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

As I go through the lectures on Taro, it seems like we need to have a lot of ownership, deal with ad-hoc problems to help the team, review a lot of code, refactor, and etc.

I feel like this is really hard in a scrum setting where we know what we exactly we are going to do that sprint, and if we do not work on the assigned tasks, our projects get delayed, missing deadlines.

I wanted to know what the correct approach is here, do we try to think this beforehand and allocate some sprint points for these tasks? Or as we become higher level engineers, are we just expected to work more? Is it a realistic view that senior engineers could work 40 hours per week, or is that almost impossible?

For me, I feel like I have a pattern of getting pulled into these tasks during my sprints and sometimes missing my deadlines by few days and so have adapted to avoiding these tasks. How could I avoid missing deadlines and still work on these tasks, at the same time maintaining work life balance?

Hello,

I am an Entry Level Engineer at a mid sized company. The thing is, my team has a very strict deadline which we have to meet at all costs. For more context, I have been with this team for around a year now. I had done some menial tasks of building small easy features and styling the components in React. I have a task now where I am supposed to write unit tests for a particular component from scratch in jest. ( I think this is a learning opportunity in disguise but concerned if I might not able to finish the task, as I already got a call out in team standup that my area is lagging behind )

The thing is I have not done this kind of task before. I am super overwhelmed with this kind of situation and everyone in the team is expecting me to deliver it asap as we have a strict deadline.

I tried to convey that this is something of a new task I am trying to a senior engineer to understand how they solve these kind of problems, but was mocked in return and was told I should already know (I agree to some extent ).

The approach I am trying right now is to understand the functionality of that part of component, trying to understand the code written for that and start making my own tests cases. I am also looking at the other unit tests written for other components but feeling super overwhelmed as I am clueless what to do. Could someone please advise me how to approach this problem ?

Hey folks, I recently got promoted to L5 (Mid Level). Looking for any advice in general on how should I approach my work, what to look for etc. Any words of wisdom that people would like to share?

TIA

PS: Apologies if this sounds too generic. My intention is just to learn from other people's experiences. Any advice is welcomed.

Hello, everyone. It is March 29, 2024 at the time I am creating my first ever post on Taro. This is the Friday night where as of now, I am no longer an employee of a Fortune 500 company I used to work for. I was, how one says in corporate talk, "impacted by a layoff". I was given news of this on March 7th that I had a few weeks before I needed to return all my work technology and leave. This is the night of my last day in the company. People in the company liked me, so they told me to apply and come back again. A LOT of people were willing to let me use them for referral. It was one of the top 10 worst feelings of my life. But, it should not be one of the top 10 worst things to happen in my life. It's on me to make sure of that. I'm only 24, so I'm confident I can bounce back. I was also given a severance package to last me until the end of July. My company provided me outplacement benefits (resume writing, interview prep, etc), but I heard they honestly weren't too helpful. That's why I'm here.

What I've done in the meantime is update my résumé. I also have a plan of action for how I want to handle this upcoming first week of the job search. I want to build small-scale projects of each programming language on my resume which showcase understanding of mid-level to advanced topics of the skills I list in my stack. I want to treat my job search like a 9-5 job, where half the work day is spent building meaningful connections, applying strategically, and interview prepping (I need a LOT of that now), and the other half is spent on coding, be it refining what I think I know and adding new skills: hopefully getting chances to contribute to open source and giving back to the community.

I think I need to work on things such as making my résumé stand out, ensuring my interview prep is rock solid, and finding opportunities to show what I can do.

In the meantime, I'll check out some content that Alex and Rahul have on Taro, but I want to ask everyone else how I can refine the best way to begin my approach. What do you all think I can do?

Thanks!

Hello, I just wanted to get some advice last month I was terminated from my job after being placed on PIP/probation. When I first joined the company I had successfully completed training in React but was put on the team that didn’t use it. When the first review cycle came one of my teammates described my learning as flat and my technical skills as inadequate. There was even a time when I was ignored and tasks were passed over and one where I couldn’t come up with a plan. The junior who they assigned it afterward had the same issue couldn’t find and also didn’t need to come up with a plan but was allowed to work on it. Also, I was given noncoding tasks for a time or generic unit test tickets for functions that didn’t need it.

Eventually, I and the other junior got a task that was basic and miscommunication led to a delay and they complained about us both because of how it took. Then the assignment that sealed my fate was I had to implement a microservice and node API with a unit test in 2 weeks. There was a reference code but we couldn’t ask for help from senior developers. When my manager saw my progress he PIP'ed me and then when saw the demo he was underwhelmed and said I couldn't justify the code had a poor understanding of restful API concepts and my test didn’t meet functional requirements he wrote up the paper to basically have me fired.

Is it common for candidates applying to FAANG companies to receive a timed online assignment as the first step in the interview process? Does this usually indicate that the company views the candidate as less qualified, compared to the typical recruiter phone screen involving two DSA questions?

Is there any way to avoid this? Or beggers can't be choosers and we gotta just go through it anyway.

My question is: since I work for a big tech company, does the company pay the tax for my vested shares, or do I?

Do you guys have any resources that could help with this? I am worry about the the tax liability aspect. As well should I talk to a CPA to be safe in my decision.

Hi, I have a question about answering these prompts for Meta referral

1. How well do you know this person's professional skills within their area of expertise? (Never worked together, just by reputation, worked occasionally, very well)
2. Why do you think your referral should be hired?

How important are they? What are they looking for?

One of the tips for processing feedback is “to convert it into action items”.

What should you do if you don’t really know what to do with the high-level feedback you get?

Example: I got the feedback that other engineers don’t think that I understand the framework/library we’re working with deeply, not understanding the patterns and whys behind things that we do in our project, not knowing how to use different/“better” patterns.

Unfortunately, they didn’t give me a specific example, so I’m unsure on how to convert this into an action item.

We don't have mentors, so there isn't anybody who can "teach" me, except learning from code reviews, asking to do more pair programming, etc.

My idea would be to study up on “design patterns”/best practices for the framework we’re using, but I’m unclear on if that would really solve the issue.

I've been on my current team for around a half, working primarily on the back-end. Unfortunately, I discovered after I joined the team that Android work is very interesting to me, so in order to pursue this, I would need to switch teams. There is actually a team fairly close to mine in my org where there's compelling Android work.

Right now, I'm heads down on a big project, so my immediate instinct is to wait until that's done to bring up this conversation with my manager, who I have a very good relationship with. Is this the right thing to do or should I have this conversation sooner rather than later?

I was laid off on November 15 2022 and since then, I have been tinkering in different stacks building small projects in C#/.NET and Java / SpringBoot based on job demand from postings. Professionally, I used JavaScript / TypeScript and React as well as Python, Ruby on Rails, some Docker and AWS for 1.5 years.

However, somehow, because of anxiety over getting a job, I have strayed from getting good at any stack and revising Django to build a MVP of a URL link sharing app and building just because I don't know if I'll ever get users or scale as I never did something really impressive hitherto in my career. Because I wasn't really targeting big companies, I have been casually leetcoding etc. this past year and a half and am decent enough to do easies and some mediums in Python.

However, recently, I haven't been really applying as much, but got reached out by Google and Meta based on yolo applying mainly; I failed my Google early career phone technical and have my Meta screening 45 minute round for an IC4 role I applied to in 2 weeks. I am preparing as the recruiter sent me some resources after our call, but I don't know what my priorities should be. As I don't have high hopes, I assume I should still try to go deep in a stack, use more of Taro's resources such as its jobsearch tool etc. Any help is appreciated. Thanks.

Hi, I was wondering how you deal with constantly changing stock prices from the company you work at. I saw a video from @Rahul where he talked about the mistake to check stock prices at the beginning of each day or something. Not sure anymore where he said it. @Rahul @Alex I was wondering how you dealt with your stocks constantly changing in value.

I've been experimenting with Big Tech stocks and find myself constantly looking at them. I wonder how people in Big Tech deal with that with the stocks they receive from the company. Do they sell when they think it's going bad and turn it into cash, or just keep them for the long run? How often do they check their stocks? How to they deal with the constantly fluctuating prices?

Part 1: Before Joining an organisation

1. How can one identify the best kind of organisation to join at different point in one's career? I understand that the advice to this question may not be a prescription for all, but how can one identify places that would help them to maximize their learning and growth. For several other people, different parameters may be important for them as well such as work-life balance. Personally, I feel that WLB is dependent on a person more than that on the organisation. Thoughts?
2. Quite often we feel that growth may be fast paced at startups, but there can be startups that do and don't promote the growth of a person. Given that there is no list out there to check, how can one make the best suited decisions for their career, not landing at a place they should not be at? What kind of research can a person do before joining an organisation?

Part 2: After joining an organisation

1. Given that a person has joined an organisation, what are the kind of signals that they can identify to see whether the organisation is supportive of their career growth and is indeed the right place to be, for them?
2. On several anonymous portals, there are people from the organisation that will talk poorly about an organisation when things are not going good for them. Managers can quite often paint a really rosy picture about the place. How do you identify the honest signal from the noise all around?
3. If you find an organisation not good for you after you join there, how quick is it too quick to leave? How much time should you spend there before you can make a judgement about the same?

1. How do pull requests and pull request comments look like with an increasing level of seniority?
2. Are pull requests for senior engineers not expected to have any comments for improvements? If yes, then what kind of comments should be there?
3. Also, have seen some principal engineers not sharing their pull requests as they are quite high in seniority and merging it directly. Do you recommend that? If not, who should review PRs for very senior engineers if the team does not have engineers at that level?

I have a new grad offer from Amazon, which was forcefully deferred earlier this year.

I currently work as an SRE (which I don't want long-term), and my offer is for an SDE role in the same team I interned at when I was there pre-layoffs. Plus despite me working for >6 months elsewhere, they're not increasing my comp in any way.

I'm attracted to the Amazon job since it's a SWE role and that's something I want career-wise, but given that the company and current economic situation have been kind of unstable, I'm hesitant to join. Does anyone have any advice for me on how to navigate this? I'm on a student Visa so I guess that's why the threat of layoffs is a bit higher in my eyes.

Hi all,
I entered the company as an L4 Frontend Engineer and it is my first tech job, so I started with 0 experience. Our team has a lot of frontend tasks, but also has a lot of backend work as well. As a result, I have been doing a lot of backend work when it is necessary and there isn't much difference betwee an SDE and FEE in our team in terms of the work we do.

My manager knows that I had 0 experience prior to coming here and recognizes that that I'm able to do both backend and frontend work. He mentions that I could always transition into the SDE role if I wanted to.

My question is, would there be any huge benefits of changing my role to be an SDE for my career? At this point, I wouldn't say that my skillset is more geared towards Frontend since I'm doing both and this is my first job.

My original intention was to stay a Frontend Engineer as I find frontend work more fun and it was what I studied the most for when preparing for interviews. But my friends were telling me that SDE would probably give me more opportunities in the future, so I've been thinking about this lately.

I joined about 6 months ago and my manager is absolutely great. I don’t have anything where I think they can be better at at this stage. At the current stage, I feel like I have a lot of self improvement to do before expecting anything more from them. What do I say in the critical feedback section for my manager?

Hi I wanted to ask how valuable a bootcamp can be and can I do that instead of a four year degree? The reason for this is because of how expensive college tuition is and I'm really worried about the return on investment. I feel like there's a lot of information that I'm learning right now that I feel like I won't really need and instead, I can use that time at a bootcamp to work on projects and learn valuable skills I can use in the work field. Would I be at a huge disadvantage by not completing my 4 year degree and are there valuable concepts that I would be really missing out on by not completing my four year degree?

I've heard that situations at Atlassian and other companies in general can be very competitive to the point where engineers are competing against each other for survival with systems like stack rank and team quotas. I'm wondering what's the best way to navigate through systems like these.

I'm a new E3, and I know that there's the up-or-out promotion timeline to E4. I was wondering how much of a challenge this level-up generally is and what are the main things to keep in mind with this promo?

I'm a junior SWE at a small company which does not have a lot of standardized culture or process. A lot of inaccurate / non-standard terms get thrown around (for example, we call the entirety of one of our older apps the "backend" because of the way our repo is structured) and I've found that this has caused confusion in meetings, especially with new engineers being onboarded. Even though something like this usually only causes a 10-second confusion which is cleared up with follow-up questions, it feels like such an unnecessary inefficiency that could be easily resolved. Also, in general, I believe this can leak into situation where repercussions are worse like client-facing or investor-facing meetings, where for example a manager might call the old app the "backend" to a client, leaving them confused and thus unaligned on what's going on.

I typically wouldn't care about something of this scope as a junior, but it seems to me that the entire org would benefit from something like this, and that nobody else has addressed it nor will address it. So I've drafted a proposal for standardized terminology, with suggestions for specific terms to use and specific terms to deprecate in our company vernacular.

My question is whether it's appropriate to submit this proposal to my managers. It feels necessary but also not be my place / come across as aggressive. Of course it is hard to answer this question without knowing the specific company culture, but nonetheless, I would like to hear thoughts from seniors about how something like this would come across when coming from a junior.

I'm currently building a side project. I completed my idea of a MVP for the project and I'm looking to market it at some point to get some real users.

I have some ideas on posting on reddit and linkedin, but I'm a little nervous as I've never posted on linkedin before.

My project is a web app.