One thing that I think would be useful is to decide IN ADVANCE a project you think the employee can accomplish in their first week as part of getting to know a

One thing that I think would be useful is to decide IN ADVANCE a project you think the employee can accomplish in their first week as part of getting to know a codebase. I've been thrown into new projects where I'm expected to read thousands of lines of code and issue histories and then just pick subsequent issues and feature requests and implement. This kind of undirected noodling is awful. It can be very difficult even as a subject matter expert to immediately understand a codebase.