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> I'm more than happy to spend 2-3 hours on a separate remote call with an individual, where we go through a socratic'ish discovery, using things like draw.io or mermaid to quickly sketch out concepts and architecture.

I'm sure you are.

If you have time.

Thing is, at most companies, most employees are perpetually swamped. Or at least quite frequently.

I'm a new employee (3 months) at a company. The documentation is quite bad. In other words, it's quite standard compared to all other companies out there. There are some wikis, tutorials, confluence pages, etc, but the links tend to get reused, and in the end you have just a handful of true documentation sources, all being 10 or 15 or 20 years old. My team members are friendly and eager to help. They have all gone through the same pains as me. But they are super busy. Some times, I say "hi" on chat, and tell them I have a question, and sometimes they help me, but some times they tell me "can you write your problem in an email, and I'll take a look by tomorrow". And sometimes they tell me they are super-busy "this week".

In the end, I got the most help from another new joiner, who joined 2 weeks after me. He's helping me, I'm helping him. We really depend on each other. Because of him, I'm probably twice as far as where I'd be without him.

But here's the thing: our company has a 3-day-a-week policy. And his desk is just next to mine. Whenever we are physically next to each other, we interact a lot. But when we communicate on zoom, the interaction goes down maybe by a factor of 10.




Always include the question with your greeting.

https://nohello.net/en/


I hate no-question-his because people always assume any response is synchronous after response.


If your team is that busy it’s grossly mismanaged. Get a new job.

I’ve never worked at a company where the programmers were so “busy” they had no time for at least ok documentation and time to train.

It’s simple. You assign an onboarding mentor, and it it one of his deliverables that you get onboarded and proficient in say three to four months.




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