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

I am a junior engineer, and I am worried that the code velocity that I have right now, which is about 1-2 quality commits per week (By quality commits, I refer to ~100-200 lines of core code) is too slow.

I understand that not all code is the same, and code quality >> code quantity, and this job is a lot more than just coding. However, I am curious as to on average, how many quality commits would expect a junior vs senior vs staff to churn out in a week? Should one even be asking this question, is there a better way that I can frame my mentality towards this?

How do I make sure to continuously improve at a company which does not really give much feedback? We have a meeting once a year where we talk salary and the work that I've done. I have only had one meeting, but they just said they were happy with me and my work. It's a rather small company so we don't have many of the feedback loops that larger companies have (code reviews etc). Since we are a quite small company, every senior have their own view of what good code should look like and I'm not sure which one to listen to.

I'm a junior engineer working with one other person on a pretty isolated part of the codebase. I work closely with this one person, but I don't work for an extended amount of time with anyone else. I am part of a larger team, but the work we do doesn't really interact with them (for example, I don't even take part in their sprint planning, and they generally don't know anything about what we're working on, and us them.)

As a result I only had a couple of peer reviewers in the last review cycle, and my manager said I would need more peer reviews in order to be promoted. What are some things I can do to plan ahead and assemble more reviewers, given I don't naturally get enough reviewers through my core work? I am trying to review some of my team's PRs and be more active on slack in order to increase my interaction with the team, but I'm not sure that's enough to request peer reviews from others.

Question: "For being promoted from SWE I to SWE II, how do I take the behaviors my company has associated with each role (below) and make that more concrete for a growth plan, taking into account the changing & flexible timelines startups have?"

For context, I already have weekly one-on-ones with my manager (who is new at being a manager & is also my mentor), and a growth plan (that I created with him) that roughly outlines (meets most expectations, meets expectations and exceeds expectations for my role). Additionally, keep in mind I work at a startup w/ <30 people so highly specific concrete goals set on a particular date can change in 2-3 weeks as priorities change. Also, my company has defined a series of behaviors as to what each SWE level should be able to accomplish. Here it is.

Software Engineer I (<1 year - 2 years)

• Technical Skill
  • Broad knowledge of CS concepts
  • Focus on growing as an engineer, learning existing tools, resources, and processes
• Getting Stuff Done
  • Develops their productivity skills by learning source control, editors, the build system and other tools as well as testing best practices.
  • Capable of taking well-defined sub-tasks and completing these tasks
• Impact
  • Developing knowledge of a single component of our architecture
• Communication & Leadership
  • Effective in communicating status to the team
  • Exhibits company’s core values, focuses on understanding and living these values
  • Accepts feedback graciously and learns from everything they do

Software Engineer II (2-6Years+)

• Technical Skill
  • Writes correct and clean code with guidance; consistently fellows stated best practices
  • Participates in technical design of features with guidance
  • Rarely makes the same mistake twice, begins to focus on attaining expertise in one or more areas(eg. embedded , testing, algorithm, support code, commlink).
  • Learns quickly and makes steady progress without the need for constant significant feedback from more senior engineers.
• Getting Stuff Done
  • Makes steady progress on tasks; knows when to ask for help in order to get themselves unblocked.
  • Able to own small-to-medium features from technical design through completion.
  • Capable of prioritizing tasks; avoids getting caught up in unimportant details and endless “bikeshedding”.
• Impact
  • Self-sufficient in at least one large area of the codebase with a high-level understanding of other components
  • Capable of providing on-call support for their area including systems that they are not familiar with.
• Communication & Leadership
  • Gives timely, helpful feedback to peers and managers
  • Communicates assumptions and gets clarification on tasks up front to minimize the need for rework.
  • Solicits feedback from others and is eager to find ways to improve
  • Understands how their work fits into the larger project and identifies problems with requirements.

I tend to give everything my all, which is what I did back in school. I overdid it back then, so I needed a long break afterwards. I want to make sure I don't make the same mistake with my career - What can I do to prevent burnout while still achieving lots of impact and growth?

Currently, I'm on a 10 person team, but we only have 3 senior engineers and the remaining 7 are E4s (5 people) and E3s (me and one other new grad). For our upcoming half, they want E4s leading some of the projects for their development. However, I would like guidance, mentorship, and feedback from an E5 or above ideally since they are more experienced. Also, from one of the Taro videos on feedback, one of the points made was to find a way to get feedback from senior engineers at the end of the half who will bolster your PSC packet versus a mid-level engineer who might not hold as much weight (Correct me if I'm wrong)?

Anyway to navigate this the right way? Should I avoid certain projects that are led by E4s? Does this even matter?

Sometimes I sit in meetings that I feel aren't really necessary. How can I better identify whether these meetings are necessary and propose a better asynchronous form of communication (slack post, quip doc, etc) if they aren't?

Some of these meetings include status update meetings (besides standup), and meetings where people are there just to absorb knowledge. Is it a general rule of thumb to have meetings primarily to get alignment on decisions? Are there cases where we can get alignment asynchronously as well via commenting on a slack post/quip doc, etc.

In the last month I had 5 companies I interviewed for. I made it to on-site for 2 companies and got rejected after first round for 3 interviews and i'm feeling so lost on how to get better or what I'm doing wrong

1. a series A YC startup: they ghosted me after a first round which was a HM convo about my past experience. Didn't even send an email even after follow up

2. Wayfair associate level role (asking for 1-2 YoE): passed OA. idk what happened i thought it went well but I got rejected after first round. It was a "case interview" for data science. Dont want to leak the exam on public forum but it was something along the lines of they said u have X data, what would you use it for? How to train a model on it? and a lot of follow up questions.

   I took a mock interview for a system design from and got passed at the mid level so im not sure why i got rejected here.

3. a series B startup: passed OA/takehome. failed on site - 4x rounds (SQL, pandas, coding/pair programming, ML theory) I thought I did fine on everything except the SQL which honestly is not my storng suit. I did ok ok on it. I kinda fumbled on 1 question out of 6 questions of the ML theory round where they asked me a stats question (find sample size needed for calculating significance of an A/B test). But I think I did well on the pandas round and the rest of ML and coding/pair programming.

4. a really really fancy AI startup hiring ML Scientist: I did a 4 hr take home which I passed and then a 5 hour onsite no DSA but really delving into ML research skills and system design and coding. I was totally unqualified for this (they wanted strong research/math skills) so im not surprised here

5. Series B startup: Passed OA and I got rejected after the first interview the moment the HM realized I had 6 mos of experience he ended the interview right there

Didnt also make it past the phone screen for 2 companies. I presume they were looking for someone more senior based on the JD

If you have a new manager joining to manage your team, how can you ramp them up quickly on all the work you have done before them, the impact you have generated, your role in the team.

Also how to make sure you clear grasp of said fundamentals. I just say this cause it's never really keeping with all the latest technologies it's all about understanding said fundamentals. Also is there some learning path to follow I feel as if I never felt like I'm learning and to be a successful junior I need to find the best way to learn for me.

I'm a Data Scientist looking to switch company and move to a role closer to ML/LLMs. My plan is to build a side project fine-tuning LLMs to familiarize myself with this field and leverage that experience on my resume. I was wondering if anyone here has experience building similar projects or went through a similar learning process - it would be very helpful to get some insights on skill acquisition and finding a job in this area. Here're some examples of what advice I'm looking for, but please feel free to share other aspects as well - anything will be greatly appreciated:

1. What are some good resources to learn about building LLMs? (currently mostly learning from HF, reddit, and googling)
2. What's the best tech stack to build personal fine-tuned LLM projects? (I'm planning to use Runpod or similar services like Vast for training and inference, but was wondering if there's other better options)
3. I'm looking to get into an early stage company in this field. What kind of project should I build to maximize my chance at getting into such companies? My plan rn is to fine tune a model using literature works (novels, poems, proses, etc.) since training data is relatively abundant and it's aligned with my interests. Are there more impactful use cases (for job hunting) out there?
4. What are some things I should keep in mind when producing deliverables to better showcase my technical and learning abilities? I'm planning to make a series of blog/social media posts documenting my experience building this project. Is there anything in specific that would draw companies' attention?

Thanks in advance and please feel free to share your thoughts!

I m hearing a lot of podcast regarding coding will be dead and we have no need for programmers and all these kind of stuff. So, my question is why to do it then? Why do LeetCode and why to do other stuff for entry level software engineering jobs?

What’s the future?

I am a junior engineer at a series A startup. I was interning for the past 8 months and got converted full time, now working as full time junior engineer for the past 3 months. I had been getting "Exceeds Expectation" from my tech lead/manager.

But from the past 3 1:1s from the tech lead. He mentioned that

1. My code is not up to the mark to directly merge without taking a much deeper look into. Basically mentioning that my code is not levelling as a senior engineer. There are no senior engineers in my team, I directly report to tech lead. So I really cannot learn how to write better code as he mentioned. Where can I learn this?

2. I have been just crunching tasks or helping someone without understanding the root cause. He mentioned I lack "Product Thinking". I am really not sure what he means by this. I thought helping others would help me grow in my career. By helping others I mean if there is a small task that is required by some other team, I just go and do it without understanding entirely what they want.

3. The founders keep mentioning that there is a lot of growth potential in our company

I really work hard every day from 8 AM and late 11 till night but the work I do is not helping me to grow and I want to grow and become a senior engineer. There are not even tests in our codebase, and a lot of problems I see in the way we do things which I don't know I can help solve . How can i grow? how can I tell them that I can be that senior engineer to solve the problems? How can I learn to make good decisions as to what needs to be prioritised in terms of which task needs to be done? If I don't know let's say how to write tests, how can I learn that and cultivate that in the team?

Hello, I am a software engineer at a hardware startup company in the South Bay Area and live in San Francisco.

I make $124K/year and have been at the company for little more than a year (I joined out of college in mid-late 2022). Work-life balance at the company is pretty great (40 hours/week), the company does make exceptions for working remote from other locations from time-to-time (i.e. when you’re traveling) and is generous with PTO (this may change in 2024 as new processes have been put in place). The company raised quite a bit of money in 2021 and receives funds from government research grants so they’re in a good financial position and are even looking to hire a bit in 2024. The company culture is positive, the software team as a whole gets along quite well and I genuinely like my manager; there’s very little office politics. The company also encourages its engineers to learn.

Admittedly though, strong mentorship is lacking; something that I think I’d be highly receptive to given that I deeply cherish and frequently act upon feedback.

As for the company's future, I think the company has established a solid technology moat and might do well (maybe unicorn?). But I don’t think the company will explode into wealth anytime soon (5+ years to get there) and the equity payoff is OK (I might make an additional $280K/yr if the company 20x in valuation to be a unicorn).

The reason I am seriously considering resigning is the commute. The company has a hybrid model (3 days in-office, 2 days remote) so it’s about 1hr 30 min one-way, (3hr roundtrip) 3 days a week and it’s really getting to me.

To commute, I walk 30 min (or 20 min by bus) and then drive for an hour, sometimes in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the 101-South to 280-South. Then I repeat this going back, one hour drive, and a 30 min walk (or 20 min by bus). In multiple ways, this is costing me.

Financially-speaking, I’m paying $545/month ($250 parking and $300 for gas, that’s $12,500 gross, meaning pre-tax), so effectively I make $111,500/year. I could maybe pay more for parking ($350-$500) and skip the 30 min walk, then I’d be making even less.

While I could live near Caltrain in SF, even taking Caltrain would involve taking a bus and then a 8 min walk (still roughly 1 hr 30 min one-way). Additionally, I really enjoy where I live in the city and would strongly oppose any move (as a last, last resort only).

Time-wise, I strongly feel that it’s a waste of my time to sit in traffic! I often put on podcasts + songs to distract myself from staring at the bumpers of vehicles in front of me. Getting back 9 hours of my time per week (effectively a whole day) would be incredibly beneficial. This is time and energy that I want to put towards things that are deeply, deeply important to me, one of which being health (gym, yoga, movement in general).

Health is a really important pillar for me and so having reduced time & energy to go to the gym strikes me as a major red flag for this job. I value my health far, far over compensation and career growth.

Energy-wise, on the days that I commute, I feel incredibly low energy after work. I typically come home, eat junk food, watch some on Youtube and sleep late. It's not the person that I am when I’m not commuting.

While I recognize that the market may not be so great, I am considering quitting my job in the beginning of next year and diverting my efforts to looking for a new job within the city, either startup or Big Tech (generally a company where the profit center is technology) and something with a much shorter commute (a bus or walk to somewhere in the city is perfectly fine). Alternatively, a remote job w/ healthy culture would also be OK.

I also have 6+ months of savings and am not at a risk of being deported (a U.S. citizen).

Additionally, I have multiple friends who live & work in SF, others who commute 1/week to South Bay and even some who work entirely remote. Some also work at SF startups that are actually looking for engineers right now!

So in my head, it’s quite hard to justify driving each day, paying all this money, spending all this time & energy to work at a company so far away for equivalent, or many times, less money than I would be making here in the city or even working remote.

Would greatly appreciate any thoughts y'all have! Any and all feedback is welcome :)

I would like some info on how hiring decisions are made. I understand DSA and System Design are important but HMs know these aren't good predictors of performance so I see a disconnect there.

I'd like to understand what goes through the mind of the HM and/or committee before a decision is made.

I know it's a broad and complicated question that has different answers depending on the company, but any info is helpful.

I'm trying to better understand how to select a company that has good growth opportunties.

My priority is to get into a company where I can grow the fastest in my career. Unfortunately, at this time getting into big tech/prestigious companies is not an option for me and I am choosing between typical tech companies

I have already watched the

My questions are as follows:

1. In the video, it's mentioned "Growth solved all problems". It's not really clear to me why? Obviously if a company is moving backwards, then I understand, but between a company that ships products every 6 months vs every 1-1.5 years why exactly is 1 company better than the other in terms of how it impacts my growth opportunity
2. How do I know if a company has good growth opportunities?

In the video in , Alex mentioned that we should focus on the stack we're the most experienced in and pick a lane.

However, in my case, I only have ML experience and do not have specific stack that I am working on, even though I am fluent in .NET

Should I put my projects upfront instead of work experience?

I recently had an interview with a small health care and wellness firm: ~500 employees founded in 2008. The potential pay increase would be significant for me (25-30%; 42% factoring in their annual profit sharing bonus - not guaranteed) and its definitely a promotion for me as its a Sr. Engineer role however I’m torn on whether that justifies leaving my current job. 

My current company isn’t that competitive with pay and many times I’m restricted as to what I can or can’t do outside of work to make additional money because of potential conflicts of interests for them. I also am a bit tired of having to disclose every financial transaction and personal financial data to them. It’s very frustrating. I do have stability with my company and I enjoy the variety of experience from projects and tech stacks I get to work with. 

This new firm however, per Glassdoor reviews, seems to indicate that management are strictly top-down decision makers (“my way or the highway”), have a tendency to micromanage with lots of turnover in management as well. Employees, especially a few engineers, have noted how there is a poor work life balance. I’m not confident in their business yet either from what I’ve researched since their product is banned in Australia although they are supposedly in Inc. 500’s list of Fastest-Growing Companies.

Maybe I'm only focusing on the extreme negatives.  Would love if anyone could weigh in with their $0.02.

To give some context, I am a Masters student in the US, with 5 years of experience as a software engineer. I try my best to learn as much as I can about Software development, Machine Learning, System Designs and everything developers are interested in.

I read blogs, books, research papers, and news feeds from LinkedIn, Twitter and I am part of multiple discord channels of up and coming AI startups and open source communities. I am also part of GDG study groups who connect on slack that focuses on Google Cloud solutions and discussions on Taro as well. So, I basically have a lot of data sources and I am overloaded with information.

As much as I want to focus on one domain (ML in my case), I don’t want to miss out on what is happening in the industry. I am trying really hard to reduce distractions: I have setup a second brain account with Notion, which has helped me organize the informative links I receive from my data sources but I am always doing a catch up because there is only so much I can learn and remember.

I am working on a bot which can classify discord messages as random conversations or important links or conversations and push them to my notion database. I want to expand this to other data sources eventually so I can ignore comments and random conversations lying around a certain topic which are irrelevant.

I also have a lot of hobby project ideas that I have noted down like PRD documents, some very small which can be built in few week and some which will take months to build with a good architecture.

You can ask why I am trying to learn everything. My simple reason is little bit of FOMO and a fear of not knowing enough. But also, as a CS student, I am also preparing for interviews and I want to be able to explain how a certain technology works and be able to build and design using those technologies.

I have faced this information overload while I was a software engineer and continue to feel it as a student. If you have read till here and you are able to relate to this, I would like to know how you would suggest one should go about staying organized and maximizing the information gain.

Basically, I feel like I have so many unnecessary ‘DUH! I can’t believe I missed that!’ moments in public -- mainly when asking for help and creating PR's.

For example, I recently was so focused on the more difficult part of a ticket, thinking about edge cases and trying to really polish this bit of functionality, that I spaced on reviewing the ticket before creating a PR. This meant the lead engineer reviewing my PR had to explain to me that I missed some other aspects of the ticket.

Another time, I spent a while trying to right a really good question about a solution to what I suspected was a tough issue. The problem? I hadn’t thought to test my hypothesis and confirm that this issue would occur (it didn’t) before formulating and asking my question. So I needn’t have bothered anyone else or myself about navigating this hypothetical problem.

When this happens, it makes me feel like my work isn’t thorough or to a high standard, not mention making me look bad. So it’s something I’d really like to improve, but it seems when I focus on being thorough it perpetuates the problem like in the two examples above.

I feel like I need some checklists/processes as guardrails for common scenarios (e.g., creating PR’s, asking for help) I can fall back on, because otherwise I feel my brain will keep missing things and making easily preventable mistakes.

One thing I have noticed about competent engineers is that they have a very strong understanding of upstream and downstream dependencies in terms of what are the typical parameters being passed into our API's and what we return and what are the things we pass into our dependencies API's and what they return,

How can I learn the context behind what data is typically being passed quickly? I understand that one of the best ways to learn is to start tinkering, and call the API's myself and see what they return. I was wondering if there is any faster way because surely a staff/principal/TL doesn't have the time to tinker with all of the different dependency services and understand what they take in and return. Is it just a matter of reading documentation and asking around?

Hi, I recently joined Meta and this is my first job out of college. I'm a bit unsure about how performance is categorized and what initial signs to look for. Is it considered a negative if it takes longer to onboard? What is the normal period of onboarding? Is it normal to have a mentor assigned for an extended period if onboarding is slower, or does this reflect poorly? What should I keep in mind and avoid to get an MA (Meets All) or EE (Exceeds Expectation) rating?

Also, how can I avoid receiving a BE (Below Expectation) rating as an E3? The stack ranking is confusing and I don’t understand the baseline expectations.

I'm a little over two months in at this large (10k+ employees) org, and I work remotely in internal tools to try to automate processes. My immediate development team is fairly small and mostly junior. Most of us onboarded right before the 2023 holidays when things were winding down.

I am trying hard to fit in here and balance, but I am struggling. Our group chats are pretty dead, and it doesn't seem like group-questions are rewarded. We have daily standups, but a lot of work here seems to be conducted "behind-the-scenes" and in 1:1 conversations. I've gotten a bit of a vibe check on this scenario from folks who don't work in tech, and that seems to be normal for those environments. Things feel like they take an age.

For some reference: I get that everyone is different, but also sense a direct correlation between curiosity (to get questions answered and work done) and our team velocity. Maybe it's not something I should be worried about nor even my business, but I still am. I'm still working on disambiguating how performance reviews work, but in the meantime, it seems like we will be judged on velocity metrics, probably sometime in Q3/Q4.

I come from a space where questions were welcomed / encouraged. It doesn't feel that way here, which I feel like I need to adapt to healthily for the near future. A conversation starter model I've found helpful from a managerial relationship is "I've noticed a different communication style here. Is there any way we can discuss?"

Any additional suggestions for coping at this stage would be enormously helpful. I also definitely want to be mindful of being careful what I wish for and the impacts of "going fast" on junior devs, especially because there's a bit of trauma for me there on that side.

I've looked at the leadership principles. But it's a bit overwhelming the number of questions that can be asked. I dont want to be caught like a deer in headlights when I'm asked a question. But it also doesnt seem practical to prepare every question.

I'd love to know people's preparation strategy. Are you preparing 5-10 stories and then tagging them to different principles? if so what kinds of stories should I be preparing? i.e. what are the broad topics of each story?

Or Maybe are you preparing 1 different story for each leadership value?

Also If I'm asked "Who was your most difficult customer?" how would I answer this if I'm just a junior and have never dealt with customers first hand? or similar where I'm just like i've never been in this situation