
How Fast Should I Expect New Programmers to Start Producing? - davidg11
Have a couple new employees, virtual office type setup; angel funded.  We typically start with bugs and then roll forward to minor features.  Most coding in GO with Angular on the front end.<p>Whats a reasonable timeframe to expect solid code contributions?  These employees have 3-8 years of experience.
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greenyoda
I depends on a lot of factors:

\- How complex is your codebase? Is it a pretty standard CRUD app, or does it
have extra components like machine learning or complex image rendering? Does
it need to interact with services outside your company?

\- Is your code easy to read, or a mess? Are there unit tests?

\- Is there documentation about the system architecture and functionality (or
people who can spend time providing a system overview), or do the new
developers have to figure it all out on their own?

\- How much specific domain knowledge would developers need to pick up to work
on the application? E.g., would they need to know all about banking or HIPAA
regulations to be able to write code that won't break laws?

Depending on the answers to these questions, the answer could be anywhere from
days to months.

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franzjoy
This question cannot be answered easily. It depends on so many details... Are
the original authors still there to guide new employees? Is the overall design
clear and simple?

Experience doesn't need to be an indicator for productivity. Also often you
can find programmers who seem not productive at all, but without their
contribution the whole project might fail.

The best thing to do is to set your milestones, and put trust in the people
you hired. Then check your progress regulary. Talk and listen to your
employees. Be trustworthy yourself.

You don't want to know how much code a new hire can put out in a month. It
doesn't matter. You want to know weather you reach your business goals. So
communication, trust and transparency will improve every contribution of your
engineers.

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Piskvorrr
Honestly, that's something _you_ should be able to guess at, from how long it
took your previous "new" programmers. From my experience, this mostly depends
on the complexity of existing code - I've seen code that could be reasonably
extended in a few weeks, but also monstrosities that took months to understand
and start contributing.

