Career Advice About Google

Hi everyone,

I just recently accepted an offer at Google as an L3. The thing is I have 4.5 years of experience full time and have done a number of internships (that I'm not counting in the 4.5). I didn't do super great in the coding rounds and couldn't get cleared for L4 but managed to get approved at L3. The coding rounds (specifically, algorithm optimization) was the specific reason they gave for the down level.

I firmly do believe I'm of L3 level, my manager did as well. I'm not great at leetcode so that part was off but my performance was very good at my previous company and I hope to get promoted to L4 as quickly as possible.

Anyone have advice specific to someone that was down leveled? I see a lot of discussion on a promotion from L3 to L4 in general which I've been reading a lot on. But I was curious about the down leveled case specifically

Also another thing to note - I'm about halfway through the L3 to L4 course and I'd say my skills line up virtually entirely with what Alex is describing as L4 (I used to do a lot of the L3 stuff but have improved). Is this just a matter of coming in and making sure I perform as highly as I can to speed up the process?

My first team didn't work out for me. I was there for less than a year and got the poorest rating, was set up for a PIP. Somehow I made a transfer at the last moment and survived. Certainly, it was the most difficult phase of my life & I am quite grateful to my new team. Now, I'm already in the new team for less than a year and got an average rating last time. The rating was partially influenced by previous manager as I spent almost half of my time there.

Currently working on multiple projects at the same time and grabbing almost whatever task is offered and somewhat gained trust I believe. But the quality of those tasks are not too much complex rather modular & takes more time. I can keep on doing this way but not sure what is the right thing to do. The team is relatively new. Recently started a promo discussion humbly and not pushing it. Manager's review is I'm operating at L3.6 now.

Now,

• What might be the mental model to forget the past?
• Sticking around for almost two years now, what might be the correct time & way to reach Next Level?

First of all, thank you guys for making these wonderful courses on Taro. The courses on Onboarding, Internships, Code Quality, and Promotions really helped me shine in my internship.

After my internship, my manager gave me "Strong Hire"; however, I was scared that headcount will be an issue so I applied to some other internships from different companies as "backup" (I planned to graduate an year later if I didn't get the return offer).

Luckily, I received a full-time return offer from Amazon. Now, I am in the interview loop for Google Internship. I am wondering what I should do:

1. Tell my Google Recruiter that I got an Amazon offer and don't waste their time.
2. Do the Google interview, and if I get the offer, go to Google for an internship before joining Amazon full time
3. Do the Google interview, and if I get the offer, reject the offer.

Additional context:

• My team at Amazon is amazing. I love working with software architecture, and the hours are really good. However, promotions are on the slower end. It seems like people from my team are getting promoted in 2.5-3 years.
• The location of Amazon will be in Vancouver (where I grew up - I don't need to pay rent), the location of Google is either Toronto or Montreal (where I will need to pay rent)

I just got promoted to senior engineer level (E5) at Google and I just switched into an infra team 2 months ago. In order to succeed as a senior engineer, I know I need to mentor and influence other engineers, specifically helping newer and more junior folks on the team.

How can I do that quickly, acknowledging that I’m not their direct manager?

I've been a Data Engineer for most of my career and my observation is that scope as a Data Engineer can plateau and therefore I see a lot more L4/5 DE's than L6+. I think it is because you don't impact the bottom line directly and regularly.

At FAANG's I've worked at so far, finding new scope can be difficult even when you are working with stakeholders: it is "easier" to scope/build a product (i.e. SWE work) and show metrics of success to add value vs building a data pipeline which may be limited to them having a reporting need for example which often isn't the case especially in a more established firm.

I moved into a partner facing DE role to help more with scope/stakeholder exposure. The highest impact project I worked on so far is influencing an internal team to change the way we measure a particular metric. This involved mostly stakeholder management and nothing more complex than SQL queries from a technical standpoint. While it was fulfilling, this is also something I 'stumbled' upon and is rare due to challenges like partner scope/vision is limited/slow (their leadership can change and therefore you projects/ideas can), technical challenges of automating things because of larger concerns (e.g. privacy, lack of infra on their side which you have no control over) and so on (you generally have even less control than an internal DE).

In my current role, I am generally able to derive projects, but (in my opinion) they are limited in scope/value: i.e. build a pipeline, deliver an analysis. Therefore, even though the projects 'ticks the boxes' for an L5, it is not really driving a 'transformation' as an L6+ would. I also directly asked my manager what are some of the hardest problems we have, and have been told we have a lot, yet, I'm not hearing or seeing them.

Given the situation, would you:

1. Move to a SWE role internally at FAANG for a more established path 'up' (not sure this resolves the scope problem especially at FAANG as I think SWE-DE's can almost be even harder to get to L6+ on because they generally lack stakeholder visibility and focus on more top down work?).
2. Seek roles outside of FAANG where the scope of the work is already scoped to L6+ e.g. Airbnb so the 'heavy lifting' has been done in terms of scope.
3. Refine your scoping strategy within you own team, and if so, how?

Note: my motivation is to thrive at work, this isn't for a promo, just incase the post comes across as promo-focused. :)

Hi folks, I have roughly 2 weeks to prepare, I wanted to know thoughts on what should be my plan to give it my best shot?

Main Problem that I am facing right now is implementing a solution correctly.

What would you recommend if you run into a problem where you do lay out a high-level implementation and approach, but once you're in the code writing phase, you either come up with new edge cases or possibilities and then end up second-guessing yourself and going down a rabbit hole? The same question can also be extended to mistakes. Given how competitive the market still is for software engineers, it feels like the margin for error is lower than ever. Before, you could be more collaborative with the interviewer, but nowadays, it feels more of a lone-wolf activity, and sometimes even adversarial based on the general pressure to find that unicorn engineer.

This was a question I wanted to ask Edbert, but I had an obligation that took me away from his talk.

I'm thinking there are a few options:

1. Get a role on an AI project/team (internal transfer), learn AI specific engineering expertise on the job (not research)
2. Do part-time masters, land a role in AI research
3. Self-learn, land a role in AI research

I'm currently working on one of my KR tasks, and have pockets of time available as the project involves cross-time zone communication at this stage. My manager wants me to focus on another KR that I have been planned for in Q4. This project is an important part of my manager's project that he started when he was a TL.

My skip manager wants me to focus on a non-KR task of increasing the scope of our team in a different project. If I manage to increase the scope of this project, I can change my KR to this new task in Q4 and lead the whole project is his rationale. I'm confused in this situation as to what to do?

What are the common failure modes you’ve seen for new engineers at Big Tech cos, where they had to quickly exit the company due to bad performance?

Hello, I am a recent graduate with a background in Software Engineering and Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning. I have Amazon’s final virtual interviews, consisting of four rounds, in 10 days, and Google’s final virtual interviews, also comprising four rounds, scheduled for early November. Although I passed the online assessments for both companies, I am not at all confident in my upcoming interviews. I have realized that my Data Structures and Algorithms (DSA) skills, as well as my proficiency in Leetcode, are quite very rusty. There have been times when I struggled to solve many of the Leetcode problems.

I am currently using Neetcode to practice DSA and advanced algorithms, but I am feeling demotivated about tackling these coding problems and breaking into MAANG, despite having secured interview opportunities. I would greatly appreciate any advice on how I should approach my preparation if I were to start over from a beginner's perspective.

For Amazon’s interview, I have been following a 1-to-0 approach rather than a 0-to-1 strategy—focusing on reviewing solutions, understanding problems, and recognizing patterns using Neetcode and Grokking the Coding Interview, rather than actively solving the questions. With only 10 days remaining, how can I enhance my performance under pressure and prevent freezing during Amazon's coding interviews? Additionally, how can I sustain this momentum for Google’s interview preparation?

Thank you for your time and guidance.

My team is a fairly distributed team, so I've setup monthly 1-on-1s with everyone to help build up relationships.

For 1-on-1s like this, what strategies do you use to build strong relationships quickly?

Most resources on 1-on-1s focus on ones with your manager. But I feel like there's a difference here.

List of companies besides Google that you’ve heard respond well to accommodation requests for testing anxiety / neurodivergents / ADHD ? (e.g. more time for live coding interview, flexible with breaks, headsup on question 1 hour prior to interview, etc.)

(Updated with list of companies with good and bad reputation for accommodations)

Good

• Google
• 1Password
• CleoAI

Bad Needs improvement

I’ve only worked at startups and non-tech companies, but I’m joining Google next month. How can I make sure that I meet all expectations as an L4? When it comes to talking to my manager, how should I frame the conversation?

• Just ask something generic like “What are my expectations as an L4?”
• Ask for more specifics like how much code to write

I am actively interviewing for companies and passed hiring committee for Google but there are barely any headcount. I have received some good competing offers and I told my recruiter I have some deadlines coming up. That has not sped up the process and my recruiter isn’t especially communicative after I told him I wouldn’t mind expanding the product area for team match. Should I just accept a good competing offer and come back to team match while working that other job? Also, does anyone have experience finding a new recruiter at this stage? I don’t feel like mine is particularly invested in advocating for my profile despite passing hiring committee.

My manager had assigned a mentor for me on my team to help onboard me. My assigned mentor asked me about what timing works best for me and I told them I gave them full discretion around timing and cadence since my calendar was basically completely open compared to theirs. By the time we had our first 1:1, it was a 15 minute time-slot right before our daily standup. We would have these mentoring sessions ~2x a week for a few weeks before these mentoring sessions just fizzled out and stopped completely.

Now my manager is urging me to continue these mentoring sessions with the same assigned mentor citing that the reason they fizzled out was because my mentor "was not sure whether I wanted to continue the sessions and was waiting for me to set up more sessions if I was interested" even though I had expressed enjoyment of the sessions we have had thus far.

Should I be proactive here in reengaging my assigned team mentor and scheduling mentoring meetings with them? I wouldn't mind having a little more time than 15 minutes per session and in a different timeslot than right before standup, but I respect that it is tricky considering the mentor is remote and in a timezone 2 hours behind the rest of the team. I also wouldn't really know what to proactively ask them for during these sessions beyond typical work questions as part of working with them on the same team. How proactive should I be here?

I would like to interview for a staff software engineer position at google. Can someone who has been through the process shed some light on the preparation plan How much coding versus system design versus behavioral questions to expect? What is the best way to prepare for the interview.

My sub-team was 3 people (an L5 tech lead, an L4 engineer, and me), but now it’s just me since the others left. My manager is hiring other people in the coming months.

How can I best onboard the new people and set myself up to lead the team?

Hey :)

A colleague of mine suggested talking with my manager about comp. planning at the end of the next performance cycle saying something like:

"Hey now that perf has wrapped up, I know you’ll be going into comp planning. Should there be any funding that could be applied in my situation, here are my for which bucket it goes into (base salary, GSUs, bonus). "

They also said that they always have this discussion with whoever is their manager each year.

What do you think about this tip? Do you have any other suggestions?

Thanks!

I’ve recently been applying to various jobs, just in case of an unexpected layoff (golden parachute). Lately, I’ve been motivated to upskill as a developer. I’ve now reached the two-year mark at my company. After the reorg, I have a new manager, team, and director, and I really like this team. My performance over the past six months has been better than it was with my old team. Recently, Google reached out to me for an interview, but I haven’t really studied data structures and algorithms (DSA) due to work. My performance hasn’t been great, and now I also have a phone interview with Meta.

On the plus side, my company's stock has surged, and we’ve received bonuses, raises, and promotions. In my last 1-on-1 meeting with my manager, he told me I should be more independent and that my performance is great (hinting at a promotion)—fingers crossed. My family and friends are encouraging me to interview with both Meta and Google, but I don’t really want to leave my current company.

Security teams are typically infrastructure teams rather than product teams. Security teams make changes to existing products to make them more secure, which are usually trivial changes, not intellectually stimulating.

The interesting part is the planning happening before. For the first few months at Google, I did routine security fixes, which was boring but impactful. Then I found a project that allowed me to develop a more complex system for about 2 months, but that project has shipped to production and has concluded.

I am working actively with my manager to find projects that would allow me to write more complex software that will also help me grow technically. So the question is: how do I find these projects?

What I am doing now: stay up-to-date on new threats and what other security teams are doing at Google to see if I can draw some inspiration from them.

I've gotten some feedback from peers on my team that I should "manage up" more. So:

• What do you think "managing up" is?
• What are examples of things you do to "manage up"?

P.S. I have clarified this with the people I've gotten feedback from. But asking here to get the "taro perspective" since y'all tend to have great insights.