[BerislavLopac]

> I’m sure you’ve already experienced being very “productive” after a short time when joining a large project

Most definitely, but that only happened when at least one of the following conditions were met:

1. There was good documentation in place and an onboarding process that made it easy to transfer the foundation of the architectural knowlegde.

2. The work was clearly delineated and compartmentalised, so understanding the overall architecture wasn't critical for at least the entry-level tasks.

3. The architecture was a simple, standard pattern I was already very familiar with: for example a Django monolith.

I'd also like to add that a better name what I called "architecture knowledge" would be "institutional knowledge", as it does not include just the architecture per se; it includes the auxiliary things like development process, testing mechanisms, deployment etc.