Beginning my journey to learn senior behaviors
So I’m the same person who asked how to compare faang experience to non faang and I’m taking the advice to develop the senior behaviors. Again the idea is let’s work on this and as the lagging indicator I’ll be ready for the e4 offer at faang, a senior promotion or the stretch e5 offer when I interview with faang companies at some point.
So I think I have a plan in mind.
For the 2 projects I’ve effectively got buy in from my manager to own end to end.
One of them is just a large volume of coding that basically gave my manager confidence I can craft lower level requirements and cross check my research on the requirements to deliver independently and hold meetings with the po and work with him to confirm my research on the production data. The other I will explain below.
His advice when I talked to him in my 1:1 after expressing the desire to learn senior skills was to effectively deliver “here’s the problem here’s the xfn, go”. But is that senior or mid level? I’d imagine this is borderline and if I’m doing this I guess execution has to be flawless. But I think the goal is to go further. I hear the key bit is having that multiplicative project under your belt and think about how to make the space better every year.
My proposed path to learn senior behaviors:
Basically I have an api migration project which involved technically complex ways of using the internals of a framework to connect to a mandatory interface for the company. I effectively figured the tech on my own and built the partnership with the senior engineer on the xfn team who I’m connecting to without my manager connecting us. It made me look good to everyone and I plan on trying to grow my scope from mid level to senior by coordinating the url switch for the clients who use it I believe there are 4 teams.
my multiplicative project in mind is to make data translation and data correlation in a streaming environment config driven so our dev work goes down by like a significant percentage. It’s a pain im seeing . I imagine there might be some complexity involved in managing this. My po mentioned that the skip wants something like this and I’m leveraging work that I seen be a huge hit at my previous company to base my execution off of. Again this is super early, so I’m just checking if my idea is good even though I get that it’s 1% of the journey since execution is the 99% that’s gonna count.
I hope this plan is gonna count, any tips to begin this journey will help.
Discussion
(8 comments)- 2
4 months agoEngineer @ RobinhoodIf your goal is to prepare for senior level FAANG interviews, we can treat this question like an answer to a behaviorial interview.
While the projects do seem to have the technically complexity to be senior, there's 2 questions I'd have:
- Most of the implementation for these projects (where the technical complexity is) seems to be done by you and only you. Is your team involved at all during any part of the implementation process?
- What does the technical complexity of coordinating with other teams for this project looks like? Will it take a lot of code/time for them? Are there signficant risks of this migration going poorly?
My high level read of this question is:
- Your focus is too much on yourself being the "hero" by consuming most of the implementation. There's very little around the system (people and technical) around the projects besides mainly "oh they'll use the project when I'm done". A senior engineer needs to show they can be a team player besides individually consuming a bunch of implementation, while mid-level engineers generally are more individualistic.
- You're a bit rambly without any clear organization of your thoughts, so it's hard to follow the question. Efficient communication (organizing your thoughts, using simple and concise terminology) is a key trait expected from a senior engineer. More words usually doesn't mean more overall value communicated & people often have an unspoken cutline around communication where they just stop listening to you (bringing what you said down to 0).
Like I mentioned in a previous Q&A, it's very easy to tell the difference between a mid-level who's trying too hard and a true senior engineer. You're trying a lot and doing a lot, but you're focusing too much on your own individual output. For senior engineers for FAANG, they're able to support teammates on projects in a way that's not completely taking over their work. My recommendation is to focus on growing these behaviors.
- Communication. Simply down your thoughts and the words you use and look to provide some level of organization to them. This Q&A is pretty helpful for providing some general tips.
- Enabling the team. Taking over the work of your peers doesn't count here: you need to show that you can work with a team and be the primary person that unblocks them. Focus on non-technical behaviors for this: creating clear requirements/design docs, leading project meetings to track status and check in on blockers, and coordinate the launch process are common ways to achieve this.
Hope this helps set up the baseline for senior-level at FAANG!
- 04 months agoMid-Level Software Engineer [OP]Taro Community
Thanks for the answer!! Appreciate the kickoff of this journey.
Answers to your questions
- Most of the implementation for these projects (where the technical complexity is) seems to be done by you and only you. Is your team involved at all during any part of the implementation process?
This is actually the case it is just me. I think this is gonna get me to think differently for sure. Will use this feedback for introspection and I’m reading this as let’s figure out how to do such projects in a way where we work with others to get it done.
- What does the technical complexity of coordinating with other teams for this project looks like? Will it take a lot of code/time for them? Are there signficant risks of this migration going poorly?
Client technical complexity is actually low because it is a url change with the same exact endpoint structure. I think for me I thought it’s a good way to introduce myself to how to properly work with other teams to coordinate testing and all. Again the idea is to introduce myself to owning the relationship and get reps for standing on my own 2 feet instead of being carried by my manager and po on non technical stuff.
Skills you said I should start fixing asap to build the foundation.
- Communication: what’s a good format to begin with selling the work? I’d imagine one liner of the revenue impact and how many teammates it affected. And then go into all behaviors we did for the project? To me I consider this my biggest priority.
- Enabling others: we have 3 mid levels on our team and 2 senior engineers. If I have a multiplicative impact idea could I use it to mentor others or smthn? Is that something I can do? Is this the right way to think about how to execute such initiative ideas? For context I joined this company 6 months ago. I think this is something I’d prioritize second cuz I think the bigger thing to work on immediately is how to sell the work.
- 14 months agoEngineer @ Robinhood
You're trying to pigeon-hole the behaviors into the specific projects, which feels like you're focusing more on gaming the process over building long term behaviors. Within your day-to-day, you need to demonstrate these behaviors regardless of how big/small/promo-worthy the issue is at hand is. True growth manifests from your view of the world changing to reflect a broader view: gaming the career matrix might make getting the promo easier, but it often leads to you not having the right fundamental understanding of your environment to sustain your promo.
- 04 months agoMid-Level Software Engineer [OP]Taro Community
Sounds good let’s start with maybe next 2 weeks what can I start off with to do this in a small scale or smthn? If I have to deeply understand it there’s smthn I can focus on tomorrow and onwards to begin. I’m ready for this to take a while so throw whatever we gotta do first at me :)
- 04 months agoMid-Level Software Engineer [OP]Taro Community
Also to be fair my goal is to build foundation for senior not necessarily get promoted. I’m kind of in this boat where I’m expecting that I won’t be ready for a while so why not start one thing at a time and expect failure and growing pains. But I just want to make progress.
- 04 months agoEngineer @ Robinhood
We can take communication as a starting point as an example.
- Organize your thoughts into bullet points and paragraphs.
- Every time you write something, do another pass to see if you can lower the total word count before hitting submit.
- Bias towards using simple words.
ChatGPT is the perfect tool for improving what you type: I highly recommend using ChatGPT on what you write ("Hey GPT can you organize this text and reduce the word count?"). We can have a metric here of how many changes ChatGPT has. The less changes GPT makes, the better your communication is. I highly recommend treating your communication on Taro's Q&A the same as communicating as work so that you'll be better prepared for higher-stakes situation at work.
- 04 months agoMid-Level Software Engineer [OP]Taro Community
Hold on: so you’re saying at work and in standup if no one has follow up questions and people get my thoughts first time that’s the goal? Similarly to what ur saying here? Basically covering verbal and slack communication?
- 14 months agoEngineer @ Robinhood
Your goal is to reduce the amount of time it takes for your coworkers to understand you. If the frequency in which they ask you to reclarify what you just stated goes down, you are succeeding. I strongly recommend taking this course end-to-end more granulary understand what a good communication as an engineer looks like (although this focuses more on the interpersonal part).
