How can I be more decisive about my career decisions?

• You shouldn't feel bad about taking 2 months to find a team: The team you choose to work on is one of the most important decisions you'll ever make. A healthy team is the foundation for your success.
• Historical side-note: Bootcamp mentors at Meta have been pushing mentees to graduate faster now, trying to offload them across weeks 4-6. This is different from when I joined Meta back in 2017 where mentors regularly encouraged mentees to take 6+ weeks to find the best team for them. I know many people who took 2 months+.
• The 2 keys to improve your career decision framework are to:
  • Understand that "perfect" doesn't exist - Software and tech as a whole is just so complex that there's pretty much never any option that's clearly head-and-shoulders above the rest.
  • Timebox your decisions - Timeboxing is the act of confining an action to a certain block of time (e.g. "We will agree on the technical architecture for this project within 2 weeks"). When it comes to decisions, the contract is that no matter what happens by the end of this time block, you will go with the existing best option you have.
• If you don't aggressively timebox your job decisions at Meta, you will simply not survive. The company moves way too fast for indecisiveness.

Software engineering is inherently a crazy and chaotic space - You have to learn to be comfortable settling with a decision that doesn't feel perfect and has to make tradeoffs. If that decision ends up having problems, that's perfectly fine - Learn from the mistakes, patch them up, and move on. Repeat this process and continue becoming a better and better engineer 😁