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

Going into Q4 there seems to be a lack of projects allocated from planning to our team. I think this is related to our manager being on parental leave last quarter and not having an advocate at the higher level planning meetings.

My question is also around how to deal with a situation where projects are strictly determined from the top-down (aside from engineering/maintenance + backlog issues, which are less valued).

I've heard 1-1.5x your full-time rate is valid. I know this will likely be context driven, I'm specifically looking for longer-term hourly rates as opposed to short-term / project-based, but would be interested in knowing the differences if there are any.

Thanks in advance folks!

I have unlimited PTO at my company, but I'm not sure how much I can/should reasonably take. Any advice on this? How much do you take?

I have been an Android engineer since my first job 7 years ago. I learned React and React Native along the way and made myself into making apps for iOS. I really like working on this environment and would like to gear myself up with native iOS dev skills.

I do get to design solutions and review other mobile engineers' design docs and code. I often find myself struggling to review the objective C code and nuances of iOS platform API usage (like animations, background operations, ARkit etc).

Where should I start to get better in iOS native app development?

I want to become better at

1. Writing objective C/ Swift code using native iOS platform APIs
2. Reading iOS platform documentations

Thanks!

Hi community,

I am a recently joined M/L engineer at Meta and working in ads domain. I am stuck for last few weeks in verifying a change. Essentially, it involves multiple systems built, request routing and looking for the expected changes. Tried reaching out to T/Ls and internal users. Even politely asked team / outside to ramp me up in the domain but nobody responded positively. They all give me pointers to some internal documentation or workplace group to ask questions. I feel I am really stuck. I have regular updates meeting on Monday.

Here's 2 things about how the updates work:

1. I am making some progress everyday but things are moving very slow which is making me frustrated.
2. When sharing updates, everybody shares the impact and good followups where I only share one incremental step like looked at the logging, traffic is low so can't determine the magnitude of the change.

Anyone willing to share their experiences?

I live in India, I aspire to work in a product-based company in the United States as a Senior Software Engineer.

There are a couple of approaches that I know of so I will jot them down:

1. Open-source: Contribute, talk to the community, and build a brand around yourself. This is the higher chance of getting noticed in the ecosystem. (I'm planning to do this in the coming months)
2. Freelancing for example use Upwork & target specific locations.

If there is a pathway or any other resources to follow please help.

I'm working remote and I feel I may not be more visible in what I'm doing:

• Should I keep showcasing things I'm working on?
• How do I be more visible and noticeable so my team doesn't think what I'm doing all day? We have multiple group chats involving skip level bosses and global team in which I feel I should be more visible but don't know how to.

Please guide me.

I'm a Database Administrator and I'm looking how I should proceed further as I see many companies especially big tech don't have a DBA role but Data engineer or Data Scientist or Data Architect. I tried talking to interview kickstart about what roles I can apply to and I'm told to choose one of the above mentioned Data * roles. Can you guide me here on what will be a better approach here?

Thanks

Hey folks,

I'm wondering if you all have experience working short-term contracting positions concurrently with a full-time position? My main motivation is to meet short-term expenses that came on the radar.

Let me know your thoughts, thanks!

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.

Hey there, for context, I completed my first year as Software Engineer.

I joined the company because I was in dire need without checking the company culture, following which I was not satisfied with the designation. I then started to look out for a job.

I got that offer after 4 months of joining with 33% increase in the salary.

When I told my EM he was willing to talk to the HR and match the salary but then the Head of the department didn't promote my role in the light that others in the team will think and ask why in 4 months I got my role upgraded.

The leadership conveyed that I might get the designation in the 6 months appraisal cycle.
In the appraisal cycle they denied my promotion saying my salary doesn't match the orgs designation and they don't know what to do.

I was not happy with the decision and since I didn't had any offers I kept working for the organisation hoping I will get it in the 1 year cycle.

Now I didn't get the review form for 1 year appraisal cycle. I think they will say in the lines of because your salary was revised at the 4 month you are not eligible for this cycle.

Though I don't feel my designation is the right one. But I have some other responsibilities as well like family, commute etc. I'm losing my motivation.

I need help in crafting effectively to EM and HR so that they consider my role and some appraisal so that they inline my career in the organisation else juniors will have a higher role in front of me.

From today I have also started looking out for other jobs, but I don't want to hurry in making decisions.

Hi,

I have 6 years of experience in the software engineering field, mostly working as a software consultant and at not well known startups. Having done MSc in the field AI, I got an offer to interview with Apple for an interesting role that seemed to have the best from 2 worlds - Software Engineering & AI/ML. To my surprise, after 6 interviews over the span of 2 months and an emotional rollercoaster, I got the job at ICT3 level and moved to another country. I thought I might be underleveled at first, but I kept thinking I actually don’t have experience in AI/ML so they’re levelling me as ICT3 must be right, I also don’t feel like a senior yet.

The situation I’m in now at work is very frustrating and disappointing to me, because of the following :

• I’m still onboarding after 9 months in, without being in a senior role. There is no serious documentation, I have to “network” in a forced manner, to find out vital information for an engineer like “do we have 2 prod environments and when do releases happen”.
• up until now I have not received any tasks or projects to sharpen my skills or keep the ones I worked hard for so far
• I had to beg for 8 months to be included in a project, the explanation was “we’re in the planning stage, we’re waiting for OKs to get started”
• I get neither serious SWE experience from this, nor ML/AI related one.
• Over the past month, after telling my manager I would apply for other jobs if this situation (not participating in anything palpable - just meetings) did not change, they finally moved me to another team that’s closest to SWE that this role can get.
• in the new team, they advertised this project that would mostly be backend work in Go. It turns out the codebase belonged to another team and the role that I’m in, does not imply bettering/maintaining their codebase or adding new features, it’s mostly data hillclimbing and adding some strings in the right places, so super humiliating after having prepared from DSA , system design & design patterns
• I don’t get to touch any AI/ML models yet or work with them, because I don’t have experience with AI/ML
• My manager is a new manager and has half the experience in the field as I do. I talked to him about my disappointment of being so undervalued and his take on this is, I first have to learn the tech stack to participate in “more advanced” projects. However my male colleagues, who joined the company a few months earlier than me, have been given more responsibility faster (participating in 2-3 projects after aprox. 6 months in)
• Time spent in the office is not productive at all, I can’t do focused work there at all. People chat and socialise all the time in the open spaced office we all work in and there are at least 60 people working there. This forces me to work overtime & during weekends, to achieve deadlines for the project and to learn the needed tech stack
• I’m starting to feel trapped in this job because it’s consuming my time, including my free time and I’m actually worried that if I continue like this without coding, participating in code reviews & other healthy SWE practices I’ll get out of hand and have a hard time getting another software engineering job or staying relevant in the industry
• Maybe what I’m experiencing in this particular branch of Apple is unusual for FANG or even other Apple jobs and would be grateful for others’ opinions on this situation.

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

Hi. Sorry for the long post.

My manager is quite happy with my performance as an IC, so in our 1:1s during feedback sessions, his suggestions for me are usually around increasing my influence within the team. Drive decisions, improve processes etc.

To add some context, Snap has a HUGE L4 band. Bigger than most companies (L5 at Snap is equivalent to E6 at Meta). This means we have a LOT of L4 engineers.

So right now I am in a situation where my team has 6 L4 engineers, ranging from 3 years of experience to 10 years of experience, with me falling towards the lower end of this range. To make matters worse, we also don't have a TL or Principal Engineer in the team. Which means we don't have a "guiding" engineer in the team to help "decide" on important technical decisions.

This has some consequences.

There's a big scope for "showing influence" in the team. Since we don't have a TL, every important decision is an opportunity to influence the team. And literally every L4 engineer is trying to jump on that ship. So we have this situation where people try to out-influence others (not sure if thats a word). This leads to lots of debates, lots of pointless meetings, and people eventually "fighting" over trying to be the decision makers for a decision.

A real example scenario: we recently had some discussions about improving our operational tickets backlog process, and literally every single L4 in the team wanted to write a doc on it to suggest improvements, to introduce a process to make the ticket backlog handling better, to show "influence" in the team.

I guess my question is, in a team like this, how should I try to build my influence ? I realize that everyone in the team is trying to achieve the same, so what can I do different. I know this is not a unique situation and very very common among more senior ICs, so hoping to pick their brains.

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.

Well, I've read the choosing the right team blog here on Taro and I've a more extended question to it.

The team I'm working with is not focused in communicating in a high quality level or a thought process. Probably the leadership is fearing job security and impostor syndrome such that there is no process or documentation followed. Even the way the normal communication is happening is very weak.
Though everyone is well-paid the direction is not clear enough.

The other day I was learning GMAT syllabus especially the verbal section and I can see the difference in the lingo and effective communication.

Please share your thoughts.

How can I avoid being assigned a manager who is managing people for the first time? This happened to me and my colleagues multiple times and it was always extremely stressful and unpleasant to work with someone who is managing people for the first time.

I know this would never happen to a staff engineer or a tech lead, but I'm mid-level.

Should I ask to move to another team? What reason should I give for wanting to switch teams?

I don't feel as interested in work as much as before after being at the current company for a little bit over a year. Is there something that I'm doing wrong? Do you have any suggestions to get better at this?

For some context, I also only stayed at my last 2 jobs for over 1 year, but less than 2 years. I think the current company, co-workers and product are great. I haven't been stressed about work for a while. But I don't feel as excited for work as I was 6 months in.

I've noticed a trend where despite passing recruiter screens as well as initial technical screens, the "on-site" phase with a full interview loop has been a barrier for me. This has happened at both start-ups as well as public companies (not Big Tech, but publicly traded). As for any glaring mistakes, maybe I just go too far down a given rabbit hole, or just don't code up the perfect solution immediately and instead have to actually work through the problem-solving and having that dialogue with the interviewer.

How much of this problem is down to the market or forces out of my control, and how much can I actually influence? The technical questions themselves are easier than the ones I answered when I interviewed (and got hired) at FAANG two summers ago.

I really don't feel good blaming things on blind luck or random chance, but it's either that or the hiring bar is literally absolute perfection.

• 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 received a couple of offers from companies when I applied for positions but there is always this thinking: "I haven't learned enough things here; I will wait for a better moment to change jobs". How do you all deal with it?

I am a mid-level developer. I am attending a tech event for the first time. Could you provide some tips on how to network effectively in the event? I feel like I don't have anything to talk about. Mostly my mind goes blank.

I'm currently working on one of my KR tasks, and have pockets of time available as the project involves cross-time zone communication at this stage. My manager wants me to focus on another KR that I have been planned for in Q4. This project is an important part of my manager's project that he started when he was a TL.

My skip manager wants me to focus on a non-KR task of increasing the scope of our team in a different project. If I manage to increase the scope of this project, I can change my KR to this new task in Q4 and lead the whole project is his rationale. I'm confused in this situation as to what to do?

I've recently joined a medical robotics startup as an Embedded Software Engineer after working for four years in large organizations in the wireless and semiconductor domain. I'm grateful for the full-time role and have already started contributing positively.

I have taken the initiative in documenting processes and setting standards, which my manager appreciates. However, my curiosity about the business side led me to arrange brief interviews with all employees, including the CEO. This was well-received by the engineering team, but caused concerns with the non-engineering staff, leading to a reprimand for inappropriate conduct.

Previously, I endured a difficult experience as a contractor with non-technical managers who were dissatisfied with my work despite my hard efforts, failing to convert me to full-time. I now find myself in a better situation but am still haunted by past experiences and need guidance to navigate this new environment.

Could you provide advice on how to integrate into the startup culture and reconcile my curiosity for learning with appropriate professional conduct? How can I heal from past trauma while embracing new challenges and opportunities in my current role?