> Novice developers have considerable difficulty in foraging among different versions of the same code.
In my experience developers generally find it difficult in any singular version of code, even code they fully control. Leaving my last job I did a considerable amount of knowledge transfer (20 hours of dedicated sessions, nearly all the rest of a month informal KT), and something that kept surprising me was how much time I spent sharing debugging techniques that were either exploratory (walking up the call stack, stepping through execution) or were platform-specific pain points but very well understood (async boundaries).
Overall my takeaway was that most people just read docs and existing bug reports, and if they don’t find the answer there they tend to get lost and give up.
In my experience developers generally find it difficult in any singular version of code, even code they fully control. Leaving my last job I did a considerable amount of knowledge transfer (20 hours of dedicated sessions, nearly all the rest of a month informal KT), and something that kept surprising me was how much time I spent sharing debugging techniques that were either exploratory (walking up the call stack, stepping through execution) or were platform-specific pain points but very well understood (async boundaries).
Overall my takeaway was that most people just read docs and existing bug reports, and if they don’t find the answer there they tend to get lost and give up.