I wouldn’t say this is an expectation. Depending on the size and quality of code, you may be able to identify what’s going on in a code base within a day, or un

I wouldn’t say this is an expectation. Depending on the size and quality of code, you may be able to identify what’s going on in a code base within a day, or understanding it may require weeks. Then you probably want to document what you’ve found, so you can delegate whatever new features you need to implement or modify. And this can stretch longer if the nature of your tasks requires a deeper investigation of whatever dependencies (lets say other services or libraries) the code base depends on. I’ve been at a couple of the large FAANGs. You don’t need to be able to do all of this on a day. If you do, your management fundamentally doesn’t understand what’s going on. If you’re at a senior level, it’s your job to communicate. If you have non technical stakeholders, you must be able to take complex topics and break them down and influence your stakeholders to agree to the right thing or at least explicitly accept the cost of what it is you lose by doing A over B or C. Edit: I did work at a company before where something like this was an expectation, and not just from senior folks. The underlying issue was the manager chain upwards was all people managers who fundamentally don’t know the first thing about software development. The best you can do in that situation is break down the problem, size components, and communicate.