Onboarding Q&A and Videos

Joined Meta 2 months ago as an E4 in a completely different tech stack and domain. Recently my manager informed me in a 1:1 and subsequent email with my skip and ERBP that I’m trending BE. It has areas I’m missing the bar on and ways to improve so I’m planning to work on those but is there anything else I can do to turn this around and be successful? Is it impossible to get a CME for H1 if this signal has been documented?

I'm on a team with many new SDE 1s, and I'm trying to get them up to speed. However talking with all of them takes a lot of time, and it's affecting my velocity with project execution. My manager suggested that I set up office hours. Does that idea make sense and are there any other ways to make this all more efficient?

I’ll be starting as an E6 at Meta, working on internal tools. Currently, the headcount is really low, and people only have 60 days to match, so I decided to go with the first team I matched with, even though it’s not the most exciting option.

I’m committed to doing a great job in this role, but I’m a bit concerned about the potential impact I can have and how that might affect my performance reviews (or get me PIPd). Is this something I should be worried about? Any advice on how I can maximize my impact on a team that might not be seen as highly impactful?

How would you spend you first 30 days to achieve the an impactful start (ideally from a staff perspective):

• What would you prioritize?
• What questions would you ask?
• When given your first tasks, what additional/beyond scope extras would you consider?
• What would you be mindful of NOT to do?
• How would you start prepping to figure out what to become an SME in?

I joined Meta but Im wondering if I really will be growing if I am just working on small features for the first year or two

I recently joined Meta, with over a decade of experience in software product development from various companies.

Currently, I'm working as a system generalist, but I have a growing interest in transitioning into a machine learning engineer role by next year.

This interest stems from both a desire to explore that sector and the recognition of the high demand for ML skills. I'm eager to invest the necessary effort to learn and adapt.

Could anyone share insights on the feasibility of this transition within Meta? Additionally, what specific skill set should I focus on developing to align with the expectations for a machine learning engineer role here at Meta?

Your guidance and advice would be greatly appreciated.

I have recently joined a team which works in Go (no frameworks). My team handles multiple backend services ( exposed through REST APIs ) which are like a platform for various other services.

I have picked up the language grammar and have enough understanding to write working code. However, I feel I don't "get" it. I don't understand how to organise the code into a well-defined folder structure and interfaces.

I would like to understand what are some of the good ways to learn a new language. It's been 2 months since I started learning it and feel like I am working with incomplete knowledge. Maybe at 50% level. I know there's no point in understanding all the features of a language but I would like to understand design patterns, best practices and how to write high-quality code.

I really need to be able to ramp up in another month's time.

Majorly need advice on

1. Learning to write high-quality Go code
2. Writing with Dependency Injection in mind
3. Design patterns and low-level system design

I'll be going into Amazon as a senior engineer leading a team of 6-7 engineers. I have some anxiety as I have never worked in a FAANG company before, and I imagine the bar is high. Things are also trickier as I'll be in a different time zone from the rest of the team.

How can I make a stellar first impression after I start?

I'm part of a team of 10 and my team is barely 3 months old, with many of us having joined this team very recently. I would love to start some initiatives to help our team bond and get closer as a team. For context, the team very distributed (3 different locations) and travel budgets are tight :(

What are some of the most effective tools you've used and/or seen to cultivate a sense of camaraderie amongst teammates?

Hi all,

I will be joining Amazon as an SDE 2 in a couple of weeks and wanted to see if anyone had any advice on how I can succeed at Amazon or large companies as an external hire. One of my worries is that I do not have experience working at a big tech company. Most of my experiences (3 YOE) have been in small to medium sized companies where I worked on a team of 10 - 15 engineer of with varying scopes of responsibility.

Any advice would be appreciated!

I used to be a mid-level Business Engineer at a FAANG company and recently joined this company as a SWE 4 months ago. Although it was a pleasant surprise to be uplevelled during the interview, I feel like I am not performing at my level now. There are backend engineering conversations where I lose context pretty fast. In fact the mid level engineers in my team are much more knowledgeable and faster than me. I don't want to bother them to explain too much because it feels like everyone else (even those who are relatively new) "gets it" except for me.

I have a young toddler who only goes to daycare twice a week (due to affordability). The rest of the days I have to cook and get him to eat and attend to him during work hours occasionally. As a result, I stretch my day but it feels like I am going to burn out soon. I work from 5am to 11pm daily and work weekends because I feel I am lagging behind too much, but new things always pile up.

I feel really mentally drained out doing work continuously over the past few months. At the same time, I don't want the company to think they made a wrong decision to hire me at this level.

I rececntly joined a series D startup as a software engineer 2. Prior to that I have about a year and half of experience, where I didn't get to learn much due to remote work and an absentee manager.

Since the beginning of this new job I have been feeling very anxious, as if I don't deserve this new role. I feel the team will figure out they made a mistake hiring me at an SE-2 level. The leveling in this company is different compared to big tech so SE-2 is not same as Amazon SDE-2.

Coming to my actual struggle, the product in itself is infra heavy and I have very limited understanding of DevOps. I am feeling overwhelmed with everything I need to learn to understand even basic tickets, and I end up just starting on the tickets directly instead of taking up say a docker/kubernetes course or even going through the numerous onboarding video recordings. Add to it that a good part of my team is on PTO this past month so I was getting stuck with no-one to unblock me.

I would love some tips to figure out a framework to follow, things to do when I get stuck, or better practices that show I am not repeating my mistakes. Right now I am documenting the patterns (say how to test a plugin) that keep repeating.

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.

Hi Taro Community,

I am a new hire for my company and I will have an amazing opportunity to chat with a tech lead.

I wonder from a more senior engineer perspective, what some important information or questions are essential to ask or tackle during the opportunity coffee chat?

Thanks a lot for the help :)

1. What are the things you can suggest to reduce the turnaround time for onboarding a new engineer within the team?
2. What are the things that can enable them better?
3. How does this differ based on the stage of their career at which the new hire is in?

I have previously worked as a software engineer at an company with a more traditional tech stack and working methods. Now, I am two months into my role as a mid-level engineer at my new company, where I develop microservices using a modern tech stack that supports hundreds of thousands of users.

However, I am finding that my personal progress is slower than desired. My performance in the technical interview was alright, and my EM expects me to gradually assume more senior responsibilities to assist our tech lead. Accordingly, I have been selecting tasks that demonstrate leadership qualities. At the same time I feel like I don't have time to plan meetings when I clearly lack expertise in our current tech stack.

To bridge the gap in my technical skills, I immerse myself in technology podcasts during my commute and workouts, making the most of my available time. In the evenings, I try to read blogs and work on side projects. Additionally, I rely extensively on Taro for learning the behavioral aspects of engineering. To make up for my slow pace, I ensure my PRs are thoroughly prepared, aiming to establish myself as a reliable engineer. Despite these efforts, I recognize the need to boost my productivity. What further steps can I take to thrive in my new role?

I need some advice on how to navigate my situation. I have recently joined a staff engineer role and its has been 2 months. My manager mentioned today that I would be put under PIP. He mentioned that there is gap in the expectations.

To give a context, I am the only one person here and everyone else including manager (who is a director) are in different country (in europe), completely different time zone and it has been every hard to get any time from them to discuss anything. I have been left out of important meetings because of the time zone. Now, I am working alone here on a new project independent from others. When I created PRs, they were stuck for ever (sometimes a week or so). I posted in multiple channels, etc. Even sync meeting with team mates sometimes were cancelled because of they were busy and it has been hard. I have raised this with manager but nothing changed. For onboarding, I didn't have a buddy to begin with and manager was my buddy.

I am supposed to talk with HR tomorrow and discuss my options. PIP or mutual termination. I am not sure what should I ask HR and what should I do? Any advice would be greatly helpful.

hi,

I just started. I've never been at a company this big. I have worked at a 1000 person place before it shrunk (it grew from 3-500 while I was there) and 65 and 500 person shops.

How do you suggest I ramp up? It's so many people and so many layers of code and tech. I have a good amount of experience in data/ml and also eng. I don't think I'm a 10x engineer but I am pretty proficient at getting things done.

What should my plan be even with holiday slow down coming? People are super nice and I don't feel crazy pressure to ship something rn but I put a lot of pressure on myself and want to do well.

I also know code quality is even more important at bigger companies trying to deal with scale. How do I make sure I can keep up?

Background Context

About 7.5-8 YOE, worked at a F500 before and a med tech startup before that. I'm an iOS Developer to be more specific.

I recently joined Apple as an ICT4/Senior SWE, and this is my first time joining FAANG. So far I’ve been assigned a couple of basic tickets which I landed ahead of schedule, and my manager is unsure of what I’ll be focusing on as Apple is wrapping up its last week of feature dev for the year.

I am extremely stressed. And honestly, for no reason other than I’m placing this stress on myself. I feel like I need to prove to my team and manager that I am in fact a senior level engineer, but since I am already at the level I guess there’s no need to? My colleagues who are mostly all a level below have been on this team for years and obviously can code circles around me. What I’m failing to find is what Rahul and Alex call “the engineer who everyone gravitates towards” on my team. I don’t think we have a dedicated Staff Eng, but rather a few senior SWEs (and even that I’m not sure of since everyone’s title is hidden), and honestly I have no idea what the expectations are of me, and I think that also attributes to my stress levels.

My manager says to just sit tight and has given me a few tickets that are supposed to help my designated Apple buddy - who has been amazing btw - and these tickets are fine and all, but I guess I’m just not sure if I can actually perform at the senior level at FAANG. From all the videos on Taro it seems like at the senior levels there’s a lot of leadership and design going on (which held true at my last company), but frankly in the past couple weeks I’ve been here, I’ve only seen engineers across all levels chugging out code as fast as they can (maybe that’s something specific to Apple).

Not sure if Apple just values "solver" archetype or if this is normal and that it's going to just take me a few months to ramp up and get used to everything. I think there's also quite a bit of imposter syndrome going on - I know I deserve to be here, I just need time to deliver more work and for my manager to give me some feedback.

I know I'm very fortunate to be in the position that I am, but I just want to take care of my mental health while doing the past I can to make sure I'm taking care of my career.