Transitioning to back-end as a new engineer - How can I onboard smoothly?

Question

I'm a new engineer at Snap, and my first month here is for onboarding. My team does internal tooling, and I have my first major project already lined up.

My manager said this should take an L4 engineer 1-2 months with a lot of help from the tech lead. This tech lead is a senior engineer pushing for promo.

The stack is a mix of Java, Go, and Python - I'm a back-end engineer on the team. However, I'm transitioning from a field that's pretty far from back-end. I'm wondering how I can make this transition as soon as possible and make sure I onboard well into the team?

Alex Chiou · Accepted Answer

Work backwards from the 1-2 month time-range you were given and break down the project into smaller milestones, weekly seems good. I would imagine that 30 day completion is doing quite well, 60 day is okay, and anything in between is good. You can verify this with your manager. Use this senior engineer tasked with helping you aggressively. Don't be afraid to ask lots of questions and learn to ask great questions. The incentives check out: Every L5 needs to be able to lead L4s. Set up a weekly recurring 1:1 with the senior engineer if there isn't one already. It's good to build this relationship, and in the immediate term, it's a stop-gap mechanism to prevent your struggles slipping through the cracks. If you're going to do extra learning outside of work, I recommend just spending 1-3 days on each language just learning basic syntax. Since you're working on the internal infra side, outside tutorials won't be very applicable I imagine. The vast majority of learning will have to be done on the job.  Related resources: Asking Effective Questions That Get Great Answers Quickly There Is No Such Thing As A Stupid Question Step-By-Step Guide To Build Any Large Software Project

Transitioning to back-end as a new engineer - How can I onboard smoothly?

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