Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by bseidensticker 1555 days ago
IDK what your experience is, but in my experience at Google it would take about 6 months before I could consider someone "reasonably productive". Or maybe it takes about 6 months before I'm confident that they are actually underperforming.

A week is just enough time to get a cursory understanding of the product and tooling and fix a newbie bug.
1 comments
native_samples 1555 days ago
Google is not at all a reasonable proxy for the rest of the industry. It has an almost entirely parallel infrastructure that bears little resemblence to what everyone else learns and uses. Google has notoriously high training times for this reason and always did.
link
bseidensticker 1555 days ago
I realize that, but 1 month vs 6 months? It's not just that the infrastructure is all different, ramping up on a codebase is extremely time consuming itself. You're going to have that at any other large tech company.

If it's a tiny startup on mostly greenfield stuff then sure, but that's also not a reasonable proxy for the rest of the industry.

link
native_samples 1555 days ago
Trust me, Google is just weird. I used to work there. When I joined SRE it took 3 months for me to be able to do anything useful at all, and another three months after that before I was really able to function on my own without needing to constantly look things up or ask for help.

After Google I joined a startup where I built two new products from scratch, including hiring most of the team myself. On boarding time was about a week and that included learning a new programming language from scratch (Kotlin, which is in fairness, easy to learn). This remained true true even after several years where the codebase had become quite large. On-boarding time never really changed for programmers of equivalent skill.

Ramp-up time in most normal businesses and most normal codebases is measured in weeks, not six months.

link