Title: Building T-shaped engineers: how we onboard software engineers at Bending Spoons
Abstract:
How do you turn a new engineer into someone who can ship confidently, in weeks rather than months, without turning onboarding into an endless list of links? And if you were designing that from scratch, for engineers who arrive with very different backgrounds and experience levels, what would you put in it?
At Bending Spoons we approached it by building two things together: a Knowledge Portal - a single, version-controlled home for how we build software - and the One Path training, one onboarding route shared by every software engineer, whatever platform they will eventually specialise in. In this talk I'll walk through the design of both: why we organise knowledge around what engineers need to do rather than the technologies they use, how the training deliberately combines breadth (the foundations of the craft that every engineer needs) with depth (the stack a new joiner will actually work in), and how the path introduces the proprietary platforms - experimentation, telemetry, data and deployment - that our engineers use every day.
We'll also dive into how search over the portal evolved; we built a semantic search system to help people navigate it, and have since iterated on that design as AI capabilities improved. What held up, what we changed, and why the current version leans on a broader AI assistant.