I've been working as a programmer for 16 years now, and would say I'm not inexperienced, so it's frustrating to feel like a noob after months at a new company when they have poor internal documentation, hundreds of repos with default readme, pretty much no use of docker, sub standard equipment and use their own weird software for deployment. It's hard to meet expectations under these conditions.

Yeah I noticed that happing a lot. Working with this senior who has 6 years experience. I can see how in the past 6 months his hands are tied because of new codebase and bad documentation. What he does is he tries to introduce new things or refactor. But at the moment he is less efficient than a junior who worked here for 2 years and knows the codebase. It sucks but it takes time to digest everything especially if its a large codebase and u are thrown to work at random spots.

That kinda calmed me down as a junior dev. Because for some reason I expected seniors to be really good from the get go. So maybe your or your employers expectations are unrealistic?

It is a learning curve problem.

Docs will not help much, unless the previous devs put in serious effort yo kept them up to date.
Develop the ability to learn new shit quickly, and apply it asap. If you don't - the curve will be hard.

"Getting programmers to write documentation is almost as hard as getting them to wear ties."

- Larry Wall, et.al, 'Programming Perl'

What do you mean by substandard equipment?