New ask Hacker News story: I worked at M*ta for a year with no training, still had substantial impact

I worked at M*ta for a year with no training, still had substantial impact
5 by stargirl | 1 comments on Hacker News.
I got a job as a rotational engineer at the company that was formerly F**book. My bootcamp experience was seemingly rather devoid of tasks - my mentor told me to monitor my calendar as that was where any training I was assigned would show up. None ever did. I joined a team and just went along figuring everything out for myself, kind of surprised that apparently everyone there just had to struggle along like I did. I still managed to get fairly good reviews in most axes, albeit my delivery speed was not what was expected. I kept asking my mentor and my manager if there was some training I could have missed, some "Welcome to " or "Intro to" the company. Neither of them had any idea what I was talking about. I started writing some of my own documentation, because I thought it was so bizarre that there wasn't anything they could point me to, everything seemed to be...word of mouth? I continued along, shipping features and volunteering for things. I even shipped a feature that improved a metric by 4.5million [action] per day! I was told this was an example of substantial impact. I was proud of that but still couldn't shake this feeling that I had missed something crucial. I kept coming across things that I felt I should not have had to figure out for myself. I started collecting these in my head, and I noticed myself becoming more and more preoccupied with what else I must have missed, because these were things that each would have saved me weeks of searching - tools and processes that people would happen to mention that I had never heard of before, and they seemed to expect me to know about them. When I would ask, "Oh, what was that tool you just named?" They would look at me bizarrely and repeat it and were very confused when I thanked them enthusiastically. It wasn't until the second half of my second half that I made a list of Things That I Should Have Been Told (Instead of Having to Find Out For Myself) - for example: what diff tool we use and that submitting a diff automatically marks it ready for review, as opposed to that being a separate step (I was struggling to figure out why my mentor kept commenting on my diffs that to me were still in WIP - at the same time, he didn't understand why I kept submitting diffs that were not ready for review - he was using the GUI version, I was using command line...) I had asked, trying not to show my mounting frustration, "Did you guys learn these things somewhere? Or did you just come across them?" Someone on my team was like, "Didn't you have bootcamp basics training? You know, like classes and videos?" "No, I didn't have any classes. I watched some HR videos but that was it." I brought it up to my manager, he couldn't care less. Nor could HR or anyone else. Apparently I am the only person this has ever happened to and nobody would go so far as to simply acknowledge that yeah, that must have been a frustrating experience, and yeah, it would make sense to then allow me to take the training, to fill in any gaps I might still have that would serve to improve my efficacy and allow me the same opportunity as everyone else. Even with that successfully shipped feature that had impressive impact for a rotational engineer, I did not impress the powers that be. I did not transition to FTE because apparently while I made sufficient progress in the first half, in the second I was too focused on having missed the training and should not have requested access to the training that I never had the opportunity to take. I thought this would amount to... discrimination or something, but I was merely singled out, not a member of a group against whom anyone discriminated. TL;DR: Worked at a FAANG company for a year with no training and still shipped a feature with significant impact - ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED!