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This has been a big challenge for me, and I’m curious how others are handling it, especially those working in hybrid environments.

I find that I struggle to get real focused work done during the traditional 9–5 window. Ironically, I tend to be *most* productive outside of that, evenings, weekends, which obviously isn’t sustainable long-term and doesn't support a real life-work balance.

Part of it is all the noise: constant DM pings, meetings, notifications, (WORKPLACE, how do I stop scrolling haha?), it’s hard to carve out blocks of time to focus deeply on one thing. I know I need to be stricter with my time and probably set up more rigid focus blocks, but I haven’t quite cracked that yet.

There’s also a personal factor: I’ve never really been a “morning person.” Even when I wake up early and try to start strong (coffee, workouts, etc.), it still takes me hours to fully “boot up” mentally. That delayed ramp-up makes it even harder to be effective during core working hours.

On top of that, I think some of this is a byproduct of how I worked in college. I never studied on campus, I always worked at home. So public or shared workspaces have always been tough for me. When I started my first job (in-person), I struggled *a lot* with that adjustment.

I then worked fully remotely for about three years, which honestly suited me better. Now I’m in a hybrid role, and I assumed it would be the best of both worlds. But I'm still having trouble finding a rhythm.

One of my biggest pain points with hybrid work is the commute, it’s about two hours each way. Moving isn’t really an option right now, so when I go in, that’s four hours of my day just gone. I try to cluster my office days together and use them mostly for meetings or team face-time, because I often feel like I can’t get any deep work done on those days anyway… though, weirdly, sometimes I can. It really depends.

So I’m wondering:

- Has anyone else faced similar struggles, especially transitioning from remote to hybrid?
- How do you protect your time for deep work during the day?
- Any specific strategies (schedule-wise or mindset-wise) that helped you turn the corner?

How do you actually get focused work done during the workday? Especially in a hybrid setup?

Staff Software Engineer at Taro Community

Hi Folks,

I've been here for a couple of months now and I've been getting good value from the advice here. So thanks a ton. However, I still have a few lingering questions.

1. Is there a good template for a 1:1 with my manager without sounding like promotion/growth/TC hungry desperate person?
2. Is there a good itemized growth plan template to track my own growth that is holistic in terms of technical complexity and interpersonal skills? The idea is to periodically check-in with myself using this template so that I'm able to measure my progress since last check-in. Would it make sense to also do this check-in during my 1:1? or is that too much?

I recently joined Meta as a mid-level SWE and matched with a backend-heavy infra team. I chose it because I wanted to grow. I've been forcing myself to keep doing backend because it always felt harder, and I didn’t want to keep avoiding it. I’m technically full-stack and enjoy frontend/product work more, but this org is very backend-focused, and I don't know how much product work (like internal tools) drives impact here. I'm assuming it doesn't as much as infra, because the whole org is infra. 

Now that I’ve been on the team for \~2 months, I’m really struggling. I want to get better at backend,  but I genuinely don’t know how to improve. Even small changes feel like editing 20 files. There’s no clear testing strategy, and things are very company-specific, so I can’t Google, build side projects, or learn in public like I could with frontend (React/HTML/JS). Backend here feels like a wall, and it’s hard to build intuition or momentum.

I’ve been reading test plans and tracing code, but it often feels like I’m guessing. I also know I need to hit "meets expectations" to transfer internally, which I understand, but it makes it feel like I have to get good at backend, whether it fits me or not. There is a possible exemption path, but I think I wouldn’t even be eligible to ask until I’m at least 6 months in, and I’m not sure if that’s worth pursuing.

So I have a few questions:

1\. How do you get better at backend (infra-style, internal tools, big-company scale) when it’s hard to Google or practice on your own? I've been asking my team members, but I just feel like I can't get any straight answers from them. I even asked how I can trigger or test the code, and even for that the answer was "most of the time you can't."

2\. If you’re full-stack in a backend org, is it okay to lean into frontend work for delivery — or does that limit your growth and impact?

3\. Has anyone here ever successfully switched teams before the usual 12-month requirement? Is asking for an exemption ever worth it?

Appreciate any thoughts or advice — I just want to find a path where I can both grow and be effective.

Struggling with backend development, how do you improve when it’s all internal?

Sr Staff Software Engineer at Taro Community

I’m looking for some guidance as I prepare for a role transition.

### Background

For the past few years, I’ve been working as a Software Architect. My responsibilities have primarily involved reviewing and critiquing design documents, providing architectural guidance, and supporting other staff engineers in their execution. The role has been valuable for building broad perspective, but it hasn’t carried much direct accountability for delivery. Hands-on work has been quite limited, and I realize I’ve drifted away from the practice of designing and building solutions end-to-end myself.

### Context

I’m about to move into a Staff Engineer role (different company) in about a month.

### Concern

I feel that my solution design skills have atrophied. I’m comfortable reviewing others’ proposals and spotting gaps, but I struggle when starting from a blank page. I want to rebuild confidence in designing systems and making concrete technical decisions.

If you’ve been through a similar shift—or coached someone who has—I’d love to hear what helped you or your colleagues succeed.

Role transition, regaining hands on skills

Entry-Level Software Engineer at Taro Community

About three months ago, I left a big tech company—just seven months in—to join a seed-stage startup. It had always been a goal of mine to experience life at an early-stage company, and I figured the timing was right: I was early in my career, eager to learn, and ready to take a risk.

Since joining, the startup has made some progress. We recently raised our Series A, which is exciting and definitely a milestone. But now that I’ve had time to settle in, I’m starting to question whether this is still the right place for me to grow.

The toughest part so far has been the hours. I'm often putting in 12-hour days, six days a week. I knew startup life would be demanding, but the constant grind has been more taxing than I expected. While we did raise a Series A, I’d say I’m about 50-50 on how confident I feel about the startup’s long-term success. Some things are promising, but other aspects still feel uncertain.

From a learning standpoint, it’s been a mixed bag. I’ve picked up a lot just from being thrown into the fire, building fast, and working directly with founders and early team members. But we don’t really do code reviews. There’s little mentorship or structured feedback, and I worry that I might be missing out on developing stronger fundamentals—especially important for me as a junior engineer.

I’d love to hear thoughts from folks who’ve been in similar situations: *Is it worth sticking it out longer at a startup like this, or should I consider moving on?*

I'm around midpoint for my internship and I've ended up having quite a few longer diffs that are difficult to split. In various courses it's mentioned that having small diffs is very important so this something I'm trying to stay conscious of but the nature of my changes makes this difficult at times. I asked my IM and peers specifically about this and they all said they don't have problems with it but I'm worried this might come up in calibration as a big negative for me despite what my peers/IM have said. To put it into perspective right now I have about 45 diffs and \~10k SLOC written so it's an average of \~220. Will this end up being an issue in PSC?

Intern diffs are long but IM and peers don't mind

Mid-Level Software Engineer at Taro Community

Hi everyone,\
As we plan for H2, multiple high-visibility projects have been assigned to our team. Due to limited resources, we’ve been split into virtual groups, and I'm expected to contribute to multiple projects simultaneously.\
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The main challenge is prioritisation. When I ask my manager, the response is usually “everything is important,” which makes it hard to focus. I want to avoid a situation where I’m spread too thin and end up underdelivering.\
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Would love your thoughts on:\
1. How do you prioritize when everything feels urgent?\
2. How do you manage bandwidth while still setting realistic expectations?\
3. Any frameworks or tactics that have worked well for you in similar situations?\
\
Thank you

How to prioritise when working on multiple high-visibility projects with limited time

I heard building RAG on top of LLAMA is possible pretty easy over DataBricks. But there are some challenge’s with metrics, what else is confusing and hard? How to learn the proper best practices and avoid basic pitfalls? 

What Machine Learning Engineers do with RAG?

I am currently Staff Eng in Airbnb and accepted the offer from Cisco on Senior Staff MLE. How to make transition smooth?

in many big tech companies where team matching happens and you get a generic DSA round, what kinds of questions do folks ask?

I know taro has a video on it but i'm curious to get some anecdotes here from taro members on what kinds of questions you ask?

Things like asking about team culture, challenges in team, tech stack, how the team handles XYZ specific issue are all off the table

Asking generic questions (what is culture like? favorite part of working here?) also probs arent useful bc you could be matched with a completely different org

How to ask questions when you're not interviewing for a specific team?

I see more and more non-FAANG companies are switching to live coding exercises and not traditional leetcode style questions. I see there aren't any such questions online. Any tips to prepare for those type of questions?

How to practice for live coding interviews

I'm interviewing for FAANG L3

My story: Coworkers and I were creating design doc. I had suggestion A. coworker had suggestion B. We had a fruitful discussion on pros/cons on each approach. Decided to go with coworkers approach as that made more sense

My worry: 

- it's too simple/not chaotic/severe enough. 
- It ends too cleanly

Is a story like that good enough for tell me about a time you had a conflict?

Any advice/example stories people have used?

Advise on story for "tell me about a time you had a conflict"

I have been doing incident management work for product (not infra) all throughoutmy career, and I'm up against two offers I have at hand. \
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I wanted your insights on the Problem Management role if anyone has some idea about this role \
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Option A: Senior SWE : Regular backend development/Java, Spring Boot, microservices, APIs. Building features customers use. \
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Option B: **:** Basically you dig through system outages and failures to spot patterns that keep happening. Then you have to convince different engineering teams to actually fix the root causes and put those improvements on their roadmaps. Lots of post-incident reviews and working with service owners to make sure problems get properly addressed. It's more about influencing people and being the technical voice pushing for stability improvements rather than writing code yourself. High visibility role since executives care about platform reliability, but you're mostly coordinating and advocating rather than building things.\
\
What do you think of the problem management role?\
Does it have long-term career sustainability as opposed to dev roles where I could earn hard skills in development?\
\
I am in a dilemma because the Option B pays significantly more than A, while option B is progression from what I am currently doing in the similar line of work, Option A will equip me with new set of skills in dev world that I see transferrable (hoping AI will not automate them away down the line?)

Help me choose: Senior SWE vs Reliability Engineer

Senior Software Engineer at Taro Community

Hi,

I just feel like most of the advice about a software engineering career online applies to the US, and mostly to Silicon Valley, NYC, and Boston - big cities. After spending 6 years in London, I noticed these things:

1. FAANG companies mostly hire in the US, and the offices that they have in Europe are quite small, and when an interesting project comes up, it is often moved to the US. FAANG quite often have restrictions that when you want to get promoted to L7+, you have to move to the US.
2. Startups struggle to raise funding even in London. Closing B2B deals in Europe is really hard, so most of the startups try to find deals in the US.
3. There are barely any Europe-based scale-ups.
4. The most successful Europe-based scale ups are in the fintech - monzo, revolut, wise, zilch. Deliveroo got acquired by the US-based company - doordash. Babylon Health went bankrupt.

Are your observations consistent with this? How do you think about your career when you want to stay in Europe? What is your strategy?

Hello Everyone, 

With the market being especially brutal for juniors, I wanted to try to get all of us in Taro together so we can support one another, offer strategies together, and possibly collaborate on projects. I think united, we are strong. I think just having a group where you feel you aren’t in this alone could help greatly. So I wanted to post this as a question: if enough people are interested, I think we could use this group to supercharge our career growth and, most importantly, be there for each other in these tough times.

Entry-Level Software Engineer [SDE 1] at Amazon

For senior folk on Taro, what’s the most reliable signal you’ve seen that consistently predicts strong IC performance (EE/GE-level)?

Assuming you had access to all the metrics of a person and you had to predict based on that who is most likely to be successful, what trait or signal would most strongly correlate with high performance? Examples include:

- How fast could they ship code, create POCs and get signal quickly?
- Do they just write **a lot** of code in general?
- How many high-quality questions did they ask?
- How often did they take on work outside of their core responsibilities?

What is the most common trait of the best ICs?

Hi Team,

I have an full loop coming up and one of the 4 rounds that doesn't seem standard for big tech loops. It is the Project Deep Dive. 

I have suspicions on how to prepare: aka have a strong "tell me about a project you are proud of" story, and be able to explain it in excalidraw. 

So for mid level, my guess on how to be successful in this round is to go into detail about the edge cases of the project I worked on, and how I drove the solutions for them. \
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Is anyone here familiar with giving this interview type and if I am on the right track in terms of being able to give the right signals?

Hey guys! Need some help.

My milestone is to basically get all the exceptions from a huge async job and propagate it upwards.

So I was assigned to do milestone 1 for my internship by week 3. My manager initially mentioned to me how it can be done. I took a look at the codebase, but was unsure of how it could be implemented. I wanted to explore ways this solution can be implemented easily. I initially did my approach in a diff but that would break the async job. So I asked my peer's opinions on how they would approach it. I made a design of all the approaches my peers and my manager mentioned and made a design doc and wrote my thoughts on the designs.

I had a design review with my team, and my manager realized that his idea would not be the best longterm feasible and scalable. My peer recommended a way to pass the output from each function as a data or an error, allowing to see where we could pinpoint to exactly what value the error is happening at and it would be the best overall solution. My manager agreed it was a good solution, but we realized that it was a lot of code changes.

So I was unsure of what route to choose, and wanted to go with the safest approach so I chose my peers solution as that adheres to a lot of best practices. Me and my manager also realized that the codebase is a mess, as there is a lot of blockers eg. backend code is calling graphQL endpoints etc. and a lot more refactoring needs to be done. There is insufficient log for exceptions etc...

I am still in the process of implementing that solution. Midpoint is going to be soon, and I am still looking to finish task 1 of milestone 1. I do not know what to do at this point. I have 15 diffs, 2000 significant lines. Is it too late now?\
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Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

I recently transferred departments at Instacart and so have a new manager and skip manager.

My old skip manager (a Director) put a recurring 1:1 for 15 minutes on our calendar  for every 6 weeks before I switched. I have 1:1 with her scheduled for tomorrow. I reached out to her to ask her if she wants to keep it and she said it's up to me, we can speak or have meetings on an adhoc basis.

Should I go ahead with this 1:1? I already have a weekly 1:1 with my new manager, a biweekly 1:1 with my old manager, presumably periodical meetings with my new skip, a bikweekly 1:1 with my company mentor, and a monthly 1:1 with my career mentor (thanks Taro!). 

I don't want to waste my old skip's time, and in general don't love meetings. I always feel like I wish I had more to say I did. 

I'm aware that many people would love the opportunity to speak to a director as it's a great opportunity to get more scope or develop networking skills, but I'm not super amibitious, am happy being an L4 and just want to get my work done and be in good standing. No plans to be a Senior Staff Engineer anytime soon.

It's only 15 minutes to not a big deal either way, but would love to get people's thoughts.

Thanks!

Recently, I left my first company after working there for about a year. While I completed a major project during my time there, I ultimately decided to leave because of irreconcilable issues with my manager.

The situation was challenging - I never clicked with my manager despite my efforts, and the workplace atmosphere felt outright hostile. I received zero positive feedback from my manager throughout my tenure, and any negative feedback was unconstructive - just criticism without actionable improvement areas, as I understand a manager is supposed to do. I felt like staying longer would lead to burnout and potentially damage the good work I'd accomplished. Thus, I timed my departure right after completing my project to leave on a professional note and maintain a positive impression.

Now I'm unemployed, and have heard a major backlash from family and colleagues, and also that leaving a first job so quickly looks bad on a résumé. This feedback has me second-guessing my decision.

So my real question is: Did I make the right call, or should I have toughed it out longer? Also, how should I frame it in an upcoming interview without throwing my former employer under the bus?

How to explain short tenure at first job in interviews?

Join The Discussion

Share insights on complex topics like system design, code review, tech leadership, interpersonal communication, and more.

How do you actually get focused work done during the workday? Especially in a hybrid setup?

Template for 1:1 with Manager/Skip Level

Struggling with backend development, how do you improve when it’s all internal?

Role transition, regaining hands on skills

Staying at startup or leave?

Intern diffs are long but IM and peers don't mind

How to prioritise when working on multiple high-visibility projects with limited time

What Machine Learning Engineers do with RAG?

How to transition from staff eng to MLE?

How to ask questions when you're not interviewing for a specific team?

How to practice for live coding interviews

Advise on story for "tell me about a time you had a conflict"

Help me choose: Senior SWE vs Reliability Engineer

Building career in Europe

Junior Support Group

What is the most common trait of the best ICs?

Project Deep Dive Interview

Week 5 at Meta Internship

Keep 1:1 With Old Skip Manager?

How to explain short tenure at first job in interviews?