> "Our engineers take six months to ship something they are proud of — and most of that is just figuring out where things live and who to ask." ^pain A collective survivability pain (knowledge surviving past the people who originally encoded it). New hires get unstructured info dumps and no clear map. Engineers take 3-12 months to reach full productivity. Same basic questions recur across cohorts — the answers exist but are never compiled into a path. ## Discovery questions - "How long does it take a new engineer on your team to ship something they're proud of?" - "What questions do your new hires ask in their first month that have been asked by every new hire before them?" - "What share of your senior engineers' time goes to onboarding rather than building?" ^discovery-questions ## Examples - Google's Noogler program includes multi-week technical training and extensive documentation to accelerate ramp-up for new engineers.[^1] - Stack Overflow Developer Survey: developers commonly cite complex codebases and poor documentation as reasons onboarding can take several months.[^2] - Stripe + Harris Poll Developer Coefficient: developers at large companies spend significant time dealing with bad code and context ramp-up, increasing onboarding time.[^3] [^1]: https://rework.withgoogle.com/blog/noogler-orientation-onboarding [^2]: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023 [^3]: https://stripe.com/reports/developer-coefficient-2018