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by native_samples 1557 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.