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What Happens to Your Team When a New Developer Joins
Everyone writes about onboarding the new hire. Nobody writes about what it does to the team they just joined.
Everyone talks about onboarding the new developer. The checklist, the buddy system, the week-one tasks. But almost nobody talks about what happens to the team that’s already there. New developers don’t just join your team. They change it. The patterns shift before you notice. The knowledge that lived in conversations gets written down. Some people step forward. Some pull back. And for 3 to 4 weeks, your team gets slower.
This isn’t failure. It’s predictable. And knowing it’s coming makes you a better lead.
The Velocity Always Dips. Plan for It.
My team typically loses about 15 to 20% of velocity for three to four weeks when someone new joins. Not because anyone’s lazy. Not because the new person is slow. But because the whole system has to recalibrate.
Someone has to pair with the new developer. Code reviews take longer because they’re explaining things, not just checking for bugs. People answer more questions. The product manager gets interrupted more. The person doing infrastructure still has to do infrastructure, but now they’re also explaining…
