Junior Engineer Career Development Videos, Forum, and Q&A

Hello Everyone,

I need some clarification about where to take my career.

My background: I have a bachelor's (Information Technology) and a master's degree (IT management with a dissertation using machine learning). I performed poorly during my bachelor's; to rectify that, I worked hard during my master's and was placed first.

After university, I did gig work for a while and worked part-time at a startup where I was a solo developer (using Django and Flutter).

After 2.5 years, I realised that my career was going nowhere, so I finished the project, quit (on good terms), and got a job as a Junior Full Stack engineer at a small company. I was fired after three months due to low code quality and asking too many questions, so I am unemployed now.

My Conundrum: I need to figure out where to take my career as the market is quite bad. I have heard various opinions from friends and family, making me indecisive. The views that I have heard are as follows:

• Focus on backend-only roles using Python and contribute to open source.
• Focus on Analyst roles instead, such as Data or Business Analyst (Based on my skills from my master's)
• Learn React Native and get rid of Flutter.
• Learn something else instead of Python, such as .Net or C#. I did Java during my bachelor's, so I think I should be able to pick it up relatively quickly.

I should pick one of these and focus on it, but I am having difficulty selecting which.

Which area should I focus on? What would you do if you were in my position?

Any guidance would be highly appreciated. Thank you!

What are some good 2 week, 1 month, and 3 month onboarding milestones for a new grad engineer at a FAANG company? I will discuss these with my manager as well, but I want to first come up with realistic expectations that will set me up for success.

Hello Everyone,

I have one year of experience as a Flutter and Django developer at a startup, but am having trouble finding a new role. I believe the reason is that there are very few Flutter positions in my area.

To increase my chances of landing a job, I plan to build a side project, which would be a mobile application.

Should I build it using Flutter or make a switch to something more popular like React?

My first team didn't work out for me either. I was there for less than a year Got the the poorest rating and was set up for a PIP. Somehow I made a transfer at the last moment and survived. Certainly, it was the most difficult phase of my life & I am quite grateful to my new team. Now, I'm already in the new team for less than a year and got an average rating last time. The rating was partially influenced by previous manager as I spent almost half of my time there.

Currently working on multiple projects at the same time and grabbing almost whatever task is offered and somewhat gained trust I believe. But the quality of those tasks are not too much complex rather modular & takes more time. I can keep on doing this way but not sure what is the right thing to do. The team is relatively new. Recently started a promo discussion humbly and not pushing it. Manger's review is I'm operating at L3.6 now.

Now,

• What might be the mental model to forget the past?
• Sticking around for almost two years now, what might be the correct time & way to reach Next Level?

I'm curious since you now have the opportunity to design and interview candidates as you see fit, how would you design the interview for your next hire?

How many rounds?

Any takehomes?

how would you source your candidates?

what are things you would do to avoid doing the terrible interview practices companies usually do?

How would you interview a candidate for a backend role vs a frontend role?

I used to try several courses to learn C++ for Unreal Engine, however after I finished all of them, I even can't came up an idea to make a project which matched on personal limited skills. As a result I tried lowering my expectations by finding it the most basic one (I found CS50 - programming with Scratch) to build logical thinking skills. When I did the assignment (the assignment has specific perquisite), unfortunately it turns out I trapped into tutorial hell and I still can't came up an idea. Feeling burnout, I decided to take a break for few days because I believe good idea doesn't come from burnout. But after few days recovered I somehow came up an idea by looking past interest game and turns it into my assignment , however after did a few days, my idea didn't match my knowledge skills. (in this moment I don't know about Jointaro yet)

I understand programming is about doing and doing as this explains and also communication . But I'm struggling to find the solutions based on my current situation. A lot of advice and courses on internet are omnipresent, and the comments more or less just say "thank you for your advice" or "Great video" whatsoever (especially YouTube) . I tried some of them based on my current situation, however I realized there is no progress and I slowly doesn't have principle of life.

Sorry if my questions seems so futile for experienced software engineer. However I want to give it a shot to breakdown my own problem. If you think my situation has something off, feel free to ask so there will be no misunderstanding. Thank you for your attention.

Additional: I also find out whether I write blog or write questions, it takes me a lot of time (maybe 1 - 3 hours or could be more depending the complexity), because I try every possibilities to avoid misunderstanding or miscommunication. I believe people who smart at great university or company might not need take such hours to do so.

Hello Everyone,

I recently joined a small company that advertised a junior position. I cleared the technical task, which was a take-home assignment. In the interview, I was told I was the only one who cleared the assignment.

After 2.5 months, I was told that I was asking too many questions and it was okay for me to make mistakes but not ask questions, so I stopped asking questions. After that, I made a mistake as I misinterpreted how something would work (It turns out both my solution and the instructions given to me were incorrect).

Once the project was finished, I was told I was too junior, my code was not clean, and I was let go from the company. Currently, they are hiring for a senior role with the same job description.

The manager told me he would only give me a referral if I did a non-development-related Google search task during my notice period (which ends in mid-May). He also told me to put my job as contract work. I am having difficulty trusting him to give me a good referral.

My plan is as follows:

• Learn more about clean code and focus on code quality.
• Start working on open source, which might help improve my technical communication skills.
• Build a side project.
• Leetcode
• AWS Certifications

Should I keep the job experience on my resume or not? What are some ways for me to navigate my current situation?

I recently joined Meta as a junior engineer and my hope is to be able to try out several domains (guessing realistically 2) to see where my interest lies. I’m not on an AI team currently, but given the rise of AI, I hope to be able to explore that area.

However, I understand that switching teams will disrupt my productivity and growth as a junior engineer. I’m wondering:

• When should I approach changing teams/domain? More specifically, is it better to change teams after being promoted to mid-level?
• How should I approach changing teams?

I'm just curious about people's opinions from a tech perspective

• Does this impact current tiktok employees?
• Can this affect their RSU/equity?

Any other thoughts are also welcome!

What is the average promotion timeline from an entry-level engineer (SDE I) to mid-level engineer (SDE II)? What is considered great?

What is considered a fast promotion? How do you convince others of impact and take on more meaningful projects?

Hi, a little bit about myself: I am an entry-junior level software engineer. I just graduated from a coding bootcamp 2 months ago. But before that, I had been doing self-studies. I mainly build with JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Express, HTML, CSS, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB. However, I have knowledge in Python, Redux, OAuth, Jest, Docker, Kubernetes, and some services in AWS. I have been sending out a resume that has a long list of technical skills, but I'm concerned that the very long list might make me appear overreaching and amateurish. That said, I wonder if I should make different versions of my resume.

P.S. I have sent out almost 500 applications, and only 4 reached out to me. I made it to the final round with one company, but didn't make it past the final round.

I'm an sde 1 at Amazon and been working there for 2 years. I have changed multiple teams during that time unfortunately. In every team, I have struggled with getting noticed by the team.

I have observed that the best performers talk about active tickets even when they are not on call. How do I balance between my task and working on extra tickets to get noticed?

What else can I do to get noticed apart from my own task and high sev tickets?

Hi! I'm a new member looking to participate in the book club sessions for the Designing data intensive applications book. How can I get a copy of the book?

I've gotten rejected from companies (unicorns, F500s) (in this rough market) because I didn't have experience with their specific tech stack.

I know because one company gave feedback saying that I didn't have experience with a framework that the team uses (though I had experience with adjacent but not similar stuff) and also I was able to get someone to put in a referral, but that person responded back saying HM wanted someone who had experience with the team's language

I'm curious if this is the norm? I've always heard that all that companies want is business impact. They have in-house/custom tooling so it doesnt matter what you used before

Should I also be building projects in other languages just for the sake of showing experience? I'd rather just put in more time at my job and have more impact at work

Because unless a project has sufficient depth which takes months of time, it has little value and time spent at work is 100x ROI compared to a side project

Hello Taro Community,

I've had the first onboarding weeks at my company. My department stack is Angular-Frontend, Java-Backend and Oracle/PostgreSQL databases. While they want me to dip my toe in everything, right now the priority is learning the database section first because the engineer responsible for the database will leave in June.

I've never done database development, and the engineer that is supposed to teach me, can't articulate a curriculum for me and is on vacation 50% of the time until they leave in June. What topics do I have to know to have a good grasp on database development? What courses can you recommend? How can I guide the person to teach me what's necessary?

Thanks everyone

Hi there, everybody. I was aiming to build a few applications to present in interviews. Last week, I was building a small-scale Spring Boot application with the help of a tutorial. The project I was working on was meant to retrieve data from a database using PostgreSQL to provide multiple choice DSA questions. I was creating an automated study buddy for technical interviews. Unfortunately, I've been trying to figure out some technical issues and database connectivity mishaps for some days, unfortunately to no avail. Currently, I'm working through a Node.Js tutorial to build an application geared to help me keep track of the things I'd like to do during my job search, so I can always stay on task. I don't know if I'm going to run into some more issues that plague me.

The thing is, I'm learning a LOT from both experiences. Now I feel I can have an educated conversation on the trade-offs of monolithic and microservice architectures... and I LOVE what I'm learning. I'd really like to have at least 3 small-scale projects handy that I'm using to automate my own life and make this job search easier for me.

Of course I'm going to continue to try to plow through these issues, and I'm not here to necessarily ask for help with my applications (although I won't say no if someone wants to help). It'd be great if I can explain how I solved these problems, because I know the challenging problems I've solved are what I'd want to highlight to people in an interview.

But let's say if the day comes where I have an interview and DON'T have a "finished" product, yet I still have these code samples that I can defend and show that I've gained a great deal of experience from... would it be a good idea to present these in an interview?

Thanks for the help,

Evan

What does Alex Chiou read?

How does he think when he writes?

Is there a certain number of drafts?

Does he get someone to read it and give their thoughts etc?

When I read Alex's work, it makes me think better. I learn something new because I think - oh, I could also think this way. Oh, someone else can think this way. Oh, I learned something new.

Layoffs are making me quite anxious. I understand job security might not really be a thing when it comes to big tech, but I do want to try pursuing employment security, if that makes sense. How do I "get good" so I can be a little more resilient when it comes to layoffs and employment? I'm not really sure where to start.

Recently, I was helping migrate my team’s entire codebase from a legacy Java DateTime library to the newer, built-in Java DateTime library.

I’ve never performed a migration before, so I don’t have context to know whether this kind of migration is typical (my current team isn’t very good). 

Some of the features of the migration:

• The codebase primarily contains poorly written unit tests or tests without assertions (and no E2E or integration tests)

• Consequently, we tested the application by setting up a separate environment, simulating user flows, and manually verifying results inside the DB

• The migration took over a month to perform - meaning constant merge conflicts from new changes to resolve

What might a migration look like at a good tech company? 

For the record, I’m not personally interested in game development - I’m just quite curious.

Everyone hears the following complaints across the gaming industry in general:

• Crunch time

• Lower TCs

I find this quite curious, because I imagine there’s a lot of technical complexity in building games and the numerous tools and engines needed to make them. 

Games are interdisciplinary, combining art, music, sound design, acting, writing, and game design, to create interactive entertainment software - so I would imagine this presents a unique world of challenges that make it just as complex as “regular” software. 

Plus, MMOs and games like Fortnite or Counter-Strike have to deal with all the technical complexity of ensuring a good player experience while having millions of players (clients) playing concurrently.

In fact, Gergely Orosz has on the subject that I found fascinating.

Yet, game developers typically complain of lots of crunch time and being underpaid - and, subjectively, the game dev industry is less “prestigious” than SWE.

Also, I’ve almost always seen devs listed as “game programmer” or “UI programmer” in the credits, as if their primary job is to just write code (and not build good, complex software at scale).

What might be the reason for the differences between game development and regular software engineering?

Hello I wanted to get some advice. I noticed I can make it to the recruiter, but I keep failing when it goes to the hiring manger side. I'm not interviewing with any engineers - Any ideas on how I can improve this?

Questions:

1. Is learning design a worthwhile investment as someone most interested in doing full-stack work at product-based startups?

2. Might working in a small product-based startup be an effective way to pick up design skills while working as a SWE?

3. How can engineers build more complex side projects without any design skills?

Regarding #3:

I’d argue that basic product design skills are critical for building any CRUD application. You can’t build something without defining what it’s going to do first. 

Literally - you can’t write code for a feature if you don’t know how the app will behave during a loading state, an error state, a complex edge case from a wonky user flow, etc.

You can wing the design and iteratively dogfood it to improve its UX - but that’s the same as doing UX design while having zero UX design skills. It’s the software engineering equivalent of writing spaghetti code - except you’re not even improving.

Personally, I find that UI libraries like or are most helpful for solving UI problems like designing a button or a modal. However, they can’t help you decide how a screen in an app should work, nor can they abstract away all design challenges for more custom use cases.

Also, any CRUD application built with poor design will inevitably feel like a crappy database client. 

The design problem applies to backend projects, too. Backends exist to service frontends, so you can’t build a backend without knowing what features the frontend needs - and you can’t do that, either, if you don’t design it first!

These are all challenges I’ve faced working on my own projects.

I suspect the best approach is really to just learn UX design and a design tool like Figma. However, that’d be a hefty investment given UX design is a separate field from SWE - especially if it’s just for a side project.

Also, building cool stuff as a semi-competent engineer is tons more fun (for me) than learning design from scratch!

What are your thoughts on my aforementioned questions?

I'm currently happily employed and I want to cultivate a strong network so that when I need a new job in the future, I am not struggling

I have watched the Taro course on referrals and cold emailing, but my issues is that I went to a small no-name state school and I don't know that many alumni. Also work at a 5-10 person YC backed startup so I don't interact with many people at my job

I understand networking is a long term game, but I feel stuck trying to build deeper relationships and especially trying to level up

I'd love something actionable on how I can add value to people and network that doesn't rely on my job/college

I'd also love to know how to leverage the fact that I work at a YC backed company to network with other YC backed startups?

Everyone wants to work at a YC backed company so I worry that the eng leads/founders get tons of spam email, so how can I stand out -- especially if they are a B2B company where I cant use their product and offer feedback or if they're more mature (series A/B) and I don't really have a lot of feedback