What kind of tasks should I work on as an onboarding engineer?
Should I be focusing initially on quick wins or higher-impact, high-priority projects that could potentially take longer?
Discussion
(2 comments)- 123 years agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
- 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:
- 0a year agoTech Lead/Manager at Meta, Pinterest, Kosei
To frame the decision, I highly recommend creating an onboarding doc that clearly describes what success looks like in the first 1 month, 3 months, and 6 months. Learn more here: Create An Onboarding Doc
Then talk about this doc with your manager. This understanding will help you figure out what type of work to prioritize. As a general rule:
- When you're more junior, you should bias toward shipping quick wins. People won't trust you with a larger project to begin with anyway.
- When you're more senior, you can focus more on higher-impact and longer projects, and especially focus on building out relationships that will become critical later on.
In general, I'm a big fan of taking on making small changes in the codebase for all seniority levels. It helps you gain familiarly with the workflow and also forces some interaction with colleagues during code review.
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