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How Orca made remote onboarding work for engineers

When the pandemic pivoted how we work and do business, Orca Security’s team was tapping into new tools that will propel communication and double the size of their engineering pod within a few months. The Startup just announced a killer round C series of $210M at unicorn valuation (March, 2021), and is out on a mission to fix cloud security and scale.

Yoav Alon, CTO at Orca Security, shared with Swimm some actionable tips for setting up an internal remote bootcamp (that actually works).

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Facing silos, geographical distance and growth pains

“It’s challenging to create an onboarding journey that works remotely and at scale, to make it engaging and efficient for those who have to tread new and unfamiliar waters. We were in search of a framework for such a journey rather than a distilled spreadsheet or checklist.

"By focusing on a developer’s first few weeks, days, and tasks - we were able to promise a smooth transition into Orca’s codebase, and build up our team. Orca’s new developers felt like they were being invested in, they knew exactly what was expected of them in their first few days and in their new role and that helped bridge the remote work gap.

Reducing costs and dependencies

“When we started onboarding remotely, we came across hires who were extremely dependent on a person in a different time zone to answer them, and this only exacerbated a problem we wanted to cost-efficiently solve.

“We needed a tool to help us create thorough content such as guides, walkthroughs, documentation and tutorials, and then easily share it with the team. Swimm helped us reduce the cost of setting up an internal bootcamp. Otherwise, we would have had to fly the team in, and halt several days of development.

Looking at results

“Employees gain independence as well as competency. Now, when new developers are required to tackle new topics, they have Swimm to turn to. This takes the edge off of onboarding, and it takes the heavy lifting off training creations. Because Swimm lives on the code, it helps us maintain our knowledge without letting it become obsolete before we even notice.

“Employees also feel like there has been an improvement in ramp-up time. Part of our engineering team abroad, also started learning about Orca’s codebase through Swimm, experiencing faster orientation. Onboarding in a pandemic is hard enough, and so we now made it self-paced, by empowering independence and ownership”.

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Orca has been using Swimm from our very first alpha version, getting over a dozen of remote and on-site developers up to speed during 2020. We’re thankful for the wonderful design partners they have been from early on.