It's valuable if you get paid and you're using somewhat modern technology. If you're doing it for free labor, you might as well do a side project though.

Employee @ Robinhood

Jonathan C

School generally lags far behind the industry, so it's hard to get the same ROI from school compared to a proper internship.

Just spend the bare mininum maintaining above a 3.0 & shift that time saved to find more internships, build more practical software through clubs, or to do some paid research for school.

What if I told you some people I referred I enjoyed talking to enough to the point where I offered to refer them? 🤔

Did you manually test the change before merging & deploying the code?

I went to a very lowly perceived university (for tech) and worked as a contractor and then at a struggling startup for the 1st 2 years of my career. It also took me 5 months to find my first job. I still got calls & interviews from big tech consistently once I got to the 1-2 year mark.

There's a mix of factors that gets looked at:

- Years of experience & what did you did in those years
- School (matters less as time goes on)
- Side projects
- Referrals
- Readability of resume

Honestly, the best way to get noticed is with a referral and a concise 1 pager resume that focuses on the business impact of your work & a nature of being proactive. Time is valuable & candidates who take less time to convince others of their skill are seen as vaulable.

If your application is not getting noticed, it means that you're focusing your resume on the wrong things. I'd recommend this [resume course](https://www.jointaro.com/course/get-more-interviews-write-a-stellar-resume-as-a-software-engineer/) to better align with the expectations of hiring managers.

1. Yes. If the project is urgent, shipping the project with more people is better than not shipping it at all. I'd frame to your manager thar you and the other senior engineer are not familiar enough with the technologies involved to ship high quality code in a time manner.
2. Focus on 1 tool/technology at a time. Try picking up sequence of tasks that focus on a specific tool/technology that you need to learn.

1. It's a very uphill battle to pivot nowadays. A lot of larger companies have been burned from hiring pivots, so unfortunately the big tech dream will have more friction (the hiring bar is higher, the bar for performance when you get in is even higher). If you worked a solid career in finance, you'll be scrutinized less (since finance is seen as respectable from the eyes of most tech recruiters). I'd imagine that mid sized companies (sub 1000) will give you the most yield: big enough to support interns, but small enough to still have a culture of taking chances.
2. You are viewed below undergrads and above bootcampers.
3. You need to ruthlessly prioritze (classic big tech term) getting internships and strong side projects. Internships are harder to get traction on without experience, so I recommend side projects first. The [course on side projects](https://www.jointaro.com/course/build-side-projects-with-500k-users-coming-up-with-an-idea/) will be very helpful setting up a baseline around what to do with side projects. [Devon Crebbin](https://www.linkedin.com/in/devoncrebbin?trk=blended-typeahead) also hosts regular [side project accountability hours](https://www.jointaro.com/event/side-project-accountability-hours-93912/). The general rule of thumb recruiters follow is: if real users aren't using your code, you might as well write no code.
4. The top candidates generally apply for internships the year before the target start date & most of these positions are filled up by them. The earlier you apply, the higher the baseline "perception" will be. I've heard a few folks are setting alerts for when new positions open and immediately applying to maximize this perception to their advantage.

The bar is much higher for software engineers coming out of the pandemic, but it's not an impossible bar. The focus should be skewed heavily towards writing practical code that is exposed to real users (either through an internship or side projects actively used by real users). This will be a tough balance to strike with school & you will likely spend a lot of time planning around how to use your time. Before things take off too far with your career transition and school, I'd take advantage of Taro events (office hours, coffee chats, side project accountability) to get a better view on what to expect.

I think your manager is getting pressured to PIP their reports and this project is being used to make a decision.

There's nothing much you can do about whoever's making the call to PIP, but Alex's advice covers what you can do to control your impact on the project.

Honestly if you're paying for Taro, trying leveraging the community first. There's events for interview prep fairly often & it's not hard to find someone else in Taro to pair up with.

Yeah it's fine to ask your manager for another mentor: I know someone at Meta who did that because they weren't getting along with their mentor.

(Note: I had ChatGPT ingest my taro profile, and give out this response)

Every engineer, at every level, has shipped a bug that made it to production. It’s part of the job. The fact that your manager and teammates aren’t making a big deal out of it should tell you something: **This happens. What matters is how you respond.**

### **1\. Own It, But Don’t Dwell on It**

You already **acknowledged the mistake**—that’s step one. No need to keep beating yourself up over it. Instead, **shift your focus to learning and improving**.

### **2\. Identify How It Slipped Through**

Instead of just feeling bad, ask yourself:

- What kind of test could have caught this earlier?
- Was there a gap in validation? Could a better unit/integration test have helped?
- Were there warning signs in the code review that you or others overlooked?

### **3\. Build a Simple Fix & Prevention Plan**

- If a fix is still needed, **prioritize it and make it right**.
- Then, take the initiative to **improve the process**—maybe by adding better test coverage, refining code review checklists, or automating something that would have caught the issue earlier.
- When you do this, it **shows growth and ownership**, which will impress your team far more than the original bug.

### **4\. Zoom Out—This Won’t Define You**

Your reputation isn’t built on **one mistake**—it’s built on **patterns of behavior over time**. Engineers aren’t judged by whether they make mistakes; they’re judged by:

- How they **respond to them**
- How quickly they **recover and improve**
- Whether they take **ownership and level up**

### **5\. Move Forward with Confidence**

Take what you’ve learned, apply it, and **keep shipping**. No engineer—no matter how senior—writes perfect code all the time. What separates great engineers is their ability to **iterate, improve, and move on**.

This won’t be the last bug you introduce. But if you use this as a learning opportunity, you’ll come out of it as a **stronger engineer**—and that’s what really matters.

Absolutely! It’s **not only acceptable but encouraged** to ask others for help—especially if it keeps you unblocked and moving forward. Here’s how to approach it effectively:

### **1\. Prioritize Your Manager First, But Don’t Be Stuck**

Your intern manager is your primary point of contact, but they **expect you to be proactive**. If they’re busy, it’s totally fine to reach out to others. Just be **transparent** about it so they’re aware you’re taking initiative.

### **2\. Start with Team Members Who Own Relevant Areas**

- If you’re stuck on a technical issue, **find the right person on your team who has context** and ask them directly.
- Look at past commits, documentation, or team Slack channels to **identify the best person to ask**.

### **3\. Be Thoughtful in Your Ask**

- **Be specific:** Instead of "I’m stuck," frame it as **"I tried X and Y, but I’m still running into Z. Do you have any suggestions?"**
- **Respect their time:** If someone seems busy, ask **"Is now a good time?"** or use async communication (Slack, email).

### **4\. Keep Your Manager in the Loop**

Your manager **won’t feel sidelined** as long as they know what’s happening. A quick message like:\
*"Hey, I had a quick blocker on X, so I checked with \[teammate\] since they worked on it recently. They helped me move forward!"*\
This reassures your manager that you’re being resourceful, not bypassing them.

### **5\. Balance Self-Sufficiency and Asking for Help**

- **Try to debug first** before asking—this shows initiative.
- If you’re stuck for **more than 20-30 minutes**, it’s time to reach out.
- **Watch how your team communicates**—some teams prefer Slack over direct messages, so adapt accordingly.

### **Bottom Line**

Your goal as an intern is to **learn, deliver, and integrate into the team**. Being proactive while keeping your manager informed shows both **Ownership and Bias for Action**—qualities that will help you stand out.

Crafting strong stories for an SDE2 interview is all about **clear impact, structured storytelling, and natural alignment with Leadership Principles (LPs)**. Here’s how you can make sure your stories are strong enough to pass the interview:

1. **Start with High-Impact Examples**

   - Choose projects where you **solved a tough problem, took ownership, or made a significant impact**.
   - If your story doesn’t clearly show your contribution or impact, it might not be strong enough.

2. **Use the STAR Framework**

   - **Situation:** What was the problem? Keep it brief.
   - **Task:** What was your role?
   - **Action:** What did you do? Highlight **decision-making, trade-offs, and leadership**.
   - **Result:** What was the measurable impact? Metrics help make your story stronger.

3. **Embed LPs Naturally**

   - Don’t force LPs into your story. Instead, **align your real experiences with principles like Ownership, Bias for Action, or Customer Obsession**.
   - Example: If you fixed a critical bug under pressure, focus on **Bias for Action** and **Customer Obsession**—why was fixing it urgent, and how did you ensure a long-term solution?

4. **Test Your Story’s Strength**

   - Would someone unfamiliar with your work **clearly understand your impact?**
   - Does it **naturally align with LPs** without feeling forced?
   - Get **peer feedback**—practicing with others helps refine weak areas.

5. **Iterate and Improve**

   - If a story feels weak, refine the framing—maybe the challenge isn’t clear, or the impact isn’t strong enough.
   - **Clarity matters**—don’t bury the key message in unnecessary details.

At the end of the day, **strong stories are simple, impactful, and clearly demonstrate leadership**. Keep iterating and testing them until they feel natural and compelling.

The window for up-or-out is 3 years, which isn't as bad IMO compared to the &lt;1 year generally given for E5s (senior) to land on their feet. Senior expectations is multiple times higher than mid level. The money is higher, but the expectations are even higher. I've talked to a few folks who are being pressured for not meeting senior-level expectations (often with a threat of PIP): it is very stressful and the feedback is ambiguous. (A lot of feedback at senior level and beyond at FAANG is very indirect because they expect you to be skilled enough to figure out the action items.)

If you get a high mid-level offer, take it. If you were underleveled, you will get promo'd very quickly.

Do you actually need to meet across a wider span of hours? You're doing it, but it's clear to me you're not thinking about if you actually need do it in the current way.

Do you need to do these things that are burning time out of your personal life in the way it currently is? What's stopping you from organizing your portion of the workstream around more standard working hours?

- Start writing code ASAP
- Start writing code ASAP
- Be proactive around trying to write production code ASAP and getting your manager to funnel things that can be coded to you

Code should be your #1 priority.

- If you are joining at mid level or below, your code output (speed and quality) will be scrutinized. If you fall below the average, you will be PIP'd.
- If you are joining at senior level or beyond, you do not want your coding skills to get in the way of other behaviors and responsibilities expected from you. If your code execution skills are the main blocker for achieving impact from the projects you worked on (there's a clear lack of speed and/or quality compared to other engineers), you will get PIP'd.

I'd say 2 ways.

- Show a clear mindset around shipping for impact
- Have a clear track record working with other "exceptional engineers"

The simplest litmus test is how easy it is for you to get a good referral and phone screen at &lt;insert names of current hottest tech companies&gt; (OpenAI/Anthropic/Perplexity/Cursor for our current AI boom). Exceptional people generally know other exceptional people, so it's pretty easy to get a strong vouch.

(I've even heard rumors that OpenAI believes this so such that they pretty much only consider referrals).

- You should be escalating to her manager too instead of only just yours. People generally don't listen to people not in their line of command.
- If she's so confident that the permission change isn't needed, why don't you have her make the change and have her write in the PR that permission is not needed? Assuming everyone in the company can see the PR, there's a clearer paper trail to follow if she's wrong.

My general advice for folks who are at the stage of building mastery is just write more code. There's many behaviors and actions that can help build more mastery, but writing code will handle the bulk of guiding you to the write learnings.

- If you need to learn something, you will be writing code for it at some point.
- If you need to be better at understanding and explanation a part of the system, it's easier to explain when you're written code for it (compared to if you've written less code or no code).

If you write better code faster, you also get more opportunities (both given to you and by better being able to identify them). The more opportunties you're able to execute on in a year, the more you will learn from them.

Short tenure's not an issue when it comes to finding another job, but you won't grow as much in a short tenure. Especially with RTO and geo-location, it'll also be hard to find a high-growth job if you're moving to somewhere that's not a major tech hub.

- If you're optimizing for career growth and keeping your job when you move, the Meta offer would have been your best choice (assuming you'll still be near an office after moving)
- If you're optimizing for WLB, I'd stick with Amazon.

Week 1: every intern is more or less trying to get a return offer, so I'd be more upfront for internship return offers (since it's more normal compared to something like a staff level promo).

My honest advice is just focus on writing more code. The more code you write, the more you have learned about what it takes to write code. Your slow velocity is because you haven't done enough reps writing code to have that subconcious base-level understanding. There's 2 things that will help building up the learning loop when it comes to writing code: space and velocity.

For space, focus on one task at a time. Start with the one that has the highest level or urgency and/or impact. Focus on that one single task until a PR is up. Then switch to another task. Do not switch off of that task unless something more urgent comes out.

For velocity, the main bottleneck for you seems to be getting help. So let's look to improve the process of how you get help to reduce the total time needed.

- If your question is more specific to a commonly used programming language or a framework and you're pretty sure the answer can be Google'd, ask ChatGPT.
- If you feel like your question is more towards proprietary code in the company, look through Slack (or the Slack-equivalent) and see if anyone asks a similar question. From my experience, there's usually a record of someone else saying something if the context is common enough.
- When you ask your questions, try to narrow it down to a "yes"/"no" question. The smaller the decision tree, the more likely you'll get help. If you have a guess on what's going on, include that into your question too.

Your best chance of getting into the US is to work at a big established US company. Immigration is a very messy and expensive process in the US, so usually only bigger companies are able to afford it.

For getting into these bigger tech companies, a lot of it will boil down to your experience. There's an initial downwards perception that foreign developers are generally weaker than the US-based talent pool, so you need to make sure your experiences, your narratives, and your coding skills are clear to your interviewers. That and the cost of the immigration means that the bar you're held by will be much higher.

As an middle path, you could just switch to a company that's based in the US but has offices in other countries. You can get in for a non- US based office and then transfer to the US office. This will require less upfront effort when it comes to immigration, but will take more effort overall.

I also wouldn't do a masters/phd at any school unless the company pays for me. The time and money invested is signficiantly less than the growth from just working hard.

The main thing I'd call out is mentality. A lot of the engineers I've noticed who are struggling/not doing as well are waiting for something to be given to them before they succeed. Unfortunately, nearly all opportunities aren't given and almost always requiring some action on our part to initiate.

There's never really any perfect circumstances, but there's always an opportunity to make it better. Instead of accepting the circumstances, look for opportunities to improve something you don't like. Then there's a clearer path towards painting a narrative that you're someone who's proactive about improving their environment, but your current enviroment won't let you improve things as fast as you like.

It's just sales and hype: a lot of it is just exaggreration to get people to use AI more so AI company evaluations and hype.

I tried using AI tools to write CrowdStrike QL and it was not super helpful. I don't know about vibe coding, but I spent the entire time complaining out loud how much it sucked.

Pretty much there's some spreadsheet somewhere that aggregates a few factors such as:

- bands for each level
- inflation
- what other companies are paying for similar engineering talent
- attrition
- your latest perf rating

And spits out a number. There's very little room to go for more pay unless:

- you convince your manager to try to argue for more pay without a rating change or a higher rating
- you have a competing offer much higher than your current compensation

For growth for compensation, the answer's pretty simple and a mix of:

- Get better ratings
- Get promoted more
- Get stronger competing offers

But if question is moreso "how do I grow faster so I can get paid more", you can check out the [mid level to senior level course](https://www.jointaro.com/course/grow-from-mid-level-to-senior-senior-l4-to-l5/).

Recently, I've been learning through a mixture:

- Spamming diffs
- Running things through ChatGPT/Claude (to limit test how large of an ask I can give it, debugging smaller issues, more quickly parsing documentation)
- A little bit of pair programming

I was recently looped into an effort around reducing on the backend and I'm a bit out of the water since:

- I'm an Android engineer and I haven't done backend in years. I was the first (and currently only) frontend engineer to be looped into this effort.
  - The backend service my team owns manages payments (so the cost of a mistake is very high).
- I ended up getting tasked with some complex metrics query in a query language I wasn't super familiar with (CrowdStrike QL for humio).

My progress looked like:

- I put up a backend diff (unit tests included) within a day of me making the call to start putting up some backend diffs myself.
  - I cleaned up some code along the way. Also I took a few mental notes on how I can even further clean up the code if I have some spare time.
  - (The diff landed and didn't break prod!)
- I scheduled an ad-hoc \~30 mins IRL pair programming session with a backend engineer to figure out the query
  - After I built up some basics from working with this backend engineer, I started using a mix of trail and error and ChatGPT/Claude.
    - By the end of the next day, I had a bar graph segmented by hours set up for one of the metrics we were tracking (I even tweaked the query to discard the last hour since it'd potentially have incomplete data).

5-year of practical software experience is enough to get interviews at most companies with a recent resume. Just apply.

I just work here @ Robinhood

Don't jump on the latest trends. Focus on getting good at writing code in some modern language by quite frankly writing more code.

If you're looking for entrepreneurship, a PM job likely isn't that much of a jump. Honestly, being proactive at finding opportunities & convincing others is the better shift to make (and that's not really tied to any job).

Focus less on titles and more on what skills & behaviors you want to build & loosely rank them on how important they are for you. See if you're able to find opportunities to build those skills/behaviors and leverage your manager to help you opportunities as well.

Roles are just a string and there's not hard-coded fixed list of things that narrowly defines what is OK/not OK in each role. The control over the skills and behaviors developed in your career is what matters for progressing to your goals. If that results in a role/title change, so be it. **But don't be dependent on needing to switch to PM as a deciding factor to move your career towards entrepreneurship: doing so is 100% a skill issue.**

Since you're joining at mid level, the good news is that a lot of the momentum is coming from individual skill.

The main behavior I'd demonstrate to show that you're serious is being proactive.

- Don't wait to take up more tasks for your project(s): just take them.
- Someone has a question around your domain? Give them an answer and potentially some references.
- Code isn't as clean as you could be? Fix it along the way of your current task.
- Are there tasks on someone's else project that could be parallelized with an extra set of hands? Jump in.

Being close to E5 at Meta means nothing to your Anthropic manager: so you need to set the baseline that you're doing more than what's needed beyond E4/mid-level and that impression can be seen. If your manager views your baseline as an average mid-level engineer, they likely won't take you as seriously. Once that baseline is set, I'd look to the following two:

- Ask your manager for opportunities to lead projects to show senior-level compotency. If you really want the senior-level promo, bring this up every 1:1 or every other 1:1.
- While you're proactively poking around the broader scope of the company/team, see if there's any gaps you can help fill around existing projects when it comes to project leadership. Why wait for your manager to give you opportunities when it could be faster finding them yourself?

Before switching teams, do you know if other engineers on the team feel the same way? If it's just you encountering this level of friction, your manager sees the world like this:

- E6 with longer tenure with more equity is doing things the way they always do. This has historically had impact for the team/company/org.
- You (new E5) comes in and doesn't work well with the E6.
- You complain to manager.
- E6 gets paid more and has longer tenure =&gt; bigger risk to the team/org to disrupt them.
- Therefore, your manager will bias towards the E6.

In order for your feedback to be received, you need to put more weight on your side of the scale. You would need an E5+ in your org with tenture to also vouch for you. If not, your manager won't take any action.

Coming from someone who's in the position your E6 is, the main thing that causes me to more aggressively shoot certain people down is if they don't follow the same principles as I do. I'd look to figure out the following:

- What does your E6 value when it comes to engineering?
- What patterns does the E6 display when it comes to reviewing artifacts (code, docs, etc.)?
- How does your E6 view the world around them?

Once you figure those out, try to see if you can proactively incorporate those learnings into your workflow. Download your E6 and work with/around their behaviors. It might help to have your manager mediate in case you don't feel like your E6 will respond well.

(A few other misc notes)

- It's plausible that you might be taking enough scope to risk their E6 standing. If you feel like the friction they're putting is often amounting to nothing, start documenting these occurances and if they amounted to some changes.
- One key piece of feedback I got growing towards a TL was that I needed to shoot people down more.

A sprint is just an arbritrary construct to ensure some level of consistency. I'd focus less on completing the sprint and more on proactively calling out if the corners you're cutting should be cut or not. In the end, business impact is what matters the most if you want to judge the value of your work.

Yes. Depends on the mood: sometimes I go for more fast-paced music when I need to spam code, but usually I do a mix of city pop & random youtuber drama videos.

Yes. I had my role as Software Engineer (Contractor).

When I contracted at Pinterest, I just said I was contracting at Pinterest during interviews. Even as a contractor, the big tech name does attract eyes.

Let's start by looking at metrics and measuring impact with it since that was explicitly called out.

How would you prove your code actually did something for your team/company? 

Some line that the company is tracking is going up. That line is a metric. If your project helped the company, the line's slope goes up more. That change of slope is your project's impact.

For larger efforts, the main expectation is that you are able to disambiguate what needs to be done.

Right now, we can see from your question you're leaning towards thinking about it as one big thing. You've broken it down to a few sub items, which is a good step forward.

The next steps would be: how should the work be sequenced? Let's start with the first step: there's always a first step in the project. Out of the different things you need to do, what should be done first and why should it be done first? And are you able to break it down into an even smaller action?

That's a lot of questions, so let me start with one to help you move forward: what's stopping you from doing everything right now without needing someone else to carry you? Answer this question and see if you can narrow down on something from that answer that you can immediately do independently.

For general junior =&gt; mid level advice, I'd recommend:

- <https://www.jointaro.com/course/ask-great-questions-that-get-great-answers-quickly/how-this-course-works/>
- <https://www.jointaro.com/course/grow-from-junior-to-mid-level-engineer-l3-to-l4/how-this-course-works/>

The best to understand a programming language is to write more code in it. Your diff count is the main metric used to guage your skill level. To repeat: **just write more code**. Anything else you can potentially try to do provides negligible value compared to getting better at writing code and landing diffs.

The main heuristic for junior engineers is diff count. If your count is low, you will not get anything above meets all. If you are an expert, it will show in your diffs (volume and quality will be examined, but volume is an easier step forward & more quantifiable).

- Dig into why your management thinks that this on-call is a high impact opportunity.
- Not every opportunity is tied to your role & and the highest growth opportunities beyond senior are often outside your role. Take an extreme ownership mentality: focus on potential impact that you're able to execute on and not if it fits the bound of your role.

Take whatever # of diffs you're averaging in a day and 2x the volume. A lot of code you're writing will be specific to Meta & learning outside of your codebase won't be as valuable.

Since your marriage is 1 year away, I feel that's enough for 1-2 attempts at switching jobs. Given your years of experience and your current job at Amazon, you should be able to secure mid-level interviews.

But the honest question you want to ask yourself is: do you really want to live in the Bay Area? The weather's nicer and all, but housing here is quite expensive and it's like 80% sparse suburbs. If you don't like the bay area, it's going to be a potentially expensive reversal (time and money). I'd start with having a ranked list of what you're looking for and working backwards towards what that maps to location-wise.

Are you always afraid when you're walking down any stairs that you're going to fall and get injured? Is your mind working in overdrive to figure out how to put one foot in front another?

(Assuming your body is perfectly fine) No you don't. Becauae you've spent so much time naturally walking and occassionally using stairs that you just do it.

It's the same thing with coding: just write more code. If you are actively trying to improve at coding, you will start spend less energy and effort writing code. With one less thing overworking your brain, you'll have more mental bandwith to focus on other things that need attention.

I'd start with writing more code (without sacrificing code quality) than every other SDE1. The first step to get promoted is being better than the average of your current level. The next step is to build the behaviors of the next level.

This course will likely help break down the path more thoroughly: <https://www.jointaro.com/course/grow-from-junior-to-mid-level-engineer-l3-to-l4/>

For showing more impact: get to landing diffs as quickly as possible.

For 2-3 months in towards E5:

- Be in the 80th percentile for diffs landed
- Start reviewing code
- Start answering questions for your team

For dealing with politics: get good at writing code. You're likely fighting other mid levels for scope due to up-or-out and they're all asking for scope to get promo'd. Asking is not enough (since every other mid level engineer is doing this): you need to stand out. At mid-level, the main bar is execution. So the focus on standing out should be on execution first.

For the 1 year target with your manager: I'd bring it up early on in your 1:1s to set the pace (after you're done onboarding is a good time), but I wouldn't expect much in terms of having the E5 promo in a year secured. Most likely, your manager will do their best to set you up and you end up with "Exceeds Expectation" (no promo) if you meet your manager's expectations.

For what to focus on: write more code. In this economy, the efficiency expectations are much higher for senior. Strong foundations are needed to more quickly break problems down into systems and code. The simplest way to get better with code is to write more code. The more time you spend thinking about code, the less time you have for impact.

Do you feel like the growth of the engineers is reflecting more the growth of the company and not the engineering culture? If the team skews fairly young & most folks spent most of their career at the company, their view of the world is narrowed down to what works for them at the company.

Instead of rolling with the existing system, why not try to fix a small part of if? If you're serving as a TLM (tech lead manager), there's a clear line of influence on the engineers around you. If you don't think you can get buy-in from upper management to fix things, then just fix it first and then tell them later. There's a clear opportunity with the DB updates: why not get your team to make the deploy faster?

There's always a hypergrowth and/or high-paying company out there, but you only get one life. You can't work hard to make money when you're dead. If it's starting to look like the stress is causing long-term health issues, just quit.

You have \~6 months to stabilize from your join date (9 months would be the maximum stretch). If you have a decent manager, they'll likely save you if you get a Meets Most (MM) trending towards Meets All (MA).

- No.
- Focus on building 1 good app and learning the concepts behind it along the way.

As a fairly senior Android engineer, I don't know the internals of many of the newer frameworks. And I honestly don't need to: the skills needed to grow to senior and beyond is heavily skewed towards non-technical skills. If I need to learn it in order to accomplish a critical task or goal for the team/company, I will learn it. Else, the knowledge doesn't give me that much value.

For evaluating interns, I'd evaluate the following (ordered by descending value):

- Repeat internships at top companies
- An internship at a top company
- Strong side projects (thousands of downloads for mobile apps, thousands of daily page views for a web app)
- School

It's easier for earlier career enginners to focus on creativity and ideas: the understanding of the world is smaller, so the view of paths forward are more short-sighted. If you can only see 100 meters ahead, how can you immediately tell the cliff ends in 500 meters?

The first step to understanding if software engineering is not for you is to get more experience. Get more software engineering experience, but also see if you can incorporate learning about other roles along the way. Build up a strong track record so that people in the roles you're interested in are more willing to invest their time in you (either letting you take on some of their responsibilities or properly engaging with you during conversations). People are generally nice, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're going to properly spend their time for you.

As an experienced frontend engineer, I've worn many hats to get something done (frontend, backend, data analysis, product/project management, etc.). I just see the world as using my time and skills to solve whatever problem. If you anchor your view on the world based on the limits of your role, often times you miss the opportunties to grow and change standing there right in front of your face. And that's often why most junior engineers who have the same mentality often fail with zero progress: they only see the destination and never see the steps towards that destination.

If you really need space and time and have the money to pay for rent/mortgage for a few months, you can try applying for FMLA & using that leave to study for your next job.

I work around 35ish hours a week pretty consistently and I spend 20% of that time browsing the internet. This is what worked for me.

- **Understand what times are you generally more productive**. Out of morning/afternoon/evening, identify which one are you most productive in. Organize your work so that your most important tasks happen around that block.
- **Understand how focused you are as a person**. Some people have long attention spans, some people don't. I personally have a very short attention span. Build your focus blocks around how you naturally work around your focus: if you have a short attention span for example, long planned focus blocks will not work (instead plan smaller blocks for shorter bursts of focus).
- **After a certain number of hours work, behaviors &gt; impact**. If you're doing the same work in the same exact way given the more hours, you will not be rewarded with a higher rating or a promo. Promotions are mainly about developing behaviors that have a higher baseline of impact. For every task/project/whatever you get, ask yourself how this will grow you (towards the next level). If you can't give yourself a clear answer, spend your time trying to shoot down that task instead.

Engineer @ Robinhood

You should focus on what you're assigned by your team and not think about the broader cross-collaboration of the team. You don't have the experience to know how to use the knowledge of how the other team operates, so getting it will yield 0 value of your time. 

Start by repeating this scenario.

1. You are writing some code for task X
2. You need to touch Y code/service owned by the other team
3. You are unsure how this integration works
4. You ask Y team how to do the intregration
5. They tell you
6. You do it

As you repeat this scenario with the same team, you should look to get more effective at this pattern by doing some of the following:

- When you go to Y team, you will provide them with your best guess on what you think you need to do
- You reference a past task that you or someone else has done that you looked at & mention what information you got from it
- You narrow down the scope of your question ("How does this API work" =&gt; "What does Z field in the API request do"  =&gt; "I set use Z field in this specific way, will the API behave in &lt;blah&gt;")?
- You ask your questions in more public mediums (like a public project Slack channel) so that others can reference your question in the future

A collaboration means someone else needs to spend time with you to get something done. Your first step to getting good at this is spending your time to make sure the other party will spend the least amount of time and effort to work with you. The [asking great questions course](https://www.jointaro.com/course/ask-great-questions-that-get-great-answers-quickly/how-this-course-works/) establishes a pretty good framework that also works for thinking about collaborations.

That Android engineer pretty much sounds like the position I'm currently in my org. So the perspective that I can share is how did I get into this position.

- I wrote a ton of code: I consistently do 2x-3x the yearly average for mobile engineers.
- Whenever I had spare bandwidth, I'd immediately try to refactor/delete something based on how much I had to spare. This led to me understanding the codebase more broadly and allowed me to play around with figuring out how I wanted my code to look.
- I spent a lot of time iterating on the code I wrote so I was exposed to pain points that my past decision introduced. Over time as I got more exposure to these points, I also began to code around them or be more deliberate for the tradeoffs I wanted. Since I circled back to bad code I wrote less, I was able to move and ship faster.
- This naturally built up to me reviewing a lot more code (since so much code had my fingerprints on them): I'd say this yearly number I do is 3x-4x the average.
- I pretty much said "yes" to every opportunity (that I felt like I could reasonably do given my bandwidth), but often times I didn't have much choice (one time, I ended up TLing 3 projects concurrently + writing nearly all of the Android code for all 3 projects). I felt like the exposure I got was much broader here compared to "normal work": both in terms of variety of responsiblities and intensity of work.

I'd boil down my experience to 2 themes:

- If your volume of work is signficantly more than your peers, you will get more opportunities. Since in the end, teams are judged on impact every year and giving work to the fastest, most consistent engineers means more impact to be had.
- Mentality is a big factor as well: what you think you own impacts what you're actually owning. I've been fortunate enough to be at the company for a while, so I have enough domain knowledge and trust where people are more willing to let me do whatever. Example: I just spent 2-3 months deleting an entire feature from the Android codebase the company shut down a while ago. I never worked on the feature before, it was causing complications to occassionally support it, and no one planned to delete it.

Hope this helps!

How companies perceive failure reflects how the experiences end up shaping your career. I'd say &gt;90% of folks who go this route end up failing. And this becomes very clear when you talk to them:

- They are unable to clearly express how they see the world and how their failures shaped their world.
- A constant resume of flip flopping between random ideas makes it clear they're just purely treating it as a game of chance.

3-4 years after graduation is likely the edge of being able to go back to an entry-level role: after that, companies will push towards mid-level+ roles (where your experiences will be scrutinized more thoroughly).

If you feel like you absolutely want to explore before working full time, go for it.

I think a lot of early career engineers are seeing peers jumping into entrepreneurship and making a big and flashy impression (likely through LinkedIn). These impressions are surface level and I highly doubt these peers are going to be honest about their current situation. This is to hold up an illusion of success when reality is likely much more stark and harsh. No one's going to be jealous of someone living of discount ramen from Walmart, so why post it?

Honestly for junior engineers, there are 2 general truths.

- **They can't do anything meaningful.** Internships, clubs, etc. build experience, but that experience isn't deep since the durations of those efforts are short and shallow. To build something, you must understand something deeply. If you have not understand something deeply, how will you be able to build a solution for it that people need? And if you need the company to make money, that just increases the activation energy for success 100x.
- **They don't know how to work with people**. Similar to experience + expertise above, it takes a long time (more than however many months spent on a club or internship) to have a relationship with people. At some point, you need to interact with people: a potential cofounder, a potential customer, a VC. If you (in your current state) try to reach out to the people that will move your company forward (even with the best idea in the world on hand), nearly all of them will ignore you. And you will have no idea why.

I'd recommend that you should just work both a standard tech job and doing your entreprenurial work on the side. Your day job will set up foundations of people you can interact with and potential build deep relationships in, give you a baseline of code to write and some structure for you to improve, and work experience to make your background look stronger. You can pull in your learnings about software into your soon-to-be startup & you have a pool of coworkers that could be a potential customer/cofounder or potentially route you to someone who can help you.

There's also nothing stopping you just finding a job that better aligns with your goals (joining a smaller company) or just shifting your behaviors at work to better align with your goals. My very hot take here is that the folks (working a decently sized company) who are complaining about their work not aliging with their goals just have skill issues & don't want to admit it.

Can you try fixing 1 test? Set a hardstop 1-2 weeks in the future, annoy whatever people can help fix it, and then document what you tried? This will compliment what Rahul is suggesting: what you're looking to define is yield (value/effort). If the yield is low (value is very low or effort is too high), that will explain why no one fixes the tests. In that case, I'd just delete them and measure if that decreases build times.

1. Yes
2. If you ditch a smaller company, you might run the risk for getting blacklisted from that company's network. Other than that, just leave the 1-2 month stint off your resume and it'll be fine.

There's not enough depth in a junior engineer's experience to be able to have a thorough behavioral interview.

Honestly most of my improvement outside of coding skills has been repeated pratice in a broader group. For system design, I started with:

- Asking questions on other people's docs on how does X work or why did we pick Y
- Then I started asking could we do Z instead once I felt like I got the hang of things. Example: whenever service A needs to talk to service B, I usually ask could Kafka work for this.

I also try to design systems to be simple. My prioritiy is breaking down the system into a hierarchy of smaller pieces (needs to be small enough to describe in 1 phrase or 1 word). Ideally I'm going for a structure like somewhat balanced tree or a list. Then I focus on the implementation of each piece.

Did you register it as a non-profit or a Delaware LLC? If not, it's a side project.

After watching each section of the course, can you try boiling down the course into 1-5 action items or frameworks for thinking? A 10h course is a bit too mentally intensive to memorize everything for.

Yes: you can specialize in domains specific to your company (knowing how x product works for your company). As an early career engineer, I'd just focus on finding something you're comfortably able to do good work in first. You'll have a feel for depth and your interests once you've hit a good comfort level. Then you can start thinking about how you want to specialize, using that understanding of yourself and your skills as a guide.

Start with a programming language you're most comfortable with and can consistently write code in.

- Context switching takes away some focus. The more junior you are, the more expensive that focus cost is (since you don't have the mental framework to refocus yet). You are still learning, so there's an additional cost to make sure that learning is reinforced.
- Business logic (which is nearly always written in some programming language) is generally what glues all the pieces of a system together. So it's a great jumping point to see how every connects.

Look at a mix of:

- Time to land (low = good)
- Lines of code/diff (low = good)
- Average words in diff summary + test plan (high = good)
- Comments/diff (low = good)

I'm going to take a shot in the dark: your diffs are likely too big. As a result:

- It's making it harder for others to properly review
- It's harder to have an exhaustive test plan for every diff you put up

Break up your changes into smaller diffs (ideally at most 100 lines of non-test code changed) and try to split out codegen + boilerplate code changes into isolated diffs.

In terms of how this will impact perf, I'd say this pushes you down to Meets Most (MM). E3/E4 perf is usually focused on coding fundamentals (speed + quality)

I might be off though since I don't have the full context. Maybe [this course](https://www.jointaro.com/course/level-up-your-code-quality-as-a-software-engineer/) can help?

Promos are lagging, so you need to generally perform at slightly above average for your next level for 9 -12 months. This is so that perf can confirm that this level is your operating baseline & your performance is not due to 1-off circumstances.

Usually when I downlevel someone in a coding interview, there's a clear foundations gap between:

- The candidate being able to concisely talk about code at both a high and low level
- The code the candidate typed out

I'd look to see if your recruiter can give you more details on what reads they got.

Are you looking to measure this for a personal project that you're doing on the side or within the bounds of a larger company that you're currently employed at?

I've gone through similar struggles: it took a while for me to find what works for me. Given:

- At E5, your interactions with people are the core part of your work
- Getting pinged is generally the main way focus is shifted away/lost (from my experience)

I'll focus on tackling the people aspects of your situation. Here's the framework I had that worked for me:

1. **Accept that people will always ping you & derail your focus.** It's going to happen and the occurences are going to be unpredictable.
2. **Find out the timing for responding to them that works for you.** Having a dedicated block on your calendar for responding to these pings is one way. For me, I have a short attention span so I try to respond to pings the moment I'm pinged (if I can't then I give the person a rough ETA).
3. **See if there's any themes on people pinging you.** If you're noticing that people are pinging you for the same thing(s), it might be worth having a centralized communication medium for people to ask questions or see past updates. Dedicated project channels for project updates and a channel for general Q&A questions are the most common channels I've spun up. Once those mediums are pushed up, push folks to go through those mediums instead.

Once you feel like you've lowered the time distractions from other people going to you, take a step back and see what's the next thing giving you trouble (whether it's still people pinging you, on-call, better foundations around perf). Take things one step/one problem at a time.

You don't need to go through this discovery alone either: I'd talk to your manager about your stresses and work with them to help figure out a clear path forward. Keep in mind though at E5 it's when people expect you to tell them what to possibly do, so you'll need to lead the convo by:

- Stating your stress in a clean, straightforward problem statement
- Provide one or two potential ways to move forward with this stress

Else your manager might interpret your struggles as you being overleveled & underperforming.

I'll assume the following happened:

- They agreed in writing & still walked back despite the written agreement

The questions I would have are:

- Why are they pushing back?
- What's lost if the project is pushed back?

Maybe the service is unable to effectively be shared across teams because it's in a legacy state? Sinking in more time might not be the most effective short-term use of time, but refactoring it so that it's much easier to work with later could help out. And it seems like this legacy system isn't low impact: high risk and low impact are descibing opposite things to me (high risk = high impact).

I've written over hundreds of thousands lines of code in seconds by code genning json migration files and lint baseline xml files. Does that count as writing code? I'd imagine Google's AI coders are doing something similar with the "code" they touch.

I think you made the same mistake that a lot of folks make in college of assuming that doing well in school matters. It doesn't: a lot of your classmates are either coasting with borderline grades or cheating to save time.

What does impact your ability to get a top tech job is your ability to ship code. There are 3 factors companies look at:

1. Can you write code independently?
2. Are you able to talk about your code effectively?
3. Are you able to ship code with real user impact?

Often times the candidates who are struggling miss out on at least 2 out 3 of these categories, get frustrated that they're struggling, and deathloop back into whatever behaviors got them stuck in their first place. The priorities of tech are much more aligned with providing practical value in the real world (especially when software is so easy to deploy out). While in school there's a clear rubric and path on a good outcome, this does not exist in tech. Treating succeeding in tech like academics will incur harsh (but fair) outcomes: slow career growth at best, unemployment at average and at worst.

If you want break out of the loop, you need to write code. You need to get into a focus loop where you are constantly writing code, learning as you're writing code, and using those learnings to write better code faster. Side projects are a great place to start ([here's a Taro playlist on it](https://www.jointaro.com/playlist/vKUWMgmmaEvzcYUXZs4B/)).

For picking your first company, **beggars can't be choosers**. Pick whatever position you can get that's reasonable (factoring in pay, location, hours worked, modernity of tech stack, culture) and work your way up. Unless your bachelors is for comp sci from either Waterloo or Stanford, assume that your options are limited. Big tech will always be around, but the time spent on zero outcomes will never come back.

Feel free to put some time on my calendar if you want to chat more (message me on Slack): I've gone through a lot of struggles after graduating & I currently work a FAANG-adjancent.

It's common to push back dates so you have more time to prepare (and won't reflect poorly on your packet), but there is a risk of the roles running out of headcount.

- It doesn't matter who refers you: what matters is how strongly they can vouch for you
- If you are rejected at the resume screening stage, you can keep applying. The cooldown only comes if you interview with another human and they made a concious choice to reject you.

Instead of imagining it as we need to do X doc for Y path, let's think about a RFC as a scenario working toward resolution.

1. You have a proposal that will impact the code surfaces of multiple people.
2. You want to make sure that the people impacted are aware of the changes and are comfortable having them made.
3. You write a document to explain the problem that is leading to the changes needing to be made, the changes being made, and the path of progression for making said changes.
4. You tag the people impacted on your doc and have them read it. Try to be exact with the tagging people on the exact changes that only impact them.
5. Go back and forth until they explicitly sign off (likely on a table on the doc).
6. Proceed with making the changes.

Lead with principles identifying the core problem first & work towards the outcome for the problem. Don't think about the exact terminology unless it makes communication with the people around you easier.

Your first step is to validate if your approach is acceptable with the miminum amount of effort possible. If edge cases won't change the core design, don't include them & focus on getting your senior engineers to approve the approach.

My general guidelines are:

- Lead with high level summaries & try to use as concise wording as possible
- Prioritize topics that the audience is most interest in

Since there's a lot of high-level employees in the meeting, you should ensure their time is used as effectively as possible. Their time is worth more, so optimizing for their time should be the priority.

You're taking initiative (which is a good signal of growth), but you seem to be unclear on how to proceed.

If you think of everything at once as one goal, excution becomes harder: instead of a path forward, things seems more like a maze. Mazes are disorienting because it's unclear if your movement is bringing you closer or further away. The more you're imagining doing, the larger the maze. The larger the maze, the harder it is to get out. Fortunately for us, we're able to construct our own path and just simply not construct a maze.

I'd start with: what's the least amount of effort you can do to move the project forward?

- Is there a simple solution you can start out with that you can iterate on?
- What is the bare minimum needed to product an artifact for your senior engineer to review (you can probably ask them)?

Identify these small steps forward and then take them one at a time. You can leverage your senior engineer peers to make sure you're moving in the right direction. Small steps are easy to walk back from: running 50 miles, not so much.

(Misc note: in the future, it'll really help the small pool of question answerers if you could organize your thoughrs and use simpler wording. Try doing a few proofreading passes to clean things up & run your question through ChatGPT to clean it up).

wow if they're charging 2.8k for 5 lessons maybe you should pay me for the coaching instead for cheaper?

Feel free to connect to me. Do you mind telling me which LinkedIn post of mine was inspiring and how it was inspiring?

The only magical portal is to network IRL and be skilled and confident enough to convince people you're worth hiring.

It's too early to say. If you do your work well over time, your path forward will become clear. Experience is what truly will give you an answer, and it must be built up over time.

A tech lead is just a possible career path as an engineer, but not a title in itself. A tech lead's main impact is supporting the team around them (the more senior they are the larger the team they support). Not all engineers need to grow to become a tech lead of a team as opportunities are pretty spread out across a company.

- Your goal to writing documentation is to suppliment the reader's development in the code. There are mainly 2 reasons I write documentation. First is to explain the context and/or line of thought that lead me to the code (if I feel like the past context is important for understanding the code in the present). Second is to provide a high level summary of what the code does if I feel like the code will take too much time to read & scroll through.
- My hot take is that if someone is trying hard to document as much as they can: that's not a documentation issue. That's a skill issue with the developer being bad at writing code.

I've written thousands of lines of code of payments related code for a high-traffic financial company (with a few attempts earlier in my career to actively "document" code) and the best way I found to document my code was to:

1. Write better code. Good code is easy to read. If engineers can read the code, why document it? Good code is self documenting.
2. Write better commit comments. A good commit message and a good PR review gives me all of the context I need on who wrote the commit's code, what were they thinking, and who reviewed it. Traditional documentation doesn't really do that for me.

What generally needs documention for me though is the high-level of a feature or a product. High level behavior is less susceptible to change and is harder to understand (since it's built from many layers of code), so documentation is more valuable here (it grows stale slower & the information exposed is time-intensive to get). A good eng design doc will do the job here: bonus points if an engineer links the design doc in every commit/PR to implement that design doc.

- Employment gap is OK: just expect recruiters to ask & have a reasonable answer prepared.
- With the game your main intention is likely just doing random stuff (like the accelerator) and seeing what sticks. Building without a clear intention to learn (especially when you're early in your career and you're not getting traction in it) will unfortunately have the same result as doing nothing. I recommend this [masterclass](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/OEuX0KMhcnNSTJ50Voee/masterclass-how-to-build-and-grow-tech-products-to-500k-users-for-free/) on side projects on how to better approach side projects.

I think you misunderstood my post: the top priority is **your company's satisfaction with you.** Since your clients have money (which your company needs) and signed a legally binding contract, they are the main metric in which your company's satisfaction is measured around. Their time is worth money that your company needs. So that trickles then to your only priority to serving clients.

Your satisfaction is unfortunately effectively non-existent on the company's totem pole of priorities (this will be the same for any company). If you want the company's view of the business to align with your engineering view of the business, you first need to prove that you are one of the company's most efficient engineers. Most ideas and viewpoints are reasonable, but there's too many where there's not enough time to reasonably act upon them. So to guide their decision on what to follow, people implicitly will bias towards how they perceive the value of the person providing those ideas of viewpoints. Jamie Oliver says a lot of things about cooking, but people generally listen to Gordon Ramsey over Jamie because Jamie is just saying random nonsense and Gordon Ramsey is legitimately a good chef.

The downside of working with clients is that you're operating on their whims and you can't predict those whims. You could spend time trying to figure out how to make your code flexible for every client, but you're effectively playing roulette with your time (if you guess wrong, your business value/time ratio is 0 for your efforts).

If you want to increase the yield of your time, you can:

- Get better at writing code faster and better. This will lower the time investment needed to add quality to your code.
- Understand what clients who frequently make feature requests & how valuable there are. From that list, identify the top 3 clients with the largest contracts. See if there's any repeated themes around their requests & build your code so that it can be more flexibly changed for those themes. This reduces the chances of you yielding 0 business value with your polish time since you're guessing blindly less.

**Time is the part of the equation you're missing**. You only have a fixed amount of time in your day-to-day work & the clients likely have a hard timeline for needing your company's software. Clients won't budge because they have money and signed a legally binding contract. So their needs are top priority, while your desire for higher quality is very low on the company's priority list. Likewise, the company will want your time spent for them to reflect this (they're the ones paying you after all).

E7s+ solve broad problems that cover the scope of a significant portion of the company and/or a significant number of people (usually both).

I would put it like this:

- E5s generally own projects.
- E6s generally own a team (it's more complex than just helping E5s, but that's another discussion).
- E7s own org-level problems (defining an org as at least 2 teams/collectives of people). Often, a lot of these org-level problems are not scoped to their reporting structure & are happening outside of the org of their reporting structure.

For the E7 I mention, they just simply saw a gap around the company lacking a cross-platform framework that could run the shared code locally on device. So they built one. This problem is E7 because:

- Technical depth is really high. Cross platform frameworks are not easy to build, yet one was built from scratch despite existing solutions (meaning they were technical enough to identify what wouldn't work for existing solutions + align others on this).
- The solution had a positive impact on all Android and iOS engineers (which is 2 collectives of \~70-80 engineers).

That's more like influencing & people don't generally care about that. People at work care about 2 things for someone:

- Does this individual have a personality I'm comfortable working with?
- Is the person sufficiently compotent in my day-to-day interactions?

The nature of how most relationships are built are through 1:1 interactions. A company is a collection of people in the end, so the more number of good relationships you have the more potential you have to influence over the broader company.

I've tried to jump straight to staff+ behaviors earlier in my career, but I was never able to accomplish anything meaningful in my career. I didn't have the strong technical fundamentals that clearly set me apart from my peers (making it harder for me to drive action just by myself & making it harder for engineers to implicitly trust me), and I didn't have an understanding of the foundations of a good relationship (making it frustrating when people were okay with things that I was pushing, but they never really did much else).

If you want to take the most consistent next steps in your career:

- Get good at your current job. Make it clear that some aspect of your technical skills outstrips your peers (coding speed, code quality, company-level technical domain knowledge, general technical expertise).
- Be kind and helpful to other people (both technical and non-technical. Good relationships are built from consistent stream of positive interactions, and beinging helpful and kind are the most straightforward ways to set relationships up on a positive note (especially when you don't know who you're going to frequently interact with in the future).

If you job hop, you need to build relationships all over again (regardless of level). Relationships generally take years: I'd say best case, it takes a 1-2 years to build the relationships. And there's influencing impact over those relationships, which takes another 1-2 years. So that brings the range to 2 years minimum best case. If you try to jump the gun and try to influence without any strong relationships, people will just ignore you best case or try to get you fired worst case.

It's very hard to master the complexities of relationships without a strong foundation of technical (mainly coding) and non-technical (mainly driving xfn discussions to getting people to agree on something). If your goal is to be the "staff" (in quotes because in the end a title is just an arbritrary string) engineer that's balancing technical, business, and people needs, focus on the perfecting the basics first. I wouldn't trust a chef who can't consistently boil an egg to consistently cook a Beef Wellington, and I wouldn't trust someone trying to be a tech lead when they're struggling to push out code on time.

It's a level higher than that for Staff. You don't own the project: you own the team (a collection of people and projects). If your teammate gets stuck, it should be on them to get themselves unstuck. You are there to guide them how to get unstuck more efficiently in the long run. You can help them get unstuck here and there witthout too much scrutiny, but if you do it too much that wouldn't reflect well on you (this is okay as a senior though).