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Any significant system will take months to learn. Your statement is probably only true for some trivial system. A senior engineer comes with years of experienc

by mianos 6y ago

Any significant system will take months to learn. Your statement is probably only true for some trivial system. A senior engineer comes with years of experience designing and coding systems that took years to develop and run at scale. Given time to learn they should be just as good at solving day to day bugs but if you assign them that you are wasting your time and money on experience. If you don't value experience you are wasting your time and money on experience. It's pretty normal to have more junior engineering staff help new senior staff learn the ropes. It's also common for those less experienced staff to learn from the more experienced people even in that situation. I'm not saying senior hires should be respected from the first second because they are over 30 or have a long resume.

lumost 6y ago
Learning the ropes of a new company is fair and being slower at first is to be expected, but explaining that code reviews need to be tested to a senior hire isn't as fair. Similarly a new senior hire should be able to hop into a code review and catch problems/suggest improvements early in the process. These two behaviors aren't as dependent on knowledge of the system as they are on core coding competencies. The whiteboard interview reasonably works to assess these, but it requires a lot of prep and is prone to false negatives.