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Career Advice About Instacart

Videos and discussions from Taro to grow your tech career.

Potential Side Project with a Matchmaking Site (with real users)

Mid-Level Data Engineer at Instacart profile pic
Mid-Level Data Engineer at Instacart

I have an opportunity to work on what could be an interesting side-project.

I was approached by a matchmaker friend of mine to help her with her website. Her website is currently used by ~80 matchmakers and the number of matchmakers is growing. Essentially, the site is a database of profiles that matchmakers can search based on various criteria.

After speaking with my friend, it's clear there are 2 main things that need to be done.

The first is a website migration. Right now the site is hosted on Salesforce which my friend says is expensive, so she's looking to host on something cheaper.

The second thing is she wants to develop a mobile app because so many of the matchmakers matchmake on the go and it's inconvenient for them to use a site that's not optimized for mobile.

This project has a number of great qualities

  1. An area of interest (to me)
  2. Real users with a real business problem
  3. Potential to get paid for my work
  4. Ability to make lots of connections and develop my network
  5. Grow my technical skills through web-dev and mobile-dev

As it happens, a lot of the plusses are also minuses:

  1. I'm a Data Engineer and have never done front-end or mobile-dev, so I'll have to learn a lot and it could be stressful
  2. I'm 2 months into a 6 month contract Data Engineer role at Instacart (my first Big Tech job) and really want to be renewed if possible. Working on this orthogonal project in the evening won't allow me to work on work

Overall, I'm learning towards just punting on this, i.e. telling my friend I don't have time for this right now, helping her find someone, and if I change my mind later on, offering to help then.

Am curious if people feel strongly one way or the other regarding what to do.

Thought are welcome!

Thanks!

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Posted 2 months ago
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2 Comments

Prepping to Move From Slow Finance Company to Fast Big Tech One

Data Engineer at Financial Company profile pic
Data Engineer at Financial Company

I'll be starting at Instacart in a couple weeks as an L4 Data Engineer on contract for 6 months to start. I'm coming from a finance company where things move slowly. I was a high performer in my department while regularly working 3 hours a day or less. Much of my time spent at my old job was dedicated towards finding my new job - applying, interviewing, taking courses, etc.

I know I will encounter a culture shock when I start at IC and want to prepare myself as much as possible for it. Mentally, I am taking the approach that I will put in a solid full-day, 8 hours of work every day and perhaps work some weeknights and weekends as well, although I'd like to minimize the need to do that by being effective and prioritizing work during my regular work hours.

In terms of preparation, from Taro I have gleaned that there are 2 main areas I should be focusing on:

  1. Code Quality and Velocity

  2. Communication

For 1), I have bookmarked on the topic and plan on doing it before I start working. For 2), I have bookmarked and likewise plan on finishing the course before starting work. I actually plan on doing Rahul's Onboarding Course before Alex's Code Course.

Is there anything else I should be aware of? I have gone through already as well as looked over these threads:

I imagine the advice for me is virtually identical to the above threads, but if there's anything I'm missing, please fill me in!

Thanks!!

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Posted 5 months ago
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7 Comments

Paying Attention During Team Stand Ups Vs. Working Through Them

Mid-Level Data Engineer at Instacart profile pic
Mid-Level Data Engineer at Instacart

I'm on a team of 10 people, including my manager. During our weekly meetings, I struggle to pay attention to what's happening when other people give their updates. I only work closely with 2 of my 8 coworkers. For those 2 coworkers, I already have a weekly sync with our manager on a different day. For the time being, I don't have much to do with the other 6 people on my team.

I have 2 questions:

  1. Should I try paying attention to others' updates or should I try and reclaim this time and do work during the meeting? One can make an argument that long-term, it's beneficial for me to know what's happening with the other people on my team, but in general, I'm under the impression that the greedy (short-term) approach is best.
  2. If I should try and pay attention to others, does anyone have tips for doing so? I'm not sure how normal/abnormal I am in being able to pay attention to people, but I've always been a big day-dreamer. In elementary and high school, I was a good student in spite of day-dreaming during class because school was pretty easy and I was self-motivated to learn from the textbook. In university, I was still a big day-dreamer, but I was no longer a good student because school was hard and I couldn't just learn from the textbook. Now, post-school, I am motivated to pay attention to things that really count. e.g. when my boss wants me to do something, you better believe I'm motivated to pay attention closely to what he says. But by default, my mind doesn't want pay attention to anything unless it knows I need to do it. I can try taking notes, but often times there's so much additional knowledge and context the people working on the tickets have that my notes are kinda useless.

Ultimately, this team meeting is only a half hour per week, so it's a huge deal either way, but I'm leaning towards trying to continue working on my tickets during them (i.e. what I know counts).

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Posted 3 months ago
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3 Comments