Your new hire's first week is expensive. You're pulling senior engineers off projects to explain architecture, answer "why did you choose this?" questions, and onboard them on tribal knowledge.
Teams using a decision log cut this time dramatically.
The Baseline
A typical onboarding process without a decision log:
- Week 1: Setting up, documentation, "getting oriented" (20 hours of senior engineer time)
- Week 2-3: Architecture deep dive, tech decisions explained, "why did you choose X?" (30 hours)
- Week 4: Integration into workflow (15 hours)
- Total: 65 hours per new hire
With a decision log:
- Week 1: Setup, documentation, self-service decision search (10 hours)
- Week 2-3: Architecture deep dive (10 hours for clarification only)
- Week 4: Integration (15 hours)
- Total: 35 hours per new hire
"Having a decision log meant our new hires stopped asking and started searching. That alone cut 30 hours off onboarding."
That's not just faster onboarding. That's a senior engineer getting 65 hours back per new hire — hours they can spend shipping instead of explaining.