Onboarding Q&A and Videos

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

Heard this phrase many times, but would appreciate some elaboration/insights. Let's say I don't have ANY frontend experience in the past, but somehow get hired at a FAANG as a frontend dev. We know onboarding is already tough - meeting new people, understanding new codebase, etc. In the first few weeks especially, how do you manage so many things? You have to go through the onboarding challenges, and on top of that also ramp up on frontend. Isn't that too much to take on? How to make sure I am performing well and learning new things quickly?

Most people spend a tone of time prepping for FAANG interview but once you have the job, you need a different set of skill to be competitive and exceed the job expectations as a SDE. It would have be nice if we had also took the time to build up the skills to do the job better before joining the company. Any recommendation on material to skill up for FAANG job

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.

I've heard Alex, Rahul, and other engineers within Taro talk about handholding when joining a new company for all engineers and for newer engineers in general. What does it mean that an engineer doesn't require handholding anymore? Does this mean the frequency of the questions gets diminished or is it more about needing as much initial help to start tasks or something else entirely?

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?

I'm a new staff engineer at Meta, and I know that the bar is high for E6. In particular, an E6 needs to be able to have a large influence on the roadmap and team charter, leading and creating very substantial projects. All that being said, I want to start crafting and executing that vision as soon as I can to hit the ground running, but I'm unsure on exactly how to do that with Meta's more bottoms-up culture. At my previous job, things were more top-down (i.e. leading with authority, where software engineers work on things because their manager/leadership tells them to). How do I lead the team with this almost opposite engineering culture?

Hi All, Would love to get some advice on how to ask highly pointed questions during a 30 minute conversation with a hiring manager to get the maximum info out of him regarding the team culture and the product. Regarding my preferences... I would love to stick fully on the Backend stack. I have experience working with Python, NodeJS, Typescript and a bit of Java, I have experience working with Infra and databases as well. I get excited working with data at scale but do not have stellar industry experience with it such that I can start being impactful on day 1. Since this will be my first time at a big tech, I want to optimize for a decent to moderate enough ramp up time, good wlb and not being super heavy with oncall at least for my first team. Once I get used to the pace, I'll jump around to start optimizing for impact, visibility and scope. Here is what I have in mind for my Hiring Manager meetings but feel free to add/subtract from this. Basics, what is the product/org What is the team size and team structure (how many E5s, E4s etc) and tech stack. What is the code velocity like on average for an E5. Give me a brief idea about what the first project you have in mind for me, if not tell me about a project an E5 is currently working on.

I'm pretty new to my company, so I've been asking questions and looking for "hand-holding" to bring myself up to speed. I've been having trouble ramping up though - My velocity hasn't been the best, and I've also gotten feedback that I need to be more independent as a senior engineer. This leaves me a bit confused - I know that in order to onboard, you need to seek out help aggressively and ask questions, but this seems opposite of the feedback around being more independent. How do I think about these 2 ideas? Should I just be working harder and spending more time figuring things out on my own?

In this Taro Premium session about onboarding at Robinhood, Alex mentioned that his technical documentation stood out because no one wrote docs in that much detail. Are tech docs mainly for how you plan to accomplish a project and are they useful for junior engineers? If so, how do you write good technical documentation?