Asking Great Questions Q&A and Videos

I'm still navigating a career switch to SWE, and I tend to get pretty overwhelmed when looking at code. I already ask a lot of questions, and I want to be more self-sufficient because my full-stack team members are pretty busy. (They are all kind and would all be willing to to take some time out of their day.)

How can I get faster at reading code on my own while balancing a team transition? I'm at the point where I understand the high-level purpose of parts of our codebase but little as to how the moving pieces all fit together.

While I understand that there is likely no magic threshold to determine the point at one needs to ask for codebase navigation guidance, a good rule of thumb would be helpful when possible.

I'm a relatively new engineer at Twitter, so I know that I'm in a "golden period" where I can ask whatever "stupid" questions I want and I won't be judged as much. I ask a good amount of questions and follow the habit of doing 10-15 minutes of research before asking questions, but sometimes I do spend too much time on research and overall, I feel like I can put myself out there more to learn even more from others.

I think this stems from some gaps I have in my confidence, particularly around my ability to communicate in an impactful way. How can I overcome this issue and get the maximum amount of value learning from my teammates?

Re. this on building relationship, I was wondering what questions would you usually ask or like to ask to tactical stakeholders and good to know connections in the company to better know them and strengthen relationships?

First of all, I'm a huge fan of Alex & Rahul and I want to grow in this community together with mentors, seniors & humans.

But lately being in meetings I've stopped asking much more questions to my seniors because they come with limited knowledge whereas GPT can follow up with me can guide me expertly. Whereas it can even give me expert advise in tech career growth and many such areas.

Even I don't even open stack overflow now.

Hello! 👋🏼

I finished my first JIRA ticket today and I was assigned another ticket, but this ticket feels different…its requirements are significantly more vague.

I understand at a high-level what the requirements for this task are:

1. check a folder for new files every x min
2. copy new files to another folder
3. keep track of copied files

These are examples of some the questions I had, however they feel too low-level for the analysis stage.

• what file types can I expect?
• should the frequency be editable?
• how should the program handle a job run that takes > x minutes?

So, my question is this: what high-level questions can I ask to further demystify these vague requirements and future requirements?