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

Hey everyone!

I just passed all my Meta interviews for E4 in infra! and now I am onto team matching!
However, my recruiter wants me to try out for the monetization/ads org, but I've heard a lot of bad rumors about that org, notably that work life balance is awful and stress is really high. (Blind seems to especially dislike it haha)

Does anyone have real experience with that org here? Are the rumors true?

I don't mind a little bit of extra stress and doing some overtime from time to time as long as it's not overtaking my personal life.
For instance at Amazon (Gen AI) there were months where I was doing 80h+ per week non stop and that's the number one reason why I would like to leave tbh.

This is only the fast track option that my recruiter is offering me tho, I might still be able to get into the normal team matching pipeline afterwards too.

Anyways, thanks in advance! :)

I'm trying to figure out the proper level of fidelity here: Should I have very granular estimates or something that's not super structured - Just a high-level idea of projects with some buffer built in.

I'm curious to know how to structure this plan to ensure that one doesn't take on too much and get overwhelmed, but is also full enough so that in case of blockers on core projects, there's a pipeline of projects to switch into. Would love to hear everyone's thoughts!

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

I am currently on a team where I am assigned to work on a different area of the product(s) in each quarter as per the priorities of the leadership for that quarter. This has resulted in me gaining a good full-stack overview but not much depth on any specific components/technologies. I've been on this team for around 18 months right out of college but 80% of the technical work I've delivered till now has just been pattern-matching based on the existing code and infrastructure, although the outcomes have been impactful for the business. I feel like I'm not learning anything technically significant beyond company/product-specific knowledge which are not transferable to other companies. When I check out job postings from other companies for my level of experience, there always seems to be a focus on having expertise in some technology, which I can't confidently claim. This brings me to the following questions:

1. Should I stay at my current company? My career growth prospects seem great here as I have a very good reputation in my team and sibling teams, and have gotten very good feedback and visibility from managers and seniors. I also work as the lead developer for a legacy product which is not that robust and has hard-to-reproduce customer bugs, but the leadership has taken a renewed interest in adding new features to it, resulting in more potential scope for me. The main downside is low technical-learning as mentioned above, and I've heard this same remark being mentioned by senior engineers who have joined from other companies as well.

2. If I decide to switch companies, how do I bridge the lack of technical expertise that's expected for my level? When a recruiter views my resume, the technologies that I've used at work and as part of side-projects are all over the place, without a clear specialization. Although I'm confident that I can pick up these stacks without trouble on the job if needed, I feel underconfident in them in an interview setting.

One of my core goals is to get to L5, which is senior at Target. However, I'm not entirely sure what is necessary to get to that next level - I've tried to get specifics from my manager, but their answers have been relatively vague. I was wondering if anyone could share more concrete attributes of what a strong senior engineer looks like.

• I can use chat-gpt/claude to understand small code-snippets. But I'm not sure how to use it to understand the whole code structure. Are there any IDE plugins that worked for you for this purpose?
• Especially in streaming/online model service, I can't add print statements to debug. I can only look at tensorboard which isn't helpful in understanding the code-base. How can you better understand with ML models in this scenario?

As a fellow keyboard goblin, commit-ing away either from home or the office (depending on the alignment of the moon) it can be sometimes tricky to make sure you're also living a healthy lifestyle.

It can be so easy to fall into bad habits of eating at your desk, snacking excessively, retorting at the scorn of ultraviolet rays hitting your eyes upon waking up 10 minutes before stand-up etc.

How do you mitigate this?

My personal strategy:

• Maintain high water KPIs
• Using my lunch to do some laps outside of the office
• Going for runs (albeit lately, nearly exclusively on treadmills)
• Never buying bulk snacks (gotta increase the friction somehow)
• Having a health checklist with a list of items I've determined to be impactful

I have also played around with the idea of finding the health "meta" and tracking every single micronutrient via cronometer, basing my diet off of a nutrigenomic report compiled via my gene data, buying every single reasonable health tracker and using that as a success metric etc.

But the above won't be useful if I randomly decide, "today I'm going to only eat pbnj sandwiches bc I'm feeling lazy".

Consistency definitely seems key

I'm currently working through a task where I have to write unit tests. These unit tests in theory should test out the entirety of its class isolated from any other classes or function and effectively apply business logic on how these functions/methods are being called.

But where do I draw the line in regards to how much testing I'd need to run? Currently struggling with this PR because there's lots of lines of code (bad I know), but I do need to find out what a complete unit test looks like.

If you had to ask me, a complete unit test is where all the unit tests traverse through all code path and have both positive tests and negative tests being ran to show how the code should be used.

If there's some sort of guidance online, that would be helpful. Otherwise I'm mimicking what unit tests have been approved based on style and usage.

Currently, I am only going through Neetcode's roadmap. I have solved 40+ problems.

My process is:

1. Understand problem
2. Try to solve the problem
3. Try for 10 mins
4. If not, go see the solution video
5. Understand the solution and code up the solution
6. Take notes in an excel sheet for revising later

I only read up theory related to the video in case its something I do not know about from before. Only for max 30 mins, so that I do not waste a lot of time reading up. My primary aim is to learn by solving problems.

I am able to solve some problems but I feel I still do not have the intuition for solving new problems.

My questions:

1. Should I be reading up on more theory before I start doing more of the roadmap? Maybe go through Neetcode's courses.
2. Does it simply take solving more problems to build up the intuition?
3. Should I try harder on my own before checking the solution video?
4. How did you build the intuition to solving new problems?

I've heard from my peers at Meta that you should post a lot on Workplace, otherwise it can reflect badly on your PSC. Is this true or more of a myth?

I am a mid level engineer and I work for a manager who has micromanaging tendencies. Some of these tendencies include,

1. Going deep into implementation details of tasks that engineers are working on. I have been in meetings/discussions where proposed solutions by engineers have been ripped apart by this manager without them having enough context about why the engineer is doing it a certain way. This almost always leads into the engineer having to explain the nitty gritty implementation details to this manager to convince them that the engineer is doing the right thing. Overall, the manager shows very little trust on the decisions taken by the engineers.
2. When there arises a situation that the manager wants something from an engineer, they will want it immediately i.e. within the next few hours, eod etc. The manager is aware that the engineer is working on a bunch of things but they will not show any regard for that fact. This means that the engineer has to put everything they are working on aside to produce the thing that the manager wants. The problem is that this happens very often and it results in engineers either having to overwork to get their job done or affecting quality of their work.
3. The manager will put the engineers under extreme pressure to deliver projects on or before the deadline. This includes minor nudges in meetings, lunches, team activities etc. reminding engineers of the timeline to having 2 hour meetings to discuss where we are in terms of meeting the deadline.

I have a few questions based on the above context.

1. How to deal with such managers?
2. Is it sustainable long term to work for such a manager? I am considering getting to the next level in my role within the next 2 years, would it be advisable to continue working with this person?
3. Do most managers have more trust on their directs than described in the above situations?

My skip level manager arranges 1:1 every quarter to know if everything is going good, if I need any help from him or if I have any questions. How can I best utilize this time?

Hi, I have my first team match call with a hiring manager this week. I am E4 level. I have compiled a list of questions to ask to try and demonstrate that I am willing to come in and work hard to contribute to the team's success. Would love some feedback:

1. What are some past projects that E4 engineers have worked on?
2. What is the team distribution, everyone's level, and how do people interact with each other?
3. What are the top 3 traits you look for in a candidate to join and be successful to contribute to your team?
4. What do you think I specifically would be working on at the start?
5. What are the specific expectations for my role/level during onboarding / ramp up? How long is ramp up? What are the expectations after ramp up?
6. How does the team celebrate success?

And please feel free to add any questions you think would be helpful to ask!

Thanks in advance!

I'm relatively new to Meta, so I'm having trouble processing things in meetings as they happen, making them a substantial waste of time for me overall. I don't want to seem dumb, so I would to avoid asking a bunch of questions during meetings to make people explain what they just said. What can I do to make meetings more productive for me?

I'm primarily on the back-end, but I've been put on a lot of other stacks. I've worked with www and Bloks and now I need to pick up native Android to debug a deep link issue.

I'm having a hard time with the Android issue. I took a long time just setting up the environment, choosing between VSCode, Android Studio, and OnDemand. I'm now working with adb, which I don't really understand as it's completely new to me. There's not a lot of documentation for my problem area, and it's been rough.

More broadly speaking, how can I do better in these situations and pick up new stacks faster?

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?

I had a career discussion with my new manager during my one-on-one meeting. I did ask him if he is ready to put me up for promotion to senior software engineer. He said he will gather feedback and get back to me next week. In the following one-on-one discussion, he brought up a few points as feedback.

1. I have to do independent projects: (I have already delivered three independent projects right from design to shipping to prod. My old manager knows about this and he had given me the highest rating).
2. I have to mentor juniors: (I have already mentored two juniors in my team).
3. He pointed out saying that I took more time to lock my recent design: ( We took over a project from another team, and the design had many open-ended loose strings. I took the initiative to fill those gaps apart from designing my module.) From this discussion, I feel like my new manager is either less informed or he lacks knowledge of the previous impact that I delivered.

I am actually upset and demotivated. How can I handle this situation? How to move forward with my new manager regarding career discussion?