Is this a US/SV thing? I hear it here over and over but in 20+ years of professional development (Europe + US/Canada remote start ups) never I needed more than a week to start working on a system (usually is 1-2 days that are mixed with onboarding sessions as well).

I may not be able to refactor the system to use micro services or whatnot, but to dig into the code and start fixing some bugs or even add a small feature has always been a week 1 goal for me (and one I set to the people I manage now).

Dunno it is kinda strange. The variation between different companies has to be huge in how accessable their codebase and workflow are.

I think this might be a cultural difference, in Europe taking months to be able to contribute to a codebase would get you fired pretty quickly.

What stack are you working with? With Node/React I (as a fullstack) could run most projects in 10 minutes, with about 4 hours for the worst offenders with local kubernetes and aws authentication. And I usually merge my first PR on the first day.