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

Feedback

I got feedback on the last two quarters since I joined the company on three things:

Impact - E; Teamwork - M+; Technical Skills - M

Except for that, something that I was lacking was leadership & ownership.

Current Level: Mid-level.

Question Focus

• I wanted here to discuss my struggles in improving my technical skills & leadership. And what mindsets & behaviors I need adopt.

• My focus is more about getting a good rating & having a good bonus. And less about promotion at the moment.

Discussion

1. At the moment, I rely a lot of my lead to make decisions about things I work on & focus on. This is due to following aspects:
   1. I feel part of it is me not having confidence in myself to know what's right. Since my lead has much more experience in this area & I'm very new to it.
   2. The uneasiness of not knowing what's the right approach. It's easy to have another person look at it than dive deep into something you don't look of.
   3. Sometimes documentation is not in English at my company & that is a burden into looking at things deeply.
      1. It breaks my confidence at times & slows me compared to other people who know that language.
2. New tools & languages
   1. C++: I haven't spent much time learning it since I focussed on moving fast & creating impact so far. So that hampered me in setting aside time to learn this language that's used a lot in backend code.
      1. And at times I ask people in help for navigating code than I should do myself.
   2. I'm also haven't worked much in the backend part before being a MLE but now we all have at my current company but I don't feel any new concepts here I need to know.
   3. Design patterns
      1. I see these patterns in the code-base. Like how they use configs & classes. I see some other people in my team figuring it out very seamlessly. But I don't know which pattern they are using.
      2. And I don't know how time I should spend on this. Since reading a whole book on design patterns would be a lot of time. But knowing them would be useful.
3. Algorithms & ML
   1. A big part of my job or my main-job is improving the algorithms & ML models to make more revenue.
   2. A lot of times, I see my teammates reading similar approaches in the company & adopting them to our use-case. Sometimes doing so I find it hard. Since the docs of these approaches are not in english at times.
      1. So I have ask around some folks to translate things. This severely slows me down.
      2. The better way could be to read outside papers/approaches but that takes more time. And may not know if they fit so good to our use-case.

Would love feedback on

• how I can work better on these things
• what mindsets I can adopt here to make more progress.

Last weekend, I got some surprising news from my EM after our team's Pulse review submission was done.
Turns out, I'm getting a 'Meet Most' rating. I've been at Meta for two years now, and my EM thinks it's a good idea for me to start looking outside the company since a promotion seems tough in the next six months.

I'm not really sure what to think about this. Has anyone else been in this boat? I'd love to hear your experiences. Also, Is switching teams within Meta a viable option ?

Hi All,

I have a situation, can you help me on how you'd navigate it?

I have a potential project idea that has staff level scope.

There's a pain point across our company and this project would help the entire company.

I want to lead this project because it'd be a tremendous opportunity for my growth.

Given that I'm mid-level and lack of experience leading projects, I fear ownership of the project will be given to someone else to lead if I speak on it. This project shouldn’t be done in silo, this project needs to be part of the engineering priority because it will span across multiple teams.

Can you help me navigate how to maintain ownership/lead this project?

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).

Hi everyone,

I received an offer from AWS for a SDE 2 role. I was planning on asking for an additional 50k sign on bonus for year 1. I would justify this ask with evidence of past work (saving on infrastructure costs, mentoring multiple engineers) and being willing to cancel other interviews (mix of onsites and first rounds).

I'm a boomerang and the offer is the same as my TC before I got laid off. I also read some Taro Q&A and negotiation videos but couldn't find a situation similar to mine. The email states:

This will be the highest offer we are able to put forward at this time.

Is this a trick to try to get me not to negotiate?

My last feedback from my engineer manager was, I don't understand the task at work regularly and this is not an isolated incident, it takes too long for me to complete a task. When I seek for help, they point me to a direction to where to look into. After that when we meet at the second time, there is not much progress from where I left off.

It seems like I rely on my senior engineer too much, I feel like my approach was asking them for answers. I don't find it sustainable in the long term.
Obviously, I want to grow in developing my skills but whenever I get stuck, I get frustrated which add more stresses to me so I procrastinate, whether it is sleeping or playing games.

I don't have a computer science degree and come straight out of a coding bootcamp. Maybe that's where I feel lack of confidence or just feel lack of motivation in tackling difficult problems.

I am a bit lost at the moment, but I don't want to repeat this kind of behaviour.

How do I set myself up for success?

I'm moving forward to team matching at Meta for E4 and wanted to ask the community if they had any suggestions for teams with the strongest potential for growth, especially for the New York office.

The recruiter gave me the following survey. I stated I'd be more of a "Product - Generalist" role. Would also be curious to learn more about "Systems - Generalist" as I did the System Design interview as well.

In general from what I've seen, there's a decent amount of opportunity in Instagram, Whatsapp, and Reality Labs (from product announcements and earnings calls). I've also been told to avoid monetization as it's difficult to make an impact there.

Would appreciate any advice or suggestions! Also would appreciate tips on what questions to ask Hiring Managers to assess how they grow E4s.

What is your role? (select the one that applies)

• Systems - Generalist
• Product - Generalist

What type of work motivates you the most? (select all that apply)

• Infra: Scaling challenges
• UX: Building user experiences
• Growth: Top of line impact
• Integrity: Ensuring platform safety
• Social Impact: Progressing positive change on key social issues

Who do you want to build products for? (select all that apply)

• Consumers: External, individual users of the Meta family of apps
• Businesses: External business account users of Meta family of products
• Meta Employees: Users of internal tools
• Developers: Internal and external engineers using Meta developer products and APIs

Please select which Meta Pillar(s) you’d be interested in joining? (select all that apply)

• Family of Apps: Enable optimized enforcement and support of account integrity to foster safe and meaningful communities.
• Monetization: Empower people and businesses to succeed in the global economy
• Gen AI: bring the transformative potential of generative AI to people and businesses
• Reality Labs: build tools that help people feel connected anytime, anywhere

How would you rank your preference in terms of products? (feel free to use numbers)

• Facebook App
• Monetization
• Privacy
• Messenger
• Instagram
• WhatsApp
• Reality Labs (AR/VR)

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?

I recently got an opportunity to switch teams and am evaluating whether this is the right move for me.

To help me decide:

1. What's your thought process when deciding when to switch teams?
2. What's your thought process to decide which team to switch to?
3. What lessons have you learned from when you've previously switched teams?

P.S. I'm purposely leaving this extremely vague to not bias your answers. My goal is to discover blind spots in my thought processes, so I don't limit the discussion to revolve around my current scenario.

This will be a bit of a long story so please bear with me, I am willing to give you more context.

I am a foreign student who graduated from computer science. I have been working in the field since 2021, I was more passionate about design and big data over intensive leet code coding. These were the projects I also aced in college getting 90% in Big Data or Front End Design projects and barely passing on coding intensive

When I graduated to maintain my status I had to be employed in an E verified company so I took what I got, a full stack developer position. My mindset was more, maybe it’s a fear once I dive into might overcome it. The company was amazing and so were my managers. I loved every moment working there - I even finished all the assigned projects ranging from maintenance to building full MERN stack apps in 2 1/2 years. I learnt a lot and got more confident in my developer abilities.

Despite getting things done and finishing projects, I did realize I want to dive into UI/UX/ Front End Development or Reporting, because I’ve always enjoyed doing that more than Full Stack. I had a talk with my manager to see if I can laterally move. He gave me a go signal, but I got laid off a month after.

I will take 100% responsibility here that I had got a little complacent with furthering my career “outside “ work hours, and I learnt my lesson which I am willing to change and I got time to think about it after being unemployed 2 1/2 years of all the things I could’ve done better.

It’s been 2 months. I’ve been applying for jobs and haven’t got any, barely got 2 interviews which I didn’t do well in, but I’ll keep persisting

A sticking point I noticed here, generally being introverted I have some discomfort with marketing myself better or more like an imposter syndrome, and I was passive during my last work too which I know is not serving me anymore

What am I doing which is in my control?

• I enrolled in Googles UX certification and plan to get my portfolio ready in 2-3 months so in future I can be transition into my dream career
• Enrolled in a SQL course so I can keep the option of reporting open
• Joined this group because I never had much of a tech industry network or guidance, and I plan to take my career more seriously going in future.
• Applying for jobs everyday, mostly Full stack because that’s what I can explain to the interviewer because I have experience. Since my OPT unemployment starts Nov 15 which I get 3 months of

My questions:

1. What might be the possibilities that I am not getting interviews at all? I am not even applying to big tech, mostly manufacturing companies. Where can I send over my resume for review?
2. I do want to make the change into either reporting or UI/UX, because I am passionate about that and I believe I can kill it In that, how would you suggest an entry-mid level developer going down that path?

I am open to any honest feedback.

My Role is Senior SRE

I received my second performance review and it came in at a -M which means Sometimes meets expectations. This is my first year in big tech and I'm at a loss for words. I worked 12-hour days since I started. The first 6 months I just winged it and did not realize how strategic and crucial these performance reviews were.

So for my second 6 months, I aligned with my team lead and manager. I executed every project they asked me to and even created some projects to help the entire team. I was led to believe I was doing good work. However, this Tuesday I received the news that my rating is again a -M. They said that they did not put me on a PIP because they saw improvement from the last PR.

They told me the reason was that I am one of 3 Sr. Engineers and that two of them are performing more than I am. Since we are rated on a curve I am last. 9 out of my 10, 360 reviews were positive and an M or above. I have a follow-up meeting next week with my manager to discuss my improvement plan. I also set up a call with my manager's manager for a coaching/mentorship call.
Here are my questions.

• I feel like my manager sees others as more proficient than me. Even though other colleagues tell me I am better than the other senior engineers how can I break out of this perception my manager has?
• How can I avoid a PIP? Our next performance review is in 2-3 months due to some changes they made in the yearly PR schedule. I don't think I can make enough changes during that time.
• What should my approach be towards my manager and his manager?
  • I want to be humble but also direct.
  • I feel I am not being treated fairly but I also think the system may be designed this way. I don't want to appear like I am a victim either.
• I fear that I will get a PIP due to my manager's subjective opinion I will lose my job, my apartment, and I will have lost the last 2 years of working myself to the bone. How can I escape being in this state of survival?

Every time I'm assigned to a new ticket. I feel really anxious and afraid of asking questions because I don't know anything about it.

This led to procrastinating and making zero progress during 2 - 3 days.

Has someone else experienced this? How did you overcome it?

Code freeze is coming up next week so everyone is scrambling to ship their diffs in right now. However I am facing a hard technical blocker which can be resolved by a coworker on another team, but he’s too busy with his own diffs to help out. I am unable to reproduce or debug this issue myself as it involves some highly technical details about how a proprietary mobile framework (Bloks) interacts and compiles down to the Android native fragments, and I have minimal experience with either. The coworker wrote that specific part of the Bloks framework and no one else seems to understand it (even the Bloks on-call couldn’t figure it out). What can I do at this point?

I'm at a medium size software company, but still sometimes I find it really hard to get promoted if I don't fight for or create a golden project in the org. With almost 5YOE approaching, I still find myself struggle to advance to next level in my role. People I worked directly on my project are both at least 2 levels above me, they're at Senior II or Staff eng level.

I am now in a really awkward situation where I don't know if I should just interview at other similar level company for senior position or change teams internally.

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.

I started working at TikTok last September. So far I feel like I have learned a lot but am unhappy with the work-life balance and the expectations to work long hours. I don't see a path for promotion here so I would like to move to a company that isn't under so much political pressure and the path to career development is clear. One caveat is that my official title is DevOps but I am doing SRE work. I like SRE work and would like to get that official title.

1. I have 11 months to prepare for my next role. What should my preparation look like?
2. What kind of companies should I aim for? I made a list from blind of the 2023 prestige companies and wanted to shoot for high TC. I am thinking that after the prep phase, I would start interviewing at companies I don't want to work at and get practice and offers so I have some leverage during negotiations.
3. How can I connect with other SREs from top companies that I can ask them how it is to actually work there?

At this stage of my life, I need to begin more focus on my social life. I have been working on my career only and I don't have the abundance in my social life to justify the work I have been doing. So I am hoping to land a role at a company with prestige, solid TC, and work-life balance so I can accomplish both my personal goals and my career goals.

Can I do well at Job and interview prep simultaneously? Would be interested to hear stories from people and strategies employed.

Hey everyone, I tried searching online about this but couldn't find much info. I did virtual onsites with Meta this week and the recruiter called me asking if I knew anyone at Meta that could be used as an internal reference.

Is this generally a good sign and does this mean I'm going to the HC?

There have been multiple instances since I joined last October with my manager where in, I felt I didn't fit in. I had lots of excitement when I joined in, but since the 1st month, with interactions I have had with him everything went downhill.

I realised that I don't work until there's a fire/my life depends on it (serious deadline). I am literally the pro definition of procrastinator. I have been this person for so many years. Until things get serious, I have never had self motivation to do the hard things. When I want to do hard things, I always have procrastinated, when deadline comes, I try to find existing solutions, only when there's nothing that exists but I have to think and create one and I believe I can do it, I do it!

These things make me worry whether I have the ability to take anything up in this world. When items/issues are discussed during work, others pitch in and talk, and I just listen, and think, how am I not able to come up with these stuffs or be proactive in solving problems.

Is tech not for me?

What should I do now? My PIP is for 1 month. I do think I can survive PIP as this is exactly the fire thing I was talking about above. But I don't think I can provide the consistency they ask for! I am preparing for backend since I found my work in DevOps is mostly Ops and I like learning things than executing. I am not ready for job change for primary reasons like -

1. Don't know what job should I take?
2. Not ready to take DevOps roles with current knowledge I have
3. Not ready yet to clear backend interviews

Has anyone else ever been in my shoes? Not in PIP terms, but if they can relate to the procrastination bit / self motivation. What did you do to solve the problem?

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?

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.

What AI or ML courses help in the career of Database Administrator? Since AI is taking over the world, I would like to learn what helps my career growth

I was recently approached by a recruiter to interview for Bytedance, Singapore.

My DSA skills are rusty, not having interviewed in over a year. The primary language I use at work is Golang, but I do not think its good for DSA interview rounds as it has limited in built data structures. Earlier I have given interviews in Java but I have not touched it in a year.

Given I have 3 weeks to prepare for the DSA Coding rounds, should I consider learning Python as I have "heard" that its the preferred language and faster to use in coding interviews?

Given I have to ramp up on my leetcode and learn python, I feel this might be setting myself up for failure. Would like suggestions on how to think about this.