[tensility]

At twelve years in, you are expected to be a senior engineer and to be able to bootstrap yourself into a new dev environment without someone leading you to do so. How you go about doing that, especially in a chaotic environment with aggressive schedules, will become your image with your peers.

One technique I would advise is to use 'git blame' (and/or conversations with your engineering and product managers) to identify authors of components (or even just chunks of code) that you are struggling to understand, and then set up short 1-on-1 meetings with those authors to discuss the system architecture from the perspective of the component(s) that they have written. Rinse. Repeat.

Remember, as you go about this, that what you are really doing here is building a living network of the tribal knowledge graph within your company, so be kind and respectful. Further, consider starting making a guide book of sorts, both for yourself as well as for subsequent new hires, especially more junior engineers (who you may need or want to mentor).

Don't worry. You've got this. Best of luck!

[donavanm]

Good advice. Another “pro tip” i learned from an AMZN coworker; while learning a system start writing integration tests. Youll learn the existing vs expected behavior, youll improve the existing system, and you’ll see how your components interact with the rest of the poorly documented ecosystem.

[gardenhedge]

I disagree. All team members should be onboarded by the team - not HR - regardless of how much experience they have. It's so crazy to hire someone and expect them to just figure it when their teammates have the information. Be a team, have a common sense goal, help each other.