Mid-level Engineer Career Development Videos, Forum, and Q&A

I am in the very fortunate position to be choosing among some great offers. My question is how to properly choose between

1. A company with an industry-leading reputation (eg Citadel, Two Sigma, DeepMind)
2. A “lower tier” company with less brand recognition/lower quality bar but is able and willing to outbid company (1) on comp.

If comp were equal going to company (1) would be a no-brainer, but how much of a premium should I place on the brand of a company? Put another way, how can I place a number on things like exit option value, social/engineering prestige and so on.

I'm a support engineer in big data profile working in Amazon web services, and I'm looking to transition into a SDE role within the teams like Spark, Hadoop, Yarn EMR infrastructure, etc

At the same time I have been working hard on my promotion from L4 support engineer to L5 support engineer.

Given a scenario if I get promoted to L5 support engineer and later, down the line I also get L4 software engineer role within Amazon, should I take the SDE role at a downgraded level, should I look outside or what should be the best route?

Somebody I know has been working in Amazon BA and related positions for seven years, however they switched to SDE intern positions within Amazon. Do you think it is a wise move?

Hi all,

I will be joining Amazon as an SDE 2 in a couple of weeks and wanted to see if anyone had any advice on how I can succeed at Amazon or large companies as an external hire. One of my worries is that I do not have experience working at a big tech company. Most of my experiences (3 YOE) have been in small to medium sized companies where I worked on a team of 10 - 15 engineer of with varying scopes of responsibility.

Any advice would be appreciated!

Hi,

I just completed Meta interview last week, no results yet.

I got a request from my recruiter now asking if anyone at Meta would give feedback on working with me. What are the expectations here? Also, why post interviews?

How do you build up technical skills for a senior engineer? I want to develop that intuition to understand how to choose the proper technical approach and break down the trade-offs. Are there any resources I can read to accelerate this process?

What is the average promotion timeline from an entry-level engineer (SDE I) to mid-level engineer (SDE II)? What is considered great?

What is considered a fast promotion? How do you convince others of impact and take on more meaningful projects?

In the age of IDEs with autocomplete, chat gpt and copilot does it makes sense to learn it?

I have seen Devs who use Vim browse through files and make changes at tremendous speed and am curious if it's a good tool to improve my productivity.

I did do a bit of Vim during my bachelor's but mostly used IDEs in all my jobs. It will take me some time to learn and make the switch but I feel it's a good time to learn it.

Also what is the importance of setting up your tooling and IDEs in being able to code faster.

Balancing these two approaches is crucial depending on the project and our own values.
1. Writing completely messy code that just works. In other words, making spaghetti
2. During a development, focusing on future scaling, readability, and cleanness by spending more time on the code.

Managers often prefer quick development that works from client’s perspective, which aligns more with the first approach. It’s really difficult thing to tolerate for me, as I don’t consider it to be good programming, even if the clients are happy.

Despite client satisfaction, I feel an ethical conflict.

Should I refuse these types of projects and their financial benefits, even though my stomach is empty? 🤣

My main goal right now is to level up, and that next level for me is making the jump from junior to mid-level, hopefully within 2-3 years. To better understand the evolutions I need to make, what are the main differences between junior and mid-level when it comes to SWE?

Recently, I was required to work on multiple things in parallel. Like 1-2 features and couple of bugs.

In theory there are dead moments, like waiting 20 minutes for a build, that I can use to do something else. But even in those 20 minutes I feel like my context belongs to that task and it seems hard to switch the branch and investigate a bug while the build is running because of the context switch and when the build is done I have to come back to the previous task and re-switch context.

Also the pressure of knowing that I have to deliver multiple things is very stressing. Even though they might not be complicated things, the pressure alone of knowing that I have multiple items and the deadline is coming is very harmful.

Is there any "trick" or effective way to work on multiple items at the same time without feeling like "drowning" and to not be affected by the multiple deadlines pressure?

Hi,

I have recently received an E5 offer from RL team as part of the dev-infra org working on developer tooling infra such as debugger, code editor. I have received this offer after a long 2 month wait in TeamMatching. Given the long wait time in team-matching, the recommendation in general is to accept the first offer regardless of your preference and then do an internal hop later.

I have a safe and secure job at Msft L62 right now(about to be promoted in the next quarter), working in developer tooling as well.

Team structure: The team is comprised of 4 sub teams with each sub-team focusing on a vertical and containing 6-8 members. My manager has 25 reportees under him and we have a tech-lead who is overseeing the whole product.

1. Any advice/gotchas in general about work-culture, leadership for the org?

2. Being an infra role, I wanted to know if there would be enough scope for me to succeed in this role ?

3. I see there is less diversity in my immediate team, except me all the other team mates, tech-lead, skip manager are Asian, my manager is Indian. P.S I am not against any race, but wanted to get some perspective if I would be isolated and if I could an impact and survive there.

4. I see that some of my peers are L6 at Amazon and I wonder if it would be difficult to compete with them and have decent job security. P.S: I am on H1B visa

Thanks!!

YOE:9

I'm mainly working remotely due to covid and a team distributed across time zones, but I feel like earlier-in-career engineers like myself should have more in-person work. How can I overcome the barriers of remote work?

I've been an SDE 2 at Amazon for the past 4 years, consistently exceeding expectations. However, I'm feeling burnt out, and it seems like support for my growth is lacking. I'm contemplating taking a career break, but uncertain about the current state of the industry and whether I'll find equivalent-paying jobs upon my return. What advice can you offer?

I'm looking to level up and am currently designated as an SWE-2, where I take end-to-end responsibility for an Android app. I have a couple of juniors who report to me. I also took responsibility for writing backend APIs.

I even led a feature using guidelines of system design playlist and made a brag journal for promotions.

What are the exact behaviors to become one level up as SWE-3 (Mid-level)?

Hi everyone,

I just recently accepted an offer at Google as an L3. The thing is I have 4.5 years of experience full time and have done a number of internships (that I'm not counting in the 4.5). I didn't do super great in the coding rounds and couldn't get cleared for L4 but managed to get approved at L3. The coding rounds (specifically, algorithm optimization) was the specific reason they gave for the down level.

I firmly do believe I'm of L3 level, my manager did as well. I'm not great at leetcode so that part was off but my performance was very good at my previous company and I hope to get promoted to L4 as quickly as possible.

Anyone have advice specific to someone that was down leveled? I see a lot of discussion on a promotion from L3 to L4 in general which I've been reading a lot on. But I was curious about the down leveled case specifically

Also another thing to note - I'm about halfway through the L3 to L4 course and I'd say my skills line up virtually entirely with what Alex is describing as L4 (I used to do a lot of the L3 stuff but have improved). Is this just a matter of coming in and making sure I perform as highly as I can to speed up the process?

Hello! 👋🏼

I finished my first JIRA ticket today and I was assigned another ticket, but this ticket feels different…its requirements are significantly more vague.

I understand at a high-level what the requirements for this task are:

1. check a folder for new files every x min
2. copy new files to another folder
3. keep track of copied files

These are examples of some the questions I had, however they feel too low-level for the analysis stage.

• what file types can I expect?
• should the frequency be editable?
• how should the program handle a job run that takes > x minutes?

So, my question is this: what high-level questions can I ask to further demystify these vague requirements and future requirements?

Hello, is anyone familiar with the interview process (what questions they will ask) for a sr. python engineer position at apple?

This might have been asked before but I couldn't find an answer. Can be a good video idea.

At my company, I am currently owning 3 L-sized (>1.5months) projects in parallel. They are with different teams and different product managers, and I am having difficulty managing all 3 at once.

Things I am facing:

1. Every morning, I face the question - "which one do I focus today"
2. When giving estimates in individual project sync meetings, I try to give estimates by assuming my time would be equally divided among the 3, but its almost always unequally divided, meaning some product manager is let down almost always.
3. A lot of times, if I am focusing on project A for the day, if I get pings about project B a lot, then my focus keeps going towards project B, and I can't make progress on both project A and project B.

I feel like this is such a common problem, but I cant find a solution that fits my needs.

Appreciate senior engineers' input on this

Something I want to get more efficient at is promotion trajectory, and team selection is a big part of that. If I were to switch teams, how can I find one that's important for the business and has a good amount of L5 scope? My goal is to move up to L5 soon and have scope to start making progress to L6 as well afterwards.

Hi,

I have 6 years of experience in the software engineering field, mostly working as a software consultant and at not well known startups. Having done MSc in the field AI, I got an offer to interview with Apple for an interesting role that seemed to have the best from 2 worlds - Software Engineering & AI/ML. To my surprise, after 6 interviews over the span of 2 months and an emotional rollercoaster, I got the job at ICT3 level and moved to another country. I thought I might be underleveled at first, but I kept thinking I actually don’t have experience in AI/ML so they’re levelling me as ICT3 must be right, I also don’t feel like a senior yet.

The situation I’m in now at work is very frustrating and disappointing to me, because of the following :

• I’m still onboarding after 9 months in, without being in a senior role. There is no serious documentation, I have to “network” in a forced manner, to find out vital information for an engineer like “do we have 2 prod environments and when do releases happen”.
• up until now I have not received any tasks or projects to sharpen my skills or keep the ones I worked hard for so far
• I had to beg for 8 months to be included in a project, the explanation was “we’re in the planning stage, we’re waiting for OKs to get started”
• I get neither serious SWE experience from this, nor ML/AI related one.
• Over the past month, after telling my manager I would apply for other jobs if this situation (not participating in anything palpable - just meetings) did not change, they finally moved me to another team that’s closest to SWE that this role can get.
• in the new team, they advertised this project that would mostly be backend work in Go. It turns out the codebase belonged to another team and the role that I’m in, does not imply bettering/maintaining their codebase or adding new features, it’s mostly data hillclimbing and adding some strings in the right places, so super humiliating after having prepared from DSA , system design & design patterns
• I don’t get to touch any AI/ML models yet or work with them, because I don’t have experience with AI/ML
• My manager is a new manager and has half the experience in the field as I do. I talked to him about my disappointment of being so undervalued and his take on this is, I first have to learn the tech stack to participate in “more advanced” projects. However my male colleagues, who joined the company a few months earlier than me, have been given more responsibility faster (participating in 2-3 projects after aprox. 6 months in)
• Time spent in the office is not productive at all, I can’t do focused work there at all. People chat and socialise all the time in the open spaced office we all work in and there are at least 60 people working there. This forces me to work overtime & during weekends, to achieve deadlines for the project and to learn the needed tech stack
• I’m starting to feel trapped in this job because it’s consuming my time, including my free time and I’m actually worried that if I continue like this without coding, participating in code reviews & other healthy SWE practices I’ll get out of hand and have a hard time getting another software engineering job or staying relevant in the industry
• Maybe what I’m experiencing in this particular branch of Apple is unusual for FANG or even other Apple jobs and would be grateful for others’ opinions on this situation.

How often does everyone pair program here? And how do you regard them?

I am at a startup and since I have started, first as a junior, my pairing frequency is about 1-2x per week. I do not consider myself a junior anymore (at least not at the company, but maybe on Leetcode >_<) and find these sessions more valuable as volleying ideas flow more. I was wondering what it’s like for others and if it is a day in the life thing at big(ger) tech; is it kind of seldom or frowned upon or do some of you use it as a measure of skill, etc.

Hope everyone is having a good start to the week!

It's hard to figure out what's going on right now; there's just a lot being said like that some Meta employees "don't belong here", it's time to "turn up the heat", and "low performers" need to be weeded out (I would have thought this was already the case at Meta?).

At the end of the day, I just want to figure out what this means when it comes to employee performance and PSC in particular. I've heard from some managers and engineers that the ratings will be upshifted (e.g. you need old EE to get MA), but I've talked to my manager and they said that this won't happen. But if that's the case, how will the performance review system change?

Any tips on what concretely could be happening and what we can do here to adjust to these changes?

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