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I was hired as a mid-level engineer, but I'm performing at the level below it. I had about a year and a half of experience coming into my company but didn't get much from it due to multiple re-orgs. In hindsight, I was a poor hire for my role and have felt this way the entire time. I am not interested in the niche and motivation is a struggle at times. I stayed because the team was really strong and I thought I could focus on the coding and grow technically. That was a mistake.

Fast forward a year and a half later (now), my manager tells me informally that my delivery is ok, but the way I go about my work needs improvement and I'm not growing, so I am performing at a level below. I need a lot of help from other engineers. And that I need fewer comments on my diffs and to do more research on problems because I'm not problem-solving well enough to be at my level. He's completely right. The team is full of high-performers and I know that I'm doing poorly by comparison. But I'm already consistently overworking into the evening and weekends.

I'm also hitting the limit with my mental health. I am putting in effort, but am being told it's not enough. For example, I spend some time understanding X and think I understand it, but teammate questions me in a way that makes me apply that knowledge and I realize my understanding is not so good or I did not think about it that way, so I am ashamed because I have spent a lot of time working on the task, but have failed to deep dive into this part. Or my teammate asks me for my thoughts on how to make something better, but nothing really comes to mind. How do I work on this behavior?

Some other questions:

• Is this a sign to leave my team or company? And the profession? Despite my best efforts, I'm disappointing my team and it's taking a toll.
• I haven't been served a PIP yet, but is this a sign that it's coming?
• Naive take, but is it a bad idea/even possible to ask for a downlevel? The reasoning was that I'd rather keep my job than lose it.
• Any advice?

I’m currently working as a Data Engineer for a mid-sized (1500 people) investment-services corporation. The company has been around for a long time and makes money, but it definitely isn’t a tech-first company (e.g. it refers to the software side as “I.T.”, has tons of meetings, approvals needed to install almost anything on my computer, including VSCode).

I want to get into FAANG as a software engineer because I want to move away from the business/data side of things and closer to the engineer side of things. On my current team, I’m the lone data-engineer (will be joined by another in a few months) and as someone with <3 years of experience, I know that my growth is being stunted.

I’m currently grinding AlgoExpert to prep for interviews.

How should I think about the circumstances under which it would be worthwhile to quit in order to prep (full time) for FAANG interviews? Here’s what I can come up with in terms of current pros/cons of quitting:

Pro’s of quitting:

• A LOT more time to prep for interviews, can probably increase my output of questions by 3x
• Can do a lot more interviews without worrying about my job and scheduling
• Do less business/data stuff which I plan on moving away from anyways
• Get closer to a FAANG salary faster, which will likely be around 2x of my current salary

Cons:

• Don’t know how long it will take me to get a job
• Don’t know how easy it will be for me to get interviews without a job
• Psychological benefits of having a job
• Some learning on the job
• Low-stress job, nice manager, no overtime
• Already take an hour or two of my current job time to do AlgoExpert
• Make some money right now

How does the answer change (if at all) if I manage to land interviews with a bunch of different FAANG companies (say 5+) and I’m struggling to schedule all the time for interviews, prep for them, and do minimal work at my current job?

Thoughts are appreciated!

Situation:

I recently started a new position and I'm facing challenges with my manager's communication style. It's making my onboarding process difficult and I've noticed it's affecting our team's culture.

Evidence:

1. On my first day, there wasn't a structured 1:1. I received a call with scattered instructions about completing 4 PRs by the end of week 1. When I mentioned needing time for machine setup, signing up for health insurance and mandatory trainings, my concerns were dismissed.
2. By day 4, I hadn't been assigned an onboarding buddy. When I tried initiating a discussion, my manager seemed to think it was unnecessary. During an impromptu meeting, I wasn't given a chance to speak.
3. My manager suggested working during my vacation. During that vacation, I injured myself but hadn't completed health insurance formalities to see a doctor.
4. In the first week, I saw my manager confront our designer aggressively during a standup.
5. In week 2, I was abruptly reassigned to a different project without clear communication to other stakeholders.
6. During week 3, my manager had a heated debate with our team lead during standup. When I tried mediating, I was told I could leave the call.
7. Again in week 3, I was told to drop everything to complete a security training by the end of the day.

Environment & Manager:

Speaking with peers, it's clear I'm not the only one feeling overwhelmed. Our onboarding process seems disjointed and the team's morale is low due to constant shifts in priorities. This all seems to link back to our manager's communication style.

Seeking Counsel:

While I understand I'm new and might not have the full picture, I believe this issue is beyond just my experience. I'm looking for advice from:

1. Someone within the company with the authority to effect change.
2. Someone who has dealt with similar situations before.

Questions:

• Given what I've shared, how would you handle this situation?
• How can I maintain high performance when it feels like there are barriers?
• How should I approach giving feedback to my manager?
• Are there any strategies to improve my current situation?

Desired Outcome:

With your guidance, I hope to find a sense of balance and detachment, focusing on my role while navigating these challenges.

I genuinely want to make the best out of my current role and contribute positively to my team. Your insights and advice will be invaluable. Thank you in advance.

I'm pretty early in my career (~1 YOE), so I'm still trying to figure a lot of things out. A lot of the advice on Taro is around finding your strengths and investing more in those, but I'm unsure on exactly how to do that. I feel like I'm just going from ticket to ticket and am quite busy in general, so I don't know how to think about all this. Any tips?

Here's a list of tools to build side projects with LLMs for free.

NOTE: Italicized sources are no credit card needed

Databases

• Free 5GB Postgres via :
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• CockroachDB:

Hosting

• Free hosting via Heroku (24 months for free from GitHub Student perks):
• Render is good:
• is dirt cheap also:
• Free cron jobs via / / GitHub Actions / (the founders of this are on taro!)

LLM

• Gemini Flash: super generous free tier (1500+ requests/day):
• Gemma 3: (Best option, 100% free and is very performant)
• Groq: super fast LLM inference:
• Cerebras but there's a waitlist:

I'm currently working through a task where I have to write unit tests. These unit tests in theory should test out the entirety of its class isolated from any other classes or function and effectively apply business logic on how these functions/methods are being called.

But where do I draw the line in regards to how much testing I'd need to run? Currently struggling with this PR because there's lots of lines of code (bad I know), but I do need to find out what a complete unit test looks like.

If you had to ask me, a complete unit test is where all the unit tests traverse through all code path and have both positive tests and negative tests being ran to show how the code should be used.

If there's some sort of guidance online, that would be helpful. Otherwise I'm mimicking what unit tests have been approved based on style and usage.

As a followup to the talk I gave 2 weeks ago, , I'd like to give y'all the chance to ask me any question. Whether that is about interviews, engineering, career, or general interest.

Work History

• Apple Music Android (2016-2020): Worked on migrating code from the legacy Beats to a new app, creating the tablet version, constructed the general platform level code, and initiated the migration to Kotlin and other general app modernization.
• Uber (2020-Present): Lead the construction of the donation feature () that got run during the Super Bowl. Currently migrating our codebase from Buck to Bazel. Frequent complainer on Google's Github repo.

General Interest

• Spend too much time studying investing. Returns are pretty okay.
• I have 2 cats: Lina and Shadow
• Represented the US in France and Poland for fencing in 2009 for the Cadet World Cup.
• Dota 2 burnout (last ranked Divine 2). Watching TI though.

Whether that be a formal mentor within the company or you have found a mentor outside the company.

e.g. I want to level up as an engineer, have sought out a mentor(s) to help me do so, what are some of the things I should make sure happen that I get the most benefit out of the relationship.

Does it get worse as you progress from L3 -> L4 -> L5 -> L6 -> etc? Intuitively that seems like what would happen as your scope grows across promotions: Is there more overtime associated with the more senior levels?

Given the current economic volatility and uncertainty as well as the hard-to-measure business value of cost centre teams (like infrastructure or platform), would it be sensible to join such a team?

I have been chasing the SDE-3 promotion from last one year. It was denied in the year end review cycle in December.

In this cycle (Jan - June), I have ticked almost all the checkpoints as per the firm's SDE-3 competency matrix and I have a good amount of documentation around it as well which I have submitted to my manager.

I want to let my manager and skip (Director) know that I will leave if I am not promoted in this cycle as I don't think there are any negative data points against me.

Any suggestions about how should I subtly carry out this conversation?

Let’s say 2 companies give you different levels, but the compensation is the same. Is it better to have the lower level to have lower expectations? Zooming out, how should I think about level and its overall importance across my career.