Editor's Choice Q&A and Videos

Recently, I have found myself just working on the tasks and investigating the bugs that my manager tells me to. However, from a performance perspective this would be considered "meeting expectations" at best. How do I develop a nose for impact and introduce new, innovative ideas to my team that really improve our product or development workflow?

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?

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.

I asked this question on chatGPT, nothing proper not found. I need your help guys, currently I am interviewing with some companies which their Glassdoor reviews are really low and there are pretty bad reviews in terms of culture and engineering. Just wondering what is important things can I ask them to get know more about that, or is there any technique that bring this kind topics during the interview?

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.

I've had 5+ friends leave Meta or quit software engineering altogether after E6. Either the responsibilities and stress were too much or what they were being asked to work on wasn't really aligned with their core interests. Business needs are always changing, so it can be a common occurrence to take a lot of ownership over a project you don't have personal interest in.

It's important to be adaptable, but I think intrinsic motivation can be hard to sustain if the people, project, or priorities are in flux.

For the older crowd, what really typifies career longevity in a software engineering?

Hi guys to me the most difficult part of building an android apps is coming up with an idea of what to build. To me it feels like there are almost no android apps that I can build that are unique since it feels like almost any android app idea I come up with, someone else has already built it or used my idea. What is your guys advice on this situation especially when I'm trying to build an app with the goal of attracting a lot of users?

I have never contributed to open source but would like to start doing so. I believe this will make a huge difference in landing big tech jobs. Would like some references, steps, directions for beginners to get started in this journey.

After a certain experience there's a certain expectation from Senior Software Engineers, I think because in the beginning of my career I wasn't involved in Development and hence despite being of experience 10 years I think I may not have the design skills required to work independently on a feature.

That said, I am going through LLD questions on YouTube, to understand more about designing from scratch, while I am doing I thought if there's a way to get me upto speed even more. The reason I am asking is because apart from doing Leetcode daily I would like to spend some time daily on design aspect as well.

In summary, I want to work independently, and for that am learning from the internet. I am wondering if that's it or there's something more I can do in my free time to become better developer. Any actionable items would be great.

When learning new things, I often find that I don't know this, don't know the best practice in that, and so on. If I go down these rabbit holes, a lot of time is spent and not much progress is made in the original project. If this is a scene at work, usually there are external factors to guide you not to go down these rabbit holes, be it the deadline on a task or advice from colleagues. But how to manage this while building side projects? Especially, time after work is equally precious that you sacrificed doing other things to build a skill, and progress gives motivation. But at the same time, going down these knowledge rabbit holes also builds knowledge, and be more niche. How would you trade off knowing everything vs progress in side projects?

I'm pretty good at leetcode (was able to pass some 3 to 5 rounds of interviews), I got good at by practicing and continuous learning. Now I want to be good at software engineering in general like debugging, building components, understanding complex things/systems, etc. I see one of the suggestions is to improve on fundamentals of software engineering, how do I do that? and What action items can I follow consistently? Any concrete suggested steps will be great instead of just some general bullet points. Thank you all.

Given this industry, switching is always somewhere in my mind. How can I figure out if it makes sense to pursue that or stay? When it comes to staying, how do I know if my current team is conducive to my overall growth and goals going forward?

I work overtime a lot, and it's pretty stressful. I'm also worried that amidst all this effort working for Meta, I'll lose track of who I am overall and what I can do for other companies. What can I do to strike a better balance here?