Comment by pc86
8 years ago
The best way become more familiar with an unknown team and code base is to work in the code daily. Spending your entire day in 30-minute one-on-ones with people will not help either of those. The exception of course is when you're brought in as a senior-level person in order to change something. But then you need to ask yourself why the senior folks on that team aren't in charge of that.
Spending your entire day in 30-minute one-on-ones with people will not help either of those
I assumed it would be around 5-10 meetings over a few weeks. Half of which can probably be done on lunch breaks. So it shouldn't take too much time away from real work. Obviously you should be working in the code base daily, but in the beginning working 8 hours a day is probably less efficient than working 7.5 hours and spending 30 minutes actually asking someone to explain parts of the code base to you.
Please don’t ask me to explain parts of the code base during my lunch break. It’s my lunch break, not meeting time.
Sure, just say "no" when I ask if you want to go to lunch and talk shop.
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> Spending your entire day in 30-minute one-on-ones with people will not help either of those.
How many of these meetings do you think the author is suggesting?? Even one day of that is 16 meetings, roughly the number of people I worked with on a regular basis at Microsoft.
Clearly the author is suggesting to mix them with regular work. One hour of effective meetings per day, plus seven hours in the code, is going to be vastly more effective than just wallowing through code for the entire day.
This confuses me. Coding is more of a tactical operation, and with it you're still going to want a grand strategic vision of what to implement. I think it's foolish to think that you can see the big picture just by trying to make a lot of commits.
A common one is that they are bogged down in work. Then, figure out why that has been allowed to happen and tread carefully.