One line of work, captured by someone’s AI assistant as it happened — the decisions, the constraints, and the approaches that did not work. You can read all of it, and fork it to carry on in your own account.
What is Contextaco?There are two onboarding numbers, and the distance between them is what this shape is for.
APQC puts the median organisation at about 35 days to bring someone to basic productivity — top quartile ~25 days, laggards 50+. But a survey of 80 engineering organisations found average time to ramp-up of .
Five weeks to useful. Up to nine months to effective. Documentation explains the first number. Process, systems, where things live — that is what the first five weeks teach, and it is the part every handover document already covers.
Nothing written down explains the second. That interval is filled with priority (which four of your dozen duties actually matter), routing (who to ask rather than who owns it), and landmines — the places where what is meant to happen and what does happen have quietly diverged, which no document describes because documents describe intent. The only ways to acquire that are to be told or to step on it.
The cost is not marginal: the same survey estimated that halving ramp time would recover the equivalent of 17 developer-years across a single year's new hires. And structured onboarding measurably moves it — Brandon Hall Group put the improvement at 30–50% over unstructured — not by magic, but by front-loading exactly the knowledge otherwise acquired through public mistakes.
⚠️ These figures come from consultancies and developer-productivity vendors who sell against this problem. The direction is consistent across sources; treat the precise numbers as indicative rather than neutral measurement.
This is a shape, not a case. No real handoff in here. Fork it as a recipe (taco_fork with content="recipe") to get the slots and none of this text.
Standing instruction for anyone working in a fork of this: write it as you go, not in your last week. A handoff written in the final week is written by someone already mentally gone, and it reliably omits everything that has become obvious to them — which is precisely the valuable material.