Senior Engineer Career Development Videos, Forum, and Q&A

Context:-

1. My team is going to work on a new project which involves upgrading a service and migrating/enabling all of the dependents to use the new service.
2. This service provides a business critical functionality for our teams and the new version attempts to solve a lot of high impact pain points with the previous version.
3. We have just inherited this service and none of us have worked with it or any of its dependents before. We have some support from the previous team that worked on this project but only in a consultation capacity.
4. This is a project that has been attempted multiple times by various teams over the years - unsuccessfully or with little progress. My perception is that it's going to be a difficult project with low-moderate chances of success.
5. There is a lot documentation but most of it is somewhat outdated. There are a lot of PRs as well but these are for the unsuccessful attempts so I'm not sure how impactful it would be to go through them.
6. The plans for the previous attempts only had internal milestones for the team and a single big-bang completion milestone for stakeholders.

Questions:-

1. How can I identify smaller, independent high-level milestones that are relevant for external stakeholders?
2. How can I come up with broad estimates and capacity requirements for the external and internal milestones if I'm not clear on what these milestones would require for completion?
3. How can I think about de-risking this attempt of the project and improving the probability of success?

I was recently laid off but finding getting interviews to be quite difficult. If I cannot get a position in the next 6 months but spend that time focusing on interview prep, will employers view the gap as a red flag?

I'm working as a senior SWE at a series C startup. I'm looking to specifically grow my technical skills on priority.

My manager has shared a few projects that are upcoming in the roadmap for my team. Given that the requirements and constraints for these project options are yet to be fully defined, how do I identify which projects will have sufficient technical depth to allow me to push the boundaries of my technical skills?

I was earlier part of another team, where all the monolithic apps and microservices are restarted in Production environment every weekend as part of scheduled maintenance.

In my current team, there's no automatic restarts. There are some microservices that haven't been restarted since 2+ years. Isn't this a potential problem? Won't "not restarting services" lead to increased memory consumption at some stage? Don't microservices need frequent restarts as part of maintenance?

On asking the TL, they mentioned that the microservice shouldn't be written in a way that it causes increased memory consumption.

But that's not what we can always control right? Hence we have maintenance windows.

Based on Rahul's answer here, he mentions that you should move to a location where your team is based :

I am interested in moving to Seattle if I get an offer from one of the FAANG companies. I would like to know what are the teams in those companies that have a center of focus in the greater Seattle area?

I am currently 'officially' mentoring two colleagues. I have mentored a number of people in the past, but I honestly never felt like I learned how to be effective as a mentor. I wish to change this.

What resources could help me improve my mentoring skills? Would it be beneficial for me to seek a 'mentoring mentor'?

I'm an Android engineer working on an infra team, and like every other Meta E4, I am working towards the E5 promotion. Because of this, I'm spending a good amount of time building up the non-coding skills needed for the people/direction axis, doing things like XFN alignment and project management.

My question is how "all-in" should I go developing these behaviors: How much of an engineering excellence commitment do I still need to maintain? How often should I still be landing diffs?

I understand this question is slightly out of hard core tech.

I am looking for a location to settle long term and originate from India. While I like it in India, wanted to check if there are indeed places with good:

• Software Engineering Opportunities
• Cost of Living
• Earning to Spending Ratio (I am usually a spender on low side, living minimally)
• Safe to live at
• Healthcare, Education and other things needed in life usually

This is really important to me since my parents are getting old and I would want them to stay with me. Thus, it is pertinent for me to decide where I would want to stay so that it becomes easier for them to adapt themselves slowly. At the same time, I don't want to compromise too much in terms of my career as well. I consider safety really important and financial health as a hygine factor.

I am starting this thread/question for folks in various locations to share how their experience has been. Hopefully this can serve as a guiding point for folks in similar situation.

I've never worked in big tech or Tier 1 companies but I'm aiming to grow as a engineer and would like to know and learn how different companies make such decisions?

1. Does it vary for startups and FAANG+ companies?
2. How do you answer such a question if asked during an interview?
3. How much autonomy each senior engineer (L5 or L6) has in such decisions?

Could you please share an example case study here? What does the entire process look like? Thank you.

A fellow senior engineer on my team is leading a large multi year project that involves rewriting a significant portion of the codebase. He came up with the proposal, design doc, everything. A couple of team members are already helping him in the project, but since the project's scope is so big, he needs more help.

There is also a backlog of other projects that haven't been prioritized for several quarters. These include stuff like migrations, enabling CD (we still deploy manually taking up plenty of oncall engineer's time everyday) for our service, etc.

I feel like I would get more credit and build trust towards moving to E6 by leading one of the projects in the backlog as opposed to helping out the other engineer in his project. What do you recommend?

This is somewhat of a rant as well, but please bear with me.

My current level is equivalent to that of an E4 at Meta. A Senior Level in my organisation is almost equivalent of E4 in Meta, while the next level is around E5. I have been trying to work towards a promotion since the last 2 years, working on RFCs, cross team projects, a lot of glue work, upskilling the team, writing a lot of documentation, reviewing outages and RFCs, mentoring junior engineers, delivering common libraries that can be used across the organisation, driving process improvements and writing tons of code. The last few projects were shipped without a single issue in production, despite being full blown revamps for services.

With layoffs happening in a lot of organisations (Twitter/Meta/Lyft/Stripe etc.), I am feeling a bit overwhelmed that it may happen to us as well, especially given the state of market. I am trying to keep my head low and improve myself. Brushing up the fundamentals right now. I am hoping that it would help me to improve in general as an engineer as well as in interviews, if need be.

My company required me to portray the next level behaviour for some time (close to 1-1.5 years) consistently to be considered for an up-levelling. Now with everything going around, Thinking that I may have to do the same for another 2 years in the next organisation hits me a bit. Overtime, there were some feedbacks I tried to fix - went through courses on communication and now it seems a bit unfair, even if out of control. I feel I could be overthinking but just feeling this way.

1. How should one act in such weather?
2. What is the best way to not feel overwhelmed and be sure to do what is best for one's career?
3. Also, are there any advices for the above career context?

Hi all

I recently joined an organization as a senior where I was made tech lead within 3 months of joining. This was somewhat related to recognition of my work among product and my peers.

I advocated for good engineering practices such as automated integration testing and established projects for cross org collaborations to help deliver whats important for the organization.

All of this was quickly realized as a super critical projects by the organization. I created tech specs and prototypes for these projects.

However recently the organization hired a principal engineer.

since he was new I volunteered to help him onboard and asked for his advice on the new super business critical project that was next in our todo team pipeline. He is an ambitious guy so he wants to create his mark in the organization.

But for some reason the way he is approaching it doesn't seem right to me.

He plans to create a new team taking over the business critical project while splitting the newly formed team I lead on the same project that I helped him ramp up on.

I opposed to this asking for rationale for a new team.

there seem to be now two impressions of my work:-

1. held by my peers, folks I lead and product manager of good business delivery and product timelines. I am respected among both.

2. the principal Engineer tries to devalue my work in front of senior engg. Leadership saying things like I am overcommitting and under delivering if I do this project with the existing members of my team in public and in front of senior engg leadership.

The automated integration testing project which no one was doing before and we were starting from a basic version to iterate on. This is now communicated to engg management as every team is trying to do their own testing.

My engg management for some reason is siding with him since he has 15-20 years of experience and i have 5. He also is principal and i am 2-3 levels below him.

for some reason I am being micromanaged with no fault of mine.

From engg management perspective I have been just told to lead the project that I am currently leading and just help the team formed by principal engg to start the project.

I have communicated my expectations of being able to continue leading the project. Product is in support of that but engg managment isnt.

I have also tried giving feedback to the principal engineer that his actions are disruptive to the team and becauase of what he is doing he is slowing us down and blocking us from doing critical projects.

My worry is despite doing the hard work the project I have the most context on and I worked on for a while is being given to someone else and second i will not be given credit for the hard work I am doing.

Should I just change teams. I dont want to leave my existing team because I do think they need me but I feel I would rather create more impact where I dont have to swim against the tide. I may also be suffering from sunken cost fallacy here where I knew I led the development of a new critical project

Tia for your help.

I went through and kudos to her for doing a great job at articulating everything so well.

But I was wondering at the same time if there are any differences in leading a tech team at a startup (100 engineers company) vs a FAANG company?

I recently started a side project that could have an org level impact soon within this year. The feedback for the prototype is pretty good and I got a green-light to put more bandwidth in it.

I used to think once I get the good work done, promotion should come naturally. But both my manager and skip manager are telling me to leave proper documentation and communication as evidence for promotion - docs like PRD, roadmap planning, status update etc.

I usually do communications pretty well, so their feedback make me wonder if I missing something for a staff level promotion.

• What kind of evidence is being valued in a staff promo packet? Any differences between senior and staff promo packet?
• What do I need to highlight and keep track of if I'm creating scope outside of daily work?
• What kind of data I should keep track of to quantify the impact? How do you usually learn about finding the matrix to track?

Thanks!

From what I have heard so far, Staff is: The person needs to be technically very sound, guide the folks, find projects, carve solutions, and lead without authority.

Engineering managers on other hand: Would work these folks to approve/disapprove these projects, get resources, manage the people (promotions, growth of team - product as well as people).

From this I derive that managerial role is subset of staff + people management. But I am sure I am missing something, what am I missing? Why do people choose to be staff over manager, expect for passion to stay IC (not manage people)? Also, is there a pay difference?

Hello.

I have a busy senior/manager. We used to have 1-1s twice a week, and now I'm lucky if I even get a single 1-1 every other week. I understand that it's because he has a lot of responsibilities (e.g., coding, managing, scrum'ing) and end-of-year deadlines.

Here are some things I've done to make up for the lack of 1-1's:

• I over-communicate via IMs (even if he doesn't respond) to let him know how I'm progressing so he can "smoke test" my theories if I'm heading the wrong way.
• I present high-level overviews of the code (<15 bullet points) I'm working on to avoid doing deep dives into the implementation.
• I deliver short standup updates with easy-to-remember keywords that my manager has mentioned before.
• I try to offload some of his managerial tasks (e.g., onboarding new engineers) to free up some of his time.

Does anyone else have a busy senior? Should I be doing anything else? Thanks!

I’m an E5 at a Big Tech company. My team’s E6 does not communicate or delegate effectively. He dives straight into the weeds without providing proper context, then gets frustrated and explodes when people ask questions or do the "wrong thing" because they are lost. I’ve seen him do this to multiple team members, including my EM and another E5 teammate. He always assumes that everyone has the same context that he has and is unable to tailor his communication to the appropriate audience. How can I best work effectively with someone like this? He would delegate tasks to me without providing acceptance criteria or proper context, then explode when I ask questions or do something other than exactly what he had in his mind (but never communicated properly). Is there a way to fortify my questions so he’s less likely to explode on me? My EM thinks that this E6 has a “my way or the highway” approach because he’s not used to people challenging his ideas. The E6’s feedback for me is to drive discussions more. However, I find it challenging because he leaves out critical information, then explodes and shares it only when we pull teeth about it in team discussions. I tried sharing pre-read meeting docs beforehand, but he still waits until the meeting to explode / share his feedback. Unfortunately he's a domain expert in this area, so there's no one else I can extract the context from.

I joined meta just a few months ago and didn’t get even one entire half.

I missed the TNTE date by 3 weeks so had to go through PSC which was excruciating.

My manager said I got a borderline Below Expectation (BE) due to the Eng Excellence axis. All other axes were either exceeds or meets.

It’s mainly because while I started some projects I didn’t finish all parts of it and the impact wasn’t materialized. But he said there isn’t anything to freak out about and rather he’s not quite worried about the eng excellence axis. He said my trajectory is good and that if we had psc in August I wouldn’t get the BE. He asked to rather focus on people axis as he doesn’t see a clear path towards meeting expectations there and it has fewer opportunities.

I asked what the implications are for this soft BE guidance, he said there’s none pretty much. No financial implications or any other changes. He’ll just be focused on brining up Eng excellence conversations in 1:1s every month.

How concerned should I be about this? Should I take his words and not worry too much or is there some reading between the lines that I need to be doing? Will he be talking to HR already about me?

I've been on ~5 teams during my ~4 years at Meta, and I'm wondering if I need a mindset shift when it comes to choosing a team and staying there. Is it more on Meta that teams don't fit or should I make a bigger effort to stay on teams longer and establish myself there? I'm also looking to get to E6 someday, so the team switching makes things tricky.

When I build something, I get the task done and then move on. However, I feel the best engineers are able to create deeper value. If someone has a question about that topic in the future, they make the info easier to find. So everyone benefits from this resource first, before pinging the engineer.

Hello Taro community,

I hope you're all doing well. I have a question and would greatly appreciate your insights and guidance.

Background: I joined the company last year (ex-FAANG) as an L5 level and have been actively involved in developing internal tooling for a new product. Recently, while exploring our growth and levels documents, I came across our internal rubrics that outline the expectations at each level.

Situation: After identifying a gap between my current level and the staff level, I expressed my interest to my manager. As a result, I am now leading a team of five individuals in the endeavor of implementing automation tooling from scratch. This effort encompasses setting up everything related to automation.

Additional Information:

While my background is primarily in development, I possess knowledge and experience in quality as well. Given the broad impact automation can have across the company, I am eager to leverage my expertise and make a significant contribution.

However, I am uncertain if my focus on quality within a developer role might put me at a disadvantage when aiming for a staff position as a developer.

I am seeking guidance on how to navigate the path towards a staff role, either by leading projects to completion (quality) within my team (& across) or by continuing to work on internal tooling rather than customer-facing products.

Or should I pivot to product development tasks - How do I navigate this conversation with my manager about this dilemma?

Lastly, how can I show metrics and impact?

I'll be starting at DoorDash relatively soon, and I was wondering what 1 on 1s I should set up on top of the one with my manager. More specifically, are there meetings I should make recurring vs. 1-time ad-hoc? For context, I'm an iOS engineer.

I was curious if anyone had tips on writing a decent one page resume - especially in how to pick apart what's most "important" from my previous work experiences and fit it into one page.

I am a senior on my team of 6 engineers. There is one more senior on the team apart from a tech lead who leads the technical projects in the team. I have been on this team and company for a year now, and i am generally a very driven person. I started noticing that this other senior engineer competes with me for everything, he has also been rude to me on occasions (on a private call when no one else could listen) and generally plays politics like leaving me out of important discussions, trying to one-up on me over every little thing. I have tried quite a bit to ignore him but he doesn't let up. It's triggering my survival instincts and I am more stressed than usual nowadays.

Does anyone have any advice? Basically i want to be the high performer that i am without worrying about someone who is trying to sabotage me.

Opinions welcome, thanks in advance!