Asking Great Questions Q&A and Videos

Hey folks have started out on my first full-time job as an Early Career SWE at a Big Tech Company. Wanted to ask what is the ideal line of progress in terms of as months pass by.

For example in 3 months at least I should be capable of doing XYZ things.. in 6 months XYZ things... and within a year's time XYZ things independently.

I ask this question mainly since it's going to be close to 5 months of joining and I do require handholding with other peers on the team my aim is to operate as independently as possible. One of the feedbacks in the first quarterly check-in was to go in full depth for the debugging and independently create test plans for the work assigned before asking questions.

As for the creation of test plans yes since the codebase is too large I do tend to ask other team members if there is an existing functionality that can be leveraged or in case I get stuck as to what to do ahead or when I don't understand something.

The good feedback was the questions I asked were formed and detailed.

From the feedback, I am kind of at a crossroads in understanding whether I should ask questions or not ask questions and also crippled with self-doubt

Another pointer was how to be assertive in the sense I tend to be scared to share my ideology or idea about how we can potentially do something. Communicating with peers also seems intimidating especially Senior or Lead members or Manager too.

Is there a more proper way to communicate/send messages? The primary mode of communication is Slack and at times threads get bulky.

Any tips to understand the feedback properly and improve on the above pointers or in general are highly appreciated. I hope to get better at being a good SWE.

Every time I'm assigned to a new ticket. I feel really anxious and afraid of asking questions because I don't know anything about it.

This led to procrastinating and making zero progress during 2 - 3 days.

Has someone else experienced this? How did you overcome it?

I just found out that I was rejected from one of my dream FAANG companies :(

The recruiter told me:

Thanks so much for taking the time to interview with our team - they really enjoyed meeting with you. Unfortunately at this time, we will not be moving forward with an offer. The team really enjoyed your positive demeanor, thought you had great communication skills, and a well thought out process throughout the technical interviews. I am not able to share specific feedback as per company policy, but I am of course happy to jump on a call if you have any questions.

What can/should I ask her in this call to maximize my learning to be a better candidate?

My org VP holds office hours every week. Also he sometimes does AMA sessions. I'm usually not sure what to ask so I don't avail those sessions as I don't want to ask any stupid questions.

I'm new to my company, so I'm asking questions to bring myself up to speed. However, something I'm wary of is becoming a burden - I assume you don't want to ask the same person every time for help. Any tips on how to figure out who I should ask my question to minimize the chance of this happening? I want to make sure I get along well with my team.

I see most of my colleagues ask tough and deep questions. My questions are not that great a lot of time. I am ramping up in a new role for past couple of months.

Currently working full time as an Android Developer but also running a small consulting gig on the side. Main reason at the time was to have another income stream.

Now I am torn between keeping both jobs, quiting the full time and going all in on my company or dropping my company.

For me personally it is a difficult choice because I am driven to achieve what my mind sets out to do but lately I have not been enjoying work like I used to. In the end the decision is mine to make but I would love some guidance.

What is a good way to ask questions in a domain where you lack knowledge? How do you make a question a high effort question when you know relatively little about a topic? Sometimes you're put in a situation where you don't really know the fundamentals. How do you navigate this landscape and ask questions of higher quality? I feel like the more that I learn about a certain topic, the better I get at at asking questions in this area. However, I don't really have a great framework on asking questions when I'm starting out in a new field, so what could one do in these cases?

I work as a mid-level software engineer. We have team channels where people can reach us on. But for some reason people always message me in a private message or they visit my office for team related tasks or product owner tasks. I keep telling them to ask the person in charge or communicate through our team channel, but they don't.

I don't want to be rude to them, yet I find my frustration growing. Sometimes I feel like they can't bother to formalise their requests, so they go to me to quickly mention whatever is bothering them, so they later can refer to our "discussion" if the issue is brought up again.

What should I do?

I came into my role with an advanced degree, so I started out as a mid-level engineer. However, I still need to be able to ask questions as I've never worked as an engineer before. I've seen all the Taro content around asking questions, but my manager has drilled in since a few months into this role that expectations are that I function independently, unblock myself, and don't take up much of others' time by asking questions. That it would count against me in performance reviews (versus for me if I help others with their questions).

Given the current job market, I don't know where else to go, but this environment leaves me pretty exasperated. Is it normal in other companies to go to more senior engineers with help getting unblocked? Are questions only really around code, or is it normal to ask for help debugging a feature/bug/test? I worry about becoming a senior with the expectation to be independent and help others when I myself have never received guidance to grow to that level properly.

Recently I completed my first-ever proof of concept (POC). I got positive feedback, but I think it's because the manager understands that I am doing this independently for the first time. After giving credit for my work, one senior member broke down the task into smaller pieces with step-by-step technical sources (from blogs), which made my life much easier. Now when I am re-evaluating this now, I observe the following:

• I tried not to bother senior/TL for help since I didn't want to interrupt their sprint commitment. Even though they are supportive, I couldn't help but feel nervous because I am the engineer with the least experience (i.e., others are either senior or principal level or the same level but have a much broader knowledge domain).
• After receiving the breakdown plan with the easy-to-follow resources, I am much more comfortable tackling the tasks. If possible, I very much want to be able to break down a bigger POC into smaller pieces and tackle each in order.

Since it's likely to have more POC shortly, and I am sure I will face this situation, I want to overcome the nerve and ask the right amount of questions (not too much, but good enough to unblock me) during growth along the POC task.

Thanks ahead for your sharing!

I'm a little over two months in at this large (10k+ employees) org, and I work remotely in internal tools to try to automate processes. My immediate development team is fairly small and mostly junior. Most of us onboarded right before the 2023 holidays when things were winding down.

I am trying hard to fit in here and balance, but I am struggling. Our group chats are pretty dead, and it doesn't seem like group-questions are rewarded. We have daily standups, but a lot of work here seems to be conducted "behind-the-scenes" and in 1:1 conversations. I've gotten a bit of a vibe check on this scenario from folks who don't work in tech, and that seems to be normal for those environments. Things feel like they take an age.

For some reference: I get that everyone is different, but also sense a direct correlation between curiosity (to get questions answered and work done) and our team velocity. Maybe it's not something I should be worried about nor even my business, but I still am. I'm still working on disambiguating how performance reviews work, but in the meantime, it seems like we will be judged on velocity metrics, probably sometime in Q3/Q4.

I come from a space where questions were welcomed / encouraged. It doesn't feel that way here, which I feel like I need to adapt to healthily for the near future. A conversation starter model I've found helpful from a managerial relationship is "I've noticed a different communication style here. Is there any way we can discuss?"

Any additional suggestions for coping at this stage would be enormously helpful. I also definitely want to be mindful of being careful what I wish for and the impacts of "going fast" on junior devs, especially because there's a bit of trauma for me there on that side.

Up until now, (before covid basically), I used to go to different people's desk and ask for the the flow that I would have to work on, and be genuinely interested in what they had to say, in short make friends basically and it was good strategy, they were big companies too so there weren't a lot of pressure and people were eager to help me. After covid I have joined remote-first company which is also a late startup too. I have couple of challenges here

• I don't know many people in the company, and the team is really small, and in addition to that some people whom I have asked for help turned out to be really closed.
• I ended up asking a lot of question to one person which obviously made me look like I ask a lot of questions, and not a good first impression
• on top of it, I even was discouraged to ask questions and was told to work independently from the manager.

In my defence, I am new to all these new technologies, and I have not used to the way they have written the code, that said, I have improved much. But still I have to ask questions because everytime I get stories from different modules which I have no idea about, and there's no way I would know without asking questions..

So this is what I was doing in current company which back fired I guess. I was pinging one guy and trying to get his point of view, if that was not enough I used to get on calls and sync up with him for the approach and I have a feeling that although he didn't say directly to me that he didn't like this approach but he might have shared this to our manager.

Now what I am doing is, I do my work and get all the questions which I have in mind, compile them together so that it's easier to read for the other person and send it accross to the other person asking for help. This strategy is new to me but I like it because it makes me less weak I think.. also it makes me articulate as well. But since I was told that I have bugged people.. I have become scared and confused .. thinking if sometime later my manager come back to me saying you ask too many questions on slack and bug people etc.

I am basically doubting my every move. and in addition to that clocking 12+ hours everyday. it's exhausting..

I will be moving to a new team soon. Is it recommended to ask for feedback from my old team before moving out.

I have good relationship with my team and I want to leverage them to know more about my overall contribution as a team player and engineer.

What is the best way to do that ? What type of questions I can ask ?

I want to avoid falling into same mistakes and grow faster in my new team.