Editor's Choice Q&A and Videos

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?

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?

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

Before I was at Meta, I worked at a networking company for 10+ years. It was very different from Meta as a massive consumer web company. On top of the domain differences, the culture is also very different between these 2 companies. I'm working on ML at Meta, which is something I'm pretty new to. As a senior engineer who wants to make an impact quickly and make a push for staff, how can I effectively make this domain switch to hit the ground running fast?

I see engineers like Alex and Rahul, and they have had many accomplishments with pretty fast trajectories leveling up. I'm wondering if there's a primary common theme among software engineers like that - What are they doing that others aren't?

I have been at SDE 2 for a couple years now, and I feel like getting to SDE 3 is unnecessarily complicated. I've gone through multiple teams, and the recurring theme is that there isn't enough SDE 3 scope for me. You also need a lot of documentation (think 5+ pages) to show that you have the sufficient impact to deserve the promo, and that's really daunting as well. Any tips on how I can find that SDE 3 scope and navigate this senior promotion in general?

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!

Is sprint planning and agile not a thing at meta? I’m doing a lot of research since I’m trying to see how it’s like as I’m spending time leetcoding and if the vibes there are it’s on you to plan your projects and set a timeline then sprint planning would actually make the engineers not excel in independent planning? And it seems like it’s against good e4 performance to be prompted to set your deliverables at the end of the sprint? Just not sure how agile is used cuz if it’s on everyone to figure out how to project manage on their own then what’s the point of agile?

I get a lot of JIRA tickets for bugs where it's not clear what the fix should be. How can I find the problem area and relevant code faster with these issues?

I work in as an iOS engineer. My current company is a startup that's scaling up fast. In classic startup fashion, testing was historically not a top priority here. As a consequence, we struggle with lots of manual QAing and low code confidence when modifying pieces of poorly tested legacy code. This has improved in the past year simply by unit testing every new piece of code by default and by introducing unit tests in legacy code as we touch it, boy scouting style. At this point, I think we need to step it up and I'm looking forward to formalising a testing strategy for our mobile team. Here are some ideas I have: In the realm of unit tests: - I want to introduce API contract tests because our back-end API lacks documentation. In these tests we'd unit test the way we build our requests to API endpoints, and we'd have a sample JSON response from the server to test that the app can parse it into our data models as expected. - I want to introduce localisation tests because our app supports many languages but we are always manually testing localisation. In these tests, we'd assert that the outputs of our formatting logic are the ones we want for different locales. In the realm of user interface tests: - I want to introduce snapshot testing, because right now the only way we can test that our views are rendered as expected for different view configurations (for example RTL vs LTR, empty content, loading content, content in verbose languages, etc.) is manually. - I want to introduce UI tests (sparingly, only for key flows) because we have no e2e tests. Currently, key flows are tested manually and frequently to prevent regressions, which takes lots of time. What other testing strategies can I propose to establish some standard we can use to further improve our code confidence, reduce bugs, and rely more on automated testing? How do the top tier tech companies approach mobile testing?

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

I'm sure Alex and Rahul talk about this in their Masterclass "How To Write Better Code Faster as a Software Engineer", 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?

I'm defining a career path for my company, and don't know where to start. I would like to see how Meta, Google are doing this so that I can tailor to match my smaller company.