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Current Reality
Any developer who has worked professionally knows that complete effectiveness does not come on day one of a job. There is a period of onboarding time to learn the unique aspects of the way that company develops software — the particular tech stacks, syntax and semantic, internal libraries and frameworks, best practices, design decisions, and more. And this is completely expected, since different business goals and outcomes, unique histories, and other company-particular factors naturally lead to different tech stacks and standards.
For any enterprise, minimizing time to onboard is critical for obvious reasons. Effective developers add value to the organization, and onboarding time is a pure cost in support of making newly hired developers effective. However, most companies estimate that onboarding takes 4–6 months.
Why is this? A host of reasons, from minimal documentation to legacy tech stacks to duplicated and fragmented code to poorly enforced standards and best practices. These reasons make it hard for a developer to quickly, independently grok the state of the existing code in order to be effective in building upon it.
If a newly hired developer cannot independently understand the current state, they will either start developing software that only exacerbates the problem or ask tenured developers that do have this understanding. This has the second order effect of taking away time from these tenured developers who are best positioned…
