What do you need help with with regards to your promotion. Have you identify your gaps? Can the mentor share his experience in that? If it is a mentor that work closely with you, they may be able to provide you their observation and room of growth as well. And what specifically are you trying to learn from the mentor?\
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Feel free to also use the mentor as a sounding board to bounce idea off. They would generally provide you feedback based on their experience and how they may approach it differently. \
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When you feel like you went through a tough situation or tough decision, you could also run it by the mentor to understand how they would approach it.\
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Don't think of questions on the day itself, it is hard. Start taking notes of what you are doing daily, as a daily reflection kind of thing. That way you are tracking the highlight and low light of your day. You can use the lowlight as input and phrase it to questions for your mentor and learn how they would approach it.

Senior Software Engineer [SDE 3] at Amazon

leong

There are some insights that Alex have shared in the past about utilizing your mentorship. <https://www.jointaro.com/question/IbuZydz0QzsVVqESVaxQ/how-do-you-get-the-most-out-of-mentorship/>

and finding mentors:\
<https://www.jointaro.com/question/53nM0O5iemQD5K5ZQkYE/how-do-i-find-a-proper-mentor-within-my-company/>

In term of frequency, it depends on how you and your mentors interact, generally my mentor ship starts at a weekly cadence. But my mentees do reach out to me via slack all the time for any other questions. When coaching/bootstrapping a whole new team, I have participated in daily sync to answer any questions they have, so it depends on your needs from the mentor and how much time they can commit to the mentorship.

While the resource may be old, generally it is the idea and concept behind it that is important and applicable. It takes time to implement most idea in practice, but with practice I am sure you will be able to tackle it yourself in the future.

With respect of finding a mentor, one option would be to ask your Manager if he can help with the search. If you have a senior developer that you interact with a lot and you do look up to them, doesn't hurt to have a casual coffee chat and ask them. In the worse case is them rejecting due to lack of time on their end, but they may be able to suggest others that would be capable of mentoring as well.

First of all, I don't think it is bad to try to reach out to the senior/TL to get guidance on how to tackle the ambuguity. I myself tend to breakdown a high level project to more manageable sub-components/features and let the other tackle each of the them. They all may have a simple write up on what the implementation may be like if its not as simple as just adding API to the existing system.

Since you have observed your senior member breaking down the task into smaller subtasks with reference to a step-by-step guide, did they share the guide and how much do you understand the approach in said guide?

Do you have a mentor? they could be a resource that you can refer to for guidance as well. I would say try your best to breakdown the component/features into as small as a task you could. The task itself should have well define success criteria so you or anyone else could pick it up and know when they completed it.

There is no silver bullet when it come to dealing with something outside of your comfort zone, but i tend to think what is the next thing that needs to be done for a particular tasks at hand, until I reach a satisfactory completion. You won't have all the answers/solutions up front, but gradual progress can be considered a success.

One thing to note is as you gain more experience, your view on how a problem should be tackled and solve will be come easier, so learning from all your peers and senior around you is key.

chew

It may not always be feasible to tinker a complex nested collection of microservices. What you could do is review some of the documentation and make educated guesses. For documentation, APIs generally have documentation in wiki or the model themselves. You could also figure out what an API is for by looking at the API code themselves, but that's generally for deeper dives. You could also search for reference of the API and how its being used in the internal code search.\
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Ask your teammate or the dependencies owner question about their services. \
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One thing to note staff+ engineers generally pick up context faster but its not necessary deep diving into the code and models. For my ramp up, i generally find talking to a lot of tenured people and asking a lot of question help build a lot of context much faster.

Amazon

Senior Software Engineer [SDE 3]

There are multiple ways that I have seen teams tackle this aside from buffering some additional time for unknowns that may creep up during implementation and research.\
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1\. If this "extra work" is a must do along side other initial tasks. You will have to delay the overall product/feature launch by communicating the delay and why. This is a risky one and if happen often, will deprive the morale of the team and trusts from the top.\
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2\. Similar to 1, convey the extra task needed and ask for additional resources to help with the project. This only works well if there are folks from sister team with cross team context that can help quickly.\
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3\. Reduce scope of release and reevaluate what is the MVP that you will be delivering. This is what I tend to lean towards, by delivering incremental product/features if feasible.

I can't give you a comparison with India wrt to cost of living. In term of post tax earnings, i did a rough calculation when i had both a Canadian and US offer for Amazon. For me, US post tax income would have been 2x of my Canadian offer given the tax and currency conversion. Above 220\~k in Canada, your marginal tax in might be 56% at main provinces like Ontario and British Columbia. Canada also has some extremely competitive real estate market in the major cities, like Toronto and Vancouver, so owning a house would be much harder as well.\
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I had work at Amazon and startup and I can say that career ladder does exist but they may be less senior tech leadership in Canada compared to US if the company has a large presence in US.

Personally I have chosen to take the Canadian offer instead of US.

I think it may depend on what your requirements are, both serverless and containerization works great.\
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With Serverless, you won't have to worry too much about scaling if you mostly run business logic and don't have to be stateful(without leveraging and databases). It is also more economical when your workload is not even throughout the day and maybe its a cron job that only runs an hour a day. In AWS, Lambda also has integration with most of the event notification system within AWS so its generally a good option to use Lambda to handle event driven systems, although it could get costly at scale. Serverless also suffer from cold start if its not run frequently although there are provisioned concurrently for Lambda that mitigate that, but you pay more for such features too.\
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Containers allow one to build and test the solution on any machine that can run docker theorectically, so that's a good developer experience vs having to deploy new code everytime to your own cloud account for serverless. With EKS you are also able to handle multiple microservices and configure it to scale appropriately when you get a load spike. And given that at least one instance of the container should always be running, you won't have cold start issue like Lambda, you also can customize the container resources more so than serverless. There would be more operation overhead when compared to serverless but would be cheaper for higher TPS.

I think it depends on where you are at with your promo. If all you want is to kick off the conversation with your manager and understand where you are at and trying to understand what to work on, perhaps you can read through the role guideline yourself and verify if you have work summaries, datapoints and feedback provider for each of the points in the role guideline. What the person is suggesting is to be safe and conservative.\
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If you are already meeting &gt; 80% of the role guideline for the next level, I think its still fine to have the conversation and push toward it. You could sync with SDE3 around you to understand what the scope creep may be and see if you would be able to adapt to it. SDE3 work can differ quite a bit between teams and orgs as the ratio of developers differ between teams.

I think the first thing on interviewers' mind would be why, so you want to be able to clarify why you have so many short tenure at your previous few company. It would seem like you are not able to work well with others if you have been hopping around a lot and not able to convince the interviewer otherwise.

I think it really depends on what you are trying to achieve. Frontend itself is pretty diverse and you could easily get overwhelmed learning everything.

At the core of it, web development/Frontend is about:

- HTML (Core of a webpage)
- CSS (Aesthetic)
- Javascript (Business logic)

But you would need to learn about the various framework modern web pages are build on, as well as how the various SaaS ecosystem work with one another, SSO with Okta or Google for example.

My journey learning Frontend have been pretty unconventional and scattered, but there are Udemy course like "**The Web Developer Bootcamp"** that I heard a lot of good things about, but I have not tried that myself.

I did use ["The Road to React"](https://www.roadtoreact.com/) by Robin Wieruch to ramp up in react and used it in my professional work.

I think Alex point on capturing the challenged faced as your three section works, it is similar to what I used in my L6 promo.

The harder part in addition to documentation is to find supporter/feedback provider at L6+ that would support that the same view as you that what you encountered was complex and challenging. \
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What tend to block L6 promotion is showing that you influenced scope outside of your immediate team. Once you are able to express that and show that you meet x% of criteria in the L5-L6 role guideline, you are good to go.\
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Since they removed the TPA requirement, it is theoretically easier to move to L6 now.