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3-6 months? My experience is if you have that much time you should be able to ramp up with NO documentation whatsoever. 2 weeks to basic reliable bug-fix submissions from, especially, senior level devs would seem the maximum. If you want to sprain your arm patting your back about docs, it should be 2 days.

ebyrob
– ebyrob

2014-06-25 15:53:42 +00:00
Commented Jun 25, 2014 at 15:53
@ebyrob: I work on a codebase of a few hundred million LOC written over ~20 years with contributions from 10s of thousands of developers. It can take a week or more to read the books just to learn how to effectively use the software. Hence "depending on the complexity of the software."

Steven Evers
– Steven Evers

2014-06-25 18:21:48 +00:00
Commented Jun 25, 2014 at 18:21
Point taken, when your code-base is over 10x larger than the Windows 2000 code-base, I suppose you can get excited about a 2 week on-boarding process. Of course, 3 months is still the time at which you'd expect to assess accomplishments and make a keep/don't keep decision, not a time at which you'd expect someone to just be coming up to speed with nothing to show for it. It's not like it's expected to have memorized the entire OS code-base to work in the Office group at Microsoft (I'm not even sure it'd help most of the time).

ebyrob
– ebyrob

2014-06-25 18:39:59 +00:00
Commented Jun 25, 2014 at 18:39

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