An established company like Google might be able to afford that time, but startups don’t have that luxury.

There’s a saying among Googlers that it takes six months to ramp up at Google and become productive. In contrast, my initial mentor at Google did not do much more than show me to my desk on my first day. For example, at Quora, we write our own codelabs to help new hires learn key abstractions, document most of our processes, infrastructure, and best practices on our internal instance of Quora, and assign a mentor to each new hire, who’s tasked with making sure he or she is ramping up effectively and getting integrated into the team during the first eight weeks. I discuss this more in How did Edmond Lau like working at Google? If you’re curious and motivated to learn, there’s a huge library of knowledge available to you.Ī startup won’t have the same volume of resources, but any fast-growing startup that wants to help new hires ramp up as quickly as possible will also invest in creating similar training resources. I joined Google’s search quality team right after graduating with my Master’s, and I learned a great deal in my first six months from soaking up all these materials. Google’s invested a significant amount of resources to create codelabs that explain how core abstractions are used and why they exist, guides that compile the best practices for different programming languages, and design docs that explain the rationale and details behind major pieces of infrastructure. There are a number of different facets to consider.

Whether joining an established company or a rapidly growing startup will help you learn faster depends on your own preferences and comfort level. You’ll likely be working for a while, and setting up the right foundation for yourself will open up more career opportunities in the future. I’d recommend that as a fresh grad, you optimize for learning-whether it be learning technical skills, how to build a product, how to lead a team, or something else-and pick the work environment where you’d learn the most. This question originally appeared on Quora.

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