Career Advice About Robinhood

In this , Alex mentioned that his technical documentation stood out because no one wrote docs in that much detail.

Are tech docs mainly for how you plan to accomplish a project and are they useful for junior engineers? If so, how do you write good technical documentation?

I feel the quality and quantity of my contributions greatly exceeds the expectations of my level, so I'd like to ask for a raise. I'm basing this self-assessment based off raw diff count + SEV participation + project count + good peer feedback.

Typically raises are given out once a year at Robinhood, and I've only heard of employees get an off-cycle pay increase if they threaten to quit. How should I ask for a raise?

At my startup I was asked to deliver feature after feature + bug fixes by PMs as fast as possible without much time for proper refactoring work or engineering initiatives. Also it was pretty individualistic where you get assigned a task and only work with other engineers during a tech spec review meeting, code review, and syncing with a backend engineer (as an Android dev).

From Alex’s video on getting promoted to tech lead, I saw how you can 1) drive projects as an L5 engineer (vs a PM putting that together with designers) 2) Not have to know how to implement everything yourself for a project, but work with many others and facilitate the team. This sounds 100x more engineering driven and collaborative than at my start up with few developers. Is this common to many people’s experience of the norm in FAANG?

What I liked about Alex's story is also how he had the time and space to do things like document the differences between iOS and Android, as well as go all the way through to making a data analytics plan for monitoring it himself. Seems like a lot of freedom and ownership which I didn't feel I always had the time for personally. Being able to not have to spend 80% of your time coding but rather doing deep work thinking, planing, designing holistically sounds extremely satisfying and rewarding as an engineer. Maybe this also comes with experience at startups as well?