Comment by schwartzworld
4 years ago
6 months is a write-off? By the time I was 6 months into my first software gig I had 5 months and 2 weeks of being a contributor. It was made clear to me that I was as entitled to voice wrong opinions as anyone else, and also entitled to own as much responsibility as I wanted. I found a niche that nobody else wanted to own and learned way more than I would have being spoon-fed the way you describe.
Then again, I guess there's junior and JUNIOR! Maybe a recent boot camp grad would have been less able to jump in.
Yup, 6 months is a write-off. I'm guessing you had the luck of joining a new project, or a company doing very small projects very fast. I personally only know one developer who seems to be able to onboard himself in a week or two, and that's in frontend webdev.
In my experience, even if all the bureaucracy and ops goes smoothly, any kind of reasonably sized existing project will take weeks to months before one can reach anything approaching full capacity. Learning the structure of the codebase, abstractions used, testing and deployment pipelines, the who's who, protocols for dealing with issues and customers, etc. takes a lot of time, and often can't easily be batched (i.e. you won't learn as much as you need even if you read the codebase end-to-end, you'll also be learning as you do your first tasks).
I had one experience with one-day-to-full-speed onboarding in the past. That was when I was briefly borrowed to a kind of bottom-feeder software house, whose job was to take garbage projects that were outsourced to way too cheap and unskilled labor, and beating them into something mostly working. At that job, once I got necessary accounts provisioned, it was just one unending stream of pushing items on a Kanban board at high velocity. You didn't have to own anything or care about anything, just do the fastest possible change that brings some aspect of a project up to customer's spec. Ain't particularly proud of that one (though I didn't have much of a choice here, their boss was a friend of my boss and needed a favor). Ain't something I'd even consider a proper software job.
> Yup, 6 months is a write-off ... any kind of reasonably sized existing project will take weeks to months before one can reach anything approaching full capacity
I won't speak for the GP, but I think you and I have differing definitions of "write-off". I don't consider all time spent below full capacity to be a write-off because, to me, "write-off" means "net unproductive". I believe someone should hit net productive well before it hits full capacity.
I don't think this advice applies to startups.
It’s more abstract than spoon feeding. Perhaps you imagined some kind of 6 month training program?
You can be very productive in your first few days, weeks and months but in terms of experience, the topic at hand, internally and externally that time doesn’t have any value on a resume.
This is on the assumption that you are looking for ‘experience’ as in experienced team developers who can focus on this particular business's goals. If you’re looking for people “experienced at writing code in [some language]“ then, yes, any time spent writing code in the job is experience.
If you work somewhere with a large code base and a fluid enough engineering team it does indeed take many months before one can see the bigger picture, and expectations of developers are set accordingly.
This is especially so with infrastructure / dev tools / internal tools where new projects are often driven by individuals. You have to use the infra itself — a lot — before you will have the insight into what can be improved.