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

I just finished up my final technical round (went well) and the recruiter reached out wanting to chat about salary expectations before the offer stage. During my initial call with the recruiter, she did ask me about salary expectations. I deferred by saying fit and potential impact are most important to me and that I'd like to defer until I learn more. Now that I've already interviewed, I'm not sure how to handle the conversation with the recruiter. It seems wrong to give a number before getting an actual offer, but at the same time, my initial reason for deferring talking about salary is no longer valid because I've already gone through the interview process. Any advice on what should I do here?

I’d like to convert my internal system of progress into a checklist and then share it with my manager. For example, I’m learning about logging. A question to measure my own progress is to check if I know what information should be logged? What about security considerations? If someone asks me about logging in 2 months, can I unblock them?

For the past 3 months, the primary activity on my team has been to debate and discuss the architecture design of the large system our team will be developing in Q3. It feels like we’re in gridlock and I don’t see a clear path to a decision. How can we move forward productively?

I've seen multiple E6s point out flaws in others' proposals, but don't offer any alternatives of their own. What's a good way to navigate this? This is extra tricky when we're on the same team and they're the designated code reviewer for my work.

Example: I ran into a limitation with a 3rd-party SDK. I proposed 2 options as workarounds, but an E6 rejected both options due to their limitations. When I asked him for his recommendation, he could not provide any alternatives but still insisted that I find a solution without any limitations. Thankfully an E7 on another team helped me by providing a viable workaround after 3 E6s were stumped by this problem. What should I do if I'm not lucky enough to have an E7 help me next time?

I had a question on how does one exhibit impact and staff level behavior as a Senior engineer.

The staff engineers on the team code as much as me. Although I am a lead for a team, there is distinction between me and how another lead is being perceived. I am happy for them.

They have been in the company way longer, they advocate, question and are not afraid to speak up.

But code wise, I have way more commits. We are both leads, but I can tell they are on the way to becoming staff, and it is the behavior. I am not able to put a pin on it.

How can we be perceived of being extremely valuable and influential to the team without crunching code.

The project I worked in for the year is getting deprioritized and I am looking for new teams to work in for the next half. Since PSC is coming next month and I am expecting relatively better ratings.

Q1- should I look out for new teams now. have chats with them and switch by next year once ratings are locked? Would managers wait?

Q2 - when is the good time to let my manager know that I will be looking for new teams?

Q3- If I let my manager know now, will it impact my psc results negatively?

Q4 - how to make the best use of time till psc results are locked?

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?

During my recent job search process, I couldnt time my interviews well, so i ended up securing offers at different times. My first offer was from a high speed startup and they offered me a very good pay.

The recruiter was very pushy though. She gave me a weekend to decide whether to accept the offer or not. She got to know about my last working day in my current org and pushed me to join a day after that. She also said i should not interview at any other companies if i sign this offer. She insisted i meet with my potential boss at the office and do so only if i am 100% sure of accepting the offer.

She was not just pushy, she was disrespectful and crossed a lot of boundaries. It was my first job offer and i couldnt give a definite yes. Also i felt really uncomfortable with how pushy she was and rejected the offer. I thought i couldnt focus on other interviews with this guilt and fear hanging over me if i accepted the offer without being 100% sure.

Before deciding to say no i also looked up culture reviews about this company and it scared me about how poor the work life balance is. I made a snap decision cos i was afraid for my health having worked at a startup before. But now i know that most reviews online are negative and ist so for every single company out there. Plus i am actually ok with such a high speed environment especially for high pay and good work. So i no longer care for these reasons.

Its been a week since then and i think i should have played this a bit more smartly. I should have said yes and continued to interview. Am i right in thinking this way ? Is there any other way to approach this sort of a situation ?

Prior to Twitter, I was a mid-level engineer at another large tech company, so I was expecting to be leveled at mid-level again when joining Twitter. However, I did very well on the interview, so they up-leveled me to senior as a very pleasant surprise.

I know that I got this great feedback, but I feel like there's so much to learn and many gaps in my skills and can't help but feel sometimes that I shouldn't be at this level. Any advice on how to have a better mental state here?

I'm an E5 at a Big Tech company. My EM's pushing me to lead projects on our team so I can work on getting to E6. This is challenging when the E6 on my team tries to micromanage everything. How do I lead when I keep getting overruled? The E6 usually makes good decisions, but oftentimes struggles to articulate his rationale / justification.

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.

I was wondering how would one handle situations where a manager makes up a feedback based of half information (or their perception) or even misinformation from others.

There are also no actions attributed to this feedback.

for eg. Person X have to learn how to manage up or navigate office politics or learn how to work well with other. But how? And who are these others?

When asked an example of why this feedback was given, they don't have any good example of what happened ,who said what and why was the feedback not given in the first place.

I know this is not something I can control, and in their mind of course they are giving actionable feedback.

The other part of it when you are surprised by the feedback even after asking for it in every 1:1 before (in my situation my manager was out for most of the time).

It just feels that why did I even work so hard in the first place and a little demotivated.

Recently interviewed for the pathways program but was upleveled to E4 and have just entered team matching.

This has been a wild ride and I'm super grateful to have this opportunity. My girlfriend and I currently live in NYC (as well as all of our friends).

From what I hear, there is 0 headcount at E4 in NYC at the moment, but some may be opening up next spring, but seattle and menlo currently have some spots.

I would LOVE to stay in NYC, but also can't afford to let this opportunity slip through my fingers after all the blood, sweat, and leetcode.

My preferences are NYC > Seattle > Menlo Park. Recruiter says there is no ticking clock, so we are setting primary location to seattle until if/when headcount opens in NYC, and then if still no bites, expanding to Menlo Park.

If I get put in Menlo/Seattle, I'd try and transfer back to NYC after ~1-1.5 years.

Looking for guidance on how to play the location game with shifting headcounts, as well as feasibility of a transfer back to the East coast at some point.

Should I really just focus on getting a match and focus on Menlo Park from the start to maximize chances?

Suboptimal work efficiency resulted in me putting so much time at work, leading to poor WLB @Meta. I don't want to repeat it @ Pinterest. How can I improve my efficiency?

Hi all,

In the next couple days (2-3 days) will be the deadline for my current job offer (let's call it "Company 1"). I already asked them for extension twice and they said next Monday (02/12) would be the final date and the offer cannot be extended further. The best thing about this offer is the company is fully remote, but it's a startup with unknown plan for IPO.

There is another company (publicly-traded company - let's call it "Company 2") that I already finished the interview with good feedbacks, but HR told me the hiring manager literally interviewed me as the very first candidate and would want to have 2 more weeks to interview other candidates too, but I'm in the pipeline for consideration.

Should I accept the offer from "Company 1" (the startup above)? WLB seems to be better than the "Company 2". Both companies offer "Unlimited PTO" (for better or worse) but at least the 1st is fully remote.

For comp number, the publicly-traded "Company 2" definitely has higher total comp and their stock is skyrocketing in the market right now. "Company 1" has higher base salary but paper stocks.

I wonder if the hiring manager for "Company 2" is interviewing further, does that mean my positive feedback was good but not great? Should I keep interviewing or just accepting 1st offer? Any thoughts on what to do next?

I'm deciding between two companies, ie think FAANG and a pre-IPO startup.

The big difference is that

FAANG

• mid level engineering role
• work on high scalability systems in a cloud infrastructure division

Pre-IPO startup

• Senior full stack engineering role
• Work on building new products/features from scratch and continuing to evolve them

The Pre-IPO startup pay is certainly higher, and I think the company's prospects for earnings are higher. However, the FAANG role offers work on highly scalable systems, which I don't quite have much experience on. I'm a product engineering/full stack role.

I worry about there's not that many product engineering/full stack roles across FAANGs and for future job security, it might be worth building up the skillset for highly scalable systems?

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?

Lerner et al recently found that "[in resume evaluations] there were some characteristics that recruiters consistently favored: experience at a top-tier tech company..." []

I worked at Amazon as a contractor. In my resume, this is clearly labeled as contract work. In social media bios, title lines, and so on, should I claim Ex-FAANG?

US has a lot of big tech and startups. India has seen some growth in recent past as well. What are other locations worldwide where one can propel their career with good compensation and growth ?

I am thinking about this, more from a long term perspective, in terms of getting a Permanent Residence and moving with my family there.

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 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.

To put this into context, the question refers more to people who have already been at the company for a while, not onboarding engineers.

In my experience working only at startups, almost all learning has been the responsibility of the employee. There is a "spike" period where the engineer is given time to come up to speed, but it has always seemed to me a bit careless for managers to just give someone a list of technologies and say "learn this."

I guess this question is really a proxy for asking: how does FAANG approach "bootcamping" engineers on a new and important stack? Are workshops, training courses, and L&D actually effective? Suppose that I am a senior engineer who wants all the junior engineers in my team to learn how to use AI assist tools like Copilot, how would I approach making this mandatory if I really think it's a technology that's as crucial as git?

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 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!