Support Engineering onboarding

Welcome to Sourcegraph and the Support Engineering team! This document provides an overview of the outcomes you will achieve while you work on your onboarding. The specific tasks in support of these outcomes are found in Process Street. If you ever feel like an outcome is not true, share that with your manager or the team, and we will figure out how to make sure it is true and improve the onboarding for the next new teammate.

As you go through onboarding, take your time. The first few weeks are all about learning, not doing. It will feel like you have nothing to show for your first few weeks and that is by design. It’s okay to take your time and just focus on settling in. It can be reading intensive, so please know you can share your thoughts, reactions, and questions in our #team-support-engineering Slack channel, talk with your onboarding buddy, talk with your onboarding mentor, talk with your manager, or talk with anyone else on the team. Doing so can make it a little more interactive and less tedious.

By the end of your first week, the following will be true…

  • You understand Sourcegraph’s mission, vision, values, and culture
  • You understand Sourcegraph’s purpose and how you/your role supports us achieving it
  • You understand what is expected of you in your role and what it means to be a successful support engineer
  • You have started to get to know your teammates
  • You understand how to make edits to a handbook page
  • You have a sense of what tools you will be using and for what

By the end of your second week, the following will be true…

  • You are participating in our team rituals
  • You are getting to know the team even more
  • You understand how to add a new page to the handbook
  • You can wrap your head around who are our customers
  • You are getting to know what Sourcegraph can do functionality wise, at a high level and in detail
  • You are getting to know the ways that Sourcegraph can be deployed and configured and why

By the end of your third week, the following will be true…

  • You are starting to understand the day-to-day of a support engineer

By the end of your fourth week, the following will be true…

  • You have helped at least one customer
  • You feel comfortable with Zendesk

By the end of your second month, the following will be true…

  • You have closed at least 15 cases
  • You are finding you know where to start to help a customer more frequently
  • You are starting to feel more confident troubleshooting and working with the product
  • You have gotten to know some more folks around the company
  • You have started contributing to improving our official product documentation

By the end of your third month, the following will be true…

  • You’ve closed at least 30 cases
  • You are finding you need help less and less to get started helping a customer
  • You have continued to update product documentation and the handbook as needed
  • You’ve selected your focus blocks and updated our team schedule
  • You have completed a career roadmap with your manager

Notes for onboarding mentors

  • Be available to answer questions
  • If you are anything less than 100% sure of your answer to a non-technical question, tell our new teammate to also talk to Aimee
  • It’s up to you how you want to structure the shadowing to happen in week 3 for our new teammate you are paired with