First 90 days - What to do as a Staff+ Engineer?

Staff Software Engineer at Taro Community2 years ago

How can I map out what to do in the first 90 days in a new role (staff and senior staff) and a new job (given factors like new codebase, new processes, people, and work ethics), especially when the domain and coding language are also new?

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(2 comments)

4
Rahul Pandey
•Tech Lead/Manager at Meta, Pinterest, Kosei
2 years ago
I talk about this a lot in my Senior to Staff course (and I'll make an entire onboarding course soon!).

One thing I can recommend is what I call the "Talk & Observe" framework. The idea is to talk to a bunch of people on the team to get ideas of what's important, and then observe their behavior if it matches what they claim.
2
Alex Chiou
•Tech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
2 years ago
Staff engineers are tricky as that's when archetypes really solidify and the value you add is specialized. The broader all-encompassing advice is to have that honest dialog with your manager about expectations and create an onboarding plan. How engineering teams usually work is that the Staff+ engineers are the "lieutenants" of the engineering manager (EM), so it's obviously in the EM's best interest to set expectations and clarify their vision for the Staff+ engineers to carry out.

In terms of specifics, you can find concrete behaviors expected from Staff+ engineers here: "For a Staff engineer at a Big Tech company, what should their first 3-6 months look like?"

Back at Meta, every new Staff engineer I worked with made it clear within their first 3 months why they had a Staff title. 90 days is a long time, and it's certainly long enough to find a hard technical or organizational problem to solve (expected of Staff+ engineers).