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

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'm trying to understand how the math works. Amazon offers a 5/15/40/40 split

So im confused when I see on theres 30k stock options at amazon where is that coming from? does that mean year 2 theres 90k? and 250k years 3/4?

Hi!

I had mic issues in the OH and couldn't ask live. How would you recommend I prepare for System Design interview questions, especially since I feel my experience at my previous company didn't prepare me well for these?

I have 2.5 years of experience at a big tech company and was recently laid off. Ideally, I’m aiming for an ~L4 level position as I was L3 in my past role and was nearing promotion. I’m getting more interviews at start-ups now, and they typically focus on system design rather than leetcode questions. At my past company, the tools were so powerful that I didn’t get the same breadth of experience a new grad might get at a smaller company. For example, I never touched or thought about our database or considered scalability for our services. In hindsight, I should have taken the initiative to find projects outside of my team with more scope, but now I know better!

My current plan is to read "System Design Interview" by Alex Xu and go through the Taro System Design Masterclass. Do you have any feedback on this plan? I recently had my first system design interviews and have more coming up. I want to prepare as best as I can with the time I have. I’ve accepted that I may not excel at first, but any feedback to improve my preparation plan and mindset would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Example:

Hello, Taro community,

Hope everyone is well! I have been working at a mid-size company as a backend SWE for a little more than 2 years post-grad. I graduated with a BS in CogSci with a specialization in ML and a minor in computer science. My company has announced layoffs for Q4, so I want to prepare myself for starting the job hunt. My current goals are to build 1 or 2 side projects, as my resume seems a little sparse with 1 post-grad experience and 1 internship where I don't remember much from the actual project tech-wise. I will also be working on my resume and technical interview prep. In the current market conditions, would my education be a hindrance and would it be better to go for an MSCS as a non-CS degree holder? I understand the skills are most important, but I am worried about getting past the ATS for most jobs. I do see most job postings require a degree in engineering or equivalent experience, but the equivalent experience is expected to be quite high now.

Today I fumbled a technical interview.

I was told by the company I interned at previously to apply for a job posting. The person who knew the role is my manager from my internship there. That same manager I knew in there is now one position under the CTO. He told me it was a role that uses Spring Boot, Docker, and GraphQL. He said there’s a big effort to get GraphQL into the company’s architecture. It said “5+ years experience”, and didn't mention GraphQL, so I didn’t take it seriously. After I applied, the posting disappeared. My manager said the job posting I applied for was “probably just one of those ghost postings”. I had the behavioral where I spoke with the manager: I aced that. Today was the technical. The recruiter I was talking to was telling me this was an interview where I could show off projects, so I took the “prep some projects” approach. Did 3 projects. One using mern and GraphQL, one using typescript and express with rest architecture, and one using spring boot.  So I do that. I also prepped a Google doc with a list of common interview questions for all that I’m expecting. 

When I get into the interview, I get asked about my prior role. They said that showing projects wouldn’t be necessary: and that GraphQL wasn’t in the role. The first 20 minutes went well. I was asked about API stuff. I hear them say “good” sometimes, so I know something is right. Then I start getting asked simple questions I didn’t think to prep for. One was literally “what’s the difference between JDK and JRE”, and I knew what JDK was, but not JRE, and the difference between @override and @overload. I was then asked what Node is, so I tell them it’s a runtime environment (idk how I didn’t piece together what JRE was at this point), but I made a mistake because I should of delved into themes that made node.js incredible, like its event loop. Although I knew the basics of a microservice, it was only the basics. The interviewers were kind, and told me that although I articulated myself well, they’re looking for someone who knew more about microservices, and can code right now.

Luckily, the company told me prior to this that even if this doesn’t work out, they’d still want to hire me. There'll be another chance, but I realized I need mock interview help. I know I’ll need to review the Taro course on getting into and succeeding in interviews, but I also want to find people to do mock interviews with. How can I do that with Taro?

Thanks,

~Evan

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?

Thanks a lot for the great content, Alex and Rahul! Your courses to understand the expectations of various levels is really helpful.

AI is continuously increasing the productivity of software developers. AI can now write test cases, automatically fill the code given just high-level description, automatically write a summary in the PRs, add comments to the code, etc. This increases the code quality as well.

So, will the current L4 role be the expectation out of an entry-level programmer in the upcoming years? Also, due to AI, do you think the demand for non-AI software developers will keep decreasing over the years, and the job market might move towards other fields such as space engineering, robotics, nanotechnology, dna editing, etc.?

As the supply of engineers is increasing with fresh grads coming out every year, and the demand is decreasing due to increasing layoffs, do you expect the trend of reduction in software salaries continuing over the long-term? Or are you expecting a recovery in demand and salaries for software developers?

I'm curious since you now have the opportunity to design and interview candidates as you see fit, how would you design the interview for your next hire?

How many rounds?

Any takehomes?

how would you source your candidates?

what are things you would do to avoid doing the terrible interview practices companies usually do?

How would you interview a candidate for a backend role vs a frontend role?

I am at a legacy telecommunications company (one of the big 3). I currently work on relatively modern tech stack with SpringBoot, Java 21, and Angular 14. I have 2 years of experience as a professional developer and graduated this year.

At this stage of my career, my goal is to become as technically proficient as possible, so that I can have more money and options in the future.

My team consists of many developers that have been at this company their entire careers and that don't want to implement things like automated testing, or CI/CD pipelines. I fear this lack of enthusiasm for engineering growth will stunt my technical abilities, as I am the only one suggesting these kinds of upgrades.

We support an application with ~500,000 monthly users, but I have never had a discussion about building more "scalable" code. I rarely get any feedback on my PRs and our team doesn't have any clear guidance about great vs bad code.

My concern is whether getting better at this job in this role, while helpful to be promoted, may not be pushing me in the most "industry-standard" direction, leaving me behind my peers in technical ability. I worry that without team feedback and focus on "great code", then 3 years from now I am going to vastly under leveled compared to a developer with strong tech leads that have been giving code-reviews that entire span.

Would you recommend I focus on interviewing/job hunting to get into a MAANG company, so that I am surrounded by top-tier talent, or on staying put and using the techniques taught here to individually improve my abilities and our codebase? Or, perhaps there is another option you would recommend.

I would love to hear your thoughts, thanks!

In a recent behavioral mock interview, I was asked the question "Tell me about a time you worked on a team."

From my understanding, the question's focus appears to be on teamwork and collaboration (i.e. do you work well in a team setting?).

A story I had was when I was working on a call history feature. The call was managed by the call center team, and I needed to integrate their API into our backend code to pull this data in real time. When I was trying to test the integration, I noticed the data that was being returned was incomplete, leading to difficulties with integration process.

• I first analyzed the structure of the data returned as the API response. This analysis revealed that the API was lacking key fields such as agent name and call duration necessary for our dashboard.
• I recognized solving this issue would require action from the call center team, so I scheduled a meeting with the lead engineer from the call center team and worked together with him to extend the API design to return the missing fields in real time.
• After the meeting, I maintained close communication with the call center engineer to make sure the changes worked as expected. I also scheduled joint testing sessions where we verified over zoom calls that the changes worked seamlessly and did not disrupt existing systems.
• In the end, I successfully integrated the API, enabling the call history feature to function smoothly in real time. My collaboration also improved the call center API, making it more robust and easier to implement for other developers on our team in future projects. The project taught me the importance of proactive communication when it comes to working across teams.

Do you think this answer is on the right track? I would gladly appreciate any thoughts or feedback on this answer.

Big thanks for reading through all of this - I know it is a very long post and I really appreciate your time!

I am moving teams for the first time in my three-year long career and the team I am moving to is full of very experienced folks(15-20) with the least experienced person with 10 YoE. Some of these folks have also been in the same team for years. I will be new in the team as well as tech stack.

How do I create impact, learn from these people, be able to create my own identity and not be shrugged off as a "junior engineer" who is not given important tasks?

Any additional tips on how can I leverage this move as a fresh start? Like relationship with manager, team and my attitude towards the work?

I have 4 weeks before I begin as an entry level engineer in a popular big tech company in their cloud offering division. I wanted to get at least 3 actionable steps on how to set myself up for success in my new role both in tech and in relationships.

Please also discuss any common anti patterns I need to be aware of.

I'll be using a new technology (cloud) and my first step was to buy relevant books. But I realized that it's inefficient and took up an online course to build a small project. Just want to hear how you would approach your month before the job.

Hi all. I am considering starting my own development consulting company in Jordan. People are well educated there but wages are low. You can hire great engineers there for the same that a restaurant worker gets paid in California. I don't have any problem finding and hiring good developers because I know the language and I have family there. I can find developers that are fluent in English but it's harder.

I am not sure how to start getting contracts in the U.S. I see that iOS and Android development are popular so I was considering to specialize in iOS development.

I only have about 2 YOE in the U.S. at FAANG so I could also run into a problem where I am not experienced enough to lead a team or company.

Legal stuff in Jordan is no problem. I have a relative that's a lawyer in Jordan and he explained what I need to do.

Any advice is appreciated. Thanks.

I've noticed that one of the themes here is gaining depth in a specific field and striving to become the 'go-to person' for a particular subject matter. Does this apply to areas beyond languages and frameworks? In my current role, I'm focusing on deepening my expertise in API integrations and developing end-to-end developer tools. Is this a worthwhile area to specialize in? Additionally, should specialization be more abstract, or can focusing on something this specific/niche be beneficial?

I'm an earlier-in-career software engineer, and I work in an extremely busy startup on a small team (<10 engineers). I do a lot of things, including:

1. Manual QA - I test every build and find a lot of crazy bugs.
2. Release/deployment - I make sure the apps go out well and am looking into CI/CD.
3. Development - I work wherever I can to fill in the gaps and am happy to pick up any ticket.

However, at the end of the day, tickets need to get done and I've had some trouble with that. How can I get better at this? Do I just need to "put in the reps" when it comes to coding?

Hey guys, I'm really interested in this company and think I am a good fit. I have a friend who is at the tail end of the interview loop and may get an offer. If he gets an offer, he'll be able to refer me in. Should I wait for the outcome of his interview or should I just apply anyway (without a referral?)

I'm pretty junior (1-2 YOE) so the market has been tough for me, especially without referrals. Not sure if taking a chance at applying without a referral will reduce my chances.

I was going to ask what is the best way to approach recruiters from each company and what type of questions would you ask? Also what type of conversations would you try to have with the recruiter as well? Overall I was really looking to know how to get the most value out of a career fair as I can.

I am currently an entry level engineer at a big tech company and started 3 months ago. I am looking to move to a company with more fast paced work and a better engineering culture after a year. Right now, the market seems tough for junior level engineers. What advice would you give towards landing new opportunities in this position? 

After being laid off 8 months ago, I’m in a new role! 6-month contract that started earlier this November. The first two months revolve around holidays, so stuff might be slow, but things will pick up after. I want to do everything I can during the first trimester of my contract to earn fulltime with the company. This is a junior position. My manager is a kind person who says nice things about my ability to communicate, learn, and write documentation.

I reviewed the complete onboarding guide on Taro. Since I was a tad bit tired from my job search entering the company, didn’t have much direction with my first task provided in my first week, and my manager was the only person giving me communication, my initiative in my first week and a half of onboarding was lax. But now, I have sense of urgency to do more! 

I was learning company cultural norms, meeting people, etc. There was lots of stuff different from my previous employer. I also noticed there wasn’t a clear onboarding strategy. I was just given code to read through, and went over it with my manager. I’d ping my manager in the morning and in the afternoon with status updates summarizing what I’ve learned and used the formula from the guide to ask great questions. Due to my initial confusion, I decided to make an onboarding guide myself for future engineers! Eventually, I was given a senior engineer to shadow, who I also reach out to during the morning and afternoon just like my manager. I’m also building relationships with my teammates, slowly but surely finding out what teammates are in the give knowledge buckets vs the get knowledge buckets. 

I’m always vigilant to add impact. Just today, I noticed that anyone had edit access to some really important documents other than read, so I reached out to the person in charge of the documents saying “hi, I found anyone can accidentally edit these. To prevent a future mistake, I found this link that shares an idea of how to stop this.” 

Every week I make 3 goals for myself to improve on, such as “understand this code base”, “improve skills in SQL”, “make my first meaningful code contribution”, etc., and record my progress on these set goals throughout the week. My manager would have a meeting with my contract team monthly to discuss how things are going. 

My manager told me I’m still just in the onboarding phase, so I should just follow the formula, and everything will fall into place. Given all this, what else should I do?

I'm a recent college graduate who started my first job a couple of months ago. Recently, Amazon reached out to me for an interview, and I decided to go through the process to explore my options. I'm fortunate to have received an offer from Amazon, but now I find myself in a predicament.

Work at my current company (paypal) has been going well so far, there are parts that definitely could be better but overall the project I got has a high scope (working with more cross-functional teams and leaders) and allows me to sometimes present to people at a much higher level than I am at.

The offer from Amazon comes with a slightly higher salary. However, compensation isn't the primary factor for me in making this decision. My main goal is to become a better engineer by gaining access to strong mentorship, engaging in challenging projects, and building a strong portfolio early in my career.

Eventually, I do see myself leaving my current position for a reputable, faster paced startup or a large company that is known for excellent mentorship and the development of young engineers. While I'm uncertain if Amazon itself meets these specific criteria based on conversations I've had with recent graduates working there, Amazon's strong brand name and its engineering opportunities could potentially lead to more opportunities aligned with my goals.

Would love feedback on this decision and let me know if some parts need more info.

Hi! Will the recording for the chapter 9 of the Taro Book Club: Designing Data Intensive Applications - Chapter 9 (Consistency & Consensus) be available? Thanks!

I've noticed that Alex/Rahul can communicate very fast and a lot. This includes

• Answering questions on Taro
• Creating content (especially on Linkedin)
• In the workplace (Alex at Meta was a top code reviewer in addition to being senior/staff)

My question is how. I struggle to write an email without overthinking everything. Usually, what goes through my head in communication involves

• Taro: What if my advice is wrong or becomes outdated?
• Taro: What if the requester did not give enough information for me to provide an answer (I notice that Alex/Rahul rarely ask follow-up questions on Taro)?
• Content: How do I post so much content without recycling the same concepts over and over again
• Workplace communication: I don't want to offend anyone in this email/slack message
• Workplace communication: I don't want to come across as self-promotional when posting status updates on work/meeting notes/etc
• Everything: What if people just don't like what I have to say and bash it (this is very common on social media) OR if people lose respect for what I say because it reveals how dumb I am

I want to become someone who can communicate fast without overthinking since I believe it's holding me back from working much faster.

Hello! I am wondering if big tech firms sponsor masters degrees if they are related to your work (eg computer science) in top schools like Stanford if you are an employee? Is it part of the employee perks and is there a bond to fulfil after that? Asking this because it is otherwise very expensive to do masters at these top schools