“Customers value cloud services because they are agile and adaptable, scaling and transforming to meet the changing needs of business. Since the velocity of change can work against the tenets of reliability, our Azure engineering teams have evolved their culture, processes, and frameworks to balance the pace of innovation with assurance of performance and quality. Today, I asked Principal Program Manager Anne Hamilton to explore the challenges of developing a culture of reliability through Azure engineering onboarding skills training, as part of our Advancing Reliability blog series.” —Mark Russinovich, CTO, Azure
Like engineering reliability, Azure culture must balance the speed of the new with the stability of the known in the face of tremendous growth and unknowns. New hires bring new ideas and perspectives while veterans bring experience and institutional knowledge. Both contribute to the team culture, which defines how quality and innovation are valued and implemented.
To evolve the best quality outcomes, the Azure engineering team culture must be a place where ideas are openly shared, rigorously challenged, and effectively implemented. It’s a space where ideation and creativity thrive.
Skills, processes, and frameworks can be taught. But can culture be taught? How do you onboard new hires into a culture that values reliability?
Like so much about Azure, onboarding individuals and developing team culture at the speed of Azure has been fraught with challenges, and rich in learnings.
Onboarding engineers—Azure Engineering Boot Camp
The astounding growth rate of cloud computing has created an unprecedented demand for engineering roles worldwide. Within the Cloud + AI team, this results in hundreds of new hires joining Azure engineering teams each week. Hundreds of people to train on crucial skills, internal tools, and best practices. And hundreds of people to experience their first exposure to culture. How do you preserve institutional knowledge and disseminate culture that values reliability when waves of new people are onboarding constantly?
When a new engineer joins Microsoft, they spend their first day at New Employee Orientation (NEO), their first week getting familiar with their team and the environment, and their second week in the Azure Engineering Boot Camp (ABC).
ABC students delve into hands-on labs, learn Azure tools and services, and participate in lectures and activities to explore the engineering and business strategy. Many reliability principles are explicitly taught, including systems thinking, adaptive leadership, valuing diversity and inclusion, and customer development. For example, the “Systems Thinking” session looks at the tensions between feature velocity and quality, exploring the impact of whether and when adding more developers to a problem enhances feature velocity without compromising quality. But it is the way that these are presented that enables the principles to stick. The immersive week of in-person training enables trainers to model, coach, and help students develop reliability culture attributes along with technical skills in real-time.
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