How to do well as an early career engineer?

Is it considered a negative if it takes longer to onboard?

Generally, yes. The nuance is:

• Why was there a delay in your onboarding? If it was due to a poor estimate on the part of your onboarding buddy, that shouldn't be held against you. But then you need to call that out and ask good questions/explain why you're blocked.
• What is your growth rate? Even if you took longer to ramp up, are you asking good questions and becoming more self-sufficient? Your slope is more important than your y-intercept.

The normal time period of onboarding is dependent on the complexity of your team. This is why it's important to sync with your manager and collaboratively create an onboarding doc.

You don't want there to be ambiguity around what it means to be below, at, or above expectations.

Congrats on getting into Meta! 1st job is always a bit scary, especially at FAANG and especially at Meta given the current economic climate. However, you have Taro on your side, so you're much better positioned than most!

First, I recommend this thread: "Advice for someone joining big tech from a non big tech background?". This thread will put you in the proper high-level mindset to succeed at Big Tech.

Then, I recommend our onboarding course: [Course] The Complete Onboarding Guide For Software Engineers

The course covers a lot of the "meta" (pun intended) systems and mentalities you need to set yourself up for success like creating an onboarding plan, requesting support liberally, and setting up a transparent dialog with your manager (doing all 3 of these well will greatly impress an EM by the way for an E3).

After that, let's get into tactics. As an E3, you are responsible for the following:

1. Writing a lot of code
2. Writing code well
3. Writing code independently

#1 and #2 can be learned from my course here: [Course] Level Up Your Code Quality As A Software Engineer

That code quality course is by far the most important resource for E3s. It will literally take you 50%+ of the way to E4. If you can truly champion all the strategies in that course, you will be far, far ahead of most E3s and have 0 chance of getting a bad rating. Really pay attention to the content of that course and try to apply its tactics ASAP after learning them (you can easily apply them directly to your diffs).

#3 is trickier but can largely be learned with this course: [Course] Ask Great Questions That Get Great Answers Quickly

With the Taro mobile app now supporting courses, you can easily listen to these like a podcast (you can do it on the shuttle ride in and out of the office). I recommend doing at least 2-3 lessons per day (15-30 minutes). These courses have all the stuff I wish I knew when I started at Meta and when I started my career overall - If I had known all this wisdom, I would have grown 2x faster. I know that this is true as I taught all of this to my Meta mentees and they did indeed grow 2x faster than me (E3 -> E5 in 2.5 years, $400k+ TC by age 25).