Big Tech Q&A and Videos

I'm currently employed at a startup where we're building bookkeeping tools. My work mainly involves Python, some database work, and a lot of business logic wrangling. Due to the small size of our app and engineering org, I don't have many opportunities to gain the necessary experience in distributed systems. I'm seeking advice on how to transition to distributed systems. Any guidance would be greatly appreciated.

I’ve been a senior FEE at Amazon for almost a year now, and I’m still figuring out time management.

Sometimes I get overly involved in others’ tasks, or have too many meetings, or get overwhelmed by all the new campaigns and estimation requests constantly coming through the door while we’re in the middle of meeting deadlines.

How do senior FAANG engineers balance their priorities without overworking or burning out?

P.S. it’d be amazing if Taro can get Steve Huynh (PE at Amazon) to talk about this topic in detail.

My goal is to get to this level someday, so I would love to understand more. In particular, how does this dynamic play out at Big Tech/larger tech companies?

Hello,

As the title says, I’m stuck as an entry level engineer in FAANG for almost 4 years now. I’ve been reflecting on what I’m doing wrong.

My first company I worked for 1 year and didn’t not like it because the lack of mentorship. I joined and my questions never got answered, the tech lead didn’t really care about giving mentorship, just gave me links and bug IDs. I was able to survive for 1 year but I left the company because I felt so lost. My manager mentioned that I was “on track” to getting promoted but I hated the culture.

Then worked for 1.9 years on another company, where I received awards for my projects and contributions. I did receive mentorship here, but I was not able to get promoted. At the end of the timeline my manager mentioned I was moving slower and slower. I was working as a full stack and I believe my error here was not playing my strengths, since every time I had to take another project it would be on a different area, such as server on a language I never used before. I had a few discussions with my tech lead and I felt I lost my team trust because they would give a lot of comments, and just get a lot feedback from other people. This kinda demoralized me and made it hard to keep working so I changed teams. My last team I worked for 8 months before getting laid off. Here I also received recognition for my projects. My first project I missed the deadline because the onboarding had nothing to do with my project. I integrated our tool with an external team, so most of the code base I worked was not even ours (the techlead and team didn’t have much knowledge). Then I was given another project where I was starting to get traction, onboarding and project matched, I had to ramp up again on the new tech stack and my manager was getting frustrated with me, my team was very helpful and I was slowly to become independent. I feel like people trusted me here and code reviews would go smooth this time, at the end I was finally getting positive feedback, but was affected by the layoffs. From reflecting, here is what I did wrong:

• Not communicating well enough my work with my managers. Status updates I was blocked/learning and that would make me look slow.

• Not very good mentorship, I feel like at the beginning I needed lots of 1:1 to be able to learn our teams codebase. Sometimes I got very good mentorship but not complete. So I learned well parts of the code base where the tech stack applied.

• Switching projects too much, went from front end, full stack, server side with several languages. Every time I had to re learn a lot of new of the tech stack.

I did get several recognitions for my contribution with at least helps me think I’m not completely inadequate for the field.

I am looking for a new position, is there anything that could help me perform well as a mid engineer?

Thanks

Can you please share strategies in place for career growth ( L5 -> L6)

along side interview prep ( L5 / L6 ) for a FAANG+.

Goal: L6 at FAANG+, either direct or L5 -> L6.

Reason: More TC

Timeline: Not urgent, just waiting for the right opportunity.

I'm a Data Engineer looking to break into FAANG. As such, my time outside of work right now is spent applying to jobs, asking people for referrals, and networking. When I have interviews, my focus shifts to Leetcode.

I really want to build a side-project though both because it's fun and because it will help me perform better at future jobs.

My (common) issue is this: where do I start? Not in terms of the problem I am solving. I have a super-smart friend who's a lawyer and an MBA who's into fantasy sports and he has neither the time nor the ability to create an app. I feel like I could just generate a bunch of different ideas with him and pick the one most interesting to me.

I mean in terms of tech area. Alex and Rahul are both mobile developers and that naturally lends itself to great apps. I know Alex has mentioned that in a vacuum, it's better to focus on front-end for side-projects. I have no experience with front-end or mobile, some back-end dev experience and a fair bit of data.

I could build a data eng project. Start Data Engineering has some great projects on his blog () and there's definitely plenty of examples online (e.g. ).

My question is whether I should build a DE project. I'm not particularly wedded to DE because I feel like I want to do more SWE work and less business analyst work. Above all, I want to get into FAANG for the boost to my learning, career, and comp. DE is prob the easiest way of getting there but again, not wedded to it.

So I see my options as a) doing a DE project (maybe using the projects above to get my feet wet); b) doing a full-stack project (hard to do a back-end only project I think); c) mobile? (Alex and Rahul are tempting me).

Is there any advantage to mobile over a web-dev project?

If I do b or c, I'm concerned about falling into tutorial-hell or at least taking too long to learn before building. I'm tempted by a full-stack course like Zero To Mastery's full stack course, but it's 40 hrs, and I know it's prob not necessary.

Just want to add that I'm a newb for side-projects and I'm aware that I can and will experiment with multiple project types once I get started.

Sorry for the unstructured thoughts here. My brain works on NoSQL, not SQL ;)

I started my career in a mid-level startup that was on the verge of IPO. I contributed a lot. Learnt a lot in terms of how to deliver big scale features relatively quickly, work within sharp deadlines, owning features and products. I was a high performer.

After 2 years of working in that company, I decided to switch to Big Tech for better compensation. While Snap is not exactly a Big Tech company, this is what I had in mind when switching.

I immediately started adding value in terms of delivering features and owning products. However, since I come from a mid-level startup, my soft skills are very weak. I am an excellent programmer, but I struggle writing Technical Design Docs. I deliver features quickly, but I don't know how to contribute to the spec sheets and writing launch emails, holding engineering sessions, efficiently using 1:1s. It feels like in my previous company, delivering features on time, writing quality code was enough to be a high performer, but seems like Big Tech requires a lot more. My manager's ex-Amazon, so he values tech docs a lot, and I feel like I am missing a huge opportunity here by not being good at them.

How do I adapt better to this work environment ?

How would you spend you first 30 days to achieve the an impactful start (ideally from a staff perspective):

• What would you prioritize?
• What questions would you ask?
• When given your first tasks, what additional/beyond scope extras would you consider?
• What would you be mindful of NOT to do?
• How would you start prepping to figure out what to become an SME in?

I'm an E5 iOS at a Big Tech company. My team has some E6 work that I'd love to take on, but my PM prioritized some E4 work above it. Since the only other iOS engineer on my team is E6, my EM asked me to take on the E4 work while the E6 works on the E6 work. The E4 work is scoped to about a month's worth of work, but I worry that scope creep may drag things out further. I've been at this company for close to 3 years on various teams. For the majority of that time, I've been saddled with E4 work (and sometimes even E3 work) that has taken valuable time away from working towards E6. I was hired as an E5. Is there a way to avoid spending time doing lower-level work to focus on getting to the next level? For what it's worth, I got Exceeds on my latest performance review.

I'm a software engineer with 1 year experience and no degree. I recently got an interview with a Big Tech company for a Full-Stack position. I have the phone screen to do first but I've started studying Leetcode so I'm prepared if it goes forward. I'm honestly not sure what to expect as I haven't done many interviews let alone at Big Tech. What should I expect/what areas should I be focusing on to better improve my chances of passing?

Hi all,

I joined my current company (known in our industry for not-so-good WLB) 6 months ago as a Senior Software Engineer and have been doing side hustle in the evening and weekends over past 6 months beside my main job. This means I still completed the 9am to 6pm work schedule before doing my side hustle.

Now my manager is saying I have low bug fix count and my team consists of some weekends workaholics which I suspect I’m being benchmarked against. My upcoming performance review is due end of December 2023 (1 month away). The expectation for my level is ramping up in 3 months which means the last 3 months are no longer considered ramp-up period.

What should I do in this last 1 month leading to the performance review? Should I go all in on the weekends too or should I keep the pace I’m working (I’ve started working in the evening from 7PM to 10PM since receiving this feedback 2-3 weeks ago but on weekends I still hustle). Was I wrong in doing side gigs / projects while ramping up for my full time job and should have instead pushed weekends to ramp up? What could have I done better in the past 6 months and moving forward in 1 month ahead?

I know Rahul talked about doing side contract gigs and Alex talked about doing side projects while both are still at Meta (a very demanding big tech company). How did you guys handle the pressure and what are your schedules like? (Wake up @ 4AM, work on side hustle till 6-7AM, then go to sleep at night around 12AM LOL)? I'm curious about how people organize their side gigs schedule.

Thank you for your advices. I really appreciate it.

I joined Meta but Im wondering if I really will be growing if I am just working on small features for the first year or two

I work for a service-based company as a software engineer. I've been working here for two years.

I want to change jobs with a better organization, ideally a tech giant or a product-based company. Someone I know who works as an SDE3 Level Engineer at one of the companies I am pursuing is very helpful. He is always willing to assist.

How I can benefit from his experience and assist in achieving my goal of changing jobs while also advancing my career? Should I try to put together a growth plan to track my progress toward my goal?

Also, what can I do to provide value to my mentor? When the mentor works for a different company, is it very difficult to be of value?

Recently had an interview with big tech where I proposed a solution that was pretty much textbook from the Alex Xu books. I have had similar experiences with educative. They are all undeniably detailed and great but I feel there are some edge cases that are hard to figure out unless you have worked in those systems.

Educative and Alex Xu books are not perfect representations of system design either. There are some small gotchas that a big tech experienced interviewer would catch. This also happened with cochroach db interview where this very senior engineer figured out the material I was using and asked a targeted question that he knew was a flaw in design but not discussed in educative course

So I guess the question is how do I do better?

I have studied DDIA, alex xu books, Educative.

This is question for staff interviews for senior engineers

I'm working on a part-time master's degree in Computer Science while being employed. My goal is primarily just to learn for fun, but I'm wondering if there are any career advantages?

Everyone knows that the tech industry revolves around the Silicon Valley, but I'm in a different metropolitan area in the US. I'm thinking about my next move company-switch wise, and I'm wondering how much it's worth being in the Bay Area for greater access to opportunity and career development in general. Also, does this vary based on whether you want to work for Big Tech or startups?