drinking from the firehose
expressionops culture
Absorbing information far faster than anyone could - the universal description of onboarding into a complex system.
New hires, new codebases, new incident bridges: the volume is the hazing. The useful response is triage, not heroics - decide what to actually swallow, and where the rest is written down for later.
Drinking from the firehose describes receiving far more information than can be absorbed, most often used about starting a new job, joining a large codebase, or the first days of an incident.
The reason the metaphor is apt is that the problem is rate rather than volume. The same information delivered over months is manageable; delivered in a week it produces nothing retained. Onboarding routinely fails this way: everything is explained in the first three days, when the new person has no structure to attach any of it to, and the material that would make sense in week six is delivered in hour six.
The mitigations are all about sequencing and reference. Give the newcomer something to do early so the information has somewhere to attach, write things down so they can be re-read at the point they become relevant rather than the point they were mentioned, and accept that a question asked twice is a documentation problem rather than an attention problem. The same applies during incidents: the firehose is real, and the response is a written running log rather than an attempt to hold it all in memory.