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

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?

My manager is relatively inexperienced (<1 year as a manager, and only a few more years of overall work experience than me). While they have a lot of expertise as a developer in the domain that we work on, when coming them to my previous manager, I don’t think that they have a ton of experience in growing and promoting people, esp. in a deliberate or structured way. How do I make sure that I continue growing, and receive the right growth opportunities and constructive feedback?

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?

I've two engineers who report to me, and both are average and one is towards PiP. The problem is they don't listen easily get influenced by other engineers and frequently change what I've asked them to do.
I'm now angry because the pile of feature requests are piling on me, I tend to do some work for them but this really not at all productive for my career, like managing, I rather behave like an IC altogether, because I want to learn and do my own stuff instead of getting caught in these bad situations that makes me angry.

What is the right way to handle these stuff from leadership point of view? How much involvement should I have?

I'm currently equivalent of Google L4 in my org but I want to move towards L5

I'm a new engineer at Snap, and my first month here is for onboarding. My team does internal tooling, and I have my first major project already lined up.

My manager said this should take an L4 engineer 1-2 months with a lot of help from the tech lead. This tech lead is a senior engineer pushing for promo.

The stack is a mix of Java, Go, and Python - I'm a back-end engineer on the team. However, I'm transitioning from a field that's pretty far from back-end. I'm wondering how I can make this transition as soon as possible and make sure I onboard well into the team?

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?

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?

Hey. I joined Taro's Slack community, and I see neither there, do community resources for such topics exist?

I would love to share my resume for review, is there any way to do this on Taro right now (I can imagine there are non-Taro resources for this, the quality of which may vary, but if you know one which quality is up to Taro's standards, please share them).

One thing that I learnt in one of the taro videos is to choose the right project for the career growth. However, I lacked this kind of vision/ability to evaluate. What I can do to improve this weakness? Should I grow more engineering domain knowledge or should I take some business courses to further improve myself?

I am a 15 year experienced software professional holding H1B. In my last 3 companies, I was a Senior Software Engineer. In my penultimate company, I was due for Staff promotion. Fast Forwarding, I was impacted by layoffs in Jan this year. I had 3 months to find a job in this market. I was applying and passing on my resume through all my network. Most of my applications got rejected quoting they picked another candidate. Some of my applications materialized into interviews , but I ended up not clearing (was in bad form and stress and also didn't get ample time to prepare thoroughly).

Finally, I got my application picked at a company through a referral, but they only considered me for SWE2. I explained them my experience and requested to consider me for SSE level, they said the panel will be open to it. But in the end, they ended up offering me SWE2. I took the offer as I had no choice. I was running out of time and did'nt want to risk rejecting this offer and waiting for a better offer. I took up the offer and joined, but I don't feel happy. I wish I had more time to really choose what I wanted.

I would like your thoughts on how "wise" is it to be SWE2 with 15 years experience. Would my age become a factor for further career progressions as they would prefer younger people? I am confused if I should stick to this, be patient, work smart and work my way up inside, or would it make more sense to keep interviewing and find something that I feel happy about. Look forward to helpful replies or referrals for SSE :)

I work as an E4/L4 equivalent Software Engineer at a fairly big tech company (5k+ employees).
My org's Senior Director is interested in helping engineers in his team develop good soft skills which align with one's career aspirations.

I have my 1st recurring 1:1 with him soon where we'll be brainstorming over which skills I can work on one by one. I want to go in this meeting with some ideas.

Personally, at this stage of my career, I haven't thought about whether I would like to stay in IC role or get into management some years down the line. So for now, I want to work on the soft skills which would generically provide best returns in future in the tech industry.

The ones which come to my mind are -
- Presentation Skills
- Leadership Skills
- Conducting meetings well with a large audience
- Decision Making

Can you please share the right skills to work on from your side ?
Also any pointers on action items I can take for each skill you recommend (or for above mentioned skills) will be of great help too. Thanks.

This question always stresses me because I'm a backend Python developer and the stuff I could learn is a lot that I end up studying/practicing nothing.

I use in my day to day: Python, Flask Docker, and Oracle. I don't know what else I could study or if I need to get better at these technologies.

I am currently in Team Match phase at Meta for an E4 role in the Infra Org. What is the general take on joining the Infra org? Is the WLB comparatively better than Monetization/Ads (which is the other option that I have)? Also, how should one define impact after joining a team? Given the recent layoffs, and the stack-ranking, have bouts of imposter syndrome kicking in every now and then, as to whether I would be able to do a good job after joining the team. Also, because of being on a work visa, it makes it quite stressful. I currently work in a non-FAANG semi-conductor company.

I have worked as a software consultant for 4 years at companies like Amazon, Hitachi, etc.

I'm trying to get promoted to E5, and my progress so far has been decent. I'm doing well on all 4 axes, but I currently have a gap on the people axis (it's not Exceeds Expectations yet). I know that people/direction are very important for E5s, so I really want to get better here. I do things like give tech talks and mentor some rotational engineers, but it doesn't seem to be enough for an E5-level people contribution. What can I do to shore up this aspect of my performance?

Just curious about opinions here. My main language is JavaScript, and I know people probably assume I am a front-end developer / full-stack (reasonable biases). In reality, I've been primarily backend for several years now. Throughout my experience at Microsoft and Twitch, I've used a fair amount of Node.JS / vanilla JS, then a bit more TypeScript for the CDK constructs we all know at Twitch (our team was primarily responsible for building and debugging Amazon Builder Tools things). I've done the majority of my interviews in JavaScript and it has been mostly OK, since I've used it for so long, but just wondering if it matters.

I used to do my interviews in C++, but then I got burned during a Google interview when my interviewer talked about the inefficiencies of emplace_back vs push_back (I had no idea). After that point, I just decided to do JS because I was reasonably proficient at it, and it is actually faster to write than C++ in a lot of cases (less boilerplate).

The top LeetCode answers / YouTube explanations and such are usually in Java or Python, so sometimes it's also hard to find a good JS answer. I'm leaning towards Python, because it is more like JS and with less boiler-plate like Java, but I'm worried about something throwing out some random trivia about Python that I have no idea about, because honestly I haven't used it much in my career thus far.

Some engineers like to code, some like to manage projects, some like to stay close to the users. Software Engineers come in all shapes and sizes.

What are the major archetypes of Software Engineers and how can one identify one's own archetype to double down and improve.

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?

Hey, I work at a large IT firm (can be compared to Big Tech in the west, similar culture, similar scale of work), currently in the process of switching teams, interviewed with a bunch, ended up with a choice of 2.

The first team has great growth potential (they are young and intensively hiring), and it directly works with money, so it seems like a good place for an SWE to do projects that are meaningful on the scale of a company & to have an opportunity to grow as a manager (more opportunities to pick up an intern, as they hire - to become a mentor of new hires and lead projects with them as a part of my virtual team). They have an analytics team which prospects the important tasks, and when the tasks are done, the results are measured to calculate the profits.

The second team is special in that it deals with the subject area that interests me the most - they develop an analogue of Facebook Games (or ), and it hits home, as I got into SWEing to be a game dev (before I found out they get paid pennies ). This team has less potential for growth, to the point them may have no headcount for an intern, and the hiring of new members will be slower. Also, they do not work with money directly, rather with target metrics defined by business. But they also have an analytics team which proposes the tasks based on the projected metrics growth & they measure profits on task completion, so the aspect of delivering the measurable profits is present here as well.

I'm trying to choose the best team for my career goals - long-term growth from L4 -> L6. As far as I understand, that may be done through team-leading of through tech-leading. I fully understand I'm not going to develop any games myself in team #2, but the fact that the subject area is the one I understand makes me feel like I'll have some morale boost in that I'll have an understanding of usefulness of the tasks i'm doing, as well as I'm seriously considering overworking for the next 1-1.5 years to perform better than peers & grow from L4 to L5, and it just feels like if I have more connection to the area of work, it'll be easier to pour extra effort, opposite to the area which I have little emotional connection with.

But this point about the "morale boost" might just be me wearing the rose-colored glasses, and I may be making a mistake trading a team with better potential for the one with seemingly more interesting scope.

In your experience which is better long-term - the team where work is work, but it's better for career goals, or the team where the work seems interesting, there's less direct career opportunities, but you feel like you are more likely to make your own via being more involved into the project you work on?

I recently passed 5 years of work experience as a software developer, mostly working at small companies/startups. I’ve been at my current position for almost 2 years and the startup is around 100 employees.

The company is doing great, we just raised another round of funding. I’m preforming well and I’m up for promotion to senior software developer next performance review.

With all that being said. My goal has always been to get into a big tech company and I think the earlier I do the better.

Overall I really enjoy working at this startup but I have always been career driven and I think going to a big tech company would be the right career move. Am I correct on this being the right career move or is this just the pressure developers feel to work at a big tech company?

It's a combination of spaced repetition learning and interview preparation.

The basic premise is that the better you perform on a challenge, the longer it will be before you reencounter it. If you forget, you will see it sooner.

Users can create and manage a table of questions, track their mastery, and schedule review sessions based on a space repetition algorithm.

Check it out:

• The features
  • The Grow Table:
    • An editable and filterable table
    • Each record has:
      • Topic.
      • Question.
      • Confidence.
      • Last reviewed date.
      • Next review date (based on space-repetition algorithm).
      • Review count.
    • Clicking on a record gives a more detailed view of the exercise you’re working on.
    • You can rate your confidence, which creates a new review note.
      • It also updates the next review date based on confidence.
      • You can see all of your past review notes, and you can create new review notes.
  • Adjust the space-repetition algorithm based on how long you have for an interview.
    • 1 week
    • 1 month
    • 3 months
    • Custom
• The use case it was meant to help with:
  • The goal is to help you pass your technical interviews by using spaced repetition to focus on exercises that are difficult for you.
• Tech stack:
  • NextJS
  • Shadcn/UI(radix UI + tailwind CSS)
  • Supabase for backend

I have more features in mind, but for speed, this is the initial feature set that I plan to release the application with.

I'm mid level, new to the company.

I got assigned a chunk of a bigger project owned by a staff level engineer, let's call him X, who has worked on the product for a long time and has a lot of context.

Things that were new to me: the language, the tool chain, product context. The codebase is several years old.

My skip level manager (1 level above my direct manager) once encouraged that I should aim to finish my work in less than 2x the amount of time it would take X to do it (but besides this I received no pressure, or reminder to push for this target from managers).

This was overly ambitious. I worked longer hours and harder than anyone around, including weekends but still could not finish it in 3x the amount of time initially estimated.

The staff engineer overestimated what I can do too. He's very willing to explain but I had a hard time mapping his high level explanation to what happens at the code level.

I could not tell if the standard here is high or the task is too hard. So I leaned towards putting in more effort rather than voicing my concern.

I also did not have a good sense of "are these unknown parts of the code base grok-able with a little bit of time or do they require a lot of time?" to estimate time spent up front.

In the end I got some barebone thing out and he took over. Still took him a couple more weeks to get the thing finished. Along the way he solved some problems I'm sure I have no chance of solving in that timespan.

With this evidence I was sure the task was legitimately too hard for me and was comfortable letting my manager know my opinion.

Back up a little bit, when I started working on the project, my manager knew I could not stick to the original timeline set by the engineer and encouraged me to take my time to learn the codebase. What is puzzling is my manager did not tell the engineer about this unrealistic estimate. The engineer reports to a different manager and has been around way longer than my manager.

Maybe there is some politics going on that I'm not aware of.

Anyway this has been a very stressful experience.

What could I do better? What should I do to mitigate any harm done through this experience?

What are the best practices for onboarding and being successful at meta MLE ads rankings team (E4)? Please share your thoughts on office culture/how to go along well with manager? tips for successful E4-->E5 track? how to ensure getting projects with Impact (team dominated by members from 1 country)?

Note, I will go through the on-boarding course by Rahul, but was looking for some tailored suggestions, thanks

Just joined a new team at Meta. Looking to level up to E5 which will require team influence and driving the team direction by creating projects. What is the best way to quickly learn and understand what the priorities are in the org? Once this is understood, what are some ways to influence the team?