rericks

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?

Thank you for the advice! Selfish aside, but is there any chance I could ask you to upvote the question? It's not going to appear in the Ask section until it has more votes, and I'm afraid it's going to sink off newest soon.

Thanks for the reply. It's more F&G than N&A, culturally I think. Idling is probably a misnomer—I have some minor bug fixes, code reviews, and design docs to work on. But I feel like I've been basically writing no code for the last few weeks.

True, but the problem is this:

> Relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer's business, or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of the employer...

If the company has its fingers in many pies across the software landscape, then this might apply to a majority of software that could be written. Also, the company didn't imply that they would try to claim ownership, only that such behavior wouldn't be permitted by company policy.

The hiring manager made it clear that exceptions are very rarely made in this regard. This is a sizeable company with little flexibility about these things (from what I can tell).

> If the company pushes back you really don't want to work for them. Seriously.

I would have agreed with you in the past, but the offer is otherwise exceptional. Like, getting-into-Harvard exceptional, from what I can tell, especially for someone with such a weird career track.

I already spoke to a lot of them during my interviews, everything seemed to be good.