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

I'm in the process of transferring teams right now.

What topics should I discuss with my new manager in our first 2-4 1-on-1s?

Topics that come to my mind:

• Working styles
• Strengths, weaknesses, interests
• Career goals
• Onboarding expectations (30/60/90 days)
• The team's mission / goals / KPIs
• Things on the manager's top of mind
• People to meet with / get to know

Would you recommend getting a lawyer to review employment / confidentiality contracts? I’m not sure how common this is, and what to watch for.

I recently was fortunate to receive an offer from an early-stage startup, and I recently received an offer letter and a confidentiality agreement. I'm curious if I should get my employment contract reviewed, and how to go about doing that.

Thanks,
Mani

I am a software Engineer with 9 years of experience. I started my career as a front-end engineer (worked on Ember.js) and did some Ruby on Rails. Later, I worked on technologies like Node.js, Ruby on Rails, Elixir Phoenix, CI/CD work, and React. In this period, I worked on many technologies but today when I ask myself I feel like I don't know any of these technologies perfectly because I've continuously hopped onto different technologies.

For example, 2 years back I worked on Rails and last year I worked on Elixir. This year I worked on React design systems with a Node.js backend (without touching Elixir or Rails).

Now, when I see any job description about Elixir or Ruby on Rails I don't have the confidence to apply to these jobs as I don't remember much about these technologies (even though I had worked on good tasks with that technology earlier).

I feel like I am good at nothing. I don't know my niche. How can I know my strength?

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 been on a half a year long break due to unemployment and recently secured an offer at Meta as a senior. I'm a bit stressed about hitting the ground running after coming back from a hiatus, especially because I'll be joining as a senior and am coming as a mid level engineer from a non-faang company. I have a month long break still left before my joining date and I wonder if there is something I can do to set myself up for success.

Additionally how would I go about finding a mentor specifically who has had a good amount of experience working at Meta already?

Hi everyone,

I recently had my bi-annual performance review in a FAANG-like tech company, where I was evaluated against four key pillars: project impact, craft excellence, direction, and organizational impact. However, the feedback I received was an overall "met expectations" rating without specific details on how I fared within each pillar for individual tasks.

I'm now looking to engage in a follow-up discussion with my manager to gain a more granular understanding of my performance. Specifically, I want to discuss:

• How I was evaluated against each pillar for the tasks I undertook (whether it was met expectations, below expectations, or exceeded expectations).
• Clarification on which tasks were aligned with each pillar and how my performance was assessed accordingly.
• Identifying areas for improvement and potential growth opportunities within each pillar.

Any advice on initiating this conversation respectfully and productively would be incredibly helpful!

Thanks for your insights!

I have to negotiate for my offer from Uber today, verbal offer chat will be today

Context

1. I am SDE2 at Amazon and was promoted so I have the low band base salary
2. Uber is the only interview I cracked, others were a weak yes and didn’t proceed to the offer so no other offers to negotiate against
3. This is what recruiter said which has me confused: They do not pay competitive salary as the other top tech companies, their pay is still in top 70%. Starting base mentioned was less than my current salary.
4. I am not sure if this is a tactic for negotiations or the market salaries right now. (Not the same on Levels fyi and I confirmed from someone working at Uber, their pay was definitely comparable to Amazon band, may be even more)
5. Unsure how strong I should approach it, if I am switching, I need it to be at least a bump in my salary. I want to ask for at least a some bump in base. Previously, when I have negotiated the final offer was a little less than what I asked but XXk+ more than what they first told me at the first call.
6. Would like to negotiate as much as possible, unsure if they consider other competing offers or my currently salary to counter.

I find myself in this confusion as to how and when should I spend time in

1. Interview prep for FAANG or alike(I usually spend 2-3 hours everyday 7 days a week). This includes system design prep too.
2. Learning more about technologies such as and not limited to say kubernetes, new AWS services or preparing for AWS certification? or Docker etc.
3. Learning about ML, or say web 3 etc.

How should one spend time in making sure they are doing deliberate practice for the interviews, but also are in "sync" with the market with all the new tools and technologies out there? Where does one stop? I know my priorities, but I also feel i might loose focus on my interview prep if I start multitasking.

How do senior engineers or mid-level engineers keep themselves uptodate? or do they only learn "whatever is required to get my job done"?

Hi Taro community,

Seeking your help in evaluating two offers that I received from two start-up companies.

• (1) In general, in such situations how do you suggest researching about the companies and determining which company and offer is better.
• (2) I am also concerned how my future job potential will be affected and so I want to take the decision accordingly.
  (3) In this particular case, my offers are as follows,
• company A
  • Unicorn (post money valuation: $1B-$10B), Industry: Ad Tech (ML and cloud infra based), Last funding type: Series C, Total funding amount: $190M, Estimated revenue range: $1M - $10M, Founded in 2013 by ex-googler,
  • I have seen several folks joined from FAANG companies (eg, Google)
  • Offer: base $160K, bonus: 24K, Equity: $88K (not sellable now, but the company is expecting to go for IPO in one year)
• company B
  • Emerging Unicorn (post money valuation: $500M-$1B), Industry: Healthcare/AI, Last funding type: Series B, Total funding amount: $120M, Estimated revenue range: $1M - $10M, Founded in 2017
  • Among big techs, I have found just one person from AWS who joined this company
  • offer: base $190K, no bonus, Equity: 114K (not sellable now, the company is expecting to go for IPO in 2-4 years). I may be able to negotiate this offer.

Thanks in advance for any kind of suggestions/comments.

I read and implemented a lot of the advice from Taro on building my relationship with my manager. I also worked closely with him for a year to position myself for the promotion to Senior. Every two weeks, I would meticulously document senior behavior in my "brag document" that I shared with him through Microsoft OneNote. Every month during our 1:1, I would ask him for feedback on what I needed to continue doing or change to reach Senior. During performance review each quarter, I used all of this to officially document my growth, and secured 3 Exceeds with 1 Meets. By the end of Q4, he was primed to go to bat for me.

Then he suddenly got laid off a month or two before names are submitted up the chain of command for promotion. I imagine others might have or will encounter a similar situation. In addition to layoffs, company reorganization or your manager jumping into another opportunity might have similar effects.

It feels like so much of my effort over the past year was futile. What makes this sting even more is that I'm fully aware of my company's promotion cycle, which is once a year in March/April. Promotions rarely happen outside this cycle.

What are some tactics to navigate this current situation and a strategy to avoid this single point of failure in the future?

Here's what I've done so far

• Reached out to manager on LinkedIn to console him on layoffs. Fortunately he brought up the topic of my promotion and advised me to pass along a message to my next manager that we were working together on my promotion.
• My company is still undergoing reorg, and I don't have an official manager yet, so reached out to his manager, which is the Director. The "brag document" in OneNote came in handy since I shared it with him and passed along the message from my manager
• Started looking at other companies for senior roles. It's difficult to bear the thought of starting over from square one with a new manager within my current company and waiting a whole other year.

Here's my thoughts around strategy moving forward

• Maybe work with manager's manager, in addition to the direct manager, for promotions. Would work more closely with direct manager, but at least touch base with manager's manager once a quarter regarding the promo.

I'm in the onboarding phase. I was assigned a starter task and have been working on it. I haven’t done the work of asking questions on design choices (that part is pending).

I want to be ramped up after a week and am wondering how to spend the time. Should I go in-depth on overall architecture? Or spend time working on the codebase? Or is there something else I should do?

• Company is doing an AWS migration (with lambdas). We're moving away from old IBM architecture.
  • Goal is to move away from SOAP service to build scalable REST API.
• I have limited working experience with AWS but never touched Terraform or have needed to do any migration work at all.
• We'll be building out lambdas and transferring traffic over to our new service
• Team is also new to NodeJS (with the exception of some new folks i.e. me and some other people)

Any recommendations on how to best succeed given the current context?

• General recommendations for succeeding in this ambiguous domain?

• Resource recommendations?

Thinking of skimming AWS docs / AWS course to quickly learn basics but planning on spending most of my time on implementing lambdas with mock data -- goal is to share POCs with team and iterate on feedback before sharing our new service with stakeholders.

I’m currently working on a 0 to 1 project that’s outside of the team’s scope, so I have no senior engineer on the team to support me and tell me what to do. I have to spend a lot of time piecing things together and it's been rough - I've missed on the team's ship goals as it's hard to move fast enough on this project. How can I make this situation better?

I haven't gotten a promotion for several years now. I'm still 2 levels away from senior engineer. My manager says that it's because we're not on a revenue generating team so projects are harder to come by. The projects he suggests don't succeed. How can I better understand why I'm not getting promoted?

I have never worked at a big tech company, but I'm just preparing continuously for the same, though my resume is not getting shortlisted, so I rarely try applying and keep studying.

Can I get a resume review and some pathway to stay in the interviewing loop?

Hello.

I have a busy senior/manager. We used to have 1-1s twice a week, and now I'm lucky if I even get a single 1-1 every other week. I understand that it's because he has a lot of responsibilities (e.g., coding, managing, scrum'ing) and end-of-year deadlines.

Here are some things I've done to make up for the lack of 1-1's:

• I over-communicate via IMs (even if he doesn't respond) to let him know how I'm progressing so he can "smoke test" my theories if I'm heading the wrong way.
• I present high-level overviews of the code (<15 bullet points) I'm working on to avoid doing deep dives into the implementation.
• I deliver short standup updates with easy-to-remember keywords that my manager has mentioned before.
• I try to offload some of his managerial tasks (e.g., onboarding new engineers) to free up some of his time.

Does anyone else have a busy senior? Should I be doing anything else? Thanks!

I've been at mid-level for a while, so I want to level up to senior quickly. However, I'm not really sure what I need to do to make this jump - The feedback across my manager and engineering mentors has been good.

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.

I am a middle backend engineer with 2 years of experience. I recently joined a very new startup(< 2 years) where my friend is my manager. He/she is a principal software engineer with 10+ years of experience. In the team, there are 2 other senior software engineers, each is 4 years older than me with 7-8 years of experience. When my friend invited me and interviewed me to join the company, he/she said that I might not be a senior yet, but he/she's sure that I will get to senior really soon because I have a habit of learning consistently.

Even though I only have 2 years of software engineering experience, I had previous 3 years of tech experience so I already know how to navigate company politics, communication, and have that business intuition. Also, in my previous company, I was the 1st backend engineer who had to build the codebase and infrastructure from scratch, so I am pretty confident that I am not a junior anymore. However, I understand that I still lack experience and knowledge on how to build clean code and how to build reliable and fault-tolerant system, and I feel like I could learn it from my manager, that's why I joined the current company.

The 1st senior engineer is pretty chill, he/she looks like he/she is not very ambitious to get impactful projects and looks like he/she's just happy to have a job to support his family. Besides, he/she joined the company 8 months earlier so I guess he/she already has some context. The 2nd senior engineer joined at the same time as me, and he/she looks pretty competitive. I feel like he/she's constantly sizing himself up against me and he/she's always making some little undermining comments such as "Are you used to code pairing? You look like you can't code", "Let me help you use a terminal", etc. Basically these comments are very subtle and masked as jokes or him trying to help me, but I sense that he/she's actually a bit intimidated by me.

My manager has a concept of "pairing", where he/she will split the team into 2 groups, and each group will work on a project for some time and then he/she will rotate it. In the 1st rotation, I was paired with the 1st senior and I did probably 70-80% of the project, but I was happy to do it because I learned a ton and my manager, during the 1-1 said that I was doing great and he/she told me he/she felt that the 1st senior is an underperformer. Despite this, I specifically let the 1st senior gave presentation of the project to the stakeholders because I felt that he/she helped me to onboard to the company so I'm ok with it.

The 2nd senior was paired with the manager and I felt that they did project that is much larger in scope and impact compared to me and the 1st senior. It means that now the 2nd senior has much more context than me. Right now I'm being paired with my manager, and the 2nd senior is paired with the 1st senior and I feel like I'm starting to get some context, but I'm just worried that when it comes time for me to get paired with the 2nd senior, he/she will hoard all the impactful projects and context and I will be stuck with really small scope. How to avoid the "rich gets richer, poor gets poorer" scheme? Thank you

I just started working at a new company. I am still going over the general onboarding process for all employees.

How should I go about introducing myself to the team & manager? Should I ping them on chat to say Hi & asking them to add me to the meetings? My whole team has about 16 members.

Thanks in advance!

A year back I joined a Big Tech company as a mid-level software engineer. I had 5 years of work experience mostly in not-so-famous startups and I joined a large tech company after doing my masters.

It's been a year since I joined but I regularly feel like I don't belong here. I go through alternating waves of confidence and self-doubt. When I am not able to debug simple issues in a new microservice, I feel dumb. I feel like the senior devs on my team are just able to solve everything and I am still struggling after a year. I have been through a round of layoffs and re-org and am not sure about the kind of work I will be doing in the future.

I want to be promoted to senior engineer level but constantly get feedback that I am not assertive, opinionated, and take more time than usual to complete ambiguous tasks. I see everyone getting promoted around me and I don't understand why I can't seem to be improving. I am very motivated and willing to slog hard, but it seems like I simply don't get it or am not smart enough. Everyone around me just feels smarter and more experienced.

I feel like moving to a smaller company with not-so-high coding standards and ditching big tech because it will be more up my forte. I am aware that I won't grow there. It just feels frustrating to be stuck at a junior-mid level, 7 years after my bachelor's. But I also know I am not at that level yet.

Any advice on how to go through this problem to the other side will be lovely.

I have a SDE 3 mentor who is very nice and helpful. I started working with them a while ago because I am trying to get promoted to SDE 3 but I don't always have great questions to ask. I also want to be respectful of their time.

What are some questions that will be most beneficial to ask? How can I make the most of this mentorship?

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?

Sleep and exercise are essential for staying productive as a software engineer, but what about food and eating? Are there any particular food or eating habits that is detrimental to your productivity as a software engineer?