Do you think you can get a better offer in the UK with a little bit more time? Looks like you're doing well on your current job, with some more time and networking don't you think you could get a job at a Big Tech, for example?\
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Anyways, I wasn't born or raised in India but I can relate to the feeling, as an immigrant myself. I came to North America but have thought about living in Europe. For now I'm settled in North America, and I'll probably just stay around, but even here you can choose from many different cities and lifestyles. A few points that helped me think:

1. Money is important - it doesn't matter what people say. There's a lot of benefit from having financial stability and independence.
2. Opportunities also matter. The pandemic did make things more remote-friendly, but we're slowing going back to where we were with more companies with RTO.
3. Lifestyle and quality of life also matter. Do you mind having to commute every day or do you prefer WFH? Do you prefer having a car or taking good public transport?
4. What do you like to do on your weekends? Are you an outdoorsy person? Do you mind living somewhere cold and dark for most part of the year?

These are the questions I asked myself when deciding if I should move somewhere or not, and some of my own answers actually surprised me. When thinking about opportunities, for example, my home city São Paulo actually has a lot more job postings in LinkedIn as opposed to big cities in Canada like Toronto and Vancouver. Some friends even managed to get paid in USD working remotely to US companies, which is a great lifestyle upgrade. But some other factors like safety and public infrastructure made Canada / North America more attractive to me.

There's no easy answer to your question - you have to make a decision matrix and weight what's more important to you. And once a decision is made, it will also have good and bad consequences that you'll have to live with.

Software Engineer at Microsoft

Luciana Marques

The other answers are great and agree that it's not useful to overthink what has already happened. Also, from what you're describing you probably have a fantastic resumé and have collected a bunch of different experiences! And honestly that's what university is for! 

When I was in university, I liked to think about my resumé a collection of "stamps". I had to have in my CV a number of experiences that ultimately would lead to my dream job. I did a little bit of everything: private tutoring, TA positions, undergrad research, technical proposals/sales internship, interned at a bank, then my final internship was at a Big Tech company. But I don't think a resumé like that showed a person with an "identity crisis" - it only showed I willing to take the most of the experiences I had access to.

I actually believe that a generalist resumé is the best as opposed to a "focused" one when you're early in career. Having multiple experiences will help you decide which path you will want to take. It can also qualify you for more job opportunities since you will have collected experiences in more areas.

So, do not feel bad for your choices, they're just part of your story. If you want to go back to the F1000 company, you still have your whole career to do it.

**Wins:** have been progressing on some side projects and watched fireworks at the beach this weekend!

**Losses:** haven't been hitting the gym much! 

I have been a Taro premium user for quite some time now, and I have purchased other paid courses and mentorship programs. I do that because I totally agree that if a $100-1000 course can help me land a promotion, or negotiate my salary, or make me more productive, I can not only get this value back but also earning it 2X-3X-4X, etc, more throughout my career.

I can understand why someone would argue against paying for a course since a lot of information is provided for free on the web. But you'd have to do the whole work of pre-selecting, organizing and making a plan for yourself on how to absorve this kind of content. By doing a paid course, this work has already been done by someone else and is being presented in an organized way, so you can save a lot of time and potentially achieve your goals faster.

Also, there's some information that I don't think that is widely available, because not every Staff Engineer, VP or founder (assuming these are your goal) has a free Substack or YT channel. Could you still find it somehow for free? Probably, but again the course would save you some time and probably in a much nicer format.

At last, a bunch of these paid courses offer the opportunity to connect with other people with similar goals. You definitely can find communities out there, but the course will oftentimes connect people that are on the same step as you *right now*, and it's a great source for asking questions and seeing others' questions being answered too.

With that said, I think both paid courses and free online content are valuable information sources. But if I'm interested in a topic, have already done research on it and I see a course that I can afford and that will help me reach my goals faster, why not invest on it?

I’m really sorry you are going through this and I hope you can find a way out quickly.

I agree with Alex that the most obvious solution would be to look outside and that there’s a high chance your product gets deprioritized. So, the best time to look for a new job is while you’re employed.

I like to have a mindset where I can make the most out of a situation even if planning to leave. What are the opportunities you can work on so you can make your resumé more attractive? Also can you work with your lead as Alex suggested? This way you will still be growing, getting mentorship and adding value to your CV while looking externally.

The market is brutal now for new grads, so don’t blame or compare yourself to others. Everyone has their own journey!

Now talking about what you can do: continue working on yourself while job searching! Don’t just keep sending applications, but work on yourself by taking online courses, building and publishing projects, etc. Also, this might not be the best time to be picky - getting some experience now in a job that wasn’t your first choice is definitely better than waiting for your dream job.

This is non weird at all, it shows great initiative and interest! There might be a chance that they will tell you to don’t worry about it and to relax before your start (happened with me), but this will not hurt you in any manner.

I also made a switch a long time ago from traditional industries (energy and banking) to tech companies. Although that was when I was doing internships and not a full time employee, I think my experience might help.

You already covered the hard skills part. Definitely all the references from Taro you posted will help you and your attitude tells me you’re already working on your onboarding.

With that said, I think the the biggest shock for you will probably be the company’s culture and hierarchy. In traditional companies, it may be uncommon that managers have regular 1-1s with their reports for example, and still use waterfall project management instead of Agile. 

So, try to make the most of your meetings with your manager. You mentioned this is a contract position, do you think about getting a permanent one? If yes you should signal this early and ask for constant feedback on how you can achieve that since you only have six months. Still on the meetings topic, understand what are the ceremonies your team does (daily sync up, planning, retrospective, monthly demo days) and be active. It’s likely that your previous company didn’t have that.

These are all generalizations of course, but in summary what I would do in your place is to study hard Instacart’s culture and try my best to adapt fast.

Congratulations on your new job and best of luck!

> Could you guys suggest a plan for the next 3-6 months that would really help me level up my skills? Should I just focus on churning out as many projects as I can? I'm already putting in the effort at my internship, but I feel like I need to do more.

Your feelings are totally valid and I hear you! Since you already secured an internship for this year and have some previous experience, a good plan now is to try to secure a job for after graduation. The first step is to select the positions that you're more interested in and feel like you're a good fit, polish your resume to the specific requirements of each and apply as soon as possible. Connect with recruiters, reach out to the your network, etc. I feel like there's a lot of material about job searching on the internet so I won't detail this much here.

I would do projects but thinking about working on more "meaty" ones to add more impact to your resumé. There's a great masterclass by Alex on how to develop your personal projects here: <https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/AI4zi759PSGn6RwIFT6f/masterclass-how-to-come-up-with-100k-users-app-ideas-you-can-build-for-free/>

> Also, should I stick to what I know and double down on frontend skills, or should I try to learn some backend too to keep my job options open post-graduation?

To answer this question you need to ask yourself first what do you want. Do you prefer to be a front-end engineer? If yes then focus on preparing for front-end related interview questions (apart from the general DSA ones). It's certainly helpful for a front-end engineer to know some back-end, but I'd rather focus on what is going to help you pass the interviews and learn back-end on the job.

Now, would you like to try full-stack or something completely back-end? Then yes, studying some back-end would be good.

> How much ChatGPT should I use when building my projects? I feel like if I use it too much, I won't develop coding skills as much and also non-technical skills like reading documentation. Opinions?

I use ChatGPT essentially as a search, feedback and productivity tool. It will not code your project for you. It does write some code, yes, but that code still needs to be corrected, debugged, tested, etc. You can get some ideas from it more quickly for sure, but the hard part is still on you. With that said, it's OK to use ChatGPT for finding answers, just don't think that will solve your problem all the time.

> Should I also do Leetcode (I am weak at it too)? Or is it just better to focus on one thing at a time? Or something like - 3 months Frontend, 3 months Leetcode?

What kind of companies you want to interview for? Do they use leetcode style interviews? Then yes, doing Leetcode will help you, and in that case I think it's best to focus on what you're less strong on. If you're already comfortable with frontend I'd study Leetcode.

Also, some university recruiting positions don't require domain-specific knowlede (e.g., Front-end) and rather focus on Leetcode. So that's why it's important to learn more about the companies you want to interview for first.

From your question's title and description, it sounds to me that you're trying to find ways to cope with a situation while waiting for a transition, but you're certain that you need to make a transition. I think the best thing to do in this case is to see if you can transition quicker due to your mental health, but these kinds of situations can also help us grow, so I'd take advantage of that while waiting.

You're right that the current economy can add more challenges to career moves, but you already mentioned you may have other offers, so it's not totally bad as it was one year ago. Still, it is important to assess how much risk making a change would be for you, but I also think it's valid to reflect on the risk of **not** changing. You mentioned your work's speed and quality decreased, do you see a short term solution for this or not?

If not, I'd try to improve my performance as soon as possible, whether by improving my efficiency, removing myself from useless meetings and focusing on one thing at the time. Also remaining calm during stressful situations and working on your professional image/brand. If I were in such situation you described, I'd try my best to learn from it by improving the previous points while waiting for that much anticipated transition.

From your message, I understood that you want to advance your technical skills, possibly by designing a medium to large scale system from scratch so you can go from mid-level to senior. You're also debating if you should go to a startup or big tech, but you sounded pretty sure to me that you don't want to be on your current company.

So answering each of these topics one by one:

**Advancing your technical skills**

This is a broad topic that you can achieve in many ways. In one of my teams we used to have a % of time in which we could spend learning topics instead of doing feature work. I highly encourage this even if your team doesn't have a formal structure. Learning is part of being a software engineer, you will always inevitably need to study new things. What worked for me was listing the most pressing topics for my day job, and find Coursera courses that covered them (I'm particularly a fan of their Google/Meta certificates). Then, also identify skills that I had to learn for my future self, that were not going to be immediately helpful but would definitely be in the long term.

**Looking for system design opportunities**

You mentioned you want to design something from scratch, but depending on the company or the team you are, these opportunities might be super rare. This  doesn't mean though you won't be able to design something.

Have you mentioned to your manager that you want to do this? Maybe there might be a new feature coming up that will require building a new system, even if it's small it's still a good opportunity.

In terms of the system's size for scalability, this depends a lot on your team's context, so making a switch might be inevitable. Just don't stop learning and trying to find opportunities in your current team since we don't know when you will have the opportunity of switching.

**Getting a promotion from mid-level to senior engineer**

We finally got to what seems to be the reason for your question. But, while learning and designing systems are definitely important to a senior engineer, promotions are not only based on individual impact but also a lot on relationships and processes. Have you mentioned to your manager that you want to be promoted? Have you checked your company's definition of what a senior engineer is expected to do? Have you created a plan alongside with your manager of how you can grow to be already achieving such expectations? The previous two sections can be quite irrelevant if you haven't done any of this.

**Startup vs. Big Tech**

There are other threads here in Taro that answer this question specifically, so I recommend reading them if that's really something you want to consider. I believe startups can have more opportunities to design something from scratch as opposed to bigger companies with more stablished products. But, I think you need to ask yourself other questions apart from if you'll have more system design opportunities, because startup and big tech work environments as a whole have both a lot more pros and cons to consider.

Books

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[Course] Grow From Mid-Level To Senior Engineer: L4 To L5

After getting a foothold in the industry, engineers become mid-level. Most engineers stay at this level for quite a while as they navigate the senior engineer promotion (L4 -> L5 by FAANG leveling), which generally requires becoming a tech lead.