I had a job working on a piece of software that contains bits and pieces written in the 1980s. When I complained about how horribly unproductive I felt, the se

I had a job working on a piece of software that contains bits and pieces written in the 1980s. When I complained about how horribly unproductive I felt, the senior dev on the team just said, "it will take a few years to become productive." It took me a long time to internalize that and appreciate what it meant. I think it's like becoming an architect spending your career building houses. Houses are small enough that you can reasonably expect to understand every detail of one. And when all you work on is houses, you begin to expect that you'll soon understand the totality of each product you work on. But then you get a job working on skyscrapers. It's impossible for any single person to understand the entire structure, and you don't appreciate that fact because the concept is still foreign to you. I think a lot of companies have "skyscraper" code bases, and it's not always obvious when you're looking at one. A good hint is probably, any software that's been around for decades and enjoys widespread use is likely to be a skyscraper.