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If you have a new manager joining to manage your team, how can you ramp them up quickly on all the work you have done before them, the impact you have generated, your role in the team.

I started my career in a mid-level startup that was on the verge of IPO. I contributed a lot. Learnt a lot in terms of how to deliver big scale features relatively quickly, work within sharp deadlines, owning features and products. I was a high performer.

After 2 years of working in that company, I decided to switch to Big Tech for better compensation. While Snap is not exactly a Big Tech company, this is what I had in mind when switching.

I immediately started adding value in terms of delivering features and owning products. However, since I come from a mid-level startup, my soft skills are very weak. I am an excellent programmer, but I struggle writing Technical Design Docs. I deliver features quickly, but I don't know how to contribute to the spec sheets and writing launch emails, holding engineering sessions, efficiently using 1:1s. It feels like in my previous company, delivering features on time, writing quality code was enough to be a high performer, but seems like Big Tech requires a lot more. My manager's ex-Amazon, so he values tech docs a lot, and I feel like I am missing a huge opportunity here by not being good at them.

How do I adapt better to this work environment ?

I have 2.5 years of experience and working as an L3 engineer at Snap. To give you a bit more context about the structure of my team, We have 2 L3s, 2 L4s and 1 L5 in the team.

We just had our half yearly performance review. The review I got from my manager for the half yearly performance reviews was “exceeds expectations”. Clearly, I am a high performer, and in any other case, having 2.5 years of experience, I would be looking at a promotion in the next 6months-1year. However, the other L3 in the team got “redefines expectations” in his performance review.

We have same years of experience. He is a better engineer than me. He manages projects better than me, his output delivery is faster than me, he’s really good at writing technical docs as well as communicating stuff to the important stakeholders. There is no debate as to who is the better software engineer in team.

My question is, how much having him in the team affects the speed of growth from my career ? I am completing 3 years of experience soon and want to get promoted to L4. However I don’t see any situation where I am promoted before him, and I worry that this means delay of my promotion considering he'd be promoted before me and we already have many L4s in the team.

Am I overthinking this? I just want to know if switching companies or teams would be more beneficial for me than waiting in this team. Should I discuss about this with my manager ? While he is very focussed on making sure that the teams does well, I don't get the feeling from him that he cares too much about my professional growth.

One thing that I learnt in one of the taro videos is to choose the right project for the career growth. However, I lacked this kind of vision/ability to evaluate. What I can do to improve this weakness? Should I grow more engineering domain knowledge or should I take some business courses to further improve myself?

Currently, I have interviewed many companies and got many offers. However, I am struggling on what company/team to choose to maximize my potential impact and career growth in the future? What questions do I need to ask so that I will know better which team/company is best fit for me?

Apologies for the long post.

Before Snap, I was working as an Entry Level Software Engineer in a company that had just IPO'd. The growth opportunity was amazing, and I was learning a lot, but I wanted to work for Big Tech for better compensation.

I worked in that company for 2 years after my graduation. And then I switched to Snap Inc as an L3 engineer. At my previous company, I was up for promotion in a few months, and I probably made the bad (in hindsight) decision to switch at that time instead of waiting for a few months, getting promoted and then trying for L4 at Snap (I don't know if Snap would still have offered L4)

Now I am almost completing 6 months at Snap (so total 2.5 years of experience) and I talked about promo with my manager. And he told me that he isnt putting me up for promotion in the next cycle (in 6 months) as I need more than >1 year experience (around 1.5 years) in the company for promotion. So this means the realistic cycle for which he would consider me would be a year from now (at that point I'd be 3.5 years work experience). Which to me feels way too late. For some context, I am a high performer with "exceeds expectations" feedback from my manager, so the only thing stopping me from getting promoted is my tenure in the company (acc to my manager)

My question is, should I wait for another year or should I start looking outward and considering I am 2.5 years right now (and 3 years by the time I get an offer) I should be able to get L4 in a Big Tech (I think?) I am not super certain about the future of the company as well so I will most probably be switching even after promotion.

All my college friends are L4's and SDE2's so I feel like I am behind in my career.

I'm a new engineer at Snap, and my first month here is for onboarding. My team does internal tooling, and I have my first major project already lined up.

My manager said this should take an L4 engineer 1-2 months with a lot of help from the tech lead. This tech lead is a senior engineer pushing for promo.

The stack is a mix of Java, Go, and Python - I'm a back-end engineer on the team. However, I'm transitioning from a field that's pretty far from back-end. I'm wondering how I can make this transition as soon as possible and make sure I onboard well into the team?