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Ask HN: How do you become productive in a new project as a senior developer?

• vurso 9y ago
  Find out what all the blockers are. What is stopping all the dev's from being productive consistently. Find out what are the black holes (the problems that will pull you in and not let go). Introduce one improvement to the exsiting processes (automation, documentation e.g. wiki, lunch & learn/brown bag/dev days etc)
• vurso 9y ago
  Find out what all the blockers are. What is stopping all the dev's from being productive consistently. Find out what are the black holes (the problems that will pull you in and not let go). Introduce one improvement to the exsiting processes (automation, documentation e.g. wiki, lunch & learn/brown bag/dev days etc)
• threeseed 9y ago
  Fix bugs. It will help you to learn the system and technology better than any documentation will. Also it keeps you of the way of the other developers who frankly have better things to do than babysit you (just being honest) but also gives you regular opportunities to chat with everyone as you work through different issues. Either that or improve monitoring/supportability. Gives you an opportunity to build relationships and earn brownie points with your DevOps/SysAdmins.
• perlgeek 9y ago
  "Clean Code" by Robert Martin can certainly help with better engineering practices. Other books that come to mind are "Continuous Integration" by Duvall and Matyas, and "Continuous Delivery" by Humble and Farley. Apart from that, I can only recommend to play with the tech stack in a throw-away prototype before using it for real, because the first decisions you make in a project tend to be those that are hardest to change later on. Approach the task with humility. First observe, participate and learn, then come up with improved practices.
• Jedi72 9y ago
  I am 1 month into my new position, same position you're in - new stack & straight into senior role. My tips so far: 1) Take over all the admin stuff you can to free up your devs from distraction and pointless tasks. Productivity and morale will immediately go up. My guys were time reporting into 3 different tools (and this is a <10 person startup!), I just started writing a summary of our standups and told them they didnt have to do it individually any more, it was appreciated and mgmt still get the info they need. 2) Start with infrastructure stuff - how do you deploy, what's your build process, can anyone on the team draw an architecture diagram (mine couldn't) 3) Write tests, it's low risk changes to the codebase so you cant really break anything, but it'll give you the black box overview of how everything hangs together, detail will come in time 4) Accept that there's no way to immediately get to the level of familiarity the guys who built the system will have. I can spend 2 hours digging trying to find how widget x gets its props passed in, or I can ask my teammate who wrote it and immediately known which file and line its on.
  • Jedi72 9y ago
    Also I'm assuming this is a web app but taking over a live project is a bit like getting handed a gun, you should check if it's loaded before handling it ;) at the least run a vulnerability scanner over your app to look for security issues
    • kovek 9y ago
      What are some examples of vulnerability scanners you are thinking of?
      • OliverJones 9y ago
        Burp scan, zap scan are two products for penetration testing / vulnerability scans. They mount organized attacks on your web site. They look for stuff like sql injection and xsrf, and all that. Burp has a broader scope because it does fuzz-style random testing. Zap is more reproducible. (Burp can be a pain in the neck because it doesn't reliably retest stuff it found.) Be gentle with your new developer colleagues as you present them the results from these tools. They almost always find a couple of more-or-less silly vulnerabilities.
• FindMySocks 9y ago
  Do you have Team you're overseeing or working with? I'd take the time to ask each member of the team, what they are working on, what problems they are having, and how you can assist them in some way. The product your company/team is building will have a roadmap of features to be delivered, spend time with members of the Dev team talking through each of those features, what is required, how they plan to build them. As a senior, you may not know the platform, but you can get to know how the team works, offer suggestions and identify probable pain points. There might be entire sections of code you can work out that needs to be written which don't necessarily require knowledge of the platform. All this will take time, be incredibly useful for everyone and in your spare time you can learn about the platform.
  • sidcool 9y ago
    Yeah. The team is 11 devs, QA, BA.
• joelbirchler 9y ago
  My approach is to learn the stack (read books, sketch/prototype). Get the team to whiteboard the architecture with you. This is better than existing documentation because you will get the full commentary and start building a mental model of the software. Ask the team about problem areas. Don't push on major stack/architecture changes until you know the stack/architecture. Make sure the base engineering practices are there. You should have a seamless workflow from pre-merge code reviews, testing, and deploy.
• LoSboccacc 9y ago
  Start fixing long standing bugs nobody wants to address because too complex
  • raverbashing 9y ago
    Or just boring or "kinda annoying but people are busy with features" Yes, it's a nice way
  • afarrell 9y ago
    Note to junior engineers reading this: If you don't already know the codebase, this can be a terrible way to get to know it because you get sucked down rabbit holes and end up having spent 2 weeks with not much to show for it. You need to exercise skill of being able to do an organised exploration of the codebase, probably producing documentation along the way.
• DaSilentStorm 9y ago
  Well, first of all, talk to the team. To every single person involved. Be it the CTO or the intern. Have someone who has been on the team for some time onboard you and find out what the current obstacles are. Then just grab one task and start working. You'll find the place you're needed most automatically.
  • marktangotango 9y ago
    I don't favor this because then you get someones outdated view of the product, if at all. In an ideal world, yeah, you should get onboarding, and some walk throughs from the current developers. In reality this rarely happens in my experience. The code deployed to production is the ultimate source of the truth. I recently witnessed an instance when a senior develoer heavily relied on others for information as you suggest. The team was failing to deliver the manager was incompetent. This senior developer I hired on with was made a scapegoat and blamed for slowing down the team and causing missed deadlines. This was absurd of course, but she got away with it, and he was fired.
• abhikandoi2000 9y ago
  I did this: - got a broad overview of the code from my team - agreed to be the on-call just after two weeks of time; learned a lot because I had to move fast to fix issues (also call people) - asked the starting point and the core part of the entire codebase (helped me understand code at least 3x faster) - deployed a feature within 2 weeks of joining Note: I am not a senior developer, but a software engineer.
• noway421 9y ago
  I think it is a little bit of exaggeration to claim Senior Developer title on a project with unfamiliar tech stack.
  • tehlike 9y ago
    much of the knowledge in one stack translates to another. you can know RDBMS, and pick up, say, spanner. you can know IIS, and pick up node. I never cared about what stack someone uses.
    • marktangotango 9y ago
      Same here, s an example, all ORM's have to model the same abstractions for example, so after you've worked with one, the next is MUCH easier to pick up. Same with MVC frameworks, etc. There's a lot of convergence among languages and frameworks now.
  • sverhagen 9y ago
    Every place has its own names for things, but I often see "senior" refer to your interchangeable seniority in the field, not just in the one company/code base. Then for people to grow into "lead" or "principal".
    • johan_larson 9y ago
      Senior Developer is typically either a junior or intermediate title. In some places, the title progression for technical professionals is (dev, senior dev, staff dev, principal dev, arch, senior arch), meaning Senior is actually a junior title. In other places, the title progression is (dev I, dev II, senior dev, staff dev, senior staff dev, principal), meaning Senior is an intermediate title. There is of course some variability across companies, but it's safe to say that "Senior Developer" is never an actually senior position. People holding it are never in charge of big things.
      • falcolas 9y ago
        It's worth noting that most non-enterprise companies (i.e. not Microsoft, IBM, or Oracle) don't implement staff or principal prefixes, making senior the top of the list. I haven't had a principal prefix since I worked for Oracle (and got there via an acquisition where I was a senior), yet I'm always at or near the top of the development ladder for my department. As always, you need to ask questions, not make assumptions.
• narag 9y ago
  I'm a little confused by both the question and the current answers. Maybe because, when I've had that position, there was a project manager that or similar that dictated what should I do and what was expected from me. Also being new with a tech stack is enough of a handicap to keep me busy getting to speed, so adding quality and better engineering practices had to wait. Actually, the first time that I found myself in such a situation, I later regretted I had not invested much more time in learning the framework so I could had detected bad design that later slowed us.
  • sidcool 9y ago
    True. Learning the framework and its idiomatic style is very important.
• Illniyar 9y ago
  I'd just pick a bug/feature that seems short and relatively contained and isn't urgent, probably from the backlog. Inform management, and make sure it'll be deployed when you fix it - you want to learn the entire process of development and not just the code. Start learning the architecture, stack and development process with the goal of fixing that single bug. You don't have to learn the entire stack/architecture to fix that single bug. Try not to refactor the entire system while your fixing a bug - the point is to learn how the system works, not to redesign it. Make notes of the pain points you have - from setting up a dev environment, to lack of documentation or even communication problems. When you finish, do another bug, perhaps something more challenging. If you feel that you need to read a book, or do a tutorial on part of the stack you don't know to fix the bug, then do so. When your done with a few bugs, you are in a position to know and prioritize what quality and changes could be helpful, try and implement them.
• marktangotango 9y ago
  Turns out, this happens pretty frequently, getting up to speed on new code bases is a skill in itself IMO. After you've done it a few times, it does get easier, but still very annoying. I try to go in with an open mind and assume the developers who went before were at least competent and had good reasons to do things the way they did. Sometimes this charity is unfounded, and the code truly sucks, but usually some poor decisions can make sense when you have more context. Ultimately, I just dive in and start fixing bugs or implementing features. I'll start with the build to understand what the project actually consists of, then I rely heavily on shell tools like grep and find to explore the code. I once inherited a fairly large c++ application that could only be built on THE dev box, or a copy of it. Only one old timer understood it, it was his meal ticket, and he wasn't talking. It used auto tools so I converted it to cmake so I could build locally. Then I spent about two weeks just reading the code, started at main() and wrote everything down in an architecture doc on the wiki (file and method level, only document method internals that were really hairy). Then as enhancements or bugs came up I'd flesh out the doc some more. Another time I inherited an old IE6-7 app that had to be modernized. Besides the MS specific stuff, it was a mess of javascript spaghetti. Again here, I had to figure what files where actually used by the app, so I grepped log files and browser network logs to figure what was actually loaded, and just read the code. The first major project I did was to remove many hundreds of unused files.
  • laythea 9y ago
    "I once inherited a fairly large c++ application that could only be built on THE dev box, or a copy of it. Only one old timer understood it, it was his meal ticket, and he wasn't talking. It used auto tools so I converted it to cmake so I could build locally. Then I spent about two weeks just reading the code..." I am interested to know what happened to the "old timers" meal ticket?
    • marktangotango 9y ago
      He saw the writing on the wall (so to speak) and moved on. The app was eventually rewritten in Java.
• Falkon1313 9y ago
  Tackle the backlog - those bugs that have been just sitting there for months or even years because other things keep getting prioritized above them. They may be minor, low-priority fixes, but when you solve them, what people will think is "Wow! This developer fixed a bug that no one else could in 3 years! That's always annoyed me but now it's finally fixed!". Next thing you know, they'll be giving you the most important tasks. Along the way, you'll of course need to talk to people to understand both the code that has the bugs and what is expected of it, and you'll learn years of history from both the development side and the product side, which is invaluable.
  • awjr 9y ago
    I'd also add that one of the big things to look at is the documentation and start improving it as a way for you to understand the systems.
    • thr0waway1239 9y ago
      Indeed, it is amazing how many 'soft' things surrounding the software can be improved without requiring to 'get into the zone' as a developer. Of course, you also need to do the actual work and not get bogged down in these peripheral tasks.
      • throwanem 9y ago
        I'm starting to think that actually writing code is more the "peripheral task" in the senior developer role - I find I spend most of my time working with other devs, doing code reviews, dealing with administrative stuff like our organization's change management process, and handling larger-scale, higher-level stuff like making our deployment process sane. It's unusual these days that I just grab a feature or a hotfix and knock it out - generally only the ones too big and scary for anyone else to handle, and my guys are good enough that those are pretty rare.
    • afarrell 9y ago
      > and start improving it as a way for you to understand the systems. Be aware that to do this in a time-efficient way, you might need to pull in one of the existing engineers who can give you the lay of the land.
• melvinram 9y ago
  Sounds like your team needs better onboarding documentation. Make creating those docs your responsibility so that the next person that joins doesn't need to do what you're going to need to do. Start by having someone on the team give you a brain dump. Record it. It doesn't need to be high quality. Use Quicktime and your laptop's webcam. After the braindump, write out everything that was said and make the following diagrams: - Architectural diagram showing the components involved. - Infrastructure diagram that shows where things run. - Deployment pipeline that shows how code gets from git commit to production. - Data flow diagrams for the most common usage patterns. This one might come a bit later as you're more hands on in coding. Show the diagrams to your team members as you create them and ask them to verify that it's accurate. If it's not, understand why and fix your diagram. Add the above to your onboarding docs. If none exist, create it somewhere. Add a page to onboarding docs that describe how to access logs. Add a page that describes how monitoring in the system works. Add a page that will act as an index for recipes on how to do useful things. From that page, create a bunch of useful scripts that you gather as you learn stuff daily. Encourage others to do the same. I think you get the picture. Add a page for everything you need to know in order to be productive. Think about all the things you knew how to do in your previous position. Try to document how to do all those things in your new position. Soon, before you know it, you'll be productive and you'll enable your team to be able to onboard new team members more efficiently. In addition, write code and review PRs. Ask a lot of questions in PRs. Investigate how things work. Get curious.
  • baby 9y ago
    I'd add one thing: write a threat model as well. What are you protecting against? What are you not protecting against? What do you do if X leaks? X can be user hashed passwords, server's certificate keys, etc...
  • steverb 9y ago
    I'll add: find the requirements documentation for the system. Chances are it doesn't exist, or if it does it is horribly wrong. Go fix it.
• mping 9y ago
  Depends on what is expected of you, as well as your margin for manoeuvre. Some seniors are supposed to do one feature and then guide the juniors to replicate that feature, others will have more responsibility, etc. If you are the bridge between business and dev, you have to manage business expectations and point what needs to be changed. If you are the technical guidance of the team you have to be on top of code quality and architecture. In the end, the role name doesn't really mean a thing, it's what is expected of you and your legroom that matters. Both are dynamic. In fact, every team member is free to suggest improvements, how fast they are implemented just depends on who approves them. Senior normally just means you don't need alot of supervision.
• raverbashing 9y ago
  > My guys were time reporting into 3 different tools (and this is a <10 person startup!) Who is the fscking idiot that calls himself a startup founder and makes people report in 3 different tools?
  • bshimmin 9y ago
    This kind of attitude is really unhelpful. Of course this sort of situation is undesirable, demonstrably, but it's not necessarily a case of idiocy - it's actually very easy for non-technical founders to get into this situation: let's say the developers want to use JIRA, but the non-technical staff find JIRA impossible to use (totally reasonable), so they want to carry on using Trello; straight away you've got tasks spread across two disparate platforms. Then let's say that a manager has an embedded belief from a past (probably non-startup) life that time-tracking by the hour is incredibly important, and they have a preferred tool for this (because, while JIRA has this functionality, it's pretty horrible, and Trello doesn't do it at all), and boom, you've got two different tools for tracking work and a third tool for tracking time.
    • champagnepapi 9y ago
      I am at a 13 person startup. We use Confluence, Bitbucket, Google Apps, and we also use Asana (instead of Jira). It is a nightmare... Information is spread out all over these platforms. We can't stick to only Atlassian tools because the CEO thinks they don't allow you to collaborate... We spend a lot of time looking for where information lives and debating where it should live, complete waste of time. In a smaller company this sort of behavior can be catastrophic.
      • bshimmin 9y ago
        I totally agree, and I think a lot of people will have been in this situation too. There is, unfortunately, no simple solution other than the very obvious one, which is to use the right things for the right job, and as few of those things as you can. The really crushingly miserable situation is one where the documentation is in Confluence and Google Docs and some random files in Dropbox before they started using the first two and some files that someone shared on the Slack channel and a few things that are just in the CTO's inbox which he was sent by the CEO in PowerPoint and... it's utterly toxic. This proliferation of excellent tools we have today should be a good thing, but really we are all victims of our own best intentions sometimes (in that horrible chain of misery, even the CEO honestly thinks he's being helpful by emailing a PowerPoint rather than just telling someone over the phone).
• welpwelp 9y ago
  Get into the project by working right away on implementing a new feature or fixing an existing bug. Then spend additional time from your spare time learning the new stack. Bam, productive by end of week 1, 2 at the latest.
• mattmanser 9y ago
  Me go-to for learning a new code base is fix bugs, fix performance problems. The bugs give me an overview of the system and let me develop my mental map of the code base, the performance problems give me an overview of what's been done wrong.
• JustSomeNobody 9y ago
  Starting with a new (ish?) machine, write down everything you need to do to get your development environment set up and building the code. Now, take a step back. How easy was this? It should ... must... be absolutely frustration free. If not, fix that. To come up to speed on the tech stack, go sit with the other developers. Get a feel for how they are using the technology. Then, start picking off some smaller issues from the backlog and try and fix those. Don't make assumptions. Learn the tech without an opinion. Sure, you won't like some of it (nobody likes everything), but find out if the team likes it. If they do, don't try to change that.
• phd514 9y ago
  I'm similarly one month into a new senior development role. Although I am familiar with the tech stack, the system's functionality, deployment environment, and points of interface with other systems are fairly complex. The other devs on the team will answer specific questions but are pretty stingy with their time when it comes to something like an overview of the system. I could (and have) read through a fair amount of the code, but IMO, that is very inefficient and potentially misleading way (you might be able to see what is happening but not necessarily why, something that is important for senior devs to understand) to come up to speed on it. Oddly enough, the organization has a very structured onboarding process for everything except coming up to speed on the specific details of their product's functionality. Frankly, learning everything about their expense reimbursement policy and the health insurance website by day two is nice, but not nearly as useful as coming up to speed on how their product works. I'm finding it pretty frustrating. Both here and in previous roles, I start with the data model and work my way backwards. If you don't understand the data, it's nearly impossible to understand what the system does. In previous roles, I'd also browse through the production environment (e.g., AWS) and look at the monitoring pages for the different components (databases, EC2/ECS instances, queues, etc.) in order to get both a sense of the topology of the production environment and where bottlenecks might exist. In previous roles, I've been able to make some significant improvements early on as a result of that. In my current role, utilization is <5% on almost everything, so that hasn't been helpful. Earlier in my career, I had a team lead who hired me into a role on a complex system and he scheduled one hour per day with me for a full month to walk through various aspects of the system. Obviously that was a pretty significant time commitment, but I think it paid off for him in that I came up to speed pretty quickly and was quite productive. That always stuck with me and when I became a team lead, I always budgeted a significant amount of my time to bring new members of my team up to speed. I'm pretty frustrated in my current situation as an unproductive senior developer due to unfamiliarity with the functionality of the system and confused as to how its beneficial to the company to operate this way since I am rather well-compensated. I think it's quite penny-wise and pound-foolish for organizations to hire developers and invest as little time as possible in bringing them up to speed.
  • davnicwil 9y ago
    > I'm pretty frustrated ... and confused as to how its beneficial to the company to operate this way It's very likely not a considered strategy; rather the total opposite. Technical managers and by extension teams are, generally, really bad at onboarding. It's nobody's fault per-se, just an unfortunate artefact of giving people responsibility for something they never trained for, usually without any formal plan, and expecting them to just figure it out on instinct. Of course, most don't. Some do though, really well, and if you find one you've found a gem! It's unfortunately not the norm. Don't frustrate yourself thinking that it is.
• chiefalchemist 9y ago
  Your team, especially if their morale is subpar, is your number one asset. Code and deadlines will come and go, but the team, or the lack there of, is (in reality) all you have. If you're not actively engaging them for input, insights, etc. then you could be short term smart and long term foolish. Even as a serious dev you're still 75% manager, and, at best, 25% leader. Your duty is to put your people into a position to succeed. And until you know it all (sarcasm), they're going to have thoughts and feelings on what that future looks like.
• jdmichal 9y ago
  I see a lot of advice about individually contributing. I'd recommend another path: Figure out how to be a force multiplier for your team. Sure, maybe you're great at spitting out code and tests. But that's still only one developer of work. If you have 10 people and make them 10% more efficient... That's also one developer of productivity gains. Since you're new, you don't necessarily have all the insight to make this happen on your own. So ask your team! "What can I do that would make everyone more efficient." Also, make it clear that you are available for general questions on technology, architecture, algorithms, secure coding, etc. I spend one to two hours each day fielding questions like this, and I don't have a lot of in-depth knowledge of our code. But all code needs architecture and algorithms and security best practices. And since I don't have to actually spend the time coding, I'm multiplying my capacity to make decisions. It's also great for developer ownership, when I get to say things like, "I can give you general advice, but you know your code the best. So apply it with discresion."
  • hluska 9y ago
    > "I can give you general advice, but you know your code the best. So apply it with discresion." This is an excellent quote and I plan to use it, or a close variant. Thanks very much for sharing!
• baby 9y ago
  A lot of advice here are the same you could find in CONTRIBUTING.md files of open source projects on Github :) * read the docs * document what is not documented * write tests * look at small issues/todos and write code for them
• ljw1001 9y ago
  This is a symptom of a problem you might help to address. companies spend a fortune on recruitment and next to nothing on on-boarding. The problem is multiplied when there is a lot of technical debt or weak infrastructure, because they make onboarding harder. Often, the people who grow up with a mess don't see the issue because they learn it a little at a time as it's being created, but bring a new person in and require that they understand it all to be successful and you have a real problem.
• rdsubhas 9y ago
  Pair program with a few people half a day for a week or two, and you'll become productive both with codebase and with your team mates (as long as you didn't capture their keyboards). Spend rest of the day on everything else mentioned in @Jedi72's comments and get the larger context.
  • maio 9y ago
    Agreed that pair programming is great to get productive ASAP. That's what I did in my current job. Instead of working on some minor things alone I asked my team-mate to pair with me on a task which was most important/valuable at the time. We spent few weeks working together on various things, and they were quite surprised that I was able to get up to speed so quickly. If you are fan of pair-programming this may be really good opportunity to introduce this technique to your new team. Since then, we use it whenever we feel it will help.
  • tutufan 9y ago
    "Dear Diary, my new boss hovered over me for hours today while I was trying to get some urgent work done. Please kill me now. :-P "
• AngeloAnolin 9y ago
  Have the mentality and an unparalleled drive to execute and continuously ship and deliver tangible business value.
• emodendroket 9y ago
  Don't think it's really different from how you'd accomplish the same as a junior developer.
• rb808 9y ago
  I think most of the replies are solely technical. Sure that is important, but I'd say you need to also spend time with users, customers, management, marketing etc to find out what they want out of the system. Also HR issues - can you hire & fire people? Get money for resources? Bring in new tools? Its often easy to dig into the code as that is familiar but that probably wont be what you'll be judged on down the track.
• itamarst 9y ago
  A lot of being productive as you gain more experience is by working on the right things, so you produce more with same amount of effort. What this means is you want to start with figuring out goals. What is the project's goal? What are the constraints? Why are things being done the way they are? What does success mean? Once you know that you can start doing tactical stuff (and since answering those questions can take a while you can probably do lots of other stuff in parallel, as discussed in other comments). Two relevant practical talks, from PyCon that was this weekend: 1. I gave a talk on how to choose how and where to test your software (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vaq_e7qUA-4&t=63s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vaq_e7qUA-4&t=63s). 2. Awesome talk on how to structure documentation - prose version at https://www.divio.com/en/blog/documentation/ https://www.divio.com/en/blog/documentation/, video version at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azf6yzuJt54 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azf6yzuJt54
• jakeblues 9y ago
  Refactor code as you read it. If you see a method that doesn't make sense to you, change it. Even if you don't merge your changes, the exercise of trying to solve the same problem the original engineers were trying to solve is, in my opinion, the fastest and most effective way to get up to speed with a codebase.
  • falcolas 9y ago
    Err, I would advise to absolutely don't do this as a new employee. Ever. If you see a method which doesn't make sense to you, ask about it. Why is it running the way it is? What corner case prompted it? Is there testing which covers it? Only once you're sure that the code really is problematic should you refactor it. Otherwise, you're begging for regressions, new bugs, and conflicts with people who wrote the code in the first place. Understand the impact of codebase you're looking at before you try and change it.
• jakeblues 9y ago
  Refactor code as you read it. If you see a method that doesn't make sense to you, change it. Even if you don't merge your changes, the exercise of trying to solve the same problem the original engineers were trying to solve is, in my opinion, the fastest and most effective way to get up to speed with a codebase.
• khaki54 9y ago
  Write all the unit tests the team has been slacking on. By the time you are done, you will understand all of the code and have full test coverage
• gorpomon 9y ago
  Like a few others here, I just had to onboard to a project as well. I made a lot of mistakes, but learned a lot. Mistake 1 - Was too focused on committing code and getting my first PR merged. I wanted to prove I could commit code quickly, and that PR is missing a lot of things and had to be patched later. Mistake 2 - Not asking for (enough) help. I did a short pairing session that got me up to speed, I should have asked for a few more. I also should have asked "What's important in this code?" I had to learn that the hard way. Mistake 3 - Ignoring the full release lifecycle. On day 1 you should first learn how issue management works, and then how the software is released to production. Releases caught me by surprise, and I ended up having to put hotfixes in. Mistake 4 - I let QA become a second class citizen. Find out who and how your code will be QA'd, and try and be active in that process. Mistake 5 - Ignoring important "sub-systems" as they didn't seem to directly pertain to my work. For instance, I knew we had a feature toggle system, and I was told I didn't need to use it for my work, but looking back, it would have been nice to know and use. I also was told to ignore end-to-end tests since my work was so small. Well guess what held up release because my code broke it? Yep, end-to-end tests. Mistake 6 - Modifying code without reading tests and understanding the underlying data. A lot of people have mentioned this, and it can't be emphasized enough. A lot of tests have mock data at the top, why ignore that, it tells you what the code is working with. 'Describe' blocks tell you exactly what methods are supposed to do and what's important about them. So, I made a lot of mistakes it seems, but the most important thing I did right was this: Whenever I realized a mistake, I fixed it and I moved on. I didn't let it get me down, and I won't make that mistake again. That's ultimately what a good dev is, someone who can red/green/refactor their mistakes with minimal oversight.
• jkingsbery 9y ago
  I've onboarded as a senior developer onto a new project few different times: twice at a startup, once at a largish company, once at a very large company, and once at a coming-out-of-startup phase company (that time as a hybrid dev-manager). A few pointers: 1. First thing is to come up with a ramp-up plan. Before you touch any code, before you fix bugs, make sure you have a 30- and 90- day plan for where you need to be and what you need to know. That plan should include with coming up with questions for people and meeting with them to ask them, understanding the company's strategy at a sufficient level, and, yes, understanding the code base and development procedures. 2. As a Senior Developer, it's good to know where the project is now, but people are looking to you to know where the project will be in 6-9 months. So, while fixing bugs is good, don't get bogged down in that - after some initial familiarization, take up tasks that let you focus on big picture architectural and process issues. 3. Take time to get to know your colleagues. Have lunch with them. Have non-work conversations. Start to learn what interests them. Without explicitly asking, pay attention to clues about career goals and what they find challenging. As a senior developer, demonstrating that you are genuinely interested in your colleagues goes a long way towards earning trust and getting embedded into the team faster. 3a. Get a sense of the team's culture. Are there cultural norms you're not used to? Are these norms good/bad/indifferent? 4. Given that you are a Senior Developer, you should make sure your team is hitting a lot of basics. Are there feedback loops, both business-wise and process-wise to your team? If not, you should work on getting these in place (or at least making sure that it happens). Business feedback loops should include some kind of KPI report, adoption report, etc. Process feedback loops usually include regular, honest and constructive retrospectives. Usually if you're hired as a senior developer on a team, most of your teammates will have limited experience in these. 5. Whenever possible, share your perspective. One of the big differences between a senior developer and non-senior developers is that you've seen a few projects, and you've probably seen pitfalls along the way. That's probably a big reason why you were hired. A great way to add value to a team when you still don't know the nitty-gritty is being able to say "It sounds like we're doing X. I was on a team once that did X, and A, B and C happened." Of course, always do it from a point of view of humility - there might be new constraints that you didn't know about. Beyond that, a lot of it will depend. If you're joining a large company, you should spend some time doing "company networking," i.e. , meeting other senior developers, project managers your team works with, understanding not just your project but other projects near you in the org. If you're joining a start-up, chances are there is a deadline in a few months, so the emphasis will be much more on delivering something immediately. Writing documentation can sometimes be helpful, but if you're at a startup that now has hired its full allotment of engineers, writing a ton of documentation about how to get up to speed is of limited use. Fixing bugs can sometimes be a good approach, but sometimes for teams that didn't have a senior developer before, the proper fix involves a design change. Is there someone else who is also interested in raising the bar for engineering practices, but doesn't know where to begin? Work with that person, since you have the experience as a senior developer, and that person understands the specifics of the team.
• zghst 9y ago
  First thing is first, you are learning a new stack, you probably have coworkers that know it better than you, so you have a golden opportunity to kill two birds (gain favor w coworkers & learn fast) with one stone! Do not bother your coworkers with endless questions or interruptions, but try to use scheduled times to discuss how you're going to build things. In an ideal company, you shouldn't be building things in a bubble, there should be multiple team members ensuring quality instead of one or two brains. (Also ideally coworkers should be trying to learn how you think so they can best tailor tasks to you) The hardest part is continual, backbreaking improvement. It becomes easier as you keep doing it. I recommend getting a twitter and following everyone vocal in the area of the tech stack you're working on AND people who work on the same problems as your company (double reinforcement of shared knowledge in your industry). That way you're aware of the current problems that may arise (instead of being left in the dark), trending new ways to do things, counterpoints of why you should avoid some new trends, etc. Scour the internet for resources, such as HN of course, but also popular see sites, subreddits related to the stack, IRC channels, and follow the Github projects of the tech stack if possible (lots of discussion and examples are there!). I like books. I spend thousands of dollars on books a year, but books on a tech stack rather than development practice will become quickly outdated, and can learn just as much online as you can in a book on a tech stack. I will only buy a tech stack / programming language book is if the language is hard core or if it is new & emerging with a smaller community. I'd also recommend taking extra time to analyze and plan before diving in. Just sitting for maybe an extra 3 minutes allowing your mind to clear so you can put things together in the right way. Your goal is to become opinionated and knowledgeable faster, so taking the time to get it right early on is permissible. Finally I recommend something that others won't tell you. It's to become a super fan of the stack (how) and company's mission (why). Your newly found enthusiasm would be a superb speed boost to your goals and add increased visibility to your efforts. You will not instantly become productive or enlightened, but the fact that you're seeking to be better (yay enthusiasm) does increase the likeliness that you will succeed.
  • sidcool 9y ago
    Very interesting insights, thanks.
• al2o3cr 9y ago
  Start reading the code. Ask "why" a lot - the code can tell you "what" and "how", but "why" isn't always there and is the most important piece of information. If the codebase has been around for a while, this may also surface places where the reasoning no longer aligns with reality; these are great targets for refactoring. There's an interesting side-effect of this practice if you've got less-experienced devs on the team: it can encourage them to also ask more questions more confidently.
• falcolas 9y ago
  IMO, there is no magical formula, and being a senior dev doesn't change the work involved: you're still developing code, you're still working with your peers, you're still designing stuff. You're just better at it because you've seen a lot of it before. That means you'll get productive in same way you'd become productive as a junior. Pick up easy tickets and use them to learn to navigate the codebase. Talk to your colleagues and fill in your knowledge gaps. Help others who are having issues. Pick up and address more tickets. Get in the thick of things as quickly as possible. If the position includes additional roles, such as that of a PM, nail down the necessary role requirements and start doing those as well. You'll need to work on your soft skills - honey and vinegar, carrot and stick, etc. You're a senior developer because of your experience and knowledge in general, not because you're magically a productivity machine. Assumptions are going to be your biggest hinderance when coming in to your first "senior" position. Don't assume that you know more than your peers, even the junior ones; when you first start they probably know more about the codebase and tech stack than you do. Don't assume that if a team works differently than what you're used to, it's automatically worse. Don't assume that their code quality and engineering practices are poor. Don't assume; find the reality and work with your team from there.
• LanceH 9y ago
  Allowed freedom of choice, I'll start as follows. 1. Build on my machine 2. Reproduce issues 3. Fix bugs -- even typos or refactors 4. See the fix code review/merging/deployment to qa/dev/whatever When I start a new project I'm most concerned with reproducibility of the process of development. A lot of time other people are blind to the little tweaks that have occurred over the years that enable them to build, test, and deploy a system. Those tweaks often give a lot of insight into what is going on. The ability to push-button deploy is also a bellwether of what is to come.
• agentultra 9y ago
  I always start with the test suite. If I'm unfamiliar with the code base I start by trying to break things. When I do this I'm looking for missing assertions, invariants, or incorrect assertions. I create tests for those. I fix them. If the project I'm working on is smart enough to use property-based testing I look for weak invariants, serializability, or missing assertions. The end goal is to understand the module by exercising it and adding value at the same time. If the code base isn't using property-based testing or has no tests at all I will find a way to add them. It gets the ball rolling for adding some issues to the tracker and provides real value. Keep a journal of your experiences coming up to speed. Once you've grasped a certain corner of the code base review your notes and build some documentation for that code. It will help on-board new developers the next time they come to that code base. As for introducing best practices, as a senior developer, you'll have to build consensus with the rest of the team. In my team the difference between a senior developer and a team lead is the ability to communicate ideas and build consensus around them. Learning how to influence people is the hardest part about building your skill as a senior developer. Senior developers become leaders when they can communicate a proposal and immediately build in feedback from the team and turn that into a real change to the code base, product, and business.
• developer2 9y ago
  The other replies here are misguided. A senior developer's job is not to take over as a know-it-all dictator at the end of their first week. You don't write unit tests for existing code, refactor other developers' work, take over the role of architect or sysadmin, make sweeping changes to existing processes, or take any other "heroic action". The number of comments here essentially saying "assert your dominance by introducing the 'right way of doing things'" is unsettling. Shame on anyone who strolls into a new team with this mentality. Your job is simple: get to work. You don't invent "important senior work" for yourself as a way to prove your merit with your ego, before you have settled in and earned your title. You pick up existing tickets from the queue. The only way to get acquainted with the project and its stack is to begin working on real tasks that require minimal modifications to the codebase. That's your goal: commit and deploy small chunks of code that accomplish something useful for the business. You need to take the time to organically discover each subsystem, one at a time, as you complete tasks that actually close tickets. A senior developer's initial job is to be a "junior developer" who knows nothing about the project, taking the time to learn the system bit by bit. Progressively pick up enough knowledge in order to eventually be in a position to assist other developers and make decisions about the project's future. After 1-3 months, depending on the size and complexity of the project, you will have touched a majority of subsystems while working on tasks. You will then have a comprehensive understanding of the system as a whole, and may be considered informed enough to take some amount of control over the future direction of the project. tldr; Your job as the newest senior developer on a team is not to be perceived by others as a senior developer. Your job is to act like a senior developer, and that means taking the time to integrate yourself at a reasonable pace. The "Senior" prefix to the title does not kick in until you've worked on the codebase long enough to fully understand it.
  • sidcool 9y ago
    Your view is quite different from the others​. But very insightful.
    • developer2 9y ago
      Thank you. Other top-level comments are preoccupied with portraying oneself as a senior developer, rather than behaving as such. The difference is substantial.
• xenonite 9y ago
  Bv
• xrd 9y ago
  When you say "be productive," whose judgement will be making that assessment? I ask because if you were hired to come in and right the ship, writing tests might not be perceived by your manager as the right thing to do. If you need to impress the other developers, that might or might not be the right choice. If you are trying to communicate progress upward, then I would make an honest assessment of the challenges and write down a plan for your manager. If you are trying to impress downward, then that's probably a cultural challenge and you can figure out what to do from the comments here. It really depends who cares about your progress.
  • sidcool 9y ago
    The judgement will be of the team. I need to comfort other developers in team that I can handle tough conditions, the project is in a bad condition and developers are overworked and groggy. I want to help them as much as possible and not be a boss, but a servant leader.
• suls 9y ago
  As always, it depends on the context. Do you know why you were hired? You mentioned "10 devs, QA, BA" .. maybe a good chance to talk to everyone and write down and later agree on a roles & responsibilities matrix. Same goes with process. Talk to everyone and find out what they actually do, write it down and then have an objective discussion if all this is still the best way of doing things / working together. As for the coding side of things: using cloc [1] and cpd [2] proved to be super helpful every single time for me. When talking to current devs you are likely to get a glimpse if what they worked on recently or will work on in the next few weeks. Cloc gives you the whole story from the beginning. Maybe it's a new stack -- but how come there are 1000s of lines of perl code in the repo? Always a joy to dig deeper and learn about the history. Cpd is a great helper to gauge what your devs actually do vs. what the say. In the heat of deadlines it is often the case that stuff just gets copy and pasted rather than refactored -- which will turn into a nightmare sooner or later. Bonus points for lots of copy/pasting in your test suites and automating cloc & cpd runs .. Also, if everyone is busy adding code/features, be the one who removes stuff that isn't needed anymore. On the learning side: you said you are not familiar with the stack. Are you sure your team is? This is a great opportunity to start a learning/ book reading activity for your team. Last but not least, always assume best intentions. A lot of things probably do not make sense anymore but they did in the past -- find out about the history and you'll earn the trust required to make an impact in the future. [1] http://cloc.sourceforge.net http://cloc.sourceforge.net and https://github.com/AlDanial/cloc https://github.com/AlDanial/cloc [2] http://pmd.sourceforge.net/pmd-4.3.0/cpd.html http://pmd.sourceforge.net/pmd-4.3.0/cpd.html
  • sidcool 9y ago
    I have been a part of this org since 2 years as a Senior Dev, but worked with other Senior Devs on project, never been the only Sr dev. I have started having conversations with people on their experience, expectations etc. I am new to the stack but aware of what it is. The team is ramping up and certainly know more about it than me. The links are very helpful, thanks.
• davidjnelson 9y ago
  A few high level things are to choose projects that have the highest impact, and to find out or establish what the key business metrics are and work on monitoring them better and improving them.
• Communitivity 9y ago
  A step debugger has been suggested below by cubano. In my experience using a debugger as a broad lens to learn a codebase takes too much of my time. I can take a module to walk through the code in my head, paying special attention to conditional branches. Any place where I can, I ask 'What if..?', e.g. 'What if the value is null?', 'What if the network is down?', 'What if the program is being run for the first time?', 'What if an exception gets thrown here?'. For each of those what ifs, if the particular corner case is not handled then write a unit test to see what happens. That brings me to another thing a senior dev can do, refactor code to be more testable, one small piece at a time. Thing is though, your job as a senior dev is to make sure the code, and the coders, work smoothly together. A good chunk of your work will be mentoring the junior developers, fostering tech exchanges, leading design discussions, etc., and if done right the value in this far outweighs any individual code contribution you can make. In my opinion a true 10x developer is not necessarily one that produces 10x as much code, but one who maybe produces 2x as much, but enables the team around him to produce 5x as much.
• vii 9y ago
  I've had several (previously) senior developers join projects I've led or worked on. It's really hard to get them up to speed and contributing effectively - some never succeed :( Firstly, accept you're not going to be productive immediately as you don't have the project and business context. This is fine. Resist the urge to redesign everything, bring in new technologies and practices until you understand what is going on. Your instant reactions and conclusions will not be attuned to the needs of the project - so practice humility. Socially you may be used to knowing more than anybody else about the system you work on. Don't forget how much hard work this was to achieve the first time and get ready to do that again - but better :) Secondly, understanding you won't be contributing at a senior level to the project immediately, focus on learning the stack. One senior developer we had whose task was to do an integration of an open source program, got bogged down for months due to disliking the scripting language most of the backend was in. To learn a stack, make your own throwaway end-to-end projects. If you don't understand the stack, you won't contribute at a senior level. Thirdly, make sure to regularly commit code to the project. Of course, you have to talk to surrounding teams, customers, etc., and learn to cut releases, and so on, but most important is regularly contributing so as to get a feeling for who on the teams understands the system and what the real development process is like. Easy ways to make quick code changes beyond bugfixes: improve logging and metrics (also great for getting an overview of how things work). To support your suggestions for new practices and stacks: gather and document data about the real issues (regular causes of incidents, etc.) and build relationships. In time, the value of an experience transfer is huge - but the value of scattershot rewrites without context is hugely negative. Good luck!