Knowledge Sharing and Team Enablement Questions

30-60-90 day plan — onboarding a new engineer to architecture & trade-off culture

First 30 days — Immerse & Observe

• Goal: understand codebase, principles, and team norms.
• Actions: assign targeted read-list (arch docs, RFCs, incident postmortems), pair with a buddy for code walkthroughs, attend architecture and design review meetings as observer.
• Deliverable: short doc from hire summarizing two core architectural decisions and trade-offs they observed.

Days 31–60 — Apply & Discuss

• Goal: practice making trade-offs with guidance.
• Actions: give a small feature/bug with architectural implications; run a design walkthrough with mentor; participate in two design reviews giving structured feedback (cost, latency, operability, security).
• Coaching: 1:1s focused on how trade-offs map to product goals and metrics.
• Deliverable: proposed design with alternatives, risks, and measurement plan.

Days 61–90 — Lead & Influence

• Goal: demonstrate independent evaluation and influence team standards.
• Actions: own a nontrivial design RFC; lead a design review; mentor a junior on trade-off analysis.
• Metrics: quality of RFC (completeness, risk mitigation), reviewer feedback, time-to-merge improvements.
• Outcome: hire is empowered to make architecture decisions aligned with team principles.

Throughout: codify learnings into team playbook, schedule recurring brown-bags, and give continual feedback.