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Best way to spend time learning before joining a new job

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Entry-Level Software Engineer at Taro Communitya month ago

I have 4 weeks before I begin as an entry level engineer in a popular big tech company in their cloud offering division. I wanted to get at least 3 actionable steps on how to set myself up for success in my new role both in tech and in relationships.

Please also discuss any common anti patterns I need to be aware of.

I'll be using a new technology (cloud) and my first step was to buy relevant books. But I realized that it's inefficient and took up an online course to build a small project. Just want to hear how you would approach your month before the job.

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(2 comments)
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    Tech Lead/Manager at Meta, Pinterest, Kosei
    a month ago

    If you're working in cloud services, e.g. GCP, AWS, Azure, there are a huge number of moving pieces and services.

    This could be a rare instance where simply reading about these services and having a basic familiarity is valuable. It's hard or impossible to build something that involves all the 100s of services. However, as you read about them, you should not try to just regurgitate what the service is used for. Try to answer these questions:

    • What are the new features or changes coming to this service?
    • What is the developer sentiment of this service?
    • How important is this service to the company overall?

    This will make you much more valuable than simply parroting the technical definition of Amazon Athena, Inspector, Beanstalk, etc. (I wonder how they come up with these names...)

    Do you know which team you'll be on? It's probably worth building something or writing code with the product/service you'll be working in.

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    Eng @ Taro
    a month ago

    I would talk to your manager to find out what product your cloud team is going to be responsible for, and then I would ask for their recommendation for what content you can consume to get onboarded quicker.

    If you end up buying books to learn more about the cloud offerings, but you might end up reading about a lot of unrelated products.