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

I've gotten rejected from companies (unicorns, F500s) (in this rough market) because I didn't have experience with their specific tech stack.

I know because one company gave feedback saying that I didn't have experience with a framework that the team uses (though I had experience with adjacent but not similar stuff) and also I was able to get someone to put in a referral, but that person responded back saying HM wanted someone who had experience with the team's language

I'm curious if this is the norm? I've always heard that all that companies want is business impact. They have in-house/custom tooling so it doesnt matter what you used before

Should I also be building projects in other languages just for the sake of showing experience? I'd rather just put in more time at my job and have more impact at work

Because unless a project has sufficient depth which takes months of time, it has little value and time spent at work is 100x ROI compared to a side project

Hi Taro. I am starting a small SWE mentorship program for Palestinians living in the West Bank or East Jerusalem. I can take on 3 - 5 mentees. I can help with technical mentorship, university applications, job applications and, preparing for interviews. I can pay for Taro premium, Leetcode premium, Udemy, TOEFL exam fees and university application fees. My knowledge of immigration is very limited, so I cannot help with this.

I cannot read or write in Arabic so I can only take on mentees that are fluent in English. To help me adapt to the cultural and religious differences, I would like to have some Christian mentees in my cohort. I was thinking 50/50 is a good split.

I know this is a very poor time to start a mentorship program, but I prefer to start now rather than wait. If you know anyone, please send them my way. Just comment on this post.

I feel a little strange posting this anonymously, but I have always liked to keep my race and religion private in professional settings. Here is a little bit about me. I worked in Big Tech for 2 years before I got laid off. I work at a startup now. I did several internships, worked in a research lab and published a few papers. I was planning to do a PhD and I went through the application process but I did not attend.

This is my first time doing mentorship, so any advice is appreciated.

I am a recent graduate who just started a new position at a small startup. Along my short journey thus far, I have connected with a few people outside my company whom I have asked for career advice and whom I think could be great mentors for me. However, I would like to formalize, or start formalizing, our premature (I have only spoken to them 1-2 times in total) relationship which currently consists solely of advice-seeking to a mentor/mentee relationship. What is the best way to approach this? It feels inappropriate and unprofessional to ask them to "be my mentor please!" Any advice is appreciated. I expect the answer here to depend on whether the mentor figure is outside or inside one's company since if they are outside (as in my case) it is much less of an expectation for them to give me their time free of charge.

I'm looking to get promoted to E4 in the next cycle, but I'm worried as my impact contribution isn't very clear. I've done a lot of work, but due to churn within my org (which includes a recent re-org), a good amount of my code isn't truly in production yet. I've documented my work in Quips and tasks to show that I did it, but I'm wondering if a lack of shipped impact will hold back my PSC.

I recently gave my first presentation ever and I was so confident about how to do it but when I saw so many people looking at my screen for the first time and going through my work with a fine-tooth comb I just froze and didn't know what to do. I've been on the team for a year and 6 months but never had to present before because I'm so used to coding heads-down.

Lots of "ums" and "buts" and a few awkward pauses and I just wanted to crawl under a table and hide. I feel so defeated because everyone will judge me and my calibre and hold it against me as an L3 who doesn't know what he's talking about. I could feel 50 eyes looking directly into my soul.

How do I recover from this? Are my chances at promo delayed? Did you experience this early in your career?

This may be more of a vent than a question so apologies in advance.

I recently had an online assessment with a company that I was excited to interview for. The assessment was comprised of 7 SQL questions each with varying amounts of time to complete them. The questions were more than fair however I completely choked and only passed 1 of 7.

I know the obvious answer is more practice but I'm really frustrated that the penalty is really high if you can't recall the information you need at that exact moment or can't figure out the approach you need right then and there to resolve it before the allotted time. I feel like companies never consider that a candidate might very well have the body of knowledge they're looking for but just couldn't recall what was needed at that exact moment. In other words we're reduced down to a simple "pass/fail". I understand that companies have to use these tools to a certain extent in order to filter out and reduce the candidate pool size but I believe it's such a poor filter and terrible way to determine if someone has the right level they're looking for.

My question is then, how do you over come this? I practice leetcode when I can and read up on concepts that I struggle with but I feel like it's just not enough to break through this hurdle. There's only so much time in the day and my energy is usually sapped after work.

Now that PSC for the first half at Meta is nearing an end, do you think it makes sense to ask my manager for a raise in our next 1:1?

Or, given that Meta is a big tech company, are raises purely based on rating?

Hi all. I am in a 6 month contract role at Meta. I have been there about a month. I am definitely not relying on converting to FTE or even my contract getting extended, but it's worth a shot to try. I am WFH right now, but I am planning to move to MPK for a few months. I amdoing that to increase chances to convert and also to change environment.

I am confused about how and when I should reach out to HMs inside Meta.

Any other advice is appreciated :).

Thanks

I'm an L3 software engineer that been working for a bit over 1 year. During this time, I've had three managers and am about to get a fourth that will be hired externally.

I did not have great experiences with my past two managers. The team was also a bit of mess during that time (we would have oncall rotations that would average ~100-200 pages/week, 60+ page hours). I have a strong working relationship with my current manager and the team situation is better.

We had discussed putting me up for promotion this past July, but that didn't materialize due to concerns about time at level and shipped impact. I was a bit disappointed but understood. However, I did receive Exceeds ratings and was been told that I am performing above my level.

The current plan is to put up my promotion packet in the next cycle. I was operating under the expectation that, barring unforeseen circumstances, this should go through.

Additionally, the company has been planning to hire an external manager that would report to my current manager for the past ~3-4 months. I expect that this position will be filled by end of year. I expressed concern about context loss for the January promotion packet, but my manager assured me that he would ensure the packet put up was strong and all context would be written by him personally.

However, recently my manager has been hinting concerns that the packet may not go through in the next cycle and we may want to think about creating a strong packet in the cycle following.

I am concerned about my promotion not going through in January and having to rely on an external manager (who I don't know and who doesn't know company processes) to put up a packet in the next cycle. I believe I've demonstrated my ability to execute and perform at L4 level for many months at this point already, shipped some meaningful and high impact projects, and feel that I should be promoted in the next cycle.

I trust and really like my current manager, but I want to communicate these concerns in a professional way. How should I do this?

Additionally, should I also start to look externally? I'm quite confident in my Leetcode/interview skills, have a Tier-1 school on my resume, and work at a FAANG tier company currently, but I understand the market is bad. Would it be possible to get an L4 level role externally now or in the next six months?

Hi all, recently during Q1 roadmapping I chose to move on to a new workstream from a growth/independence point of view as part of working my way up to E4. (My earlier effort was a 1->100, this one is 0->1 and was decided by me, my TL and EM together), and I had a couple of questions about this move.

1. I have spent the past 6 months gaining context on a set of technologies and tools (internal to Meta) that perhaps only 2 other engineers on the team have context on.
   1. Should I do a knowledge transfer session or write up a doc to ensure all the context I have doesn't get lost?
   2. Should I allocate some time to supporting the team until I'm here on areas I gained context on?
2. There is some possibility of scope thrash since I'm also long-term supporting one of the projects part of the earlier workstream (I delivered the v0 and have been making iterative but small changes since then). Should I talk to my manager about this?
3. This is a very n00bish question: from a growth perspective, is it better to go 110% on the new workstream and all its nuances/open problems or go 80 and 20? As far as allocations go, I'm slated to be 100% on the new workstream as part of the roadmap.
4. Bonus question: should I do a year-in-review/look-back post in tandem with my self review? (This is a very Meta-specific question in a way, but would love to hear other views too!)

I want to hear the Taro community's thoughts on what's overrated/underrated.

It can be anything (IDE, language, food, headphones, chairs, keyboards, you get the idea), not just career/team stuff (Taro already has a vid on this)

I'll start:

Dark mode is overrated its too hard to read the text 😅

I recently joined a team for a project and I want to be prepared for any feedback I feel can be unfair and sometimes insulting.

Should I just document everything?
I want to be prepared to expect the worst even though I feel I'm doing fine.

Hi there, everybody. I was aiming to build a few applications to present in interviews. Last week, I was building a small-scale Spring Boot application with the help of a tutorial. The project I was working on was meant to retrieve data from a database using PostgreSQL to provide multiple choice DSA questions. I was creating an automated study buddy for technical interviews. Unfortunately, I've been trying to figure out some technical issues and database connectivity mishaps for some days, unfortunately to no avail. Currently, I'm working through a Node.Js tutorial to build an application geared to help me keep track of the things I'd like to do during my job search, so I can always stay on task. I don't know if I'm going to run into some more issues that plague me.

The thing is, I'm learning a LOT from both experiences. Now I feel I can have an educated conversation on the trade-offs of monolithic and microservice architectures... and I LOVE what I'm learning. I'd really like to have at least 3 small-scale projects handy that I'm using to automate my own life and make this job search easier for me.

Of course I'm going to continue to try to plow through these issues, and I'm not here to necessarily ask for help with my applications (although I won't say no if someone wants to help). It'd be great if I can explain how I solved these problems, because I know the challenging problems I've solved are what I'd want to highlight to people in an interview.

But let's say if the day comes where I have an interview and DON'T have a "finished" product, yet I still have these code samples that I can defend and show that I've gained a great deal of experience from... would it be a good idea to present these in an interview?

Thanks for the help,

Evan

I worked in a tech company as an SWE intern summer last year, and have returned to the same workplace in the capacity of a full-time engineer now. My intern-time project was on a completely different line (included ML based libraries and skills such as time-series forecasting that I picked up) while my present work is totally Python-based tooling development. Should I list these two experiences separately in my resume, given the time-periods are different as well?

Freedom and autonomy are often mentioned as great perks of working in tech, but I feel like there can be too much freedom, especially for earlier-in-career ICs. As someone who's relatively new to my field, I feel like having more supervision could be good. Is that true?

I'm a backend engineer and I've been working weekends/after work on my side project for the last 3 months because my actual work experience is really awful due to bad team matching, I barely even code in my day job. On reddit I got about 100k views and 500 upvotes total with 60 comments. I now have 1000 people who have done a core action on my app/meaningfully used my app

But now I feel like to get to 10k users I pretty much just need to spend 95% of my time just marketing/content creation and 5% actually building software.

My goal is to use this to get more interviews at companies im interested in (which are unicorns/late stage startups) and then start job searching early next year. (not interested rn since its holidays and I want to take it easy/have fun)

Is it worth investing time working on this project and spending my free time after work creating a tiktok and marketing this app and posting on reddit for the next few months? I certainly wont be learning anything, but users do look good on the resume.

If it wasnt that I would be spending time practicing leetcode. Not anything aggressive but just 1hr a day which really adds up over 60 days. Not sure which is higher ROI

TL;DR: side project has 1000 users. should I leetcode in free time or market my side project?

I've been working for around a year now, and I feel like there's a big gap between where I am now and where I should be in terms of skill level. I'm getting good feedback at work, but there's just such a huge gap between the senior engineers on my team and me - It all feels really daunting. How do I know if I'm good enough, and what can I do to feel better here?

If you're at faang but gaining no useful skills because you're in some niche not SWE, but semi coding production sales role does it still have that faang value?

and if you do get into FAANG SWE, how does it change career trajectory?

I wanted to ask you how do you normally break up doing vs study when learning something new in software development.

In general I want to be better coder and learn to how better apply my learning and I wanted to make sure I'm not going down a rabbit hole when doing either and most importanly making sure I'm not stagnant.

What are some good 2 week, 1 month, and 3 month onboarding milestones for a new grad engineer at a FAANG company? I will discuss these with my manager as well, but I want to first come up with realistic expectations that will set me up for success.

Hi Tarodactyls. I finally landed a temporary job after getting laid off from Big Tech in April. It's a 6 month contract with a startup. I have some interviews lined up for permanent positions. I am not sure if I should tell the interviewers if I found a new job, but I am still looking for something more permanent. I haven't been there long enough yet to claim that I gained significant experience.

If I tell them, it might make me look like a job hopper. If I don't, I might lose the chance to end concerns about my long employment gap. Not sure on this one :/

My bottle neck is debugging when you can't run code. When practicing I am able to run code and add prints and trace the code. But often in a real interview you have to debug through pure reasoning which is hard

My performance is getting hit because in DSA I often get an answer 95% correct but the interviewer tells me I have a bug and I find it really really hard to trace the bug especially in recursion problems

In my earlier experience as an intern, I haven't had much previous experience where I had significant influence over the projects I get to be allocated into; it was typically out of my control as to the sort of projects I got to work on. I've had opportunities to work on incredible projects where I grew a lot and also projects where it didn't quite align with what I wanted to do and also had limited opportunity to grow (e.g. working on some proprietary language or a lower impact project designed to be assigned to interns).

As I start my job as a junior engineer, I'd like to play more of an active role (wherever possible) to influence the direction as to the sort of project I work on and my growth direction.

In my experience and from my understanding, I think there are several factors when evaluating a project:

1. Your own personal technical background and experience (Zone of Proximal Development)
2. Your own personal career goals and skills you're trying to develop
3. Growth & business impact potential (if your goal is promotion)

Do these factors make sense when evaluating a project, and are there any others I'm missing? Also, how can I figure out #3 more in-depth for any project?

I pretty much interact with everyone else through text-based means, which is all really pronounced in this remote covid era. However, I like to learn from other people directly, talking with them. For example, I'm currently working with a senior full-stack engineer doing things like pair programming and that has been helpful.

What can I do to get more of this deeper learning instead of trying to learn almost entirely through text?