Junior Engineer Career Development Videos, Forum, and Q&A

I graduated with a master's in CS 1.5 years ago and since then I have been working at a no-name brand company as a full-stack engineer. I would love to join Spotify but I lack prestigious grades and side projects. The tech stack I work in is somewhat old (Angular 2, .NET, no cloud, in-house solution for CI/CD, etc). The company is nevertheless alright and my colleagues are all very friendly, including my boss and manager.

If I would want to join Spotify, should I double down at my current job and try to get those side projects started, or should I consider another position in-between my current position and Spotify in order to increase my chances to join Spotify? The reason why I’m not a big fan of this idea is that I don’t like to join a company with the intent to leave within 1-2 years. The reason why I'm considering changing company is because I worry that my current growth could potentially be a lot higher than what it currently is.

Will my lack of experience in newer frameworks/tools be a large disadvantage to me when I’m looking for a junior/midlevel role at a tech company where being efficient in languages/tools is a must? Is it better to stay since I can make more of an impact now since I’m familiar with my company’s tech stack compared to having to go through an onboarding process at a new company which may result in decreased impact for that period? I would prefer to join big tech in 1 year as a junior engineer, rather than in 10 years as a mid-level engineer.

I have been working at Meta for around 5 months now. I’m not very excited about the product and the tech stack (its an internal tool). I have an offer from AWS where I get to work on a T1 GenAI service. I have always wanted to be an ML Engineer and my past work has also revolved around it. I know its not ideal to switch teams until I get promoted to E4 given the tight deadline we have so I’m not sure how long it takes before I switch to a team I would prefer. Also I’m not sure how the growth would look like for an internal tool team. Should I make the move to AWS given that it would be a better career start in ML? Or should I hang in, get promoted and switch? Meta is also aggressively doing performance reviews and I’m worried being new to the tech stack and lesser interest will bite me in the back and I might have nowhere to go.

I’m early in career so TC is not a huge concern, I want to optimize for learning and eventually working towards being an MLE.

So I wanted to ask the opinions of hiring managers or anyone who had to hire someone for a technical role.

Could you possibly talk about some of the characteristics of candidates that made not want to move forward with interviewing/hiring them? And if possible, could you also talk about if you'd hire Junior Engineers and if not, why not?

I am a back end engineer that works with Java. What steps could I take to make a switch to a job that works with hardware and software? I have some small side projects to learn more firmware related skills but I'm not sure how I could make something that could help me switch career fields.

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?

I feel like engineers on my team are all just doing their own thing. I work on the front-end, and when I go into front-end meetings, it seems like nobody has an opinion on how we can improve.

I like working with the people here: Everyone is nice and the overall work/life balance and vibe are relaxed as a result, but nobody is pushing me to get better and I'm not even sure what better looks like. It seems like my manager is fairly removed from the code at this point, so they don't have concrete feedback for me.

I get some meaningful feedback in code review, but not a lot. A lot of the comments are more surface level.

Given all this, what can I do to grow more?

Sometimes I find people with a backround similar to mine who have gone to places I would love to go. Naturally, I would love to learn from them as they have done what I wish I could do. Their time is of course quite valuable and I understand that it might be naive to think that they would want to talk to a random person whose incentive might be mostly for career growth. Is there any way I could approach this in a genuine way? Or should I try to avoid connecting with people because of this reason?

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?

I'm going to be joining Amazon soon and the team I'm on is going from 4/5 people a month ago to I believe 9/10 people (counting me). Our team is going to be comprised of SDE 2's and 1's (I'm an SDE 1).

I'm wondering what's the best way to have the best onboarding experience during this time.

While it will be nice that I will have a decent amount of people who will be in the same boat as me in terms of onboarding, I'm also worried that my manager and more senior teammates won't have as much time for things like 1 on 1s, answering questions, helping me onboard, etc. if they're also helping other people on our team in addition to their own work.

Not a manager here but I strongly feel like understanding my manager's perspective is essential for me to successfully navigate my tech career.

I understand that if a software engineer wants to become promoted, they need to complete projects with increasing scope involving increased technical depth, ambiguity, impact, etc in addition to many other things.

How is this scope defined for engineering managers? Does it work the same way where engineering managers are rewarded for leading a team that develops highly ambitious products in terms of users, features, etc? Does the number of engineers on the team matter? If so, how does an organization prevent empire building from happening?

We are working on a technical product solution which provides APIs in a B2B fashion. We do not have any interface apart from these APIs. There are some internal tools which replicate this functionality (web dashboard) for us to view the data and some smaller B2B Companies to use, but is outside the scope of our Product / Team as it's just parity that is maintained.

Our PM is not a technical person and sometimes it gets very hard to explain the reasons why something cannot be done. Or their suggestions completely miss the point / question I was asking.

They view it from a visual perspective and suggest things that require a lot of back and forth to explain why it isn't feasible.

I've tried in the beginning to help them get setup with basic Postman collections of our API to see the flow. Our EM is also doing their best to prioritise tech vs product.

I feel some of this is reactive and not proactively helping as I feel a bit frustrated to what seem quite obvious which isn't helpful at all.

What do you suggest one can do to better improve communication or even how to view things from their perspective.

The one con is as a PM their calendar is always full

During my first 1 on 1 with a manager, I asked him if he could help me find a mentor and he said he would find one within our overall organization. He also said he could find me a manager within overall Amazon if I want. This would for overall mentorship in Amazon vs being limited to the scope of just my organization.

What are some advantages/disadvantages of having 2+ mentors? Also are there any qualities I should be(or probably more likely asking him to be) on the lookout for those 2 mentors?

Is there a link to slack? I can't find it anywhere.

My starter project was to migrate a web service to a new API which offers similar functionality. This was intended to be a pretty straightforward migration, mostly renaming + replacing some strings. However, this project took much longer than my manager or I anticipated. How could I have predicted and prevented this?

My goal is to join a team that would allow me to have the opportunities to work on projects that have the potential to produce higher business impact & learning opportunities to grow and reach promotion in the shortest possible time. Early in my career, I don't think I would mind working longer hours or being stressed as long as it is for good reason (such as the opportunity to be promoted) and within my capacity to handle it and also as long as it is not something that is long-term and chronic stress forever.

This is why I want to understand more about oncall. I know that oncall can be very stressful, and this applies to Atlassian too. Can being oncall be good for learning, even for a junior SWE, or does it always just give you chronic stress for no good reason?

Background : I recently started my first job as a new-grad at a Big-tech company (3-months in). I was assigned a project to work on led by a senior engineer but ended up working on it independently as he was busy with another feature ramp-up, so I ended up taking all the responsibility.

Question : I've completed the design and currently a couple of months into the implementation, so there are many things that were done well so far. There are a few areas I can improve in however, and would like some thoughts there :

• The project is still in its early stages so there aren't many features. But I'd still like to keep stakeholders updated and get them excited to gain some visibility into whats being built.
• I obsess about the quality of the work / code being written that sometimes it reaches a point of decision paralysis, where I'm afraid to take action / build in new features. A lot of the uncertainty arises due to concerns about my lack of experience (which I sometimes fear could lead to sub-optimal work)
• Since I'm working on this project totally on my own, I feel things can get a little siloed (ie : I'm the only person writing code and working on this project and have just 1 person reviewing my code).

Any thoughts on how I can address some of these issues ? :)

As a junior engineer, I ask questions and ask for help a lot in general. However, I want to make sure I'm not annoying my teammates and being too big a burden. How can I do that? Is there something I can do to return the favor for those who helped me?

Hello Everyone,

I need some clarification about where to take my career.

My background: I have a bachelor's (Information Technology) and a master's degree (IT management with a dissertation using machine learning). I performed poorly during my bachelor's; to rectify that, I worked hard during my master's and was placed first.

After university, I did gig work for a while and worked part-time at a startup where I was a solo developer (using Django and Flutter).

After 2.5 years, I realised that my career was going nowhere, so I finished the project, quit (on good terms), and got a job as a Junior Full Stack engineer at a small company. I was fired after three months due to low code quality and asking too many questions, so I am unemployed now.

My Conundrum: I need to figure out where to take my career as the market is quite bad. I have heard various opinions from friends and family, making me indecisive. The views that I have heard are as follows:

• Focus on backend-only roles using Python and contribute to open source.
• Focus on Analyst roles instead, such as Data or Business Analyst (Based on my skills from my master's)
• Learn React Native and get rid of Flutter.
• Learn something else instead of Python, such as .Net or C#. I did Java during my bachelor's, so I think I should be able to pick it up relatively quickly.

I should pick one of these and focus on it, but I am having difficulty selecting which.

Which area should I focus on? What would you do if you were in my position?

Any guidance would be highly appreciated. Thank you!

My technical lead is excellent but not the best communicator, and by that I mean I don't understand what they are saying 50% of the time. I intend this in the most respectful way when I say that I don't understand the punctuation behind their comments and chats. I ask them about X and before I've even finished they shoot out with a response on Y. I don't think they have ever been able to explain anything clearly to me. It's getting to the point where my manager sees me as incompetent (I think) even though it's clearly a lack on their part.

I'm an L3 and they are a critical L5 so the team will never stand up for me but given this economy, I'm starting to get a bit concerned about my career. The difference between their language and others on adjacent teams is like night and day and I'm not sure how to bring this up with my manager without sounding prejudiced.

What should I do to help myself and navigate this situation?

I'm positioning myself to go through the process of transitioning to a SWE position, and I've been told that junior developers would be given tasks that are small in scope, well-defined, and with low ambiguity.

That said, I would love to know if there are concrete examples of such tasks. For instance, would updating a Makefile before an internal release be within such a scope? Other examples would be helpful in order to get a better understanding. I assume that it would likely be different from company to company as well. Thank you for your time!

I recently joined a Big Tech company. My assigned mentor is helpful when I have questions, and is also friendly.

However, apart from asking questions when I get stuck, I'm not sure how to best use their time so I can onboard and grow effectively. Does anyone have some suggestions and insight on this?

I've considered asking them to explain how some parts of the codebase work when I have issues, but it feels like unless I work on those parts of the codebase, I will forget what I learn. The domain and codebase is large so this feels low-ROI, especially since I am not working on some of these pieces.

I'm currently working as an SRE (Site Reliability Engineer). I was, and am still interested in being a Software Engineer.

I am interested in switching in the future to a normal software engineering role, but want to make the most of my current situation since I recently joined the company (late-stage startup).

What do you think would be some good skills, exposure, things I could learn as an SRE that would be useful to a Software Engineer?

I work at a small company with only 10 engineers. Since it’s so small, there’s no real feedback culture - We don't have a formal performance review system.

Everything I’m hearing is always positive - Everyone just tells me I’m always surpassing expectations and doing well. However, I know that there's a lot I can improve as I'm an earlier-in-career engineer. I want real feedback so I can get better and understanding the path from junior -> mid-level -> senior: What can I do to start getting this feedback?

For some context, I am a L1 with 1 yoe with experience in DevSecOps and was recently transitioned to an ML Ops role on a AI team where they have no CI-CD pipeline infrastructure and I am tasked with setting all of that up for them by myself. My goal is to hold off asking for a promotion until I actually prove myself and achieve this feat first and it’s also my long term goal to stay on this team as an AI developer, so I don’t want to bring this up with any potential negative consequences. I’m curious to hear more opinions on this matter.