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

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!

Hi everybody. Last time I posted on here, I was laid off. I'm still laid off, BUT I got an interview where I interned at! It's a medium-sized financial company, looking to expand soon. The people I know in there are pretty high up. I told the recruiter that I was interested in making an impact on the business, and he really liked that about me. They said that no matter what happens with this interview, they're still gonna try to get me a software engineer job within the company. I think it was in a Taro course I saw when I first signed up where Alex said this, but the recruiters are looking for trust that you'll be able to ship production-level code. I've already done this within the company as an intern, and given my manager there at the time is now one guy under the CTO and CIO (the CIO remembered me and approved getting that position open!), I got that company trying to get me back in. Fingers crossed it works, but I'll have a hard time typing if I keep them crossed rather than code to practice beforehand.

The team is trying to modernize APIs. In the behavioral/vibe check interview, the manager told me that he has a bunch of awesome APIs he'd like to convince other areas in the company to use, but they're stubborn because their current processes work as they are, and they don't want to put themselves at risk by implementing the new awesome APIs. I'd be expected to act as someone who can have these conversations with these groups about the code and APIs they currently work with, and get them to buy in on the said new awesome APIs. It was originally a senior software engineer role, but they're interviewing me to see if they'd like to lower that to a mid-level role, and then (hopefully) hire me.

The role itself uses Node.js, SpringBoot, GraphQL, and Docker. I want to know what plan you guys think I should implement to study this next week and a half before it's technical interview day. I've been building some Node/GraphQL projects, and just worked on a SpringBoot project yesterday, too. A project approach is what I'm doing for this. I can also ask ChatGPT for some good interview questions on these things, but is there anything you guys can lob at me that will help me achieve proficiency (if not mastery) of those technologies in a week's time? Advice, tutorials, strategy planning, etc.

I'd really appreciate whatever y'all can throw at me. Thanks so much!

Evan

In the earnings call sundar mentioned "Today, more than a quarter of all new code at Google is generated by AI, then reviewed and accepted by engineers. This helps our engineers do more and move faster"

No question here, just thoughts, comments, concerns?

When doing personal coding challenges like maybe creating your data structures and algorithms and or just working on your personal projects. Is it bad to set a condition for yourself like you can't ask for help or no ai tools. Really only relying on Google searching or videos/documentation

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

I don't want my company here because I'm pretty sure my employer will be able to track me down, but I'm on the identity and access management team at a large e-commerce firm. I keep getting this sinking feeling with all the new job titles that are coming up as a result of AI, that I'm in a dead-end area. It's not really security engineering work, it's the bridge between the backend and security where we implement oauth, oidc, saml, passkeys, and few of the other MFA specs. I joined the team a few months ago after getting pretty bored with product engineering work (making some Graphql APIs).

Ultimately, I'm a software engineer, but not good enough or knowledgeable enough to be in security engineering. What bothers me though is that enough of a niche to switch to other companies?

A lot of postings require knowledge of k8s, CUDA because of the AI boom. I'm very early in my career and quite lost right now looking at the jobs out there. Can anyone chime in?

I’m currently an entry level engineer with 3 years of experience. I’m afraid when I look for another job, the recruiters will ask me what level I am and get down leveled. Is this something I should be worrying about? If the recruiters ask me such question, how should I respond?

I'm looking to deploy my project to get some users. I wanted to ask what the best way services to use as I'm only trying to show off the work mainly and maybe get some users once I get unity app on the stores.

I see a lot of engineers get excited by new frameworks, and I can’t emulate that same enthusiasm. There are some exceptions (e.g. when I learned about Storybook.js, I was excited to pick it up as it was applicable to my work), but for the most part, I'm just not as excited as other software engineers about picking up the latest and greatest tech. If I’m not going to get my hands dirty with a new framework or use it at work, I just don’t really care for it. What can I do to be better about this kind of learning?

Hi Taro community,

I currently have 1 YOE as a SWE at a large bank and I am on STEM OPT. I want to be more intentional with my career.

In short - I want to know how to get domain expertise. My tech stack is mostly python, SQL, and some Angular. In short, I don't feel like an 'engineer' at all and since it's a bank things don't move that fast and I feel like I will get complacent or obsolete with how fast the tech landscape is evolving with artificial intelligence.

My issue is I don't think I am gaining the 'depth' of knowledge that I would hope to acquire. I am just working on stories as they come and the knowledge I am getting is mostly proprietary to the org I belong to. I can't see how transferable the knowledge will be.

I am trying to figure out what my next move should be. So far I have tried:

• Applying to other jobs. The bad thing is that the tech job market is awful and while I don't mind leetcode, it becomes a parasitic activity that leeches on my free time.
• Switching to another team - roadblock here too. We have a hiring freeze.
• I've had some luck interviewing with startups but unfortunately a lot of them don't sponsor. I actually think that had my visa situation not been a problem, a startup would be a great way to supercharge in improving my skills.
• Build projects - I've seen this advice on here before and it seems like the only wiggle room I have until something better comes up. But, as far as projects, past a certain point they are just toys I feel - they lack the complexity, and business context that makes a good engineer. I mean after all, engineering is a team sport. Also, I am not sure how it gives me the 'depth' that I want.
• Courses/Technical papers? This is another option I am thinking of: maybe start or join a reading group for technical papers and try to re-implement and discuss the concepts discussed? Maybe brushing up on computer science fundamentals/system design will help?

I am a little worried because it seems like I will be at this job for a while - which is not a bad thing because I'm very lucky to have one to start with, but at the same time, I don't want to be left behind.

Thanks for reading and I look forward to reading your comments!

Assuming code first engineers care deeply about perfecting code while product engineers care deeply about shipping out solutions, how does one put up with an mentor that is a code first engineer to the extreme?

The one engineer on my team is known for being a code first engineer: the type that will ask every lesser ranking engineer for rewrites from every PR, takes a week to review small tickets, prefers to miss deadlines instead of pushing decent code to prod, and will not compromise on design decisions until months have gone by.

Sure, its great to learn from someone with top-notch code quality with past experience at google. I'm also confident my testing skills have improved a LOT since I started. On the other hand, having to rewrite most PRs I produce just to submit work late has destroyed my reputation as a junior engineer on my team. And for the majority of the time my team lead disagrees with this extreme code first mentality so I end up in the middle of arguments on the smallest design choices, waiting for a resolution before picking a solution.

How have you found balance between perfect code and shipping fast?

Recently, I was helping migrate my team’s entire codebase from a legacy Java DateTime library to the newer, built-in Java DateTime library.

I’ve never performed a migration before, so I don’t have context to know whether this kind of migration is typical (my current team isn’t very good). 

Some of the features of the migration:

• The codebase primarily contains poorly written unit tests or tests without assertions (and no E2E or integration tests)

• Consequently, we tested the application by setting up a separate environment, simulating user flows, and manually verifying results inside the DB

• The migration took over a month to perform - meaning constant merge conflicts from new changes to resolve

What might a migration look like at a good tech company? 

For the record, I’m not personally interested in game development - I’m just quite curious.

Everyone hears the following complaints across the gaming industry in general:

• Crunch time

• Lower TCs

I find this quite curious, because I imagine there’s a lot of technical complexity in building games and the numerous tools and engines needed to make them. 

Games are interdisciplinary, combining art, music, sound design, acting, writing, and game design, to create interactive entertainment software - so I would imagine this presents a unique world of challenges that make it just as complex as “regular” software. 

Plus, MMOs and games like Fortnite or Counter-Strike have to deal with all the technical complexity of ensuring a good player experience while having millions of players (clients) playing concurrently.

In fact, Gergely Orosz has on the subject that I found fascinating.

Yet, game developers typically complain of lots of crunch time and being underpaid - and, subjectively, the game dev industry is less “prestigious” than SWE.

Also, I’ve almost always seen devs listed as “game programmer” or “UI programmer” in the credits, as if their primary job is to just write code (and not build good, complex software at scale).

What might be the reason for the differences between game development and regular software engineering?

In, Alex answered that the key insight behind rapid career growth is good communication.

He points the reader to the "Effective Communication for Software Engineers" course and some other resources.

I feel like a ton of effective communication is , and so finding a good way to teach it outside of observing those who are already good at communication in the context a job is tricky. Specific case studies could be really helpful. I think Alex's course and the other linked resources were a really good introduction to effective communication, but if this is the key skill behind great performance I want to learn more! I've put most of the tips and tricks that Alex taught into practice at my current job and it's really improved my performance and my managers' trust in me already. A huge mindset shift for me was that it's better to risk over-communication than under-communication; it's better to be aligned but slightly annoyed by receiving a lot of messages than not aligned.

My question is: What is a good way to go about building my effective communication skills? Are there more really high-quality resources you recommend for building good communication skills?

When I started in bootcamp, my bootcamp mentor assigned me a couple tasks to do. How important are these tasks? Do I need to get them done with a certain speed and quality? Are you judged on them in any way?

Questions:

1. Is learning design a worthwhile investment as someone most interested in doing full-stack work at product-based startups?

2. Might working in a small product-based startup be an effective way to pick up design skills while working as a SWE?

3. How can engineers build more complex side projects without any design skills?

Regarding #3:

I’d argue that basic product design skills are critical for building any CRUD application. You can’t build something without defining what it’s going to do first. 

Literally - you can’t write code for a feature if you don’t know how the app will behave during a loading state, an error state, a complex edge case from a wonky user flow, etc.

You can wing the design and iteratively dogfood it to improve its UX - but that’s the same as doing UX design while having zero UX design skills. It’s the software engineering equivalent of writing spaghetti code - except you’re not even improving.

Personally, I find that UI libraries like or are most helpful for solving UI problems like designing a button or a modal. However, they can’t help you decide how a screen in an app should work, nor can they abstract away all design challenges for more custom use cases.

Also, any CRUD application built with poor design will inevitably feel like a crappy database client. 

The design problem applies to backend projects, too. Backends exist to service frontends, so you can’t build a backend without knowing what features the frontend needs - and you can’t do that, either, if you don’t design it first!

These are all challenges I’ve faced working on my own projects.

I suspect the best approach is really to just learn UX design and a design tool like Figma. However, that’d be a hefty investment given UX design is a separate field from SWE - especially if it’s just for a side project.

Also, building cool stuff as a semi-competent engineer is tons more fun (for me) than learning design from scratch!

What are your thoughts on my aforementioned questions?

My manager is letting me choose between a couple options which project I want to work. What kinds of things should I look for to choose which project would be better for me in terms of becoming a better engineer and resume impact?

In my team, we own a lot of legacy services. It seems like many of our engineers intentionally avoid these legacy services because they have less impact, and I keep getting pulled into these projects. Even worse, the work is mostly SQL or data engineering, and as a SWE, I'm afraid this will impact my career.

How do I get other people into these legacy service project? My manager is making me the only responsible person for this project on a rearchitecture of a legacy system by reducing head count commitment on the project, and I do not want to be the only person responsible for the project for few reasons. I want to stop doing deep dive on legacy systems which has no impact and has high risk. The legacy system just has so much scope that this deep dive is recurring every week that takes up about a day. In addition, I also do not want to be the sole responsible SDE for a project of such a large scope. Because the timeline of the project is long, the headcount may be justifiable, but I do not want to get isolated in a case when something goes wrong, there will be no one to vouch for me.

Ideally, I think we would all share the work as a team somehow, but our team has been very separate with a different products, so I am not sure what the best way to approach this would be.

In three months, I'm graduating, and I need to resolve my dilemma now: can I realistically land a job, or am I living in an illusion that I can do anything without understanding the challenges of the real world?

Here's my current daily schedule:

• Sleep: 8 hours (I tried 6 hours, but after a week, my performance dropped significantly, and I became forgetful.)

• Workout: 1.5 hours

• Meal prep & other daily activities: 2 hours

• Miscellaneous tasks: 1.5 hours

This leaves me with about 3 hours per day for study or self-improvement.

I'm at an intermediate level in Python that's all i know for now. I can write logical solutions, though it often takes a few attempts like run it first then fixto get things right. I also find that I need to go deep into a topic to fully grasp it. For instance, when learning SQL, it's not enough for me to know the query “SELECT * FROM TABLE_NAME”—I need to understand what's happening behind the scenes, like how each record is being retrieved.

I'm at a crossroads regarding my career. With my OPT starting in February 2025, I don't have much time to waste, and I'm trying to decide the best path forward:

• Option 1: Spend the next 6-8 months preparing intensely in DSA (Data Structures and Algorithms) and working on projects.

• Option 2: for now focus on building practical projects, aiming to join a smaller company first. This way, I could gain real-world experience and eventually advance to a better opportunity.

I'm struggling to decide which of these two paths would be better for my future.

At a huge company at Google, there's resources on everything imaginable, including other trades like product management and sales (which I'm interested in). Does it make sense at this stage in my career to spend a lot of time looking into those and learning?

In the writing your resume course, I realized it is best to keep the resume simple and non-technical for recruiters to view. I used to have a lot of bullet points like Reduced the runtime by 9x meaning I was able to reduce on average runtime of 45 seconds to 5 seconds. Looking back, I don't think this makes much sense. I also wrote how I improved the time complexity from O(n) to O(1) which I deleted now.

What is the best way to write these accomplishments? Is improving runtime even a good data point in a resume? Should I write it to something like improved the runtime of a program from 45 seconds to 5 seconds? Or does improved by 9x make sense here?

Aside from this runtime issue, I'm wondering what are some good metrics in a resume. I realize the number of users is really impressive from Alex's resume, but what are some other good metrics?

Hello Taro Community,

I've had the first onboarding weeks at my company. My department stack is Angular-Frontend, Java-Backend and Oracle/PostgreSQL databases. While they want me to dip my toe in everything, right now the priority is learning the database section first because the engineer responsible for the database will leave in June.

I've never done database development, and the engineer that is supposed to teach me, can't articulate a curriculum for me and is on vacation 50% of the time until they leave in June. What topics do I have to know to have a good grasp on database development? What courses can you recommend? How can I guide the person to teach me what's necessary?

Thanks everyone

In the team-matching phase, I connected with a team focused on a monolithic backend built in Django with GraphQL. My manager recommended I learn Datadog and Sentry, and I’d love some tips on onboarding to these technologies as efficiently as possible. This is for Nextdoor working on team that owns Feed, Events, Groups and Messaging.

I've been working through a course on CodeSignal that covers GraphQL and Apollo Server, but it’s primarily JavaScript-oriented, using Apollo with Express. Since I already have a Django side project, I’m interested in how to apply what I’m learning specifically to Django and Python environments.

Additionally, I’m aiming to streamline my onboarding with some guidance around these points from my manager:

1. GraphQL basics – Use it with a simple Django web app to surface data.
2. Datadog and Sentry – They use Datadog for real-time monitoring and Sentry for API error tracking. Any specific tips or resources to dive into these tools effectively?

For context, I am currently a Data Engineer who uses Python and SQL and am transitioning to a Backend SWE role. I do have experience building things, here is a side project I have built from scratch.

In of Taro's courses, Alex teaches building side projects as a practice during the job search, and he is right (IMHO). Since I have a strong background in OCaml open source, I initially felt frustrated to keep building side projects in OCaml yet OCaml jobs are scarce. When I asked in the Taro premium Slack channel, Josh Lindsay offered some insights into switching to promising languages.

Following Josh's guidance, I translated my project idea to TypeScript and React Native, which has allowed me to build skills aligned with more job opportunities. Again, Many thanks to Josh for the encouragement and insights!

Currently, I’m progressing on this project in a private GitHub repo, but it is far from pleasing. I'm kindly seeking advice on enhancing my resume to be competitive for non-OCaml roles. I've attached a link to my resume and would greatly appreciate any feedback.