Thread by @patio11

(I’d be borderline alarmed if we couldn’t do this for interns. Which is not a desirable posture for every shop, but once you’re scaling hiring, gets very close to mandatory unless you want to leak months of spin up time.)

https://twitter.com/mekkaokereke/status/1407434764114546690

This is an interesting proof of work though. A number of systems at Stripe it would hit:

1) You have a fully credentialed machine on day one (surprisingly not universal!)

2) That starts w/ a checkout of the mono repo and our supported dev environments installed

3) Your engineering spin up will have showed you a slide deck listing a number of places to search for things, probably most importantly livegrep (how did I work before this) and our docs systems*.

* Ongoing pain point. Please come solve it for us.

4) Large sprawling codebases are intrinsically hard to navigate but we try to keep it refactored and organized enough to reason about. You should be able to find e.g. “what happens when someone signs up” in under 15 minutes w/ no knowledge but Ruby. (I did on day one.)

5) You have to get sign off on a PR for all sorts of reasons, and you might sensibly wonder “Hmm who reviews this.” We have tooling directly in the cut-a-PR window that makes recommendations on who, and a no-biting-the-noobs culture where if you guess wrong the reviewer will help

6) And while the original has a “Don’t talk to anyone” constraint everyone starting at Stripe gets a spin up buddy with approximately 25% of their working hours at your disposal for two weeks while you get oriented to who/where to ask questions the next N years.

7) How do you run tests?

We have a tool that trivializes it but if you don’t know the magic invocation Slackbot will slide into your DMs with your test results (and an example of the command line) if you attempt to push any code.

There is an online interface for this, too.

8) A thing that I think even the team making it might not appreciate is that a lot of our tools help “unfold” your understanding of the environment you’re working in. The thing which helps you deploy also let’s you drill to the test results; exploration there will teach you more.