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Comment by subsubzero | Hacker News Reader

Haha, it typically takes 6 months to get up to speed at a company as everyone has their own set of unique tools and infrastructure. Also at that cadence you are not vesting any stock(1 year cliff?) so that seems very strange. Having worked with high-vis engineers in the past, alot of them seem to be vanity hires, they really don't impact much change and probably stoke the egos of the upper managers/execs much like (prof. slughorn from harry potter), collecting "geniuses".

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If it takes 6 month to come to speed for an experienced engineer, I would say you are working with dinosaurs, in a jurassic age company.

In jurassic age companies you can get up to speed quicker, there is less to wrap your head around and the onsite staff tend to use a simpler approach (manual methods etc).

If you think you are "up to speed" on a large company a week or so you are usually so incompetent you don't know what you don't know.

You can be contributing code in a week or less, but if you're getting fully up to speed on any moderately large system in under 3 months, you probably should take breaks for meals and sleep more. Or you're not getting fully up to speed and are just ignorant. It could be less for a trivial or entirely greenfield system, but then you're worrying about other things like requirements/constraints/etc.

Unless you stick to a very niche domain that you know well, there will be a massive amount of new information to learn. It takes many months to absorb it all.

It depends on the domain. If it's something complicated it might take a while to figure out the business logic of the system, especially if it's something large like an enterprise system. Also, I think a better way of putting it is that it might take that long for them to have a net positive effect on the org. As in they are contributing with minimal help from the rest of the team.

Depends what you define as up to speed

if an engineer can't make impact until 6 months later is this engineer even worth hiring? Large organizations typically take longer time to ramp up, but regardless of size I expect to make impact at least to my team within the first month of hiring.

Sure it is easily possible to make impact in the first month of hiring, but this will most likely be the wrong kind of impact.

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