Editor's Choice Q&A and Videos

I'm sure Alex and Rahul talk about this in their , but wondering how to write clean code, particularly in the context of someone who doesn't have technical people available to review my pull requests in my work or in side-projects.

I'm sure this skill is almost entirely developed by working with talented people and writing a lot of code, but is there a place for resources like "Clean Code" the book or courses on Udemy?

Sometimes I feel like I didn't get 40 hours "worth" of productivity after a week, and it didn't make sense to physically spend 40 hours working that week. Is it possible to succeed as a software engineer working less than the traditional 40 hours? I imagine it requires being able to get the work done faster - What are some techniques to do that?

There have been multiple instances since I joined last October with my manager where in, I felt I didn't fit in. I had lots of excitement when I joined in, but since the 1st month, with interactions I have had with him everything went downhill.

I realised that I don't work until there's a fire/my life depends on it (serious deadline). I am literally the pro definition of procrastinator. I have been this person for so many years. Until things get serious, I have never had self motivation to do the hard things. When I want to do hard things, I always have procrastinated, when deadline comes, I try to find existing solutions, only when there's nothing that exists but I have to think and create one and I believe I can do it, I do it!

These things make me worry whether I have the ability to take anything up in this world. When items/issues are discussed during work, others pitch in and talk, and I just listen, and think, how am I not able to come up with these stuffs or be proactive in solving problems.

Is tech not for me?

What should I do now? My PIP is for 1 month. I do think I can survive PIP as this is exactly the fire thing I was talking about above. But I don't think I can provide the consistency they ask for! I am preparing for backend since I found my work in DevOps is mostly Ops and I like learning things than executing. I am not ready for job change for primary reasons like -

1. Don't know what job should I take?
2. Not ready to take DevOps roles with current knowledge I have
3. Not ready yet to clear backend interviews

Has anyone else ever been in my shoes? Not in PIP terms, but if they can relate to the procrastination bit / self motivation. What did you do to solve the problem?

Hey all, I’m a new grad who has been working at JPMorgan Chase for ~3 months, and I would really like some perspective on my experience so far. This essay question will be long, but the overall theme is that my growth feels stagnant and I’ve unfortunately grown to dread coming into work. I’d really appreciate any new perspectives or advice.

For reference, my current career goal is to grow to senior engineer at a startup/Big Tech company as quickly as possible (because a) I like working towards long-term goals and b) software engineering is lots of fun).

A quick timeline:

• I joined JPMC in early August on a React + Spring Boot team

• The first 4 weeks were solely dedicated to training and getting access to stuff

• Thus, I’ve been with my team in full capacity for ~8 weeks now

A core problem is no one is really interested in how I’m spending my time or enabling me to be productive, even with me trying to upwardly manage. For instance:

• On my first day, I had to actively ask my manager and TL for my first task, but they had no immediate plan for me or the other new joiner(s)

• During my first couple weeks, I (nicely) bugged my TL for work so I can get my hands wet and start learning the codebase, to no avail

• Recently, I had a full week of no tasks assigned to me, and no one minded (I had stopped bothering asking for work)

I’ve considered the following:

1. Self-assigning myself work

   1. This won’t work because a) I don’t think that’s allowed and b) I’m not yet onboarded enough to be independently productive

2. Asking to pair program

   1. I’ve mentioned this to two engineers, to no avail

   2. Everyone seems to be focused on getting their own JIRAs completed, and pair programming will inevitably slow them down

Also, because my TL is so busy, it’s hard to get immediate, synchronous help whenever I get blocked, which leads to me having much downtime. In fairness, I understand people are busy and can’t drop their work on a whim, and I should have taken the initiative to get help from other team members too (to not overwhelm my TL).

In any case, the handful of tasks I have been given have tended to be very menial in nature - the type you could better offload to ChatGPT. For instance, adding 1-line changes to business logic or writing unit tests for existing code (that I only partially understand). Most of the work hasn’t helped me develop a mental model of how the system works or learn the business domain.

Here are a few other traits about my team that I’d like to mention, to provide more context in debugging my situation:

• My TL and manager spend most of the day pairing up to deal with production issues

• My manager doesn’t have 1-on-1s with anyone (even new grads)

• Everyone else on the team is busy, as if I’m the only engineer without much to do

• The engineering culture often seems middling at best - unit tests are often written without asserts (solely to reach 80% coverage) and code often has buggy execution paths

The whole experience is unfortunately becoming really frustrating to me. For comparison, I worked on a React/TS + Firebase side project over the summer (it couldn’t have been more than 80-100 hours of work, tops) and I learned so much stuff really quickly - not merely in terms of code velocity, but other higher-level concepts like the tradeoffs of SQL vs NoSQL, data modeling, reading documentation, how to keep a codebase organized, etc. and I also gained much more confidence in my technical abilities. The experience I gained of building something has given me more context to understand how software engineering works. Also, it was tons of fun (like grinding in an RPG, but productive).

On the other hand, I’ve spent almost three months at my first real job and I’ve objectively learned very little. As a result, I’m finding it hard to be motivated to take extra initiative and apply myself when it seems like the environment I’m in has turned out to be so stagnant and slow-moving.

Beyond this, the other major problem is I don’t feel like I’m providing value to anyone (including myself) when I go into work. My only incentive has (unfortunately) become running down the clock so I can leave, which, coupled with the boredom from a lack of work and a 2+ hour round-trip commute, is incredibly draining. It’s really silly - my primary goal right now is to get good at software engineering, yet I’m currently doing the opposite!

I have considered starting a dialogue with my manager and bringing up (some) of these concerns, but there are a few problems. Mainly, I doubt my manager would provide the best insight:

• He directly equates hours worked with productivity and suggests ambitious JPMC engineers should probably work 10-11+ hours early in career

• He suggested using my downtime to do some kind of arbitrary training (unclear what he is referring to), instead of finding real work to learn from

• He doesn’t seem to understand that the work I’ve been assigned is not very meaningful

• He spends all his time coding and very little time managing

• My manager (as part of JPMC for decades) seems to be in the siloed-off JPMC bubble where engineers join and stay for decades - so growth discussions would be centered around being the best JPMC employee, not the best software engineer in general

I don’t mean to criticize - my manager is actually a cool, friendly dude.

Plus, not everything is bad about my experience. There are several green flags:

• Most of the other engineers seem to like their work

• There appears to be some camaraderie in the team culture

• My manager seems flexible and understanding regarding people’s schedules

• My TL/manager have given very positive feedback on the code quality of my (few) contributions so far

• During my placement conversation, it sounded like there’s tons of work/scope available

Nonetheless, it still feels like I’m in a no-win state where my options are:

1. Stay until the tech market improves

   1. It feels really bad to intend on spending a minimum 1-1.5+ years working at a job where I’m learning very little and accomplishing almost nothing. It seems like it would hurt my career growth (and continue to be a really taxing, sucky experience).

   2. It seems like the only two things I’m getting out of this right now are a) income and b) resume continuity.

2. Switch jobs

   1. It feels almost as bad to want to look for a new job after ~3 months, given JPMC’s tech side is so large and reasonably well-known.

   2. Also, job searching as a junior in this current market would be very RNG-heavy, and I don’t want to have a short stint on my resume if I can avoid it.

3. Switch teams

   1. Internal mobility isn’t an actionable option because the program managers want us to spend at least 12 months in our first role.

   2. Also, to switch, you’d need to both find another team via internal networking and have your current manager sign off on the transfer.

4. Quit

   1. The large amount of downtime means I have to spend significant parts of the day running down the clock by simply sitting in my chair and doing literally nothing - which turns out to be far more mentally grueling than one might expect.

   2. The WLB on my in-person days is poor because I have a 2.5 hour round-trip commute, so I have little energy to do anything useful in my free time.

   3. I’ve tried to use my downtime to read books (like Designing Data-Intensive Applications), but this doesn’t remotely replace doing actual work.

   4. I have no expenses so I could quit, though that isn’t the best option. I only mention it because staying at my job comes at the cost of continually enduring this.

What does the Taro community think of my situation? I’d appreciate any and all suggestions on how to fix this.

Hi, I'm a SDE2 level software engineer from India. My parent's health is poor, and I can't leave my town for that reason. However, there's no tech scene at this place, so what would you suggest I do?

In particular, I'm having trouble figuring out really complex bugs. For example, on my current project, we're auditing a lot of the existing feature set to see what issues they have so we can fix them as we revamp them. I'm happy to find lots of issues, but I have no idea how to fix them, even after finding a code pointer.

I talked with a senior engineer on my team for help, and they were able to get more color on the situation. However, they mainly were able to do this as they have been in the org for a while and knew who to go to for what: I can't replicate that deep knowledge they have as I'm fairly new to the company. How can I create a systemic process I can follow to figure out these situations?

• 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.

Say a recruiter from Series C reaches out to you for a SWE role.

What all are the questions that one should ask in order to do the understand the potential of the startup so that there is less risk of layoffs when joining there, given the uncertain times.

I am aware of crunchbase website and looking at the news article that are linked there. What other homework one should during/before/after the interview process in terms of questions to ask, information to collect?

The limitation that is usually is the startups have very few employees so it is difficult to get concrete answers about the culture, WLB, actual work unless you are in their network.

I am good at LeetCode style problem solving and can also manage system design, but I never get interview calls when I apply through the company portals. Also recruiters barely accept LinkedIn requests and even those who accept them do not respond when reached out to for an open position.

Across my career, I've felt bad about my skills sometimes because I'll have teammates, who are also at my level, doing as much as 2x more than me. This has led to me feeling like an imposter many times - Any thoughts on how to process all this?

My team owns a really wide set of features spanning across multiple repos and programming languages (C++, React, Angular). On top of that, each person works on pretty different areas (telemetry/data, UI components, client side api, etc.). We have a v1 of the app being maintained and a v2 currently being developed with some people working on v1 and some working on v2. It's impossible to know all the context behind every pull request.

How can I give quality code reviews? At most I can only provide feedback to simple code logic and really well written PR descriptions. Should I be trying to private message the developer for each PR to understand more, or is this just something that comes with time?