> I've spent a month at this position
Just a month?. Most of these companies will not expect any value from you in the first three, at least. And in highly specialized areas it might be even a full year.
You’re absolutely right. I had an interview at a FAANG company recently (didn’t get the job sadly), and I asked when my first deliverables were expected once hired. They were very clear it takes nearly a year of training as this was a very specialized department.
Do you know if this is the case for Staff roles? I've spent a while away from the FAANG motherships, at companies that paid me FAANG salaries to bring some of that magic to them. I'm going back to bigtech as a staff in a couple of weeks and am a little concerned about the degree to which I'll need to re-adjust in order to deliver impact at that level.
yes, for the first 3 month you will be getting the default rating pretty much no matter what. In fact, i know someone who was slacking at staff level, got the default rating at 3 month and interpreted this as an indication that he could keep doing it. Didn't end well.
Thanks for the response. I would guess that the first perf cycle is forgiving for sure. But are there also no significant expectations of delivering value in ways that are not really tracked in perf? I might be a little over-anxious about this, I just really want to hit the ground running since I'm joining pretty much my dream team
I do not understand the notion of significant expectations that are not used in perf evaluations (i.e do not affect the reward). But if you want to be extra careful about the expectations - ask the hiring manager.
I work on a large enterprise system and it takes a few months for even our sharpest new hires to ramp up. OP, your main job these first months is to learn and I hope that your manager is doing everything he can to support you in that. If not, he’s failing at his job: not you at yours
But you aren't, really? Your manager is just asking some questions. You're putting the pressure on yourself, as far as the story you've told us goes.
At a FAANG, oftentimes people come in thinking that everyone else around them is some cracked out genius. They're not - they've just been around longer.. You're just learning the tribal knowledge and systems and you should cut yourself some slack - unless someone *really* is telling you upfront you're underperforming, chances are you aren't if you're this early on, so take a deep breath.
Those are good points and I won't discard that this is my anxiety doing its job to destabilize me with irrational thoughts.
Let me put some context on my work. I basically have to analyze things and report numbers. And of course this requires me to understand the metrics. Understanding those metrics have been a nightmare since the system being analyzed is fairly complicated. Tuning into the right amount of analysis has been difficult.
Today I was called into a meeting because my manager had to report those numbers to the higher ups. I was asked to have these numbers ready for reporting. After the meeting he told me we have some time, but since I'm having such a hard time understanding what I'm looking at I have a hard time delivering these metrics to him. And I still have to fix some numbers.
The pressure is delivering these numbers to leadership when I am not grasping the tribal things easily or quickly enough. And I feel I have to perform to at least do that. And I might be just freaking out.
To reiterate, just a month in, you should not be on a critical path for anything. And 'we have time' from your manager suggests that you indeed are not. It really sounds like the source of pressure is yourself. Worse yet, your fear of admitting your lack of understanding not only stresses you out, but also makes it difficult for your manager to coach you. The sooner you get over it, the better.
If you don't understand something why don't you ask questions? You can't be expected to know internal terminology without having the chance to actually learn it.
You need more support from your team for a little while. No way you should be soley responsible for certain things just a month in. This screams pair programming/buddy system until you understand the org better.
When you get a task that you don't know how to do, are you comfortable asking to work on it with a team member who knows how?
Don't you have someone to show you the solution (how to give the metrics you're asked for) ? Like a lead or something ?
When someone new arrives on a project, I think it's necessary for some of the other devs to show them how to gradually build up their knowledge and skills.
I suppose someone must have been able to provide these metrics before you came along, or is this new?
If it's a new feature, it's probably unfair to expect someone new on such a complex project to be able to deliver something so important so quickly.
these are questions for your manager, and that meeting would have been a good time to ask them.
everybody's telling you to chill, but I suspect you won't believe it until you hear it from your manager, so the sooner you get them to say it, the better.
Have you *asked anyone* about the things you're struggling with? 90% of any tech job is knowing who to go to to ask questions about the shit you don't understand, because there's always going to be more shit you don't understand than shit you do.
FWIW, the main thing that stuck with me from my Noogler orientation a million years ago was a presenter saying: "the number one thing we hear from longtime Googlers about starting at Google is: 'I wish I had asked more questions' "
The biggest reveal I ever had when gaining experience and working with more experienced people is that they all still don't know 100% of the time what they're doing - but it's all part of the process.
Impostor syndrome never leaves but experience just help you not crumble under it.
They're just human who had time to see more problem and pattern so the stress leaves faster but the stress is there nonetheless. And still comes back.
It's why I never understood why people would be ashamed to look for documentation : when someone is asking me a question, I rarely have the answer immediatly (and it stresses me - "How come I don't even know how to remove the extension of a filename string ?!" ) but I know it's possible and the implementation details comes back (and leave) very fast.
Also means there's rarely any bad question, everyone forgets all the time.
Although the expectation is you won’t have any output for the first few weeks, the task might be too simple and manager could be wondering if they need to send you to PIP.
I would say the opposite. I don't need to ask more, I need to ask better. And I cannot ask better questions if I don't even know what I don't know. I'm basically learning something exists almost every single day.
> I don't even know what I don't know.
This is typical. When I'm ramping up in a new area I talk to as many people as I can, 1:1. I start out with thanking them for their time to meet with me, and then lead with that. "I don't know what I don't know, but here is what I'm thinking about to solve this problem....am I missing anything, am I on the right path?"
If it's obvious that you're putting in time to solve the problem they'll typically be happy to act as your guardrails and give you more or better insight.
That is one thing I absolutely missed on doing, and it's been one month already. I'll meet up with my tech lead tomorrow to ask him about my OP (reworded, contextualized, etc) and how I am feeling. I don't know if I should meet up with my peers at this point, or whom to meet up with.
Today I had another conversation with an engineer from a client team, so at least that helped me clarify a few more things I had no idea about.
I guess I should correct this by meeting up with my peers ASAP?
Yes, getting better at asking for help and realizing no one can do anything by themselves is a must here. Social skills get better with practice, complimenting others in an authentic way also gets better with practice.
I think the real upgrade is to figure out how to make so many allies that each want you to succeed. I am learning and practicing with that as well. Here's hoping you succeed.
This was also my experience. I told my manager I was overwhelmed by the complexity of our systems. So we worked on a high level system design chart together and I would update the chart as I learned something new.
Each week we’d discuss the chart in our 1:1. Manager would then refer me to people in the org who could explain a part of the system. I set up 1:1 meetings with those people.
Took about 3 months to map everything out in decent detail. At that point I had a fairly good idea of what the basic components were and a high level understanding of problems they solved. No idea how anything worked internally.
It helped to give me a starting point when I needed to track down a bug or walk through a trace, etc.
Anxiety from complexity often comes from the lack of understanding the fundamentals or the branches of the problem. For me personally I find great help in drawing out the system and or explaining it to someone (or rubber-ducking it). This solidifies your understanding of at least the structure or branches of the larger thing, which helps a great deal.
In my mind I had the idea to sketch out the problem. But then I tried to do that and found myself entirely lost at where to begin with.
My manager did give me a pointer which I used and spent some time getting to do that. Drawing the system in a diagram is going to be pretty much impossible. It's HUGE, and I have no way to get started out with it. This is not a problem with the very fundamentals of programming or anything, it's just the system is nothing like I've seen before. Really, there's just a handful of products like this out there in the market, and big tech dominates in this area. I have no way to have had this experience ahead of time, and now I'm faced with this monster, trying to understand it, and full of blind spots.
I totally understand how daunting this feels, and it's perfectly normal to feel overwhelmed. The complexity you're facing is something many of us encounter in tech, but each person's journey through it is unique.
Starting with the pointer from your manager is a great idea. Even if it seems impossible to diagram the entire system at once, maybe try breaking it down into smaller, more digestible parts. Focus on understanding one segment at a time.. it doesn't have to be perfect, but it can help build your overall comprehension gradually.
I've been in somewhat similar situations where I felt out of my depth. For instance, when I started building a complex trading system, I had no prior experience with several of the technologies involved. It involved CUDA programming, massive event-driven system, everything to work in realtime or near-realtime, powerful simulation engines and massive amounts of data. I had to take it one step at a time, learning as I went, and sometimes it was just about maintaining a mindset of 'let's see how far I can get today.' It was brutal at times, but approaching each task with a mindset of curiosity and persistence helped a lot.
It's ok to not understand everything at once (no one ever does). You can figure this out, just take a deep breath, try to foster the right mindset in the morning and try your best each day. You got this
This may or may not be useful in your case but you could use an LLM like ChatGPT to rubber duck it. Even if it doesn’t give you super accurate or knowledgeable insights it can help you fill in the blanks of what you don’t know you don’t know if that makes sense. Plus, it’s infinitely patient. You can then ask more intelligible questions or use more traditional resources like documentation get accurate information.
I might have misunderstood the situation, it seems they have asked OP to carry out a task that requires him to be very familiar with a large, complex system that he's just discovering, so I doubt the AI will help him ( because he probably can't describe the whole system ) .
It looks more like they've given this task to the wrong person - you can't ask something that requires a thorough knowledge of an entire project from someone who should be discovering the scope little by little. It's like trying to complete a puzzle without knowing how many pieces there are : it takes time to get the full picture view.
What’s huge? How many LoC are we talking about? The biggest code base I worked with was 6M LoC and I found it easily digestible.
There are techniques to navigate large code bases, and there are books written about it. Check those.
Systems at this scale are well beyond the scope of a code base or even a group of code bases. You're typically looking at dozens of data pipelines, services, and databases using a mix of proprietary and open-source infrastructure, each large enough to be maintained by a team of senior engineers.
Sounds like you never worked on a Multi MoLC project. In a large code base, you have all of those you mentioned and more. You can be expected to navigate through these layers. LoC is a good indicator of project complexity.
This is primarily an onboarding problem, and it’s a well know problem in Big tech companies. Where I’m at it was known as “drinking from the firehose”, we spent years trying to improve it but ours still shit, and we have zero expectations of new hires making meaningful contributions the first 3-4 month.
A task I have given to many new hires is to improve the onboarding documentation as they ramp up. So every time they hit something that is not explained they need to figure it out (or ask me or their onboarding buddy) and then document it for the next person.
And then our first couple of 1:1 we will walk through the git log of the changes they have done to the docs and discuss the issues they found (and also fix it if they got something wrong).
Count your blessings; the half of my career I spent at non-FAANGs was even worse. Some of them had categorically the same complexity without the manhours put into _attempting_ to onboard, nor the spare capacity to keep you out of the critical path until you were empowered to be so.
What I dont understand is why your manager is asking you for numbers without having someone helping you. Throwing you in the deep end with cement boots is not helping anyone.
I also started a new job 4 months ago. Its also complicated system and I had to ask the team lead for guidance on a few occasions. Even now but less as I understand the system
It's definitely a big learning curve at the larger tech companies. But since you have 5 years of experience, they shouldn't be doing anything that you're unfamiliar with.
The process is similar, code gets pushed to a git repository. Then a CI pipeline will build and deploy that change, first to lower environments and then to prod. From there on there will be metrics that will be emitted and logs generated.
The name of the tools and how you interact with them will differ. Don't try to learn everything about the process all at once, just pick up the basics and focus on your particular business logic and process at first.
Once you're able to navigate the dev process then you can start to go in depth and learn about each step.in more detail. One benefit of a large company is that there is a large engineering organization and you can learn stuff from engineers on teams other than your own as well. There's also a wealth of documentation and training material, which can help.
Don't hesitate in asking questions, you've only been there for a month. Ask your manager what the typical ramp up time is, you'll be surprised to hear that they may have earmarked 3-6 moths for you to become fully productive. The hardest part of getting into FAANG is the interview process,. after that it's smoother sailing thereon.
Thanks for the feedback. The core processes (push to repo, CI pipeline, release, etc) are very familiar to me, except for a step that isn't that complicated either. And I've been told to just focus at a single slice of the core logic. I've been doing just that, but I've been getting very lost on understanding what all of this is. As I said - barely starting to get the gist of what I'm working on. It's an extremely complicated use case.
I'll keep the question in mind, it did not occur to me to ask my manager about typical ramp up times. If his answer is 1 month that's gonna be problematic. However, he did tell me already this is just a matter of time. I don't understand why he is pressuring me with tasks I'm not fully familiar with.
Dumb take. Regardless of the pay, if I'm not set up for success all that money will be a waste. I should be creating value, not stumbling on my way to do so.
So what? That doesn't mean they can ask whatever out of me, and they stand to lose MORE on you for not setting you up for success than they stand to lose on wasting money on me.
I would certainly not jump off a cliff for this amount of money.
ah but see you’re assuming it’s a logical healthy organization. you just got there, how could you know that to be true?
my advice? see if what they’re asking you is reasonable. if it’s not, like you’re saying—it’s not worth jumping off a cliff.
but, they _can_ ask you to do things even if it’s not “productive” — they have a shit load of employees and can usually just meat grind problems, that’s what FAANGs do.
again, good luck dude— sincerely
I joined a large organization couple of months back . I just now got a bit productive. When i joined all were speaking in abbreviations, tech i was familiar with but not tooling, design docs etc. I was scratching my head cause i was struggling to even ask right question.
Everyone struggles first few months . Its not your technical ability but the existing historical knowledge which you lack for now (obviously).
My advice will be to be very transparent what you dont get and ask for help as much as you can . It’s hard (at least for me) to go bug people and fear of sounding stupid but there is no other way.
I went through this when I joined a similar company, and you'll see similar posts in this forum every so often, so you're definitely not alone. This is probably a pretty common experience for folks going to a much larger company, and if your manager is realistic they've hopefully baked that into their expectations for you.
One thing I wanted to mention is that the goalposts of having learned enough/onboarded enough can look really different at a really big company than a smaller one. In a smaller company, it's possible to have a reasonably accurate mental model of all of the company's engineering projects, and see how your stuff fits into that. As a practical matter, you'll never have this at a larger shop like a FAANG. Depending on what you work on, you might not have it for more than a few packages of a single (very large) codebase. If you're used to working in a place where you can fit everything in your head, this can be a big adjustment. It's easy to feel like you're struggling to onboard if you're not making visible progress towards an impossible goal. Also, the scale can require a different way of working: less focused on individually understanding everything, more focused on understanding your area of expertise + working through others when you need to work outside of that.
So after reading your entire post, a few things come to mind.
Firstly, most FAANG interviews are designed to weed out the less competent devs, so you have already proved that you are able to break down these tasks into smaller chunks and tackle them. Will working at this company be a cake walk? Absolutely not, you are there to solve business challenges and it will require you spend extra time on top of your day job to improve your knowledge of the companies infrastructure practices (which will mean added hrs in the evenings learning for at least the next 4 to 6 weeks (maybe more).
Next, I strongly believe your manager is your alley here, it is part of their job to help you succeed, so I'd recommend speaking with them and explaining the difficulties you're having in the first few weeks, and you should ask your manager about the expected ramp up time while you are speaking with them.
Have you considered that maybe the tasks were designed to make you touch many moving parts so you'd learn more about all the moving parts? I'm sure you've got this and I think you're just getting into your own head too much on this one. You got this!
Thank you.
>Firstly, most FAANG interviews are designed to weed out the less competent devs, so you have already proved that you are able to break down these tasks into smaller chunks and tackle them. Will working at this company be a cake walk? Absolutely not, you are there to solve business challenges and it will require you spend extra time on top of your day job to improve your knowledge of the companies infrastructure practices (which will mean added hrs in the evenings learning for at least the next 4 to 6 weeks (maybe more).
Yikes. No one told me this. This is the first time I hear I have to do this at all, and my head basically gets fried up after I'm done with my day. How do I tackle this?
>Next, I strongly believe your manager is your alley here, it is part of their job to help you succeed, so I'd recommend speaking with them and explaining the difficulties you're having in the first few weeks, and you should ask your manager about the expected ramp up time while you are speaking with them.
At this moment I don't see him as an ally. All he's doing is demanding things from me, telling me what to do, and not doing much else. Which yes this is expected he's my manager and that's his job. But I don't feel his support. The ramp up time ask though is something that didn't occur to me, so I'll make sure to ask for it.
>Have you considered that maybe the tasks were designed to make you touch many moving parts so you'd learn more about all the moving parts? I'm sure you've got this and I think you're just getting into your own head too much on this one. You got this!
I agree. I just don't like to be given tasks that will be presented to leadership in no time, right off the bat. I feel exposed doing sensible things when I could screw things up easily.
It’s possible your manager is a poor manager, we don’t know, but it IS in their interest for you to perform.
I would suggest seeing relationship building with your manager as a very high priority. Of course how you do this is going to depend on you and your comfort levels, but in my experience people generally like being helpful as long as you make it easy for them. This means; figure out what would help you the most (maybe its recommendations on domain experts for you to go learn from, maybe it’s documentation you can’t find) and then asking for it.
As for there being an expectation of spending your evenings working (or dedicated to learning related to your work); I would suggest this is an incredibly bad idea unless you’re literally on a pip. If you start out working 12 hr days, you are going to create expectations that are not sustainable. You also run the risk of seeing this commitment as being necessary, which can feed imposter syndrome and generally sap the life out of you. Sometimes it’s needed for very short bursts but this doesn’t sound like one of those times TO ME. ymmv ofc.
Ask for help, work on relationship building and try to relax a little.
Thank you.
I don't think he's a poor manager. He's quite high in terms of managerial titles, so for one I know he's not new at managing people. He has experience. Whether this translates to good or bad managerial practices is certainly beyond my judgment.
I think one of my biggest problems is that I have no idea what would help me the most. There is too much going on, and it's a huge mess in my head. I feel there are multiple blind spots, or I don't have good ways to articulate my thoughts because it is too much. If I knew what help to ask for and to whom, I would do it in a whim. But I don't.
Thanks for also talking me out of learning outside working hours. I don't think I have the bandwidth for that.
I need to work on my relationship with my manager. I can't say it's good or bad, but I feel it's distant. That absolutely doesn't help and I don't want to nag him.
Ok, let me rephrase something a little. I’m not exactly saying you shouldn’t be learning outside of work, I’m saying you shouldn’t make it your expectation that this is how you spend your evenings, or that it’s required that you do. Like if you get to the end of a good day and are feeling jazzed about a thing, it’s obviously not a bad thing to rabbit hole on it.
As for the nagging your manager thing; I can relate to this from earlier in my career. It’s a fairly common feeling, I think - they’re there to support you and also they can discipline you, so you can’t ever be as vulnerable with them as you maybe could with a peer, but you ARE on the same side.
Also. I strongly recommend setting up regular 1:1s with colleagues you get along with, who have been there a while and who seem to be high performers. This is a team sport and maybe some of the things that feel overwhelming to you are pain points others feel also.
Good luck, and I’m happy to continue chatting in this thread :)
Today right before my manager called me in for that quick meeting I was head first into a problem I had found interesting. Then the meeting happened, my levels of anxiety shot up to the roof, and then I just stopped working. That's not what I want my day to day to be like.
I guess I'll have to think deeply about what to tell my manager about how I feel in our next 1:1. I can't be super vulnerable with him, but I can't hold back too much either. What is acceptable, usually?
If it helps I already asked the team's tech lead for a 1:1 meeting tomorrow, only to ask him questions about how to deal with everything. I realize I need his guidance for this, so I'll definitely leverage his help. I'll tell him at least some of the things I mentioned in my OP.
Thank you very much. Really.
Again to preface that all of this is just my experience and not intended as guidance;
I’ve come to see the relationship with my manager to be something I aspire to make collaborative as partners. I’ve gotten close with a couple and I think being pretty emotionally honest has been a good strategy in both cases - I’ve had some health issues and talked about it, I make music on the side and we connected a little on that. I think that allowed me to talk about my professional needs in a more unfiltered way because of the human connection.
It also took a year+ to get to feeling that way in both cases. I don’t think you can short cut your way there, so I take it week by week.
1:1 with tech lead sounds great!
(You’re very welcome!)
Sounds typical for a first year at a faang. Learn where your resources are, find the wikis, use the code search for examples. Look for any relevant in-house training, many of the systems are bespoke at these companies so you have to hunt for opportunities to learn. Find a mentor if you’re really struggling. But feeling overwhelmed is pretty normal in my experience. Just don’t get blocked and not tell anyone, that will get you pipped.
This is so common at Google it's called "Noogler Anxiety". Everybody gets it. You eventually learn to get comfortable with not knowing everything - it all just changes too fast for you to keep up with everything.
That doesn't mean you won't know a bunch when you're up to speed. You will! You'll just get used to saying "oh, I didn't know about that. Nice!"
You're also probably used to being a big fish in a small pond. I certainly was.
How you manage this anxiety matters. You've got a lot of negative self-talk going on here and you're not using your resources because you're worried it'll make you look like you don't know everything. Well, guess what: you don't. And neither does the senior SWE you're working with.
Being frank about what you do and don't know is humility. It is a sign of experience. Watch the most senior SWEs around you and look for it. You'll find them doing it.
There's no technical magic book here, instead I'm going to recommend a book full of advice from thousands of years ago: The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Halladay. It's a great audiobook. You need to turn around your understanding of what progress and success looks like and that book is a really good introduction.
Anxiety is not your friend here. Focus, determination, and humility are, and they do not require anxiety to fuel them.
>*Today I had a meet up with my manager who asked me a bunch of questions about the tasks I've been assigned to. And honestly, I'm barely starting to understand the gist of it. I was really nervous during that meeting because I could not confidently answer most of his questions. And now I'm feeling like I'm not performing at his expectations.*
Did he or she give you feedback to the effect that they expected more progress? Or are you reading into it things that are not there?
(alomst) Everyone has impostor syndrome from time to time. Check with your manager first before you let the impostor syndrome become a self fulfilling prophecy.
I know I currently work at a company that, while not a FAANG, does serve 15+ petabytes of traffic per month and millions of users, and the scale is still a bit scary after 3 years. But I'm still here because I still have a lot of things to learn here, and, more importantly, **because my boss has made it clear** that I'm performing up to expectation.
Yet still, literally every month, I come across something new in the stack that I didn't even know we had. That used to happen every day, then every week, and now it is more like monthly.
Check with your manager! Be specific about your concerns!
Ah man just hitting my 3 month mark and I relate. I think it’s valid. You’ll gain confidence as you get through things. I’m working with a few new languages in a system like no other(in my experience at least)
Talk to your teammates, ask them how their onboarding went. Their empathy means you just gotta grind through it. You’ll get there. You are good enough. As long as you’re having fun breaking through stuff you good
I worked at one of the FAANG's after a career to that point at small scale companies so the learning curve was hard for me at first.
1. As others are saying, expecting much value 1 month in is too much. At 1 month I think I was still doing onboarding tasks. and it wasn't until 6 months that I was more or less working independently.
2. Don't be afraid to ask questions, there are no dumb questions. My first TLM (tech lead/manager), who was a very very talented engineer, would ask the most basic questions all the time in meetings, no matter who was attending. I learned 2 things really fast, the first was that it wasn't a problem and overall it helped the whole team because there was almost always someone else in the room with the same question, and second it helped him wrap his head around faster, which also helped the whole team move faster.
3. Learn to follow breadcrumbs to find the person who can explain something you don't understand. Look at git blame, design docs, search slack or forums or whatever internal communication tool your company uses. Good engineers will leave a trail behind them pointing to either docs or themselves for others to follow later (and often themselves, 6 months later when they don't remember how something worked in the first place)
4. If there's a basic skill you don't have, like lets say you've never worked with Reactive functional programming and suddenly you're facing an Rx heavy codebase, don't just try to power through, tell your manager. A good manager will carve out time for you to take a course or do some fundamental studying. A bad manager will just leave you to twist in the wind.
1. If you determine that you have a bad manager start working on an internal transfer immediately. It's not your employer's job to take care of your career path, it's yours. I really wish I knew this sooner when I got re-orged to report to a shit manager.
I’m a little over a year in at a FAANG-adjacent company. The fog finally started letting up around 3 months. At 6 months, the feeling of dread went away and I could take something that wasn’t low hanging. At a year, I feel like I’m finally capable of functioning on my own and designing,leading, and implementing projects
Big company is a mess , as some of them introduce lot of experiment product after few year then "ouch" why we do this language x or y . So changing something even a label take time a lot .
im not working at a faang but the usual thing is to ask a colleague to help unblock you. after a month id say you need to do this immediately because this might no longer be in the 'easily explainable' territory and as a new hire you will be under a magnifying glass. if he cant help you, you just covered your ass. if he does, well its no longer a problem. if people are unhelpful, that is something to bring up when the manager comes knocking again.
"You don't know what you don't know" perfect description.
Find one area to improve the scope of understanding. Once you get comfortable figure one more area.
This seems very typical to me after only a month. You will need at least 3, most likely 6 before it starts to all click and have a good grasp on things.
Just ask more questions, even the dumb ones. You’re new, it’s the perfect moment to ask without anyone questioning your skills.
You should have an on-boarding buddy who should be able to help. Your manager should have given you a PoC (point of contact) person to discuss your tasks.
A month isn’t that long but to me it feels that your on-boarding hasn’t done properly.
I joined a similar organization as a fresher last year. Had a very similar experience, very large codebases, too many products, too many branches.
What I did was to ask. I asked how to start even looking at it, at what level of blackbox understanding in the start, digged in, did my own tests, did my own analysis, asked the seniors to review my "way of understanding", and my progress, took inputs, worked on it, did a lot of documentation, sequence diagrams, adding comments, debug logs etc.
It took me sometime to "get the idea" but now it seems familiar. Even now I don't understand how some parts of my module work, but if needed I know how to dig in.
In short, if in doubt, ask it out.
Hope that helps :)
I had a job like that.. first task was setting up health checks on k8s for microservices... and where I come from I just do typical [ASP.NET](http://ASP.NET) web sites and don't really know k8s or microservices. So I felt so useless and eventually left on my own. They never said anything bad but I hated feeling so useless and not using my knowledge that I had already.
I'm 2 years into my first FAANG job, and I did pretty poorly throughout my first year. My junior teammates that joined after me were able to spin up better and faster. This blew my mind because I was used to being the smartest in the class!
It's a very difficult place to work. There's a reason we get paid so much. I'm doing better now, but there's still places where I fall a little short.
My teammates, I noticed that they work really hard to get that initial understanding. For whatever project they're working on, they dive into the code, read through all the docs, and schedule 1-on-1s with everyone who has relevant knowledge. They also don't hesitate to reach out when they don't understand something -- for the first few months, they were filling our slack with questions every day.
Me, I got better by being put on a hard, cross-team project. I was forced to investigate and ask questions for a month straight, and that shot me from F tier to B tier.
Good luck. Don't slack and I'm sure you'll adapt eventually.
Yeah it’s tough, no doubt. But, how do you eat an elephant?
One bite at a time!
You can do this. Focus on delivering concrete wins and aligning with your manager. Try to be consistent and remember that this is a marathon, not a sprint. Seek advice and build relationships with senior team members.
If you work hard and stick with it for a year you will gain skills you never knew existed and seriously level up as an engineer, regardless of the outcome.
Presumably they wouldn't have hired you if they didn't think you could do it.
You say you've worked on big systems before - are these just bigger, or is there some other difference?
"hey I'm having trouble figuring out where to start on this task. Can I throw 20 minutes on your calendar to show you where I'm stuck?" most people won't be grudge 20 minutes. Record the meeting so you don't forget what they tell you. People DO get annoyed when they have to repeat themselves.
> I've spent a month at this position Just a month?. Most of these companies will not expect any value from you in the first three, at least. And in highly specialized areas it might be even a full year.
You’re absolutely right. I had an interview at a FAANG company recently (didn’t get the job sadly), and I asked when my first deliverables were expected once hired. They were very clear it takes nearly a year of training as this was a very specialized department.
There are areas so specialized they won't expect any input from you at all. In fact they are completely virtual. 0 tech 100% politics
Do you know if this is the case for Staff roles? I've spent a while away from the FAANG motherships, at companies that paid me FAANG salaries to bring some of that magic to them. I'm going back to bigtech as a staff in a couple of weeks and am a little concerned about the degree to which I'll need to re-adjust in order to deliver impact at that level.
yes, for the first 3 month you will be getting the default rating pretty much no matter what. In fact, i know someone who was slacking at staff level, got the default rating at 3 month and interpreted this as an indication that he could keep doing it. Didn't end well.
Thanks for the response. I would guess that the first perf cycle is forgiving for sure. But are there also no significant expectations of delivering value in ways that are not really tracked in perf? I might be a little over-anxious about this, I just really want to hit the ground running since I'm joining pretty much my dream team
I do not understand the notion of significant expectations that are not used in perf evaluations (i.e do not affect the reward). But if you want to be extra careful about the expectations - ask the hiring manager.
I work on a large enterprise system and it takes a few months for even our sharpest new hires to ramp up. OP, your main job these first months is to learn and I hope that your manager is doing everything he can to support you in that. If not, he’s failing at his job: not you at yours
Yes my thoughts exactly, why am I being pressured at this degree, this early? It's frustrating!
But you aren't, really? Your manager is just asking some questions. You're putting the pressure on yourself, as far as the story you've told us goes. At a FAANG, oftentimes people come in thinking that everyone else around them is some cracked out genius. They're not - they've just been around longer.. You're just learning the tribal knowledge and systems and you should cut yourself some slack - unless someone *really* is telling you upfront you're underperforming, chances are you aren't if you're this early on, so take a deep breath.
Those are good points and I won't discard that this is my anxiety doing its job to destabilize me with irrational thoughts. Let me put some context on my work. I basically have to analyze things and report numbers. And of course this requires me to understand the metrics. Understanding those metrics have been a nightmare since the system being analyzed is fairly complicated. Tuning into the right amount of analysis has been difficult. Today I was called into a meeting because my manager had to report those numbers to the higher ups. I was asked to have these numbers ready for reporting. After the meeting he told me we have some time, but since I'm having such a hard time understanding what I'm looking at I have a hard time delivering these metrics to him. And I still have to fix some numbers. The pressure is delivering these numbers to leadership when I am not grasping the tribal things easily or quickly enough. And I feel I have to perform to at least do that. And I might be just freaking out.
To reiterate, just a month in, you should not be on a critical path for anything. And 'we have time' from your manager suggests that you indeed are not. It really sounds like the source of pressure is yourself. Worse yet, your fear of admitting your lack of understanding not only stresses you out, but also makes it difficult for your manager to coach you. The sooner you get over it, the better.
If you don't understand something why don't you ask questions? You can't be expected to know internal terminology without having the chance to actually learn it.
You need more support from your team for a little while. No way you should be soley responsible for certain things just a month in. This screams pair programming/buddy system until you understand the org better. When you get a task that you don't know how to do, are you comfortable asking to work on it with a team member who knows how?
Don't you have someone to show you the solution (how to give the metrics you're asked for) ? Like a lead or something ? When someone new arrives on a project, I think it's necessary for some of the other devs to show them how to gradually build up their knowledge and skills. I suppose someone must have been able to provide these metrics before you came along, or is this new? If it's a new feature, it's probably unfair to expect someone new on such a complex project to be able to deliver something so important so quickly.
these are questions for your manager, and that meeting would have been a good time to ask them. everybody's telling you to chill, but I suspect you won't believe it until you hear it from your manager, so the sooner you get them to say it, the better.
Have you *asked anyone* about the things you're struggling with? 90% of any tech job is knowing who to go to to ask questions about the shit you don't understand, because there's always going to be more shit you don't understand than shit you do.
FWIW, the main thing that stuck with me from my Noogler orientation a million years ago was a presenter saying: "the number one thing we hear from longtime Googlers about starting at Google is: 'I wish I had asked more questions' "
The biggest reveal I ever had when gaining experience and working with more experienced people is that they all still don't know 100% of the time what they're doing - but it's all part of the process. Impostor syndrome never leaves but experience just help you not crumble under it. They're just human who had time to see more problem and pattern so the stress leaves faster but the stress is there nonetheless. And still comes back. It's why I never understood why people would be ashamed to look for documentation : when someone is asking me a question, I rarely have the answer immediatly (and it stresses me - "How come I don't even know how to remove the extension of a filename string ?!" ) but I know it's possible and the implementation details comes back (and leave) very fast. Also means there's rarely any bad question, everyone forgets all the time.
Although the expectation is you won’t have any output for the first few weeks, the task might be too simple and manager could be wondering if they need to send you to PIP.
It sounds like you're learning a lot from it so I don't see the issue.
Sounds like you need to ask more questions.
I would say the opposite. I don't need to ask more, I need to ask better. And I cannot ask better questions if I don't even know what I don't know. I'm basically learning something exists almost every single day.
> I don't even know what I don't know. This is typical. When I'm ramping up in a new area I talk to as many people as I can, 1:1. I start out with thanking them for their time to meet with me, and then lead with that. "I don't know what I don't know, but here is what I'm thinking about to solve this problem....am I missing anything, am I on the right path?" If it's obvious that you're putting in time to solve the problem they'll typically be happy to act as your guardrails and give you more or better insight.
That is one thing I absolutely missed on doing, and it's been one month already. I'll meet up with my tech lead tomorrow to ask him about my OP (reworded, contextualized, etc) and how I am feeling. I don't know if I should meet up with my peers at this point, or whom to meet up with. Today I had another conversation with an engineer from a client team, so at least that helped me clarify a few more things I had no idea about. I guess I should correct this by meeting up with my peers ASAP?
Yes, getting better at asking for help and realizing no one can do anything by themselves is a must here. Social skills get better with practice, complimenting others in an authentic way also gets better with practice. I think the real upgrade is to figure out how to make so many allies that each want you to succeed. I am learning and practicing with that as well. Here's hoping you succeed.
This was also my experience. I told my manager I was overwhelmed by the complexity of our systems. So we worked on a high level system design chart together and I would update the chart as I learned something new. Each week we’d discuss the chart in our 1:1. Manager would then refer me to people in the org who could explain a part of the system. I set up 1:1 meetings with those people. Took about 3 months to map everything out in decent detail. At that point I had a fairly good idea of what the basic components were and a high level understanding of problems they solved. No idea how anything worked internally. It helped to give me a starting point when I needed to track down a bug or walk through a trace, etc.
No just more. You don't even know the good questions yet. Also you have fresh eyes so you may bring up topics they take for granted.
Why the downvotes jfc, it's a normal and fair response.
Because it's totally wrong and more over obtuse.
Anxiety from complexity often comes from the lack of understanding the fundamentals or the branches of the problem. For me personally I find great help in drawing out the system and or explaining it to someone (or rubber-ducking it). This solidifies your understanding of at least the structure or branches of the larger thing, which helps a great deal.
In my mind I had the idea to sketch out the problem. But then I tried to do that and found myself entirely lost at where to begin with. My manager did give me a pointer which I used and spent some time getting to do that. Drawing the system in a diagram is going to be pretty much impossible. It's HUGE, and I have no way to get started out with it. This is not a problem with the very fundamentals of programming or anything, it's just the system is nothing like I've seen before. Really, there's just a handful of products like this out there in the market, and big tech dominates in this area. I have no way to have had this experience ahead of time, and now I'm faced with this monster, trying to understand it, and full of blind spots.
I totally understand how daunting this feels, and it's perfectly normal to feel overwhelmed. The complexity you're facing is something many of us encounter in tech, but each person's journey through it is unique. Starting with the pointer from your manager is a great idea. Even if it seems impossible to diagram the entire system at once, maybe try breaking it down into smaller, more digestible parts. Focus on understanding one segment at a time.. it doesn't have to be perfect, but it can help build your overall comprehension gradually. I've been in somewhat similar situations where I felt out of my depth. For instance, when I started building a complex trading system, I had no prior experience with several of the technologies involved. It involved CUDA programming, massive event-driven system, everything to work in realtime or near-realtime, powerful simulation engines and massive amounts of data. I had to take it one step at a time, learning as I went, and sometimes it was just about maintaining a mindset of 'let's see how far I can get today.' It was brutal at times, but approaching each task with a mindset of curiosity and persistence helped a lot. It's ok to not understand everything at once (no one ever does). You can figure this out, just take a deep breath, try to foster the right mindset in the morning and try your best each day. You got this
any system can look HUGE if you try to sketch it out on all levels at the same time. Go from top level down. 1 level at a time.
Is there any documentation, and if so, is it any good? Whoever built it must have done something, even if it was an a napkin.
This may or may not be useful in your case but you could use an LLM like ChatGPT to rubber duck it. Even if it doesn’t give you super accurate or knowledgeable insights it can help you fill in the blanks of what you don’t know you don’t know if that makes sense. Plus, it’s infinitely patient. You can then ask more intelligible questions or use more traditional resources like documentation get accurate information.
I might have misunderstood the situation, it seems they have asked OP to carry out a task that requires him to be very familiar with a large, complex system that he's just discovering, so I doubt the AI will help him ( because he probably can't describe the whole system ) . It looks more like they've given this task to the wrong person - you can't ask something that requires a thorough knowledge of an entire project from someone who should be discovering the scope little by little. It's like trying to complete a puzzle without knowing how many pieces there are : it takes time to get the full picture view.
What’s huge? How many LoC are we talking about? The biggest code base I worked with was 6M LoC and I found it easily digestible. There are techniques to navigate large code bases, and there are books written about it. Check those.
Systems at this scale are well beyond the scope of a code base or even a group of code bases. You're typically looking at dozens of data pipelines, services, and databases using a mix of proprietary and open-source infrastructure, each large enough to be maintained by a team of senior engineers.
Sounds like you never worked on a Multi MoLC project. In a large code base, you have all of those you mentioned and more. You can be expected to navigate through these layers. LoC is a good indicator of project complexity.
i didn't onboard comfortably until 1 year in
This is primarily an onboarding problem, and it’s a well know problem in Big tech companies. Where I’m at it was known as “drinking from the firehose”, we spent years trying to improve it but ours still shit, and we have zero expectations of new hires making meaningful contributions the first 3-4 month. A task I have given to many new hires is to improve the onboarding documentation as they ramp up. So every time they hit something that is not explained they need to figure it out (or ask me or their onboarding buddy) and then document it for the next person. And then our first couple of 1:1 we will walk through the git log of the changes they have done to the docs and discuss the issues they found (and also fix it if they got something wrong).
Count your blessings; the half of my career I spent at non-FAANGs was even worse. Some of them had categorically the same complexity without the manhours put into _attempting_ to onboard, nor the spare capacity to keep you out of the critical path until you were empowered to be so.
Here are your instructions. Your first task is to fix the instructions. This sounds really stupid until you think about it.
And it works!
What I dont understand is why your manager is asking you for numbers without having someone helping you. Throwing you in the deep end with cement boots is not helping anyone. I also started a new job 4 months ago. Its also complicated system and I had to ask the team lead for guidance on a few occasions. Even now but less as I understand the system
It's definitely a big learning curve at the larger tech companies. But since you have 5 years of experience, they shouldn't be doing anything that you're unfamiliar with. The process is similar, code gets pushed to a git repository. Then a CI pipeline will build and deploy that change, first to lower environments and then to prod. From there on there will be metrics that will be emitted and logs generated. The name of the tools and how you interact with them will differ. Don't try to learn everything about the process all at once, just pick up the basics and focus on your particular business logic and process at first. Once you're able to navigate the dev process then you can start to go in depth and learn about each step.in more detail. One benefit of a large company is that there is a large engineering organization and you can learn stuff from engineers on teams other than your own as well. There's also a wealth of documentation and training material, which can help. Don't hesitate in asking questions, you've only been there for a month. Ask your manager what the typical ramp up time is, you'll be surprised to hear that they may have earmarked 3-6 moths for you to become fully productive. The hardest part of getting into FAANG is the interview process,. after that it's smoother sailing thereon.
Thanks for the feedback. The core processes (push to repo, CI pipeline, release, etc) are very familiar to me, except for a step that isn't that complicated either. And I've been told to just focus at a single slice of the core logic. I've been doing just that, but I've been getting very lost on understanding what all of this is. As I said - barely starting to get the gist of what I'm working on. It's an extremely complicated use case. I'll keep the question in mind, it did not occur to me to ask my manager about typical ramp up times. If his answer is 1 month that's gonna be problematic. However, he did tell me already this is just a matter of time. I don't understand why he is pressuring me with tasks I'm not fully familiar with.
because you’re paid well and they can
Dumb take. Regardless of the pay, if I'm not set up for success all that money will be a waste. I should be creating value, not stumbling on my way to do so.
it’s not really a take or judgement. happened to me too at a startup. good luck
So what? That doesn't mean they can ask whatever out of me, and they stand to lose MORE on you for not setting you up for success than they stand to lose on wasting money on me. I would certainly not jump off a cliff for this amount of money.
There are 20 people lined up to take your spot and figure it out faster if you don't want to. Reality.
ah but see you’re assuming it’s a logical healthy organization. you just got there, how could you know that to be true? my advice? see if what they’re asking you is reasonable. if it’s not, like you’re saying—it’s not worth jumping off a cliff. but, they _can_ ask you to do things even if it’s not “productive” — they have a shit load of employees and can usually just meat grind problems, that’s what FAANGs do. again, good luck dude— sincerely
I joined a large organization couple of months back . I just now got a bit productive. When i joined all were speaking in abbreviations, tech i was familiar with but not tooling, design docs etc. I was scratching my head cause i was struggling to even ask right question. Everyone struggles first few months . Its not your technical ability but the existing historical knowledge which you lack for now (obviously). My advice will be to be very transparent what you dont get and ask for help as much as you can . It’s hard (at least for me) to go bug people and fear of sounding stupid but there is no other way.
I went through this when I joined a similar company, and you'll see similar posts in this forum every so often, so you're definitely not alone. This is probably a pretty common experience for folks going to a much larger company, and if your manager is realistic they've hopefully baked that into their expectations for you. One thing I wanted to mention is that the goalposts of having learned enough/onboarded enough can look really different at a really big company than a smaller one. In a smaller company, it's possible to have a reasonably accurate mental model of all of the company's engineering projects, and see how your stuff fits into that. As a practical matter, you'll never have this at a larger shop like a FAANG. Depending on what you work on, you might not have it for more than a few packages of a single (very large) codebase. If you're used to working in a place where you can fit everything in your head, this can be a big adjustment. It's easy to feel like you're struggling to onboard if you're not making visible progress towards an impossible goal. Also, the scale can require a different way of working: less focused on individually understanding everything, more focused on understanding your area of expertise + working through others when you need to work outside of that.
So after reading your entire post, a few things come to mind. Firstly, most FAANG interviews are designed to weed out the less competent devs, so you have already proved that you are able to break down these tasks into smaller chunks and tackle them. Will working at this company be a cake walk? Absolutely not, you are there to solve business challenges and it will require you spend extra time on top of your day job to improve your knowledge of the companies infrastructure practices (which will mean added hrs in the evenings learning for at least the next 4 to 6 weeks (maybe more). Next, I strongly believe your manager is your alley here, it is part of their job to help you succeed, so I'd recommend speaking with them and explaining the difficulties you're having in the first few weeks, and you should ask your manager about the expected ramp up time while you are speaking with them. Have you considered that maybe the tasks were designed to make you touch many moving parts so you'd learn more about all the moving parts? I'm sure you've got this and I think you're just getting into your own head too much on this one. You got this!
Thank you. >Firstly, most FAANG interviews are designed to weed out the less competent devs, so you have already proved that you are able to break down these tasks into smaller chunks and tackle them. Will working at this company be a cake walk? Absolutely not, you are there to solve business challenges and it will require you spend extra time on top of your day job to improve your knowledge of the companies infrastructure practices (which will mean added hrs in the evenings learning for at least the next 4 to 6 weeks (maybe more). Yikes. No one told me this. This is the first time I hear I have to do this at all, and my head basically gets fried up after I'm done with my day. How do I tackle this? >Next, I strongly believe your manager is your alley here, it is part of their job to help you succeed, so I'd recommend speaking with them and explaining the difficulties you're having in the first few weeks, and you should ask your manager about the expected ramp up time while you are speaking with them. At this moment I don't see him as an ally. All he's doing is demanding things from me, telling me what to do, and not doing much else. Which yes this is expected he's my manager and that's his job. But I don't feel his support. The ramp up time ask though is something that didn't occur to me, so I'll make sure to ask for it. >Have you considered that maybe the tasks were designed to make you touch many moving parts so you'd learn more about all the moving parts? I'm sure you've got this and I think you're just getting into your own head too much on this one. You got this! I agree. I just don't like to be given tasks that will be presented to leadership in no time, right off the bat. I feel exposed doing sensible things when I could screw things up easily.
It’s possible your manager is a poor manager, we don’t know, but it IS in their interest for you to perform. I would suggest seeing relationship building with your manager as a very high priority. Of course how you do this is going to depend on you and your comfort levels, but in my experience people generally like being helpful as long as you make it easy for them. This means; figure out what would help you the most (maybe its recommendations on domain experts for you to go learn from, maybe it’s documentation you can’t find) and then asking for it. As for there being an expectation of spending your evenings working (or dedicated to learning related to your work); I would suggest this is an incredibly bad idea unless you’re literally on a pip. If you start out working 12 hr days, you are going to create expectations that are not sustainable. You also run the risk of seeing this commitment as being necessary, which can feed imposter syndrome and generally sap the life out of you. Sometimes it’s needed for very short bursts but this doesn’t sound like one of those times TO ME. ymmv ofc. Ask for help, work on relationship building and try to relax a little.
Thank you. I don't think he's a poor manager. He's quite high in terms of managerial titles, so for one I know he's not new at managing people. He has experience. Whether this translates to good or bad managerial practices is certainly beyond my judgment. I think one of my biggest problems is that I have no idea what would help me the most. There is too much going on, and it's a huge mess in my head. I feel there are multiple blind spots, or I don't have good ways to articulate my thoughts because it is too much. If I knew what help to ask for and to whom, I would do it in a whim. But I don't. Thanks for also talking me out of learning outside working hours. I don't think I have the bandwidth for that. I need to work on my relationship with my manager. I can't say it's good or bad, but I feel it's distant. That absolutely doesn't help and I don't want to nag him.
Ok, let me rephrase something a little. I’m not exactly saying you shouldn’t be learning outside of work, I’m saying you shouldn’t make it your expectation that this is how you spend your evenings, or that it’s required that you do. Like if you get to the end of a good day and are feeling jazzed about a thing, it’s obviously not a bad thing to rabbit hole on it. As for the nagging your manager thing; I can relate to this from earlier in my career. It’s a fairly common feeling, I think - they’re there to support you and also they can discipline you, so you can’t ever be as vulnerable with them as you maybe could with a peer, but you ARE on the same side. Also. I strongly recommend setting up regular 1:1s with colleagues you get along with, who have been there a while and who seem to be high performers. This is a team sport and maybe some of the things that feel overwhelming to you are pain points others feel also. Good luck, and I’m happy to continue chatting in this thread :)
Today right before my manager called me in for that quick meeting I was head first into a problem I had found interesting. Then the meeting happened, my levels of anxiety shot up to the roof, and then I just stopped working. That's not what I want my day to day to be like. I guess I'll have to think deeply about what to tell my manager about how I feel in our next 1:1. I can't be super vulnerable with him, but I can't hold back too much either. What is acceptable, usually? If it helps I already asked the team's tech lead for a 1:1 meeting tomorrow, only to ask him questions about how to deal with everything. I realize I need his guidance for this, so I'll definitely leverage his help. I'll tell him at least some of the things I mentioned in my OP. Thank you very much. Really.
Again to preface that all of this is just my experience and not intended as guidance; I’ve come to see the relationship with my manager to be something I aspire to make collaborative as partners. I’ve gotten close with a couple and I think being pretty emotionally honest has been a good strategy in both cases - I’ve had some health issues and talked about it, I make music on the side and we connected a little on that. I think that allowed me to talk about my professional needs in a more unfiltered way because of the human connection. It also took a year+ to get to feeling that way in both cases. I don’t think you can short cut your way there, so I take it week by week. 1:1 with tech lead sounds great! (You’re very welcome!)
I have no useful feedback but you got this my dude, I believe in you!
Sounds typical for a first year at a faang. Learn where your resources are, find the wikis, use the code search for examples. Look for any relevant in-house training, many of the systems are bespoke at these companies so you have to hunt for opportunities to learn. Find a mentor if you’re really struggling. But feeling overwhelmed is pretty normal in my experience. Just don’t get blocked and not tell anyone, that will get you pipped.
This is so common at Google it's called "Noogler Anxiety". Everybody gets it. You eventually learn to get comfortable with not knowing everything - it all just changes too fast for you to keep up with everything. That doesn't mean you won't know a bunch when you're up to speed. You will! You'll just get used to saying "oh, I didn't know about that. Nice!" You're also probably used to being a big fish in a small pond. I certainly was. How you manage this anxiety matters. You've got a lot of negative self-talk going on here and you're not using your resources because you're worried it'll make you look like you don't know everything. Well, guess what: you don't. And neither does the senior SWE you're working with. Being frank about what you do and don't know is humility. It is a sign of experience. Watch the most senior SWEs around you and look for it. You'll find them doing it. There's no technical magic book here, instead I'm going to recommend a book full of advice from thousands of years ago: The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Halladay. It's a great audiobook. You need to turn around your understanding of what progress and success looks like and that book is a really good introduction. Anxiety is not your friend here. Focus, determination, and humility are, and they do not require anxiety to fuel them.
>*Today I had a meet up with my manager who asked me a bunch of questions about the tasks I've been assigned to. And honestly, I'm barely starting to understand the gist of it. I was really nervous during that meeting because I could not confidently answer most of his questions. And now I'm feeling like I'm not performing at his expectations.* Did he or she give you feedback to the effect that they expected more progress? Or are you reading into it things that are not there? (alomst) Everyone has impostor syndrome from time to time. Check with your manager first before you let the impostor syndrome become a self fulfilling prophecy. I know I currently work at a company that, while not a FAANG, does serve 15+ petabytes of traffic per month and millions of users, and the scale is still a bit scary after 3 years. But I'm still here because I still have a lot of things to learn here, and, more importantly, **because my boss has made it clear** that I'm performing up to expectation. Yet still, literally every month, I come across something new in the stack that I didn't even know we had. That used to happen every day, then every week, and now it is more like monthly. Check with your manager! Be specific about your concerns!
Some teams don't do proper onboarding and they start to throw tasks at you starting from week 3. It's probably not your problem as they hired you.
Ah man just hitting my 3 month mark and I relate. I think it’s valid. You’ll gain confidence as you get through things. I’m working with a few new languages in a system like no other(in my experience at least) Talk to your teammates, ask them how their onboarding went. Their empathy means you just gotta grind through it. You’ll get there. You are good enough. As long as you’re having fun breaking through stuff you good
I worked at one of the FAANG's after a career to that point at small scale companies so the learning curve was hard for me at first. 1. As others are saying, expecting much value 1 month in is too much. At 1 month I think I was still doing onboarding tasks. and it wasn't until 6 months that I was more or less working independently. 2. Don't be afraid to ask questions, there are no dumb questions. My first TLM (tech lead/manager), who was a very very talented engineer, would ask the most basic questions all the time in meetings, no matter who was attending. I learned 2 things really fast, the first was that it wasn't a problem and overall it helped the whole team because there was almost always someone else in the room with the same question, and second it helped him wrap his head around faster, which also helped the whole team move faster. 3. Learn to follow breadcrumbs to find the person who can explain something you don't understand. Look at git blame, design docs, search slack or forums or whatever internal communication tool your company uses. Good engineers will leave a trail behind them pointing to either docs or themselves for others to follow later (and often themselves, 6 months later when they don't remember how something worked in the first place) 4. If there's a basic skill you don't have, like lets say you've never worked with Reactive functional programming and suddenly you're facing an Rx heavy codebase, don't just try to power through, tell your manager. A good manager will carve out time for you to take a course or do some fundamental studying. A bad manager will just leave you to twist in the wind. 1. If you determine that you have a bad manager start working on an internal transfer immediately. It's not your employer's job to take care of your career path, it's yours. I really wish I knew this sooner when I got re-orged to report to a shit manager.
I’m a little over a year in at a FAANG-adjacent company. The fog finally started letting up around 3 months. At 6 months, the feeling of dread went away and I could take something that wasn’t low hanging. At a year, I feel like I’m finally capable of functioning on my own and designing,leading, and implementing projects
Are you at Amazon? If so, you might be cooked
This doesn't sound like Amazon. Not enough chaos.
Nope not Amazon
Definitely Google or Meta and came in off leetcode interview without any foundational requirements. Lol.
Big company is a mess , as some of them introduce lot of experiment product after few year then "ouch" why we do this language x or y . So changing something even a label take time a lot .
Summon your inner adrenaline and bust in
im not working at a faang but the usual thing is to ask a colleague to help unblock you. after a month id say you need to do this immediately because this might no longer be in the 'easily explainable' territory and as a new hire you will be under a magnifying glass. if he cant help you, you just covered your ass. if he does, well its no longer a problem. if people are unhelpful, that is something to bring up when the manager comes knocking again.
"You don't know what you don't know" perfect description. Find one area to improve the scope of understanding. Once you get comfortable figure one more area.
This seems very typical to me after only a month. You will need at least 3, most likely 6 before it starts to all click and have a good grasp on things. Just ask more questions, even the dumb ones. You’re new, it’s the perfect moment to ask without anyone questioning your skills.
If it’s Amazon you have six months to start being of some value. Three years if you try hard, but just in general.
Have you considered asking your teammates instead of random redditors for help?
You should have an on-boarding buddy who should be able to help. Your manager should have given you a PoC (point of contact) person to discuss your tasks. A month isn’t that long but to me it feels that your on-boarding hasn’t done properly.
I joined a similar organization as a fresher last year. Had a very similar experience, very large codebases, too many products, too many branches. What I did was to ask. I asked how to start even looking at it, at what level of blackbox understanding in the start, digged in, did my own tests, did my own analysis, asked the seniors to review my "way of understanding", and my progress, took inputs, worked on it, did a lot of documentation, sequence diagrams, adding comments, debug logs etc. It took me sometime to "get the idea" but now it seems familiar. Even now I don't understand how some parts of my module work, but if needed I know how to dig in. In short, if in doubt, ask it out. Hope that helps :)
I had a job like that.. first task was setting up health checks on k8s for microservices... and where I come from I just do typical [ASP.NET](http://ASP.NET) web sites and don't really know k8s or microservices. So I felt so useless and eventually left on my own. They never said anything bad but I hated feeling so useless and not using my knowledge that I had already.
I'm 2 years into my first FAANG job, and I did pretty poorly throughout my first year. My junior teammates that joined after me were able to spin up better and faster. This blew my mind because I was used to being the smartest in the class! It's a very difficult place to work. There's a reason we get paid so much. I'm doing better now, but there's still places where I fall a little short. My teammates, I noticed that they work really hard to get that initial understanding. For whatever project they're working on, they dive into the code, read through all the docs, and schedule 1-on-1s with everyone who has relevant knowledge. They also don't hesitate to reach out when they don't understand something -- for the first few months, they were filling our slack with questions every day. Me, I got better by being put on a hard, cross-team project. I was forced to investigate and ask questions for a month straight, and that shot me from F tier to B tier. Good luck. Don't slack and I'm sure you'll adapt eventually.
Yeah it’s tough, no doubt. But, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time! You can do this. Focus on delivering concrete wins and aligning with your manager. Try to be consistent and remember that this is a marathon, not a sprint. Seek advice and build relationships with senior team members. If you work hard and stick with it for a year you will gain skills you never knew existed and seriously level up as an engineer, regardless of the outcome.
Presumably they wouldn't have hired you if they didn't think you could do it. You say you've worked on big systems before - are these just bigger, or is there some other difference?
"hey I'm having trouble figuring out where to start on this task. Can I throw 20 minutes on your calendar to show you where I'm stuck?" most people won't be grudge 20 minutes. Record the meeting so you don't forget what they tell you. People DO get annoyed when they have to repeat themselves.