First questions is your personal experience, how long did you feel it took you before you are ramped up. (Since for most of us, we join a company with often large existing code base, of course, some product, the code base is simple, but some can be highly complex.)
Also what are your expectations for when you hire software developers/engineers? How quickly do you expect them to be ramped up? For junior vs senior developers.
Oldest comments (19)
100% agree with Nick!
I would also say about 3 months. Within that time I am able to get comfortable enough with the code base that I can select tickets on my own to work on and am able to grasp their scope quickly. That is also the point where I am comfortable enough with the workflow that I don't have to think about it, it just comes naturally as I complete work.
PS what year were you at MIT?! I'm 2010 😊
Ah man, I remember I started this job as a .Net/C# Developer after being a Java Developer for close to 5 years. I specifically told them in the interview that I only had basic knowledge of .Net but I was willing to learn. Little that I knew, I was the only .Net resource on site to support this project (they purchased a product from a company located in another state with no support).
It felt like the lowest point in my career because it took me so long to get up to speed on how to contribute efficiently. I had to quickly learn Visual Studio/C#, SSRS, SSIS, TSQL, IIS practically all at once. The hardest thing that took long for me to grasp was lamba expressions, since Java didnt have this at the time.
But after a year of working there, I was finally comfortable and making consistent contributions, I learned a hell of a lot and it has helped me succeed in my role today.
Took me about 2 weeks cause setting up your dev environment is a pain and learning to build something from scratch for a specific purpose which takes awhile to understand the problem.
In a week I start to work as a junior fullstack developer with Angular and Node. And they expect that after a month I will be able to work on my own
2 months in at my new place, I'd say I'm now only starting to feel comfortable navigating the project on my own, It is quite large and complex. I bolded starting because I still have a long way to go.
agree with Nick，3 months is needed, I think the most challenge is the workflow. Transform from another comfortable is hard than imagination. The next is codr project or unfamiliar languagr or framework. the last is teamwork, to be believed by your teammate is a challenge.
It depends as much on the place you are going as on you
The last place I worked their systems were a tangled complex mess and we figured it would take about 3 months before a perm member of staff could confidently deal with everyday problems
However, we used to occasionally hire contractors. They can't be training for 3 months. So we'd try and scope things so that they could be immediately productive: and on the whole this worked
Speaking more generally, in the ideal world new hires could be inducted in such a way that their early jobs are an education for the ways that a business does things
That depends on the size and complexity of the code base. I've been places where 3-6 months was all it took and I've been places where 1 year wasn't enough. One suggestion I have is to learn the product as a user. It gives you the ability to see where the problems are.
I agree! Especially, if you are stepping into a role where the core software branches out and uses different technologies for integrated pieces. I don't think there is a one-size-fits-all answer. Every code base is different.
I've been at places where I was able to start contributing right away, while others I contributed after a few months and other places where I didn't feel like I made hardcore contributions until about 9 months in. Like you said Michael, getting familiar with the product is an essential piece in understanding the code base.
In my first job as a Junior Dev it took me almost a year because we had 3 different very large products and they had an extremely niche user base so I had to become familiar with those processes. As others have said if you can understand the user experience it makes it a lot simpler to understand the code. Since becoming a consultant I've had a wide range of experiences. Some times it takes as little as a few days to understand the code, sometimes you never do because the guy who wrote it is gone and there's no documentation and the users can't explain how they use it.
I think it depends entirely on what you're stepping into on a job.
We have a huge custom product at work that was started 20+ years ago (classic asp) with on going development and I still don't feel very productive doing any coding on it even after 10 years. It's not that I don't know the language, it's just too complicated and too big of a product. We primarily let one guy do most of it because no one can learn it.. and now that it's being sunsetted we rejoice!
On the other hand I turned out my first soup to nuts product in about 2 months when I started. In retrospect it's a total piece of junk since it was dev'd in a "trial by fire" setting in a language I had to learn on the fly, but it's still in use these 10 years later.