What kind of tasks should I work on as an onboarding engineer?

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Mid-Level Software Engineer [SWE4] at Mercari10 months ago

Should I be focusing initially on quick wins or higher-impact, high-priority projects that could potentially take longer?

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  • Alex Chiou
    Tech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
    10 months ago
    • Get quick wins across the first month or so and then shift into the meatier, larger projects
    • Quick wins will let you acclimate yourself to the overall lifecycle of making production changes, which is an important engineering foundation to have
    • Another aspect to consider is team respect. Respect is gotten by generating outcomes, which quick wins obviously let you do, well, quickly.
    • You can use these smaller tasks to show your stuff. Back when I was at Instagram, a senior Android engineer joined my team and immediately won the respect of all the other Android engineers by going super deep on a tricky Android bug that was stumping everyone. This was just a 1-2 day task, which they were able to use to show a very impressive amount of depth.

    For more great resources around effective onboarding, I recommend these:

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