Hiya, I've been doing software development for about 5 years now, but always at smaller companies. My last company had about 25 developers on a single product and that was largest team I'd ever worked on at that time. I'm now working on team with closer to 250 developers across 3 locations/timezones and it's extremely overwhelming.<p>I've been here for about a month now and still feel like I'm mostly just in free falling trying to figure out 95% of what anyone talks about or how to do things. It seems like everything works fundamentally differently than it does for a smaller scale company.<p>Do you have any advice for short/long term success as a developer that is very new to operating in an environment at this scale?
>> I've been here for about a month now and still feel like I'm mostly just in free falling trying to figure out 95% of what anyone talks about or how to do things.<p>It is fairly normal, every company has its on acronyms, processes, so I would say it is fairly normal to be overwhelmed in the beginning. There is no way you could know in advance their process.<p>That being said, you should have colleagues available to help you.<p>Take always a notebook and a pen with you. Whenever there is a word, or process, you have never heard of or are not sure what it consists of, write it down.<p>Now every few days schedule a meeting with a member of you team, reviews the list, and request explanation/clarification.<p>Take additional notes for future reference. That's it, in a few weeks you'll feel at ease with what is happening around you.<p>This is a gradual process, you'll keep learning in the months, years to come.<p>Then once you feel more at ease, you can push for initiatives, new ways to do things. A newcomer has usually always lots of fresh ideas because is not yet used to how things are done here...
As you are noticing, there is a lot of communications overhead for large teams.<p>Large code bases themselves don’t have to be confusing though. I worked as a contractor at Google and their system was very dev friendly with almost everything is available/viewable in a large repo with good editing and build tools.<p>I hope those 250 developers are split up on small teams, with small manageable projects.