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

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

Some context, last July after getting laid off I started searching for new work with a particular focus on FAANG.

I garner traction with a few companies but am elated when hear from a FAANG head hunter.

I passed the first interview. Scheduled the second and it wasn’t until the confirmation email of the second interview that I saw “Contract”. I was greatly disheartened though I figured I might as well go through the interview process and decide after I’ve lined up all my options. And after talking to the hiring manager I was promised a chance to convert the contract is up.

It was a hard decision, but ultimately I passed up on a well paying senior role at smaller company to take a stab at FAANG.

And I loved it. The engineers I work with are brilliant, the products impacting orders of magnitude more clients than I ever have before and I'm learning.

However, after shipping our first project, the hiring manager that brought me on board switched teams. The projects I've been reassigned to have been largely tech debt and non technical. I have had no direct manager for 4 months with no new one stepping in in the foreseeable future. While conversion is supposedly still on the table, there is no one tracking my contributions and there is a new stipulation of “if the market permits” tacked on top, meaning they have an excuse to prolong the contract rather than give a chance to convert.

The cherry on top of all this is, recruiters from this company have reached out multiple times over the past two weeks but pull out after I inform them that I'm currently contracting for them. This is due to the understandable “external” vs “internal” hiring conflicts.

So I guess the question is, should I quit and open up the chance to once again start applying externally? Or would it make more sense to stick around and try for the mythical conversion or even just maintain and study for the inevitable interviewing at the end of the contract? Maybe try being overemployed?

I have tried asking the stand in managers, but they have much bigger fish to fry than the ambitions of a contractor so I would really appreciate some opinions on how I might navigate this period of contracting.

Thanks for the read and your time,

E

Hi all. I suck at following deadline. Every time I signup for some task, I end up either being a mediocre or finish it late passing deadline. I want to come out of this vicious cycle. Please don't suggest things like set timer, break big tasks to small tasks, use calendar all those. It doesn't help me. Please suggest some practical solutions that can be followed. TIA

Hi Taro Community,

I’ve encountered an interesting situation at my company, where I was the sole member in India until recently. In March, we hired an internal manager in India, whom I now report to. In our latest 1:1, he mentioned that I wouldn’t be assigned direct coding tasks possibly until September or October. For now, my work involves renaming elements within the codebase, and while I understand the rationale behind these changes, I’m missing out on more substantive coding work.

Given this context, I’m seeking advice on how to proactively engage with and understand our codebase. Without being assigned direct coding tasks, what are some effective ways to delve deeper into the code, learn its intricacies, and prepare myself for future assignments?

• Should I take the initiative to review and study different parts of the codebase independently?
• Could I propose small, self-initiated coding projects to demonstrate my understanding and initiative?
• How can I use this time effectively to ensure that when coding tasks are assigned, I’m fully up to speed and ready to contribute meaningfully?

Any tips or shared experiences on how to navigate this period would be highly appreciated.

Thank you for your help.

Hi Taro Community,

I’ve often come across the term ‘Pair Programming’ within discussions here and in the broader tech community. However, I realize that I may not fully grasp the various contexts in which this practice is applied. Could anyone shed light on what Pair Programming entails and how it might differ across different settings or scenarios?

Specifically, I’m curious about:

• The essential elements that define Pair Programming
• Variations in approach when it comes to Pair Programming in a remote vs. in-person environment
• The benefits and potential drawbacks of this method from your personal experiences
• Situations or types of tasks where Pair Programming is particularly effective or, conversely, not recommended.

Understanding this could greatly influence how I collaborate with my team and contribute to our projects. Any insights or personal anecdotes on this subject would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you for your help.

I had an interview with a Big Tech company last week. The Hiring Manager told me that he had 2 spots open on his team, one mid L4 and one senior L5. He then asked me what role I wanted to be in. I waffled a bit, but then said the L4 role. I genuinely believe I'd rather be in the L4 role since I've never worked in Big Tech before.

I'm assuming I made a mistake in answering the question though. Similar to how you should never give the first number when asked about comp expectations, I'm assuming the right answer to a levelling question is something like "I'm looking to contribute at the highest level I can".

I imagine this response is the better response for 2 reasons:

1. I might be able to get an L5 role and operate at that level, even if I don't feel that way

2. If they think I'm going for L5, they might give me L4 as consolation, whereas if they think I'm going for L4, I might end up with nothing. This is the "shoot for the moon, land among the stars" strategy.

Can people confirm my thinking is accurate?

Every year, there's a mandatory compensation one on one with my manager. I find the session mostly informational and it's not really a bargaining / negotiation process. Usually when the compensation conversation happens, the performance review was set in stone a few months ago. There's limited things a manager can do.

What do you ask during the compensation discussion? The nitty-gritty of compensation of my current company is thoroughly discussed over different forums and there's more information over the Internet than what my manager could officially tell me. Should I just quickly close the comp one on one to save time for both of us?