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

In a previous team and organisation I had 3 different reports.

Lvl 5, lvl 4 & a lvl 2

I was the only remote member of the team, so at times it was difficult to fully understand the social and team dynamics within their office. I initially was unaware of any jealousy within the team until I was asked to fly out for a week for an unrelated reason. When on the ground, it become very clear to me there was a strong level of tension between some of the employees.

• The lvl 5 was jealous of 2 of their friends who were now lvl 6 because they joined the organisation at the same time.
• The lvl 4 was a strong performer who was happy with their current position.
• However the lvl 2 who was an apprentice, was an outstanding performer (approx lvl 6) and it was close to witnessing a savant, especially at their age (18).

However there was no possible way for them to go up any higher as their role was tied to the completion of a certain stint of education.

This, alongside that the lvl 5 had aspirations of becoming a lvl 6 but was severely under performing which was especially noticeable by the lvl 2 - made things very awkward and difficult to navigate.

The outcome of this in the end was that I would support the lvl 2 in finding another role in a different organisation and with the lvl 5, we had a long discussion alongside my director to work out a plan of how they can start adding more value and improving their position within the team.

How could I have gone about this differently to create a more positive environment for the team?

I lead a team of five engineers. During sprint planning sessions, I collaborate with the team to create tasks aligned with our goals. Although the initial sprints were challenging, I now have a better grasp of the team's velocity. In the past, I frequently found myself directly involved in their tasks, providing boilerplates, due to their struggles with meeting the acceptance criteria. I am seeking strategies to maintain our pace without the need for constant updates or taking on the tasks myself, aiming to achieve our desired goals.

Our team is newly formed, and we will soon be involving consultants, whom the organization views simply as resources. However, understanding their skill set and velocity poses a significant challenge.

I've recently been getting more into open-source to contribute back to the community and to just make cool stuff.

But I'm interested in various ways of how to market these projects without coming off as "shilling".

I would presume there's less of a likelihood for this to happen due to the free & open framing as opposed to a for profit venture(?)

The meta seems to have a huge focus on becoming an "influencer" with creating short form viral content as a springboard to long form for then that to be your marketing funnel for any type of CTA.

But are there any other tried and tested ways that don't involve so much of this strat?

I am looking for a new role since layoffs last week and have applied for internal transfers for roles outside my skill set like Ruby on Rails work. Since I have no experience with the tech stack behind these roles, how to I put it in convincing words that:

• I can adapt to the new languages and frameworks to succeed in their role
• I compensate for this lack of technical knowledge with me already being similar with platform and tools used at this company

In my organization, there are SDE roles till level 4, and then on top of that, you become an EM. Many times, an SDE 3/4 (who is considered a technical lead) gives tasks or creates the sprint. But then when the junior engineer goes to an EM to show their work, the EM changes the entire approach or assigns vague tasks.

This impacts the velocity of the sprint. I do want to understand: How do I put it out to the upper management such that this doesn't happen? Also, should an EM make technical decisions in this way?

I was lucky to join a very competent and lovely platform team when I joined my current company. I have been working in the same team for 18 months but due to re-orgs people have moved out and we are currently 3 people and we were 9 people when we started out.

We have been doing mostly maintenance work for the past 3 months after re-orgs and recently we were given a choice to work on two projects.

There is one project, lets call it Project Hero which my skip level manager wants me to join. I would be the main PIC for this project and it will involve a lot of integration work and system design. This project is with new team mates and a new manager with whom I have not worked but they don't have the best reputation. However, going by FAANG level, they should be good enough to get the job done. Only downside is work-life balance might be skewed if I join here. However, if the project is a success, it sets me up for Senior level promotion.

There is another project, lets call it Project Nero. This will be with my existing team but from a company perspective, it's not a very important project. But I will be working with my existing team mates who are both capable of delivering a solid project and a joy to work with. However, my work here will be overshadowed by other Senior engineers on the project.

Which project should I join? I personally want to do Project Hero but not with the people present there. Also it will be challenging.
Project Nero will be challenging also but more up my comfort zone.
Given the current economic climate, I feel being in more important teams will help keep my job.

I have been practicing for system design interviews by reading through books like System Design Interview book by Alex Xu and Grokking the System Design Interview, however I sometimes struggle to internalize the knowledge and demonstrate it in an interview setting. I have done a few mock interviews which have been helpful, however the number of mocks I can do is somewhat constrained by other people's availability. Is there a way where I can improve at system design interviews quicker/more effectively while practicing on my own?

I am currently a mid-level SWE applying for senior roles at various companies. On several occasions, the recruiter who reached out asked what my level is at my current company. This feels similar to asking what my current salary is, and seems like a data-point which can be used to down-level me later in the process.

What's the best way to answer this without coming off as standoffish?

• What do you do to find someone to mentor?
  • Anything that's worked really well?
  • Anything that's not worked well?
• What do you do to qualify a potential mentee to make sure both you and they will be successful?

I recently saw a talk by someone L8 at my company. They believe everyone should mentor someone. It's not only a great way to improve at growing others, but also a great way to grow yourself.

So I'd like to try it out but am not entirely sure how to get started.

P.S. Yes, I've Googled this already. Asking a more vague question here because I've found all you tend to give really good insights that I'd never think of even asking for.

This is a serious question involving a friend who met only 3 out of 5 expectations during his mid-year review. He was hired as an IC2 and is about to reach the one-year mark. His team allowed him to approve and merge his own code into production, which resulted in a crash of the application server and AWS environment. This constitutes his first mistake, and someone has contacted the VP in the organization. What potential consequences could he face?

While talking with developers I heard a lot that most of them prefer to be on backend as compared to frontend?

I know it’s everyone’s choice who love to do what. But still in my experience developers are more biased to be on backend side compared to frontend.

I have 3 years of experience as a software engineer for a non-tech company.

It doesn't feel like the place where cutting edge development is happening. Processes feel incredibly slow.

I would like to move to a more tech oriented company, but I feel that I can't pass the coding interviews. I never felt particularly gifted. Studying CS at university felt like an uphill battle.

I spent roughly 3 months preparing for interviews (6-8 questions per week of LeetCode, completed all chapters/problems of Cracking the Coding Interview).

I'm almost 26 now. I'm still struggling to pass medium LeetCode questions in a timely manner. I'm wondering if my energy would be better spent somewhere else? Product Management? Consulting? I really want to find a job where I can be valuable. As a kid, I thought engineering was so cool. However, it feels like I am barely making progress.

If someone is just starting into software industry as a fresh graduate then why not to get into AI/ML instead of software development?

I recently got to an onsite round of a company for a backend engineer role (I have got no front-end experience so far) and they mentioned having a product architecture round which assesses how I can articulate user stories, come up with functional requirements and how I effectively collaborate with the tech lead of the team.

Does anyone have any recommendations on how to prepare for such a round?

I found some helpful videos on YouTube and I would like to hear from the Taro community on what's the best way to prepare and approach such interviews and if you all have any personal tips/ways to structure how you tackle various things in such interviews.

Hi Taro Community!

I am in a very similar position as mentioned by someone here: and from the responses it is evident that switching teams/companies will be an unavoidable step soon. I am currently at an entry-level position (will be completing 6 months at current company soon) and wish to look for roles at the next level of hierarchy (for instance my current role is equivalent to SDE 1, I wish to look for roles similar to SDE 2 or equivalent next). Few points:

• I am planning to complete 1 year at my current company, so by the time I switch I shall have ~1 yr of experience as an entry-level software engineer (apart from other experiences as internships/side projects/etc.)
• Firstly, is it realistic to prepare for mid-level at the current position? Do companies hire entry-level SWE's with at most 1 yr of experience for mid-level?
• If yes, is it advisable to apply now (or 6 months down the line)? I do not wish to work as an SDE-1 (entry-level) in another company by leaving my current one as it will only lead to further delays in promotions (I believe it takes at least a few months to set a good impression in a new team that you are capable for a promotion)
• How can I best utilize the next 6 months before I aggressively start applying to companies? I understood the point related to side projects - is it advisable to build side projects in the tech stack my team is using, or should I expand my scope to include new technologies I am interested (but not actively working on right now)?

Any insights/suggestions/interview tips will be really appreciated. I have very less workload right now and really want to make the best use of time to switch further.

Thank you!

I'm literally finding it hard to be consistent with learning various software development concepts and practicing LeetCode. I think a good mentor can help me with this issue, correct me if I'm wrong.

What else I can do to target my job search in next 5 months as a mid-level software engineer with 2 years work experience.

Do I really need a mentor at this stage?

Hey, I hope you all are having a good one.

I was curious how do you network on LinkedIn to find Internships/jobs.

Specifically:

1. What is a good approach to reach out to VPs/Hiring Managers recruiters in your target companies?
2. Being an Entry level/Mid-Level developer what are some ways you can provide value to them too?
3. What are some "Don'ts" of this approach

Thank you in advance.

Hi Team,

My team currently consists of 2 Pods, for one of which I'm a Pod Leader for and a good friend of mine being a Pod lead for other. I've been helping the other lead consistently in making better design decisions and providing right set of resources to help aid in making right decisions. I also consistently review their documents pre-design reviews, and have contributed to close to 50% of design decisions taken. However, I have lately been feeling this consistent help from my end would end up affecting my promo path (Due to team needing only 1 SE3 at the moment), I do not get any open credits for this except random one off instances where my friend mentions that he discussed xyz with me.

My current scenario is that If i stop helping abruptly it might seem odd, and can affect overall team's health, but at same time i feel a bit demotivated with the lack of credit as this takes decent amount of bandwidth (5-6Hrs a week).

How can I best navigate this situation where I can help as well as get credited for the help I provide?

Background:

Being pressured to deliver at high speed all the time, my team doesn't seem to value wiki type documentation a lot.

When starting a project/feature, we often have a high level design doc & design meeting to talk about high level infrastructure, and we make key trade-off decisions together as a team. If we are lucky, we get another low level design doc & meeting focused on sequencing of actions & interaction between class level objects.

We rarely seem to go back to our initial design doc after initial design phase of a project to update them and explain the actual final product we built and maybe some additional design decisions we made during implementation.

As a result, documentations are kind of dead after facilitating the initial design review. For legacy projects, high quality docs are extremely hard to come by and most just rely on reading large amount of code to understand how things work (nothing wrong with this but I think high quality documentation can save lots of time here).

I understand we don't want to boil the ocean and write everything in painstaking details, but we should at least have enough to help people understand responsibility of services and contract between them.

Questions:

• Could you share your view on this topic and how you find your balance?
• Do you believe it's always worth it to go back to documenting after finishing a project/feature and update it as if you are explaining it to someone new to the team/project?
• Could you share any resources we might already have on this topic as well?

• I can use chat-gpt/claude to understand small code-snippets. But I'm not sure how to use it to understand the whole code structure. Are there any IDE plugins that worked for you for this purpose?
• Especially in streaming/online model service, I can't add print statements to debug. I can only look at tensorboard which isn't helpful in understanding the code-base. How can you better understand with ML models in this scenario?

Hello Taro Community

I want to pick a specialization now due to the market and the lessons I’ve learnt being in the group.

A little context on the issue:

I had a mindset that more technologies I know the more options I’ll have and also working as a full stack dev in my last position I got a lot of hands on experience on different stacks. More like breadth of knowledge but not depth.

I was applying to jobs like Database, UI/UX, Front End, Back End, Software and DevOps couldn’t land any interview in the last job hunt.

Last month I let everything go and I told myself I’ll specialize in “Full Stack”. I have been also working on side projects for my portfolio.

However, a lot of senior devs told me Full stack is too broad and 2 and 1/2 years of experience that won’t cut it.

I want to specialize in Front End with React and go very deep in that. Build projects pertaining to React Front End for my portfolio.

My fears:

• I’m closing down my options, and limiting myself to Front End
• Also being a foreign student where you kinda have to “work in tech” since that’s my major a lot of fear is coming up. In case the time I go back in the industry there is lack of front end openings
• A lot of family friends in the industry telling me that Front-End specialization will be a waste of time since the industry is very saturated with it

Deep down I have realized specializing will really make my portfolio, knowledge and resume stronger. Plus Front-End is something I genuinely am drawn to and enjoy doing.

Would love to know your input on this.

Everything is available online. What to do, what not to, everything is there. But still, why do we need mentors and how can that actually help our career to grow? Lastly, where can you find good mentors?

I m hearing a lot of podcast regarding coding will be dead and we have no need for programmers and all these kind of stuff. So, my question is why to do it then? Why do LeetCode and why to do other stuff for entry level software engineering jobs?

What’s the future?

Good morning!

I work at a company of around 5000 employees and specifically on a team of 5. The culture and team are great but I feel bored half the time at work and don't see any true growth or progression happening. I work as the front end specialist on the team and feel a lot of the time my work has no impact as it only supports one customer.

My other question is in the current market landscape and given my work isn't even on the medium scale how do I go about transitioning to larger companies and having more impact? For context, my current job takes about 40% effort to complete my work and sprints ahead of schedule.

Thanks!