Building a Fellowship Program to Mentor and Grow Your SRE Team
summary
DigitalOcean runs a two-week fellowship that embeds one developer with senior infra engineers, using handshake pairing, one-on-ones, exit interviews and a private Slack channel to keep ties. It follows the Tuckman four stages and forces week one of broad pairing (8–9 engineers) and week two on a focused project; about 20 fellows so far and six of twenty hired into infrastructure. It improves cross-team empathy and Slack communication, costs team velocity while active, and repeatedly ships useful hires and process learning.
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chapters (14)
- 0:00Introduction
- 0:36My Story
- 2:06My Team
- 2:48What to do
- 3:39Starting the program
- 4:37Catering the program
- 7:59Benefits
- 10:32Current Team
- 11:20Fellowship Program
- 12:46Mentoring and Learning
- 15:03Three Weeks
- 16:17Recruiting
- 17:47Velocity
- 21:29Running the program
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