First Day Challenge
The first days at work are always special. You remember every single moment of your first days, even after many years.
When you enter the building of your new company, you start to be introduced to your colleagues. One after another. You hear hundreds of names and you forget them immediately:) You meet with your new colleagues, learn tons of new information about your work. When you sit to your desk and touch your new computer, you feel the energy in your bones. Now you are ready. You start to wait for the new tasks and duties as if a big tank of gasoline waiting for a spark to explode.
But — most of the time — that spark never comes.
The first day at work is often a big disappointment. You cannot setup your environment, you cannot code, even for weeks. Most of the time, you cannot even use anything becaue you have to wait access rights to be set. Many applications are not installed on your computer and you have to open an online ticket and wait to have it installed. Your very first day at work makes you feel sooooo bored. Your disappointment whispers to your ears unpleasant things about your future in the company. “I wish” you say, “I wish people prepared for me in advance”.
Every newcomer gains a unique experience on their very first day at iyzico. You return home with many beautiful moments.
On the first working day, the newcomer is given a completely real job. One of his/her colleague helps and supports by doing pair programming. The newcomer completes the task and covers all the steps a developer touches, like designing, coding, writing automated tests, doing manual tests, opening pull requests and implementing comments from the pull request, deploying the changeset to staging environment and deploying to production at the end of the day.
On the very first day, every newcomer has a commit on their behalf, a pull request on Bitbucket and a deployment build on Bamboo. It is a perfect starting event boosting energy and motivation. These points make the first day challenge so special in our company culture.
The first day project consists of several main steps.
Preparation for the Challenge
The team has to select a task for the challenge before the first day of the newcomer. The task should neither be very easy, nor very difficult. The definition of the job should be clear. It is important to complete the task in 2–3 hours, so the scope of the task should be limited and well defined.
The pair is also selected before the first day of the newcomer. It is important that the pair should have enough knowledge to finish the job.
The company should provide a gift in advance to give to the newcomer at the end of the day.
Start the Challenge
The first day starts with various meeting sessions till the lunch time. We introduce the company, people and our values and principles at these sessions. Also it is good for the newcomer to spend some time with his/her computer.
The First Day Challenge often starts after lunch and finishes at around 17:00. The newcomer often works with his/her pair for at least 2–3 hours on the given task. Newcomer and his/her pair give all their efforts to make their task happen well.
Greeting Ceremony
The project should be completed in the working hours, like around 17:00. Newcomer’s pair starts applauding to attract people’s interest All newcomer’s colleagues come together in the office afterwards. His/her pair introduces the newcomer to the audience and the work they have implemented. Everyone congratulates him/her with loud applause.
After Day Challenge
After we congratulate the newcomer, we give a gift. We call it as “After Day Challenge”. We choose to give a Lego box, designed for 8–14 year old kids. This gift should be made up of at least 100 pieces and a relatively difficult model. The harder to complete the Lego set, the more we have fun with it:) The newcomer has to complete the Lego in the evening and put to his table in the morning of the 2nd day.
Finger Selfie
It is time to complete the celebration with a selfie. Everyone comes together and shows the newcomer with their fingers. The videos and pictures taken during the celebration are published via the company’s social media accounts afterwards.
First days at work are always special. If you wonder how iyzico makes it, please check iyzico Engineering instagram and twitter accounts.
