in general depends on the team's constraints and balancing billable versus unbillable time.
Along with that, the more senior dev will likely feel like they're wasting their time, even if they're sold on the pairing concept. They'd rather be developing some of the more esoteric parts of the application, enjoying the challenge of harder problems to solve.
I use time-boxed pairing on my teams so that it's not all-consuming. We can have a new hire pair with a more experienced team member for 2-3 hours daily with great results.
We allow that to continue for the first week, then discuss with everyone involved to get a sense of how it's going and what value may be had from continuing.
Balance in Onboarding
Pair programming is just one tool in a comprehensive onboarding strategy, but it's powerful when implemented thoughtfully. As with most team dynamics, the key is finding the right balance.
By creating structured, time-boxed pairing sessions rather than open-ended commitments, we acknowledge its inherent value and limitations.
Short, daily sessions for a limited time benefit the team through knowledge transfer, relationship building, and code quality improvements while staying the potential drawbacks of decreased billable hours and developer frustration.
Each new hire brings their own learning style, personality, and expertise to the table. The most successful onboarding experiences allow for individual differences rather than forcing a one-size-fits-all approach.
Successful onboarding doesn’t rush to maximum productivity but instead lays a foundation for long-term success. Investing thoughtfully in onboarding practices builds better code and a stronger, more cohesive, and ultimately more productive team.
The short-term investment of time yields long-term dividends in code quality, team cohesion, and developer satisfaction. Indeed, sometimes you need to slow down to speed up.