Introduction to Team Building
Explore effective strategies for building an Elixir development team by training existing staff or hiring skilled developers. Understand recruitment challenges and approaches to attract and retain top talent while transitioning to Elixir technology.
We'll cover the following...
Note: If you’re confident in your training and recruiting, skip ahead to the next lesson, “Ensuring Code Consistency,” knowing you’re already prepared to recruit, hire, and train an effective Elixir team.
The need for team building
Each time we adopt new technology, we need to address talent acquisition. Whether we’re dealing with a small team or a larger one, our training and recruiting processes will necessarily change.
Imagine this: you’ve convinced your boss that your company can’t stay on your current technology stack. You’ve put in your time to research all of the alternatives. You sell the stakeholders one by one. Some come grudgingly and some immediately, but eventually you win them over.
You can almost touch the tangible sense of excitement in the room as you get the green light to start building prototypes using technology you all believe in. The stakeholders are patiently waiting for the payoffs you’ve promised, and then it hits you. There’s exactly one developer in the whole company who knows Elixir. It’s a scary feeling.
Take heart. One of the reasons we should be adopting Elixir is to retain, attract, and motivate top talent. Let’s talk about how to do so.
To thrive, we’re going to need to build a team of Elixir developers, perhaps without breaking the bank. A recurring theme that all of us hear is that working with good new technologies helps companies attract and retain good developers.
We’ll talk about two ways to find Elixir developers:
- Train developers.
- Hire already trained developers.
In this chapter, we’re going to illustrate techniques to build a team by training an existing staff or augment it by getting new developers. Both practices are a little different when we’re adopting a new technology.