The $90,000 Onboarding Tax Hidden Inside Messy Codebases
The Question Nobody Asks Out Loud
There is a question that surfaces in every engineering team, in every company, in every codebase larger than a weekend project:
“Where does this go?”
Not where should it go in theory. Where does it actually belong right now, given the directories that already exist, the conventions established by engineers who left eighteen months ago, and the unspoken rules everyone follows until a new hire touches the wrong file?
A few years ago, a senior engineer joined Slack's iOS team, stepping into a codebase containing over 13,000 files spread across 27 top-level directories. That engineer spent their first three months not shipping features, but building a map. Not a literal document, but a fragile mental model of where business logic hid, which directories were actively maintained versus silently abandoned, and which services had undocumented edge cases everyone worked around by instinct.
Three months. Full...
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