Big Tech Q&A and Videos

Hi everyone! I will join Palantir as a Forward Deployed Software Engineer(FDSE). I need advice on tackling the first 2-3 months at the company to gain team respect and trust. I am excited about this opportunity and want to grow but do it efficiently, if that is even a thing😅. Jokes aside, All I want is to have a great career at Palantir.

YOE: over 2.5years(including just over 1year of internship).

Stack Experience: Ruby on Rails, Python, some Java

Current Work: Backend Engineer. Building and maintaining APIs

I work in as an iOS engineer. My current company is a startup that's scaling up fast. In classic startup fashion, testing was historically not a top priority here. As a consequence, we struggle with lots of manual QAing and low code confidence when modifying pieces of poorly tested legacy code.

This has improved in the past year simply by unit testing every new piece of code by default and by introducing unit tests in legacy code as we touch it, boy scouting style.

At this point, I think we need to step it up and I'm looking forward to formalising a testing strategy for our mobile team.

Here are some ideas I have:

• In the realm of unit tests:
  • I want to introduce API contract tests because our back-end API lacks documentation. In these tests we'd unit test the way we build our requests to API endpoints, and we'd have a sample JSON response from the server to test that the app can parse it into our data models as expected.
  • I want to introduce localisation tests because our app supports many languages but we are always manually testing localisation. In these tests, we'd assert that the outputs of our formatting logic are the ones we want for different locales.
• In the realm of user interface tests:
  • I want to introduce snapshot testing, because right now the only way we can test that our views are rendered as expected for different view configurations (for example RTL vs LTR, empty content, loading content, content in verbose languages, etc.) is manually.
  • I want to introduce UI tests (sparingly, only for key flows) because we have no e2e tests. Currently, key flows are tested manually and frequently to prevent regressions, which takes lots of time.

What other testing strategies can I propose to establish some standard we can use to further improve our code confidence, reduce bugs, and rely more on automated testing?

How do the top tier tech companies approach mobile testing?

I'm defining a career path for my company, and don't know where to start. I would like to see how Meta, Google are doing this so that I can tailor to match my smaller company.

Regular layoffs + cut-down of perks + companies' continued focus on AI may not result in creation of huge number of new SWE positions at Big Tech anytime this year. Just my opinion.

What suggestions do seniors in this forum suggest to AI-proof your career? I agree that coding is not the only thing we do. Then what are other hard skills differentiator for a SWE? Communication, System Design skills will get easier and easier to master given plethora of improved content on the internet.

Should we start integrating AI in all our projects/workstreams in order to stay sharp?

Does specialization matter? I have a bunch of friends working in Big Tech, and some of them at my level started growing in 1 specific area. For example, one of them started going deep into machine learning. Do you need to make that decision when you’re a mid-level/senior engineer and what’s the criteria?

Adding on to this, I see a lot of noise in the market about various degrees and certifications to help you with specializations. Things like web3, ML, or other hot topics. This, combined with what I see my peers doing, makes me feel like this is a worthwhile or even the optimal thing to do.

As a counter-example, I have a friend who chose to specialize in ML and they’re job hopping a lot as they haven't been able to find good ML work at any of their recent companies.

• I am looking for a Software Engineer role in big techs.
• They varied my experience in my previous company, i.e. I was part of three different projects, all of which used different tech stacks, and none of them was a development project.
• Now I am confused about adding projects to my profile because I do not have any projects related to development.
• I have experience in python that is related to Data Science.
• I would love some guidance on deciding on what to build and how to choose between web, front/back end, full stack, android, etc.

Meta is my first large tech company, so I don't know much about the other big players (Amazon, Google, etc). I was curious as to what makes Meta unique compared to other giant tech companies, so I could get a better understanding of the industry overall.

What sorts of reasons make people leave big tech? I recently received an offer from a tech start-up is super interested in my candidacy and they're moving what they can to try to match compensation. The move includes a promotion. It also seems like I'd have access to career growth and learning due to people there wanting to work with me to help me succeed.

However, no matter what they do, they won't be able to match the compensation I'd receive within a few years, assuming I grow into a senior engineer role and stay at a big tech company. I see driven, career-focused individuals moving out of FAANG-like companies to start-ups and non-FAANG companies, so I'm curious: what drives people to do so? When is this the right career move?

Most people spend a tone of time prepping for FAANG interview but once you have the job, you need a different set of skill to be competitive and exceed the job expectations as a SDE. It would have be nice if we had also took the time to build up the skills to do the job better before joining the company. Any recommendation on material to skill up for FAANG job

I have around 15 years experience with background mainly in Java, Restful, Springboot etc. I was impacted by layoffs and I am on a H1B. Hence I have limited time before which I should choose a job. I do not have extensive time for preparing LeetCode in this short time span. I would like to know if there are mid-level companies (not startups, not big tech) that do non-leetcode style interviews. Like, a take home assignment, or some other demo kind of interviews.

What does a typical day working as a software engineer (say mid-level) in FAANG look like? I know there are at least 2 important variables, namely a) the person (how good they are at managing time, how motivated they are, how good their technical and soft skills are, etc.) and b) the team and company they are on.

I'm curious about the nitty-gritty of it, namely how much time is spent coding, how much time in meetings, how much time for breaks and lunch, how common is it to work overtime, etc. I'm looking for both the good and the bad, not the shiny, social-media-friendly videos made by people.

I have read time and again (including from Alex) that many if not most FAANG engineers work evenings and weekends. I just read that today from an ex-Facebook LinkedIn influencer I follow who was talking about his own 1 (unpleasant) year there.

I know my question might be so broad as to be meaningless given the number of engineers and situations there are, but if I can get the day of "Joe or Jane average FAANG engineer" who spends 2-3 years and then leaves, that's what I'm looking for. Not the talented and ambitious few who are able to work long and smart and able to rise up the ranks to staff.

This is not a typical question for Taro community, but l'm here to vent, and looking for honest advice. I'm a working mother at one of MAANG companies. I am a senior engineer, and currently working in a very competitive team that has very poor work life balance. I love my project and l've been getting good ratings so far and everyone is happy with my performance whether it's my manager, TL, DS, PM or XFN partners, according to their feedback for me during PSC.

However, I've been mentally stressed for months now about meeting the expectations and finishing my work while also meeting my kids expectations and having to deal with their emotions and other stuff, taking them to activities and playdates, ... etc and I don't get much help from my husband due to his larger responsibilities at work. I don't Iike to be an average engineer, as l've been used to excelling in my studies and work, it's a mental thing, perfectionism I believe. Should I just quit my job and look for a more relaxed one, if it exists? I’m at a good point in my career now and have already built very good relationships with everyone, and I’m afraid if I will regret this decision later if I don’t find a good alternative.

I've noticed a trend where despite passing recruiter screens as well as initial technical screens, the "on-site" phase with a full interview loop has been a barrier for me. This has happened at both start-ups as well as public companies (not Big Tech, but publicly traded). As for any glaring mistakes, maybe I just go too far down a given rabbit hole, or just don't code up the perfect solution immediately and instead have to actually work through the problem-solving and having that dialogue with the interviewer.

How much of this problem is down to the market or forces out of my control, and how much can I actually influence? The technical questions themselves are easier than the ones I answered when I interviewed (and got hired) at FAANG two summers ago.

I really don't feel good blaming things on blind luck or random chance, but it's either that or the hiring bar is literally absolute perfection.

At my old company, where I worked for many, many years, I wasn’t learning anything new. On my new team, I feel like a junior engineer since everything is new. Because of this, I don’t feel like I’m being taken seriously, even my engineers more junior than me.

I'm trying to stay positive throughout this learning process but would obviously like to build up respect among my team as quickly as possible to start feeling like a heavily valued voice in the room. Any advice on how to do that?

In fast-paced organisations that launch a lot of features on a quarterly basis and teams with large sizes, how should a tech lead or team members ensure that everyone knows about everything or is enabled to get to know about it?

Quite often, whenever a new feature comes in, it could be repurposing technology built for other features as well. But, given the pace at which these are developed, it is often hard to know what everyone is working on. Sometimes, each of these features may have idiosyncracies that may be getting missed out by new joiners, especially due to the volume of information, especially for teams that have been in existence since a long time.

I recall once when changes for a new feature done by a developer reverted some conditionals for an older feature, thus causing an outage. How do you prevent this and ensure knowledge of everything is available to all, especially to people new to an organisation?

Also, are there some general practices to ensure that these are easily discoverable? Video recordings are time consuming to go through, and wikis though they exist, are sometimes difficult to navigate, when you don't know what you are searching for? I am thinking of something like a mind map could help here, but what are your thoughts?