Comment by vsareto
5 years ago
>1. You were brought in to do very specific work (i.e.: migrate something to k8s).
That's how most work gets broken down though. Just find an entry point and start reading code. Read docs, comments, find dependencies, figure out what needs to change in light of your change.
You shouldn't need deep product and tribal knowledge to make simple changes.
In most places you don't need deep product and tribal knowledge to make small changes. You need deep product an tribal knowledge to know what small change to make. Almost anyone new at a company will have someone else telling them what the first thing they need to do is, and that person is telling you to do something that wasn't important enough for them to do themselves.
For what it's worth, the best interns/juniors I've had started out making simple changes like this. I'd break down the work and parcel it out for them every day until they had accomplished something big. Then I'd start parceling it out less and less until they just knew what they were doing.