Kakao Shares Review of 6-Week Technical Onboarding for New Server Hires (New Crew)

New Crew members hired through Kakao's server role open recruitment shared their technical onboarding process and growth experience over approximately 6 weeks. Although most New Crew members had no prior server programming experience, they went through a step-by-step curriculum ranging from learning Java object-oriented programming and utilizing the Spring framework to implementing pure Java to understand framework principles.

Collaboration-Centric Learning Structure

The core of the onboarding was communication and feedback with peers. Groups of 4 to 6 people conducted daily peer sessions to share code, and senior Crew members from the organizations where the New Crew would actually be placed handled code reviews, providing advice from a practical perspective. Through this, they cultivated the habit of writing 'code with reasons' and internalized a healthy collaboration culture.

Practical Missions and Deployment Experience

The curriculum increased in difficulty, progressing from developing console applications like ladder games and lotto games to implementing Spark WAS servers and deploying directly to Kakao's internal cloud. In particular, essential backend technologies such as Docker, MySQL indexing, and transaction processing were learned through both theory and practice, while tools like Zoom and Slack were used to maintain real-time communication in an online environment.