<i>>I was handed a hardcopy of the MPEG-2 transport stream spec and told to read it and come back with questions.</i><p>OK, but what did you have to do on the job with the spec after reading it? Did you also have to do a codec implementation in SW or what? Don't leave us hanging.<p><i>>That's how you onboard.</i><p>Yeah, 15-30 years ago, when professional experienced SW devs weren't dime a dozen. Valve would also hire people off the street who never wrote any SW to code on the original Half-Life. But those days are long gone now, after 10+ years of "just learn to code bro" and ZIRP creating an oversupply of coders who now need to know a dozen programing languages, frameworks and buzzwords just to get a AI written rejection. Those were the days, writing SW felt like a craft, a science and a hobby at the same time.<p>But alas, certain jobs in EE/embedded SW still work like this. You get to read and learn a lot of source code, requirements, specs, design documents and standards, before actually building things, plus a proper (graybeard) mentor to onboard you. At least those remaining jobs that haven't yet been offshored(defense, aerospace).