A co-worker and good friend of mine is changing jobs soon. It will be sad to see him go, but it got me to thinking a little. It’s always hard to take a new position. New co-workers in a new workplace culture can sometimes make you feel uneasy. Typically because you’re just the new guy and that’s how you feel. I started to think how it was for me when I took my current position 18 months ago, I felt a little awkward, even though I knew my co-workers personally. It was a different environment and a code base I was unfamiliar with. Knowing my co-workers personally made it easy to fit in on a personal level. But how easy was it to fit in on a working level? I had to learn how their application was developed. Where modules were and what did what.

I realized later on that I was able to pick up the new code base so quickly because of how I approached my new job. I noticed that they were having several error prone parts of the application (we received emails for every error that occurred in the web application) and I decided that I’d just jump right in and figure out what the issue was. After two weeks of basically bug squashing, we not only had a pretty solid application, but I also knew the code base inside and out.

I guess what I’m trying to say is if you want your new developers up to speed on your application the quickest, put them on bug squashing tasks for a couple of weeks and see where they are. I bet you’ll find out they learned more just going through the code fixing problems than if you just let them sit there and try and read code.