Don't worry about what you don't know
When joining a company, there will be things you won’t know, and that’s OK. You don’t need to study their stack ahead of time in the hope of being efficient from day 1. Companies are aware that engineers need ramp up time and will give you time to learn everything you need to perform your job.
This is even true if you switch teams inside a large company since you won’t have the technical/product historical context to be able to always do the right trade offs.
I remember during my tenure at Google, one of the new grads in my team didn’t know what a binary is – they weren’t aware we were compiling C++ code to a binary before releasing/executing it. When they asked about it, I didn’t judge them or show a surprised face, I just told them what it was and how things were working. This was the right thing to do:
- It’s not necessarily common/expected knowledge – if you just used python/ruby/javascript, you never compile code.
- Their gap in knowledge doesn’t reflect a lack of potential or desire to grow. In the case I mentioned above, I’m pretty proud about that person’s growth – they are currently a senior engineer and on their path to staff!
So don’t sweat about what you don’t know, they are just small details. Surround yourself with a good manager, a good mentor and good peers – from there just learn along the way. We all started from somewhere, and we all have gaps in our knowledge – I personally still haven’t properly learn how to escape my code in bash (I just tweak it until it works 😅)
If you happen to be a seasoned engineer, don’t judge people on what they don’t know – just help them grow. It’s the right and nice thing to do.