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Comment by rericks | Hacker News Reader

I recently joined a FANG and this is something that causes me a lot of anxiety. Our repos are hundreds of thousands of lines of code; how on earth can I, as a new hire, decide unilaterally that something needs to be added or reworked? I'm not at a startup, and the company's mission is decided at a level far above my paygrade. I need some degree of management to know what to do.

I'm also not a very social person, and randomly chatting with people around the company for project ideas is something that I'm seemingly incapable of doing.

Will this cause me to fail at my job? How do I learn to be more proactive with these kinds of things?

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It sounds like you're trying to self-discover initiative. Initiative is not a first-class thing of its own; it's an outcome of, for example, staring at an inefficiency until you can't stop twitching.

But (to use my example) "efficiency" is relative. It requires a good mental model of what fits into what and how. So, to solve for that, you'd focus on absorption, and taking-in as much of the environment you can in as much detail as you can - oh, and focus on the most insignificant things the most. (The idea is to stretch your attention span and make it grow.) Endeavor to absorb at the same rate on day 100 that you do on day 1 (ie, replicating the way you react when things are new/interesting). Not perfectly achievable (I don't think), but that's the approach I've used to get my brain going in the right direction.

As for sociability, that's something that needs to be practiced in its own right to get stronger, like attention span. A bit like learning to use a new tool, you can't immediately be fast at it without some initial purpose-less practice. (Always fun to bootstrap those kinds of things...)

At a very high level you're wanting management, but really you're expecting someone else to solve your problems for you. These companies don't work like that. You have to find a problem and hammer it down.

If necessary (but only as a last resort) spend an hour each day increasing test coverage. That is just something you can do that will probably also yield further ideas.

Second, if you're at google, get a mentor. They probably have an internal tool for that, maybe even something hr-like.

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