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

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Mid-Level Software Engineer [L4] at Snap2 years ago

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?

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    Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero, PayPal
    2 years ago
    • 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.

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