Every time, when my manager asked me to do some changes to the repository that is totally new to me. I became scared. 

I prefer to do research by myself first. But I got lost in the new repo by reading file by file, and don't get the clarity. 

So I ask the repository owner to provide documentation, mostly they don't maintain documentation, and even if they do, it is not updated or it involves a lot of detailed feature-wise documentation, which is usually not relevant to my requirement. 

Then, I call the POC of that repo, but I couldn't figure out what is the right question to ask in the first call. Over time, I ping him asking questions whenever I face hurdles while achieving the requirements. 

Sometimes, I put a debugger or logs to understand the flow of code.

The above processes took a lot of my time.

What is your suggestion to get clarity in the new repo such that I can complete my requirements in less time?

What is the effective way to understand new repository in order to make the required changes in that repo?

Entry-Level Software Engineer [SE1] at Booking.com

Crux is when you’re learning and digging deeper technically. How do you approach taking ownership and growing your impact on not just the project but across the team and larger axis?

My goal is to level up to Staff someday, and I feel like I've gotten a lot of very high-level advice and examples that are hard to directly apply. What are some detailed examples of Staff level projects, and what about the execution/behaviors made them Staff?

I would like to get more clarity on what a Staff-level project and execution look like.

Forward Deployed Software Engineer at Palantir

Some additional questions:
1. Does it vary between big companies and small companies?
2. Do you need to work a lot to be a high performer?

What's the difference between a low performer software engineer and a high performer?

Hi everyone!
I will join Palantir as a Forward Deployed Software Engineer(FDSE). I need advice on tackling the first 2-3 months at the company to gain team respect and trust. I am excited about this opportunity and want to grow but do it efficiently, if that is even a thing😅.
Jokes aside, All I want is to have a great career at Palantir.

YOE: over 2.5years(including just over 1year of internship).

Stack Experience: Ruby on Rails, Python, some Java

Current Work: Backend Engineer. Building and maintaining APIs

Advice for someone joining big tech from a non big tech background?

Alex and Rahul and the other senior people on Taro have consistently emphasized how important good software engineering fundamentals are to long-term career success as a software engineer. This is in contrast to learning the latest popular framework or area of development. Can people define what those fundamentals are and how one should go about acquiring/improving them? 

Thanks!

What are software engineering fundamentals?

Across my career, I've felt bad about my skills sometimes because I'll have teammates, who are also at my level, doing as much as 2x more than me. This has led to me feeling like an imposter many times - Any thoughts on how to process all this?

I've felt imposter syndrome from seeing super talented peers - How do I deal with this?

What sorts of reasons make people leave big tech? I recently received an offer from a tech start-up is super interested in my candidacy and they're moving what they can to try to match compensation. The move includes a promotion. It also seems like I'd have access to career growth and learning due to people there wanting to work with me to help me succeed.

However, no matter what they do, they won't be able to match the compensation I'd receive within a few years, assuming I grow into a senior engineer role and stay at a big tech company. I see driven, career-focused individuals moving out of FAANG-like companies to start-ups and non-FAANG companies, so I'm curious: what drives people to do so? When is this the right career move?

When does it make sense to leave big tech?

Entry-Level Software Engineer at Series B Startup

What can I do to get on the radar of senior engineers within the company and build respect for me overall? My company is also relatively small, so I'm fairly close with the CTO as well.

What can I do to quickly build my reputation as a junior engineer?

Entry-Level Software Engineer [E3] at Meta

In particular, I'm having trouble figuring out really complex bugs. For example, on my current project, we're auditing a lot of the existing feature set to see what issues they have so we can fix them as we revamp them. I'm happy to find lots of issues, but I have no idea how to fix them, even after finding a code pointer.

I talked with a senior engineer on my team for help, and they were able to get more color on the situation. However, they mainly were able to do this as they have been in the org for a while and knew who to go to for what: I can't replicate that deep knowledge they have as I'm fairly new to the company. How can I create a systemic process I can follow to figure out these situations?

How can I become more independent and better at unblocking myself with tricky technical issues?

Entry-Level Software Engineer [SDE 1] at Amazon

Amazon is well-known for its design doc reviews, which appear to be small-scale system design reviews. However, I'm having trouble understanding them, let alone recommending modifications.

I'm aware of Alex Xu's Byte by Byte go course, but I'm skeptical using it as it's specifically for interview preparation. I want to learn for the workplace. I can definitely look at blog posts and current design documentation, but I'd prefer something more structured. How can a novice learn system design and grow to the advanced/intermediate level? What books or resources would you suggest?

What are the best resources to learn system design in a structured way?

In fast-paced organisations that launch a lot of features on a quarterly basis and teams with large sizes, how should a tech lead or team members ensure that everyone knows about everything or is enabled to get to know about it?

Quite often, whenever a new feature comes in, it could be repurposing technology built for other features as well. But, given the pace at which these are developed, it is often hard to know what everyone is working on. Sometimes, each of these features may have idiosyncracies that may be getting missed out by new joiners, especially due to the volume of information, especially for teams that have been in existence since a long time.

I recall once when changes for a new feature done by a developer reverted some conditionals for an older feature, thus causing an outage. How do you prevent this and ensure knowledge of everything is available to all, especially to people new to an organisation?

Also, are there some general practices to ensure that these are easily discoverable? Video recordings are time consuming to go through, and wikis though they exist, are sometimes difficult to navigate, when you don't know what you are searching for? I am thinking of something like a mind map could help here, but what are your thoughts?

How do you deal with the explosion of features and ensure that the knowledge is widely distributed/discoverable by the team?

Entry-Level Software Engineer [L3] at Google

I'm really new as a Google FTE (still doing some logistical onboarding like getting my laptop fully set up), but I want to hit the ground running and start growing at Google as fast as possible. However, I don't know what I don't know - There's a lot to take in, and I'm unsure where is best to focus and allocate my time.

Started my 1st FTE SWE job and been on my team for just a few weeks - What should I do?

I'm sure Alex and Rahul talk about this in their [Masterclass "How To Write Better Code Faster as a Software Engineer"](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/iYpRj8XfyzCSaTYnce3y/how-to-write-better-code-faster-as-a-software-engineer-11192022/), but wondering how to write clean code, particularly in the context of someone who doesn't have technical people available to review my pull requests in my work or in side-projects. \
\
I'm sure this skill is almost entirely developed by working with talented people and writing a lot of code, but is there a place for resources like "Clean Code" the book or courses on Udemy?

How to Learn/Practice Clean Code, particularly by oneself?

I'm a self-taught, aspiring Android engineer, looking to land my 1st full-time role. I have around 4 hours a day to learn software development, and I'm wondering how I can spend my time the most efficiently. Here are the 2 core things I want to understand how to balance my time between:
- DSA (data structures and algorithms)
- Building projects for portfolio

How do I balance my time between studying DSA and fleshing out my portfolio?

Senior Salesforce Engineer at Series B Startup

My goal is to become extremely efficient at coding. I want to build a reputation as someone who is able to deliver tons of high-quality implementation and products very quickly. I want to build actual velocity where the actual rate of code per hour/day is really high as opposed to just being able to accomplish more from working extra hours.

What tactics can I use to level myself up in this way so that my old coding abilities feel unrecognizable when looking back 3-6 months in the future from my vast amount of improvement?

After a certain experience there's a certain expectation from Senior Software Engineers, I think because in the beginning of my career I wasn't involved in Development and hence despite being of experience 10 years I think I may not have the design skills required to work independently on a feature.

That said, I am going through LLD questions on YouTube, to understand more about designing from scratch, while I am doing I thought if there's a way to get me upto speed even more. The reason I am asking is because apart from doing Leetcode daily I would like to spend some time daily on design aspect as well.

In summary, I want to work independently, and for that am learning from the internet. I am wondering if that's it or there's something more I can do in my free time to become better developer. Any actionable items would be great.

How to upskill effectively, especially with the software design aspect?

Mid-Level Software Engineer [Senior Associate] at Capital One

Given this industry, switching is always somewhere in my mind. How can I figure out if it makes sense to pursue that or stay? When it comes to staying, how do I know if my current team is conducive to my overall growth and goals going forward?

How do I know when it's time to leave a team/company?

Meta announced that they won’t be giving return offers to interns this summer amidst economic headwinds, which is really demoralizing. 

Other companies are also putting a hold on hiring junior engineers – what should I do?

Meta is rescinding intern offers. How can I succeed now that I can't convert to full-time?

At my old company, where I worked for many, many years, I wasn’t learning anything new. On my new team, I feel like a junior engineer since everything is new. Because of this, I don’t feel like I’m being taken seriously, even my engineers more junior than me.

I'm trying to stay positive throughout this learning process but would obviously like to build up respect among my team as quickly as possible to start feeling like a heavily valued voice in the room. Any advice on how to do that?

How can I quickly gain respect among my team as a senior engineer?

Questions