Kakao FE New Hire Recruitment: Experience Report on 6-Week Technical Onboarding

New crew members from the Kakao Commerce FE Development Team shared their 6-week technical onboarding process. In collaboration with software education company Code Squad, the program focused on building a practical technical foundation.

Key Activities and Curriculum

The onboarding consisted of daily morning group peer sessions in teams of 8, code reviews by internal reviewers twice a week, and live mentoring. Participants completed a total of 4 projects, gradually increasing in difficulty.

• Project 1: Kakao Page UI Clone (Vanilla JS, DOM optimization, CSS animations)
• Project 2: Kakao Shoppinghow UI Clone (ES6 classes, Observer pattern, RxJS autocomplete)
• Project 3: Vending Machine Implementation (React, pair programming in teams of 2)
• Project 4: Issue Tracker (React, GitHub OAuth, Recoil/React-query state management)

Technical Achievements and Learning Points

In the final project, the Issue Tracker, bundle size optimization and Dynamic Import were applied to resolve initial loading speed issues with CSR. This resulted in a reduction of 5 seconds in the LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) loading time metric.

For state management, Recoil was applied to UI state and React-query to asynchronous state, allowing participants to experience the advantages of each. Additionally, the Context API was used to implement a router directly, solving props drilling issues and prompting consideration of the scope for applying memoization techniques.

Participant Feedback

Participants cited the high quality of code reviews from internal practitioners and group sessions with peers as the biggest strengths. On the other hand, communication difficulties in a remote environment and the time pressure to implement all requirements within a short period were noted as drawbacks.