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Comment by Night_Thastus | Hacker News Reader

I'm just stating my experience. A single day, if they still have access to the codebase might be able to clear up some top-level concepts.

But the devil is in all the tiny details. What is this tiny correction factor that was added 20 years ago? Why was this value cut off to X decimals? Why didn't they just do Y here? Why do we override this default behavior?

It's tens of thousands of tiny questions like that which you can't ask until you're there.

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I don't understand what you're saying. Clearly both types of meetings (one-off vs recurring) would be helpful. The one-off may save you days/weeks of research, but it seems like you're not satisfied with that unless you can answer every single minor question you might have across the entire codebase.

I'm saying that if you're maintaining a code base for years, a single day's explanations won't do much of anything. It's a drop in the bucket.

It's not a bad thing, and it's certainly good to do, but it's not a solution to the problem.

If your granularity for a task is measured in years then you have a much different and harder problem.

Effectively everything becomes a "drop in the bucket".

Having a one day intro might save you two weeks of the 6 - 36 month task of getting to know the code base.

Like ... it doesn't help that much. Mainly it saves some frustration of the build system is insane or the source code is spread out in mails, a hd and a floppy in a drawer or the current source state is broken and need to be reverted.

But if the original author is there to do a handover, the chances are the company is properly run and the work will be a breeze anyway becouse the code is good and well structured.

We'll just have to accept that we live in different worlds. I still consider what you described a massive save.

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