When Time Is of the Essence
Today's featured startup makes onboarding developers easy as pie.
Project Overview
Silo Team is a platform designed to streamline the onboarding of new developers and mitigate the impact of outgoing ones.
The problem Silo Team is trying to address is the increasing turnover rate among developers. Companies now face greater challenges when replacing departing developers and integrating new hires.
On average, replacing a developer costs a company roughly twice their annual salary. These costs include recruiting, hiring, training, and productivity losses while the new developer gets up to speed.
One major issue is that outgoing developers often leave behind unstructured work with little to no documentation. New developers must decipher this, familiarize themselves with company tools and libraries, and adapt to their team’s workflow.
Silo Team makes offboarding (departing employees wrapping up their work) and onboarding (new hires integrating into the team) structured and transparent. The platform ensures all necessary steps are completed without anything being overlooked.
The platform provides onboarding and offboarding templates tailored for different types of developers. These templates are created by Silo Team and the platform’s user community. Companies can also create their own custom templates, either from scratch or by modifying existing ones.
Onboarding templates can include structured testing stages to track a developer’s learning progress, ensuring they grasp essential tools, libraries, and workflows. The platform provides templates for these tests, and both companies and the user community can contribute new ones.
Team leads and HR managers can monitor the progress of both offboarding and onboarding, ensuring smooth transitions for departing and incoming developers.
Between onboarding and offboarding, developers can use Silo Teams’ AI assistant to quickly find answers about company tools and existing codebases.
The Scandinavian startup is currently building a waitlist for beta testing but secured $1.16 million in funding last year, adding to a prior pre-seed investment.
What's the Gist?
Developers now spend an average of 1–2 years in a role before moving on. If a developer stays for 18 months, but spends the first 6 getting up to speed and the last 6 disengaging, they are fully productive for only about 6 months.
The length of tenure also varies by company size. Developers stay 1.5 times longer at larger companies than at smaller ones.
Less experienced developers tend to switch jobs more frequently. A developer with 1–3 years of experience typically stays in a role for 9 months, while a developer with 15+ years might stay for nearly 4 years—likely because they recognize that most developer jobs are fundamentally the same.
This means onboarding and offboarding challenges hit small and mid-sized companies hardest:
Their developers have shorter tenures than those at large enterprises.
They often hire less experienced developers since seasoned ones prefer working at Google and Apple.
Their internal processes and knowledge bases tend to be weaker.
Silo Team’s platform, therefore, addresses the largest segment of the market—small and mid-sized businesses.
The startup also claims to improve developer retention. The logic? Subscription services struggle when new users don’t grasp their value quickly. Likewise, developers are more likely to quit if they can’t efficiently integrate into their new role—learning the codebase, tools, and team workflows.
About 80% of developers find onboarding too long and painful, losing at least 30 extra work hours in their first month. This happens because 71% of team leads manually handle onboarding, without dedicated platforms or automation.
Previously, this inefficiency was tolerable. But as developers become critical assets across industries, and economic conditions tighten, companies are prioritizing cost-cutting, productivity, and employee retention over constantly hiring and training replacements.
Key Takeaways
Onboarding platforms for developers are on the rise. However, a new hire’s effectiveness depends on the state in which their predecessor left things. This highlights the need for a unified onboarding/offboarding solution—precisely what Silo Teams is building.
Given the scale of the problem, other startups are tackling similar issues:
Augmend built a platform where developers record their screen and voice to document their work. These videos are indexed by AI and stored in a searchable knowledge base. Augmend raised $2.2 million in its first funding round.
Cortex enables companies to create internal developer portals, streamlining onboarding, standardizing code, and improving documentation. Cortex has raised $52.7 million, with $35 million from its most recent round.
With nearly 30 million developers worldwide and increasing job turnover, this is not just a big market—it’s a pressing problem companies are willing to pay to solve.
That raises the question: beyond developers, which other professions might benefit from platforms like Silo Team?
Where else is onboarding long and painful? Where does success critically depend on how well a predecessor documented their work? What industries accumulate vast, fragmented knowledge that new hires must sift through?
Company info:
Silo Team
Website: https://www.silo.team/
Last funding round: $1.16 million, 04.04.2024
Total funds raised: $1.3 million after 3 rounds