Mid-level Engineer Career Development Videos, Forum, and Q&A

I am currently learning Machine Learning and AI as they are essential for my ongoing project.

I've found these topics particularly challenging to master on my own due to their heavy reliance on mathematics—or at least that's how it seems to me with machine learning.

Moreover, I tend to study thoroughly, aiming to understand everything from the basics to advanced concepts before I attempt to develop practical software applications.

Could you share any strategies or advice on how to effectively learn and apply new technical knowledge in project settings?

It might be a very broad question, but how can I be better at writing design docs? At my current stage, I can get parachuted into a new package, implement a feature and fix some random things on my way out, but I struggle to write design docs. For context, people in my org really drill into the design docs and most of the questions are not really relevant. ~40 people would leave comments on a doc on average, which seems on the higher end across the industry, right?

My struggles with design docs are mostly,

1. Difficult to start working on it because I don't really like writing essays
2. Analysis paralysis that I want to have it perfect, but it's just not possible due to all kinds of observability issues (e.g. missing log fields)
3. It's unclear what the project is about so it requires lots of discussion, which takes initiation / social energy
4. Maybe some PTSD for just working with people and trying not to lose my patience

The solution to my struggles might be easy - like just get started and don't try to be perfect. Treat the design doc as a discussion instead of a one-shot event. What's your approach to design docs?

On a higher level, I can utilize my strength in coding and try avoid design docs, or I can improve on writing design docs. Which option do you think is best?

Hi Alex/Rahul!

I know y'all have mentioned DSA is somewhat of a parasitic activity, so do you recommend creating side projects to level-up after work / studying system design instead of DSA? I am asking in case I get let go again or if I am looking for a new position after this one. I basically want to future-proof myself.

Also, how do I excel in my current position as a mid-level web developer, while having these things in mind? Thanks in advance!

Hi Taro Community,

I’m scheduled for a 1:1 meeting with my skip level manager, who was also my initial manager when I first joined the company two months ago. This will be our first one-on-one discussion since the management shift, and I want to ensure it’s as productive as possible.

Given the context that he was directly overseeing my work initially, what would be important topics to discuss in this meeting? Here are a few points I’m considering:

What else should I consider bringing up during this conversation? If you’ve had similar experiences, how did you navigate your 1:1s to maintain a supportive and constructive relationship with a skip level manager?

Thank you for your insights and advice!

Hi Taro Community

Just for backstory. I've been working for almost 4 years since graduating.

For my first two years, I worked at a big 5 company where I delivered and learned very little due to constant reorgs, politics, and toxic management. I wasn't performing and found a new job at a reputed, mid-size tech company.

Despite meeting expectations each cycle at this new company, I question if I truly belong in this field. I enjoy problem solving but I don't have a much interest in software as a craft (a trait that I see from top engineers on my team), nor do I really care about tech products.

I wonder if I'll have the longevity or motivation to stay in this field long term. (Companies don't want just average engineers like me, they want the best, most passionate people, right?) The good news is I have a great manager, team, and mentor right now -- all of which have helped me grow a lot despite all this.

I'm curious if there are some reframings or mindset shifts that some senior+ folks have made to make peace with or love their career path.

I found monotonic stacks and queues to be quite difficult at first, but I felt like it would be worth the effort to become more familiar with them (seems like it would be virtually impossible to come up with them in the context of a DSA interview). My efforts led to me writing an about the monotonic stack/deque data structure.

The post linked above is all text-based, but I realize others sometime learn more effectively through other mediums (e.g., video-based instruction). Curious to know what other resources people have found to be of use!

I am a mid-level machine learning engineer in the advertising field, and I often need to provide PMs with performance numbers that are not available in the dashboard so that they can communicate with clients or make business decisions. Sometimes this need is urgent, such as needing to write code to find the number of customers who made purchases in the past seven days that meet a certain condition within half a day to a day.

I have encountered a few problems:

1. The conditions are different each time, and the code is difficult to reuse. I am not sure if it is worth investing time to write unit tests. Is there any way to make sure my code is bug-free?
2. Sometimes the calculated numbers do not seem intuitive, and I am worried about providing wrong numbers, so I spend extra time checking them, but I am also told that it takes so long to calculate such a simple thing. Indeed sometimes the code itself is not difficult to write, but the main time is spent verifying the correctness of the results. How to communicate this?
3. Sometimes I ask my colleagues to help me check my code or results, but I am worried that my manager will think that I cannot complete my work independently and that I am not meeting the company's expectations of a mid-level engineer.

Hello! I would appreciate some career guidance tips in transitioning to a new role. To give some context about me, I am currently L62 at Microsoft with 7 YOE and have recently received an offer for E5 at Meta. It is a level+1 for me. From what I have gathered, the expectations for E5 are going to be high involving scope/ambiguity resolution, delivering under tight deadline, etc. Also given the stack-ranking nature of evaluation, might need to compete with my new colleagues, who are currently working at senior level.

I feel I'm an average+ engineer and doing WFH for the last 3 years made me working in silos. My current team does not punish teammates without active participation. Being introvert by nature and someone who is afraid of public-speaking, I got used to the comfort zone of inactive participation. My misconception about focusing solely on technical skills to grow in career has made my career progress slower and I am painfully realizing it lately. To add to that, job security is important for me as I'm a visa holder.

Given this context, I am considering whether to take E5 Meta offer. On one end, I can take this as a growth opportunity and improve my technical and soft-skills. I am definitely looking forward for ways to increase participation, influence team and being a strong engineer. I wonder if I should improve my current soft-skills in my current-role and then move or if I could simultaneously improve them on my new job.

On the other end, I wonder if I could survive in an environment like Meta and deal with stress/burnouts and whether the lack of improved soft-skills would make me unsuccessful in my new role.

Appreciate your thoughts!!

I am a deep learning research engineer at an early stage autonomous driving startup and I just got an offer for a senior deep learning engineer in the autonomous team at Qualcomm. I am confused about it as compensation is low compared to industry standards but overall a bit higher from my current salary. (The base is quite low, but RSU's make up for the rest). The work is same what I do, so that will be nice.

I can either keep looking for other opportunities while staying at the startup or take this. I am not too happy with the offer but it is the best I have right now. I will be shifting to San Diego from NY and will also take a major hit in my social life.

Any suggestion on how the culture at Qualcomm is and how their machine learning and AI teams are? I am really confused if it will be worth it.

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?

Hello, is anyone familiar with the interview process (what questions they will ask) for a sr. python engineer position at apple?

For context, one of my team's project requires making changes in another team's package and they require us to file a ticket to have the change reviewed.

I want to understand why they are doing this and hear from industry experts in what situations it is suggested to request filing a ticket to review changes made by other teams.

They don't have this requirement one year ago. Their estimated turn around time is 2 weeks. All changes, big or small, are required to file a review ticket.

So if the bar is lower at non-FAANG companies that means if you take longer to complete a task or lead an initiative that takes a little longer won’t that be something that gets exposed quickly and it indicates you’re not ready to operate there?

What’s the right mentality to be able to build your stories authentically for interviewing for FAANG companies where the bar is much higher and frankly seems to be less room for error? Do I go and get a mentor who can basically ask me to go into detail for how I went about projects and analyze interactions and learn how to think about this stuff so I actually can push myself to work faster or operate at a high level at my current job?

Last Thursday, my manager and a senior engineer were sick and still went to the office. Friday, I felt a strong itchiness in my throat. Saturday I started coughing. The timeline really suggests I'm infected by my manager. My spouse is probably going to get infected as well. Luckily we are healthy in general and not immunocompromised. I really want to tell my manager in the face that he infected me, but that doesn't seem like a good way to express my thoughts.

Maybe I can also try to write something anonymously in the weekly Signal survey. How can I best approach this?

Appendix:

A few more quotes from my manager and my senior on Thursday:

• The sick senior: "if it were covid, I would have not come office today"
• The sick manager in the morning: "I should probably go home in the afternoon to not get your guys infected". Then at 3pm in the afternoon, he said "I'm sorry I really need to go home" and then he left.

On Thursday, 6 teammates were in the office. On Friday, only the sick senior and the sick manager were in the office :)

I have 5 years of experience as a “backend Swe” with the first 2 years at a company where I didn't get much chance to learn, and the following 3 years at a mid-sized company (where I have learned much more). Currently, I feel stagnant in my mid-level role and am eager to advance my technical skills.

Although I've worked on modifying existing systems and made minor improvements in scaling, I haven’t had the opportunity to design medium to large scale systems from scratch. I’m contemplating whether to join an early stage startup to gain broader experience rather than being confined to a single team.

However, I’m uncertain if this is the right step for my career or if it’s just FOMO influencing my decision to leave my current team. I'm also debating whether I should spend more time preparing and aim for other larger tech companies instead (wondering if there is a penalty for having too much YOE and having the expectation of a Senior)

I have worked primarily on the backend, but my company now has assigned me features concerning our Android app, which is built mainly on XML for layouts & Java.

How can I get started on this, be productive & contribute effectively?
Thanks.

Hi folks, I have roughly 2 weeks to prepare, I wanted to know thoughts on what should be my plan to give it my best shot?

Main Problem that I am facing right now is implementing a solution correctly.

Hi Taro Community,

I'm wrestling with a question about work hours that perhaps many of you have also encountered. Is it generally advisable to stick strictly to an 8-hour workday, or is it acceptable to work more when necessary? Specifically, if the tasks at hand don't get completed within the standard 8-hour window, should I extend my hours into the night to resolve issues?

Here's my dilemma: I've found myself working additional hours at night to tackle pending tasks. While this has helped me keep up with my workload, I'm unsure about the implications of this practice:

• Should I expect acknowledgment or appreciation from my manager for these extra efforts?
• Is it beneficial to communicate my extended hours to my manager, and could it potentially influence decisions regarding bonuses or other forms of recognition?
• How do managers typically view overtime work, and what is the balance between demonstrating dedication and setting healthy work boundaries?

I'd appreciate any guidance or personal experiences you can share on handling overtime work and how to approach discussions about it with management.

Thank you for your insights.

My brother is very worried about getting a return offer at Meta - he'll be interning there this summer. He reviewed the videos on , but is still confused on who he would assign to review diffs/vouch for his performance other than his EM.

Hello, I've seen the term "maintenance projects" (basically, projects where you do bug fixing most of the time) and green field projects (projects where you write code from scratch).

I've been told that the maintenance projects are generally the ones that you want to avoid since you won't learn much.

I didn't see this view against software projects on TARO, like to divide the projects in to these categories from a high level view and I was wondering if you guys can tell me more about this business view of the software projects.

Are there other categories besides maintenance and greenfield? How can I avoid maintenance ones or recognize them?

After watching the focus-focus-focus video in the level up your , I was thinking where to find place where I can learn stuff under the hood in java and gain higher level of knowledge.

Most books and tutorials out there I believe they focus on superficial stuff, just enough to get things working.

Thank you.

Hello everyone. I work for a consulting company.

My last project finished 2 months ago and I've not been able to find another project within my employer's clients.

People in charge assigning projects asked me if I have experience in a specific set of technologies but they are mostly related to data engineering or AI/ML and I'm a backend developer.

How can I increase the chances to find a project. I don't want to be laid off.

Hi,

I am a mid level engineer. Recently I was given a task which had a tight deadline. I started looking at the task and was stuck as the results from the code run were not as expected while testing. I was unfamiliar with this area of code so tried my best to understand the code and investigate the cause of unexpected result. I raised this with the team and also raised this as a blocker. I mentioned that I did not have confidence in going ahead with the task without understanding the cause of the unexpected results. My team was unhappy with this as the code has been working okay so far without any issues and the unexpected results were likely because of a gap in my understanding. The team assumed that I did not want to do the task whereas my hold up was not wanting to proceed without having a clear understanding of what's going on.

Should I have approached the situation differently? How to work with an unknown or hardly known area of code on a tight deadline?

I have had issues in the past with the team because of performance and other reasons. I have recently improved my performance but fear falling back to the old ways.

Thanks