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How to onboard and perform well as senior sde?

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Senior Software Engineer at Taro Communitya month ago

Hi,

I have 5 years of experience but in 3 different companies as SDE1 and now I am joining a company as senior SDE. I was able to crack the interviews as they were generic but I am very nervous on how will I perform as senior SDE. My imposter syndrome is making it worse :)

Any important pointers that you will recommend for my initial few months to onboard smoothly and performing well.

Thanks.

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Discussion

(3 comments)
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    Tech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
    a month ago

    Congrats on the new job! For onboarding, I recommend our course here: The Complete Onboarding Guide For Software Engineers

    If I were to distill down that entire course to what I personally think is the most important, my advice would be to "Win with quality". It is almost impossible for a newbie to win with velocity and quantity as they're trying to understand how the heck the codebase and overall engineering culture work. What you can do though is to spend an extra couple minutes here and there really polishing your pull requests and going out of your way to make social interactions pleasant (social quality).

    After the onboarding course, I highly recommend the mid-level to senior course to understand exact level expectations for a senior engineer: Grow From Mid-Level To Senior Engineer: L4 To L5

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    Eng @ Taro
    a month ago

    I would try to maximize that initial energy you have to talk to as many people as you can to find out what the bottlenecks are in the system. Look for low hanging fruit with high impact.

    You'll probably end up talking to people that have been in the company for a while that could be jaded about why a certain thing cannot be done or improved. I would try to question their assumptions to find out exactly how much they are saying is true. It can be easy to defer to someone else as the expert because they've been at the company for a while, but many times, they could have tunnel vision on the problem.

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    Tech Lead/Manager at Meta, Pinterest, Kosei
    a month ago

    One tip I'll share from the course: be very clear about expectations for your first 1 month, 3 months, and 6 months. Write it down and discuss with your manager!