[bialpio]

How do you reconcile this advice with the fact that in both places I've worked at, the expectation was that just the onboarding takes significant amount of time (up to ~0.5yr)? Even if I personally didn't need that much time, it was nice to know that it's available -it's not easy to get into the grind and catch up to others that already have all the institutional knowledge when starting a new job.

[brokencode]

You shouldn’t need to be onboarded to basic development skills when you come in as a senior developer as the OP is saying here. Institutional knowledge specific to each company takes time to learn, but many dev skills should be directly transferable.

[1123581321]

Be sure that half a year is thought through. I’ve seen places that pay too little attention to new employees in the first few months and then surprise them with complaints about performance. Those first few months should be drilling specific institutional knowledge (through bugs, presenting on parts of the stack, talking to a variety of people, shadowing, studying certain tech/tools most people don’t know.)

You should be looking for the employee to be making good general efforts, just without taking everything into account yet. And the employee should see evidence that you are serious about helping them master specifics of their new environment.