5
Angry
5y

What do you call time spent by a new dev learning a company's codebase?

Genuinely asking because, as a non-native English speaker who has to communicate with English speakers on a regular basis, I usually end up saying that a dev is still studying the code or familiarizing himself with it.

I'm not sure why it kinda feels off for me. Is there a specific term that describes this?

Sort of how technical debt tells me that it's the cost for someone being lazy with his work before.

Comments
  • 0
    📌
  • 3
    "The new guy"
  • 8
    "onboarding"
  • 3
    Familiarisation is a perfectly good term, IMHO as a native English speaker.

    Also technical debt! = lazy coding again IMHO. Development patterns and practices change over time. Code we were writing 20 years ago was very different to today's. Software development is still in the very early stages of progression compared to most other professions, so once code is written it already has some technical debt.
  • 1
    @kescherRant while I say onboarding, I really mean, "time for me to actually figure out how to best convey a task to you, and what tasks to start with. Here start reading this and install this while I figure out how to do manager stuff"
  • 1
    @Plasticnova yeah, onboarding, for me, is also about someone helping you get setup. Or, if it's a feature discussion, show you what's existing, show you what the client wants, etc.

    @nibor - you're right. Technical debt isn't lazy coding, it's /usually/ the result of lazy coding. Maybe not in that particular situation that you described but certainly for most situations when code gets handed over.
  • 0
    @Angry yeah, it can be applied to several situations. Bringing in new employees, clients, assets, integrations, pirates
  • 1
    @Angry In my experience technical dept is also often the result of changing requirements over time, it was the right way/thing when it was built but needs updating or rewriting to modern standards and requirements.

    Maybe customer base has grown to a stage where things are starting to slow down and you need to change how data it fetched.

    But going that way ti begin with would be over engineering .
  • 0
    Onboarding is the entire process of taking a new employee and bringing up to their potential as an employee of normal status and productivity, so it includes some IT setup, filing of forms, and meeting people but also a lot of time learning the codebase. You could also say you're "getting up to speed" with the code. "Familiarizing" also works.
  • 0
    It is "time spend by the new dev learning a company's codebase"
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