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Discussion on: What are the biggest challenges when onboarding and contributing to a new codebase/project?

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bananabrann profile image
Lee

For me, it's the lingo and acronyms. I'd say about half my time at work is deciphering lingo used in various documents handed down to me from non-tech higher-ups, just to discover it's far too abstract to work off of

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lostintangent profile image
Jonathan Carter

Yeah that’s a good point! Within MS, we have way too many acronyms and code names, and it’s take a bit for new members to get up to speed :/ How do you end up working around this? Just asking what terms mean one-by-one?

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bananabrann profile image
Lee

The "new guy" on our team is the entire team. We ask for further explanation of what is to be built, and the documents we're given are riddled with corporate jargon that abstracts the objective so far away that we effectively don't know what to code.

The way we've started tackling this project is to rapidly pump out small versions. Everyday something is sent to higher-ups for feedback. We use that daily feedback to slowly, slowly refine what we're suppose to build