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

I had a feedback session with my manager, and they gave me feedback that I was doing well overall but they would like to see me become more familiar with Meta's experimentation tools. They mentioned that this wasn't bad feedback as this unfamiliarity is expected with relatively new Meta engineers like myself. That being said, I'm unsure how to process it: Should I process it urgently and if so, how do I become familiar with Meta's gigantic experimentation infrastructure?

Hi, I'm from India. I have been unemployed since February 2024 following a layoff from my last job as a Full-Stack Developer (4+ years of experience). After that experience, I decided it was time to move away from startups and their unbalanced lifestyle. My goal is now to secure a role at a FAANG company (only in the U.S.) and nowhere else. I have savings that will last me about six months to support this transition.

Initially, I planned to focus on Data Structures and Algorithms (DSA), an area where I had very limited knowledge. After reading a few posts on LinkedIn (mainly from influencers), I mistakenly believed that three months of preparation would be sufficient for technical interviews. I now realize I was wrong. It's been 10 months, and while my DSA skills have improved to an "OK" level, I still don't feel confident. My System Design skills are also at an OK level.

I've been applying to FAANG and other companies, but I keep facing rejections. I suspect this may be due to the employment gap or the lack of big-name companies on my resume.

What I'm doing to bridge the gap:

• Working on side projects that demonstrate my skills in System Design, Databases, Programming Languages, Distributed Systems, and Microservices.
• Building a mini-startup that I can showcase on my resume, allowing me to highlight my Full-Stack development knowledge.

My goal:
I'm aiming for at least an L4 role at Netflix or a Full-Stack position at Google or Apple.

With this employment gap, is it bold or foolish to still aim for FAANG?
I’d love to hear any suggestions that could help me get shortlisted.

I've been at this small startup (~100 engineers) for about 8 months.

I've worked on 2 different projects/teams (2 months + 6 months) for various reasons. This constant ramp up process is limiting my ability to make significant impact.

Now my manger is about to move me to another totally different project because my current project scope is transferred to another team.

The startup hasn't done a layoff yet, but the possibility is there this year.

I think I need to stop paying the ramp up cost and stick to my current area (meaning switching to the other team) so I can make bigger scope impact and avoid getting laid off.

How should I navigate this conversation with my manger?

Hello Taro Community, I hope you are doing well.

I was hit by a lay off mid sept and I have been unable to land a job. I enrolled in Grad school since I have limited unemployment days because of my student visa. My degree starts Jan 2024.

During Grad School, I am only allowed part time work. I am still looking for part time work in the tech industry. And currently on 3 years of work experience.

I want to do things right this time when I graduate and go back into the job market again after Grad School.

An obvious mistake I made which was I didn’t have a clear direction of career in mind. I kinda wanted to have a tech job where I get to code, pretty vague and my applications were also shooting blind darts and seeing what sticks. I did land my first job quite fast after graduation from undergrad and got a new one a year after with a better pay and change of location which was my recent company I worked in for almost 2 years.

But these last 3 months were pretty brutal, I know the market wasn’t the best but I could’ve also been more prepared. I want to improve my odds for my next job hunt.

My goal after graduation: Front End Developer/ Full Stack Developer Position. Preferably in a non tech company example: Starbucks, Nike, H and M, Chase Bank etc.

and I set location and pay range goal too.

Question: From the seasoned in the industry here, what are some actions I can take on daily consistent basis during my Grad School to move closer to this goal and possibly achieve it when I graduate?

My plan:

• Keep revising the fundamentals of Front End and Back End to have strong grip on interviews.
• Personal Projects for a stronger portfolio

Open to any suggestions.

Thanks in advance.

I came in as an E4, but I feel like I'm over-leveled. I only had ~1.5 YOE before Meta, and I was doing relatively straightforward coding work at startups. However, when I joined my team, my manager's goal was to get me at E5 ASAP.

This has led to them giving me a lot of very complex scope. Here are some of the things I've gotten/am expected to do:

• Got a hard 0 to 1 project with no senior engineer to assist me
• Lead 2 E3s
• Work across multiple, completely separate stacks

I haven't been able to handle all of this - I'm falling behind and feeling pretty stressed out. I would much rather just take the time to build up the E4 fundamentals and stabilize at an MA initially vs. chasing E5 promo right out the gate.

I am a mid-level engineer at an HFT company. I've been with my current company for around 7 months and another similar one for 2.5 years previously. My biggest career issue so far has been poor attention to detail, which leads to me to always miss small mistakes I make.

For instance, I always review my own PRs myself before sending to reviewers, and clean up plenty of issues I notice myself. But then my reviewer will point out some kind of bug, or something I forgot to do, and in retrospect it will be immediately obvious to me. Alex often mentions the importance of being able to get most of your PRs accepted in one attempt, but for anything > 30 lines this simply feels like a pipe dream because I am so terrible at noticing things until it's too late.

(For the record, I'm very thorough with test coverage, but when I simply forget to implement something, I of course forget to test it too).

Another more specific example is that our process of verifying features in production is sometimes a bit involved, and requires changing config in several places. I knew what to change, did so and tested everything, then told my manager the feature had been verified. Later on he was looking at the configs (not sure whether he did it to check my work or for some unrelated reason) and pointed out that I did not actually set everything as I intended to, and therefore the feature wasn't verified correctly. I realized mistake I made (ran a command to change a bunch of files in the wrong directory) but only after the fact, and it cost me embarrassment and extra work.

I think I'm quite good at the other aspects of software engineering: coming up with impactful ideas and executing on them independently, picking up domain knowledge and areas of the codebase quickly, fixing bugs (my own or others'), presenting on my work, etc. So I've been able to eke out "meets" and even "exceeds" reviews at my first job because I had significant impact despite blundering all over the place.

But my deficiencies in this area make me fearful for my career, as I am always worried about making just enough mistakes to get PIP'd or fired. Furthermore, we don't have levels here, but I doubt I can make it to the equivalent of Staff or even the senior level with this kind of defect.

Does anyone have advice on how I can "train my brain", as it were, to improve at this ASAP and make sure I don't go down the wrong trajectory? Thanks!

I got a job through a friend after getting laid off, but the day I started this new job, I got a full-time offer for another more prestigious company. Do I take it?

Hi folks,

I'm a mid-level engineer at a big tech company in the bay. While at my company, I haven't felt connected with the product, excited about the work I've been doing, or that connected with the team. I was interviewing for an internal transfer -- and I just had verbally accepted the offer. It was supposed to be a transfer to an acquired company I was excited about -- but I found out they just cut budget for the role. The role is to be remote. I'd have to move back home with my parents. I'm open to doing this, but it also comes with a 15% pay decrease, and I'm already out of and not refreshed on rsus. The transfer offer is a 15% reduction in salary.

The last option is I've been working on a side project with some friends to learn building a web-app end-to-end, so I could take some time off, recharge, and potentially work on my own thing. Overall, I'm quite burnt out and feeling tired of my job. Rather than working on large-scale infra, I'd like to get back to my roots (health-related technology). Any thoughts on this decision? I'm a US citizen, so no visa restrictions.

English is not my first language. I don't know what to write or talk in all kinds of situations. I don't know if I lack critical thinking to think about points or is it because of lack of English proficiency. I have joined Toastmasters but its not helping that much. I am looking for 1-1 coaching in English speaking, writing, public speaking. Group discussions, driving meetings especially getting alignment, breaking down points, story telling are my biggest problems. Any recommendations to fix these issues?

I joined a new company about eight months ago. Up until now, most of the work was more about deploying existing models & doing minor tweaks here & there.

However, I feel the expectation now is to make novel changes to the algorithm. So, I work on a big ML model in TensorFlow. I haven't coded in tensorflow for some time. Theoretically, I read the papers of the code & I understand the model overall. But I don't understand the code; it seems super complicated. It has no comments and does not have the best variable names. I also fear reading it because I've never been that good at deep learning frameworks.

I once asked another co-worker how she/he read the code base. And they just told me it's so easy just to read, which makes me feel more dumb now.

I was thinking of using claude/chat-gpt to understand it. But every time I don't understand anything, it reinforces my mindset of being bad at this.

I don't talk about this to people in my team because I feel dumb asking how basic lines of code work. I feel I want to figure it out myself but how can I develop better mindsets & better approaches for this?

My first team didn't work out for me. I was there for less than a year and got the poorest rating, was set up for a PIP. Somehow I made a transfer at the last moment and survived. Certainly, it was the most difficult phase of my life & I am quite grateful to my new team. Now, I'm already in the new team for less than a year and got an average rating last time. The rating was partially influenced by previous manager as I spent almost half of my time there.

Currently working on multiple projects at the same time and grabbing almost whatever task is offered and somewhat gained trust I believe. But the quality of those tasks are not too much complex rather modular & takes more time. I can keep on doing this way but not sure what is the right thing to do. The team is relatively new. Recently started a promo discussion humbly and not pushing it. Manager's review is I'm operating at L3.6 now.

Now,

• What might be the mental model to forget the past?
• Sticking around for almost two years now, what might be the correct time & way to reach Next Level?

In the middle of the hiring process I decided to review the company I had applied to in Glassdoor.

The reviews were very demotivating because they all mentioned multiple waves of layoffs in the last year.

By the time I read the company reviews in Glassdoor I had already had 3 interviews: phone screen, technical interview (leetcode) and system design interview. I performed excellently in all of them. The feedback from the interviewers and the recruiter was really good.

In my last interview with the hiring manager, everything went perfectly until it was my turn to ask questions. I could almost tell he was about to offer me the position. This was the question I asked him:

"When was the last wave of layoffs at <company>?"

He was surprised; I could tell by his facial reaction.

One week later, the recruiter sent me an email with an absurd reason for why they decided not to extend me an offer.

Do you think that the question I asked was the sole reason for my rejection?

Context Of Company

This is a really well funded company (Bank) that underwent a large scale leadership change. The company's primary source of revenue was never it's tech capabilities, however with the new leadership change they're looking for a large scale revamp on how the existing systems work and are working on setting upto a FAANG equivalent engineering environment. This is vision is consistent across the leadership upto the CEO. This org currently consists of multiple Staff engineers from Twitter, Meta, Amzn and Google leading big initiatives.

Personal Context

I'll be soon taking up an offer in this company and will be joining this freshly created Org, where I've opportunity to be among the first 10-15 engineers to join with potential of the org to grow over 100+ engineers. There are lot of existing tech that have been already deemed unscalable due to previous decisions and have been a known business blockers, these tech require either re-write or a large refactor or a completely different viewpoint on tackling this problem. This will involve me working with Engineers who've built this system (Not part of this new Tech Org, rather the old existing infra), I've been already given a heads up from my potential manager that there can be potential hesitancy that the existing engineers may feel and wouldn't be too open to provide all information necessary as our systems will be replacing their soon (Have been reported that this has happened). There isn't a concept of internal wiki similar to Amazon or other Big Tech, hence lot of this is just domain knowledge etc. Fortunately the leadership is aware of this and is taking steps to answer this, and takes into consideration when scoping for projects and setting up right expectations.

The following are certain concerns that I've, and wanted to understand what is the best course of action I can take up to make my onboarding successful.

This is my Current plan, given i'll be among first engineers to join this team.

1. Understand domain, reach out to multiple PMs and document all pain points, problems we are solving in long term & Short term.

2. Go through code base of relevant packages and start adding their UMLs, HLD etc to best of my abilities to a document to move towards creating a Knowledge base.

3. Socialize with engineers from the related org and try to gain their confidence, and potentially get few KT sessions (Not sure how i'll go about this as the team is situated in different city).

4. Work with manager to setup boy-scout rule, such that everyone onboarding will incrementally add more to the existing knowledge base.

Follow Up Questions :

• I still haven't taken up the offer yet and still have a week before I can respond. The increase in pay and the growth opportunity in the new company is significantly big, I can see myself reaching Sr.SDE in < 2 years and Staff in < 4 years there due to the problem space being so fresh and getting a really early head start. However, I'm slightly concerned if the lack of co-operation from other org and lack of documentation, and the fact that the entire org is being setup fully freshly could be a concern. What's the best course of action i could take to minimize this risk?
• Second, one would view moving out from FAANG to a not well known company as a downgrade, would this still hold true if the problem space and opportunities in the new company is more complex?

Manager and I have a disagreement on creating a promo doc as per the approach suggested by Rahul and Alex .

So to avoid losing the time I went ahead with working on a XFN project, say Project XFNA , as it has high visibility and chance of impact. Due to the complexity I had to spend lot more time on it than I initially estimated.

It meant putting 1 week time learning/testing a frontend framework , Angular and I am a backend developer and never done Frontend coding earlier.

What happened was.. my main project's progress ( say Projects B , which doesn't have impact opportunities in the short term) got delayed by a week , due to my focused attention on Project XFNA. I am Mid-Level Software Engineer [SDE 2] at Amazon.

I will need to defend my time on this project XFNA as I focused on it purely for delivering quick impacts. So can I say to my Mgr that I "I took this initiative to work on Project XFNA for showing impact in the short term". If not, how should I rephrase it?

I've been a Data Engineer for most of my career and my observation is that scope as a Data Engineer can plateau and therefore I see a lot more L4/5 DE's than L6+. I think it is because you don't impact the bottom line directly and regularly.

At FAANG's I've worked at so far, finding new scope can be difficult even when you are working with stakeholders: it is "easier" to scope/build a product (i.e. SWE work) and show metrics of success to add value vs building a data pipeline which may be limited to them having a reporting need for example which often isn't the case especially in a more established firm.

I moved into a partner facing DE role to help more with scope/stakeholder exposure. The highest impact project I worked on so far is influencing an internal team to change the way we measure a particular metric. This involved mostly stakeholder management and nothing more complex than SQL queries from a technical standpoint. While it was fulfilling, this is also something I 'stumbled' upon and is rare due to challenges like partner scope/vision is limited/slow (their leadership can change and therefore you projects/ideas can), technical challenges of automating things because of larger concerns (e.g. privacy, lack of infra on their side which you have no control over) and so on (you generally have even less control than an internal DE).

In my current role, I am generally able to derive projects, but (in my opinion) they are limited in scope/value: i.e. build a pipeline, deliver an analysis. Therefore, even though the projects 'ticks the boxes' for an L5, it is not really driving a 'transformation' as an L6+ would. I also directly asked my manager what are some of the hardest problems we have, and have been told we have a lot, yet, I'm not hearing or seeing them.

Given the situation, would you:

1. Move to a SWE role internally at FAANG for a more established path 'up' (not sure this resolves the scope problem especially at FAANG as I think SWE-DE's can almost be even harder to get to L6+ on because they generally lack stakeholder visibility and focus on more top down work?).
2. Seek roles outside of FAANG where the scope of the work is already scoped to L6+ e.g. Airbnb so the 'heavy lifting' has been done in terms of scope.
3. Refine your scoping strategy within you own team, and if so, how?

Note: my motivation is to thrive at work, this isn't for a promo, just incase the post comes across as promo-focused. :)

I've been struggling with onboarding at my new job.

I'm part of a new team; my only other teammate recently joined. Many related docs are not in English & the translation is weird & confusing often. This makes revamping up independently super hard for me. I try to find that concept in an English doc from any other team, and that's my way of understanding something. But it puts a lot of overhead because I basically now try to understand the work of a lot of related teams too. And often it is much more time for me.

My manager has a lot of people report to her. I had a 1-on-1, and I explained the situation. She asked me to ping her for help. I often have stupid questions, and I feel weird asking her directly. So I asked her to assign me an onboarding buddy from the related team. But from her reply, it seemed like I should talk to everyone on the team & figure it out. I think she wants me to be more independent.

Now I ping people in my team or close teams to ask for help. I have found most or nearly all people to be super-helpful, and they relate to being in the same situation once. But I feel guilty about asking people for help. I feel it doesn't do much for them. As with most, I don't have a team meeting where I could thank them & their/our manager would notice it.

How should I better navigate this situation?

We recently wrapped up the performance review cycle and I'll be having a meeting in a few weeks with my manager about my performance review and any potential annual raises. Recently, I was switched to remote status and took a ~12% decrease in total compensation and almost puts me at the junior-level compensation. I was wondering if I should be negotiating for a larger than normal (2-4%) raise in order to make up for the remote status pay decrease. I am bit cautious during these tough economic times but the pay decrease may have been a bit drastic as others in my location pay tier are paid more. Promotion raises are likely unrealistic as I was just promoted a few months ago.

When I joined the startup, I was the most experienced engineer and I had two junior engineers working with me. At that point, I had the choice to make architecture decisions and the CTO would work with me to design new systems. The systems I created have worked well, it has been 1 year now and there are no issues with them.

The company has grown and we have hired a lot of seniors now. I have not been included in any new discussions like hiring, the product roadmap. Even on a project where I had taken the lead on it from a very long time (I was not assigned to it, I just assumed the ownership) now the CTO wants the opinion of another senior engineer.

I'm good at infra work and have setup infra when the senior engineers are not able to do it. I'm not sure about my level either as during the 1:1s I was level as an upper mid level while my colleagues believe I'm senior. It shouldn't really matter as I want to just write code and help others, but with a proper title, I think people might take me more seriously.

When speaking to the CTO about my performance, they believe that I'm doing good and probably I'm being too hard on myself. I do know I have dropped the ball at times as I have too much on my plate at times.

I'm just scared that I'm becoming becoming less relevant in the company & really want to increase my influence.

I got a P40 offer from Adobe working on some ML-related problems in AEP. The pay is decent. However, I do wonder how it will be seen on my resume.

I am from a mid-size social media company (think of Reddit, Pinterest, Snap, LinkedIn, etc.), so I can shoot for FAANG if I'd like. However, I wonder if I decide to go to Adobe first and then FAANG a few years later, will a stint at Adobe on my resume hurt the optics? I don't care about "prestige" per se but I do wonder how it will be seen from a recruiter or HM's perspective. Worry about potential bias. Thank you!

I'm a product generalist at Meta and I've been offered to opportunity to ramp up to Android and possibly specialize in Android dev. What are the considerations I should be thinking about when 'switching tracks' like this. E.g. will this reset my progress towards promotion as a prodgen or will it enhance my skillset for future opportunities?

I normally apply to companies on a warm basis, with warm contacts so I can always try to get feedback post-interview to land a job, or sometimes while I apply cold, limit these and prioritize warm ones. I've noticed a lot of new software coming out during the pandemic for mass applications, but I am not sure this will work for me as a non-traditional candidate who has mainly interviewed for positions in the non-standard way. I do realize that given layoffs, the numbers is game is one I might need to play more and could invest some money into this, but I know some software might be better than others. There seem to be so many new services out there, that the market is saturated and I'm wondering how effective this would be and if it's worth the money and that maybe I would rather spend my time (instead of just money) instead focusing on applying more thoughtfully through my warm networks and referrals, rather than mass cold applications via an AI bot or other software service.

Will I get screened/frozen out and auto-rejected for two years if my resume is crap because I hit 'apply' to a hundred companies?

Thoughts?

I am trying to start a conversation to get across my technical proficiency so that the manager is likely to recommend me for an interview at the big tech company. The company has an engineering blog that I have read, but not sure what I should ask. This is for a mid-level (ideally senior) backend role. The manager has said that if I send them a list of questions they would be open to a call to discuss said questions.

Also the company is Uber ->

I was wondering if you need to be part of a specific type of environment in order to make quick jumps in your career? Like to get promoted to senior level in 2 years.

I was asking because from my experience, there seems to be an invisible social hierarchy in every work place. Other people in the team may not allow me to make these jumps since this kind of anomaly will break the social hierarchy:

• There is project specific information, in absence of really god wikis you have to rely on the peers in the team to provide you such information (like how are specific parts in a service working, or how is an obscure internal tool working etc). From what I see, often times they will provide small chunks of information, as much as you need to do your task, but small enough such that they still have the information and you depend on them (probably a measure to prevent others from replacing them).
• Envy might appear between other senior folks if you progress quicker than them and might start to backstab you (For example, you need some information from them about a piece of code they wrote in order to progress, but they might do the knowledge transfer in such a way that it looks like they told you what you need to know, but in reality you got nothing; or might tell you to go debug to figure out how is something working, and you can spend days debugging modules when it would've been an 1 hour stretch if they simply told you or there was any wiki).
• Manager might not want to give you extra money and compensate at your true value.
• If you work too much, or too hard there's going to be problems withe the peers, because you increase the bar and kind of force them to work harder too.

I was asking these things, because I was wondering if I got anything wrong about these fast jumps or in general that I have a broken view about work. My first professional experience was an internship at a big tech and when got there the seniors told me that I have the same knowledge as a senior engineer, but best they could do was another internship next year (still in college).

I spend a lot of time on oncall. There's just 3 engineers on the oncall schedule (2 other back-end engineers and myself), so we're all oncall once every 3 weeks. We hired 2 people and are looking to onboard them into the rotation later in the summer, so it will become once every 5 weeks for oncall soon-ish.

Psychologically, the oncall is very draining as I'm constantly fearing what’s going to happen. For example, I can't work out at the gym in peace as I'm constantly on high-alert in case an issue pops up. How can I have better work-life balance and less stress with this situation?