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

Lately I am seeing lot of videos like end of Tech career.

With the AI tools like , How will the tech industry involve.
What are the other alternatives I have?

I’m currently relatively happy in my current role working on challenging problems, I like my technical peers and management and during my 3 years here I got promoted from entry level engineer to senior engineer (SD1 to SD3).

However, given the scope and impact I provide, it feels like I can potentially make ~100k more (50% increase) with a job hop talking to multiple recruiters.

The worry is that I lose the equity I built in my current role and be exposed to layoffs at the new company. Also, getting promoted to staff engineer for a similar compensation increase would probably take a while. I’m tempted to switch jobs to maximize compensation.

A new CTO was assigned in our organisation. If I get the chance to have a sync, what are the things I can and should discuss about ?

How do you people, as a Senior engineer, put things such as:

1. Team development and engineering excellence on your resume, or should I not mention them at all? I lead these activities daily at work, and my manager and team members appreciate it, but I have never thought to put those things on my resume before. I guess this should give me leverage in interviews for being considered for senior positions, but I am not sure.
2. Annual awards given? Again, should I even mention that?

Below are the elaborated points

On the team development part, I regularly mentor 2-3 engineers almost daily. Reviewing their design and code, unblock them. I introduced a document-first culture in our team as before; everything was a bit chaotic as it is a startup where everyone knew their modules but not others. No on-call process or SOPs. I led this initiative by creating 20+ documents myself related to high-level design, SOPs for engineers and others, etc.

On the engineering excellence part, I reviewed close to 150+ PRs last year, making unit tests mandatory, introducing db migration tools to the team, etc.

For the award, I got your point. Annual award: out of 18 SWE-3s in my company, three got it, including me. The reason was a bunch of high-impact projects + above points.

I work as an ML Engineer at a company, and I have been part of my team for two years. Unfortunately, the product I was solely responsible for got canceled due to external reasons, even though it was showing good growth. Throughout my career, I have specialized in creating recommendation systems for online content platforms.

Currently, I am involved in less impactful tasks related to migrating our systems. We hope to find more meaningful work in the future, but I'm unsure if our team can achieve significant growth. While my manager sees value in me, I am not considered the best player on the team.

Recently, I learned that the Ads department is actively seeking to hire experienced ML engineers, possibly even seniors. They have ambitious goals and are eager to develop new solutions to reach them. I attended their hiring meeting, and the ML director spoke passionately about the work, which felt risky but exciting.

Part of me believes I should join this team. The expectations would be higher, and the company genuinely values their work. It would provide a greater challenge, and I believe such situations are crucial for personal growth and improvement. Additionally, working in a different department would expose me to different organizational dynamics. In my current team, I'm increasingly feeling complacent and lack inspiration.

On the other hand, part of me thinks I should remain with my current team. I don't dislike my manager, which is not always the case in every job. My current team is also important, and I have respect for my colleagues. If I stick it out, there's a chance I might come across something interesting eventually. However, switching teams would mean losing the relationships I've built and potentially delaying promotion opportunities. Moreover, there are concerns about possible layoffs, so it might be safer to be conservative.

Do you have any thoughts on this matter?

I feel a deep sense of anxiety that my skillsets are becoming obsolete and is quickly becoming out of trend now that AI is becoming the most hottest tech.

The biggest motivation of considering a switch is:

1. I would like to venture into a new domain that will be lucrative/high in demand + continuous career growth. I'm not 100% sure if AI is the domain that I will enjoy working in, but if it means that it will open doors in the long run and sustain my SW career I am considering to make an effort to break into the new emerging tech even it means I have to take a pay cut or enter into down-leveled position.
2. I am becoming more unsure whether Android is still a skill that is high in demand. I don't know if there is a high demand now nor if there will be a high demand in the future since it the mobile industry has stopped evolving. I fear that if I stay in this domain my market value will slowly decline.
3. I lost interest in Android. I am unsure if I should stick with the tech I am comfortable with, climb the ladder, or take the risk to venture a different path.

Do you think there is a way I can leverage my experience and skills to come out on top? I'm having trouble sleeping with these thoughts and not sure if I'm crazy thinking about this tbh.

What I've noticed is that FAANG companies don't seem to look beyond Data Structure and Algorithms (DSA) or system design in interviews, whereas medium-sized companies also consider other skills. For example, for a Python web framework, they might look at Django, Flask, or FAST. For a data engineer role, Apache Airflow might be important. ATS may not even pickup your resume unless they see very specific word like Django or Apache Airflow in your resume. It seems like it might be easier to prepare for big tech companies since they focus only on DSA, System Design, and behavioral rounds. In contrast, other companies look for such a wide range of skills that it's hard to master and work on all of them.

Let me know your views.

I'm aiming for a promotion in 5 months and to do that I've been told that I need to evidence execution on a few complex projects. As a team we're working on some big projects but I'm not sure how to approach identifying a sub-project, isolating and owning it.

Does anyone have any tips on this?

At my startup, we use Confluence to host various documentation. I'm working on a design document draft, and I have it saved within the org's Architecture and Engineering Space (basically a folder). I have some misgivings about placing it there since I've been regularly updating it, and it notifies everyone within that group whenever I do. I'm mainly putting it there for visibility, but some of the writing is half-baked. Since it's a small company, no one really cares, but I think this might reflect poorly on me if it were a bigger company. How does Big Tech generally handle this design doc process from first to final draft? Do engineers generally just keep it within their personal Space until it's ready for review?

A coworker of mine is transitioning to a TPM role at my company. This is a new role at my org, and my coworker has never worked as a TPM before and the manager who suggested that he transition to the TPM role has left the company.

I have worked with TPMs in the past so I'm a little familiar with the TPM role at big tech, and so I volunteered to work with him on transitioning to the role. I figured this would be a good way to improve collaboration with my coworkers and improve cross team collaboration.

Are there any resources or deep dives into the TPM role, how to effectively work as a TPM, and how to onboard a TPM?

Let me preface this by saying I have extreme impostor syndrome and I am optimizing for most chill company that's easier to survive in. I have offers from cockroach labs, and disney streaming. Both are senior level offers. At my last company (which i was let go from, I believe it was cause I took too long to resolve an outage in their eyes) i was basically doing mid level eng work so I'm not even sure I'm senior material tbh.

I have a little over 5 yoe. I've been laid off before and my perf has oscillated from good to bad etc (at times I've had personal things interfere with my work) so I'm very fearful of cutthroat/extremely high expectations environments.

From what I've seen, cockroach labs is very highly regarded in the industry, so in the case where I get laid off, it may be better to have a better brand name on my resume. They also do seem to have a good wlb. However, a lot of the people there are coming from other very reputable companies, and I'm very worried I won't be up to the par compared to these people, especially in this environment where performance is looked at more closely. They also did a large RIF last year which impacted low performers.

As far as disney, it may be easier to meet the expectations if the talent bar is lower, but they have done a fair amount of layoffs over the last few years, and the streaming unit has only recently gotten profitable. Seems the leadership is telling a story this will last, it's unclear how well the performance of the business will be long term. Cockroach labs seems to be very well positioned from a company performance POV.

I say all this because I don't really want to go through another job searching phase for a while, so I'm considering the strength of the business as well in addition to how capable I would be of surviving at the company.

Recently my company has split up a core team into two teams. One team is to keep on building the core infrastructure for the product and the other team is supposed to be working in an advisory position with other web applications teams that depend on the core infrastructure. Without dwelling into more details, this core team builds, and maintains datastores, that other web applications consume. A big part of the job is to build google search type infra (on a much smaller scale of course) and data processing pipelines.

Now working with other teams is exciting. But just focusing on one task that is doing tickets/changes/investigations that help them implement some specific features w.r.t to core infra, is kinda troubling me. As it puts me in a passive position and does not clearly define metrics for success. It also puts me on the borderline as I am neither doing core infrastructure-related work nor I am completely part of the other team. The idea is to imitate how Staff engineers work across teams. But I am a Senior engineer (just recently promoted).

Though this is clearly a growth opportunity for me, I am a bit worried about falling behind and not meeting expectations. Any advice on working with cross-functional teams?

I've raised this concern to manager in almost every 1-1 once even in front of Director of Eng that I'm interested in more roles and responsibilities. Cuz I was not a fresher even when I joined the current company at entry level and now that I've done decent work too at current company.

But manager fails to give me a path/timeline of when will I be entrusted with some impactful work.

He criticises in public, and has a favourite too who uses this to influence the manager against others.

Manager also wants every small thing to be done his way and he presents the whole thing as learning opportunity for me.

If junior engineers are not supposed to do anything on their own then why are they even hired as engineers?

Should I look for new opportunities? Or how can I take away most from the current situation?

Will interviews for data-related jobs at FAANG companies be different from general software jobs? Given my most recent experience is in software engineering, how can I best prepare for behavioral questions for a data related job?

How can I prevent myself from putting myself in a job where I have to recode an entire code base after a long amount of time on a product?

More specifically, how do I identify good teams that have working styles where you aren't having to refactor an entire codebase and have a frustrating work environment? In the past, I've heard that at companies like Netflix that people can just code in whatever language they want, then when folks sometimes regroup/resync with a larger product team, one team in a particular language will win, leading to large parts of other specific devs on the team to hate it because they have to refactor their code.

How does one come up with certain criteria (and follow through with it) as they interview for jobs and specific companies about working styles on preferences of code base, tools, frameworks?

What other core principles and criteria folks consider as they're interviewing other people (not just the company interviewing for a role) that they should consider as a part of the dev culture, structure when it comes to these types of things so I don't make the same type of mistake?

And yes, I know people refactor code bases (ex. legacy projects, cleaning out whatever tech debt folks have), which people tend to hate because it's a lot of work--and that it's still bound to happen and unavoidable, but how can we eliminate cultures we dislike that are refactoring code bases as a result of a dysfunctional tech team? I want to avoid having terrible experiences at a future company I work (similar to an hackathon experience I had recently working on a small MVP can be frustrating when folks are not aligned / on the same page for things that might take to long to complete or have to refactor completely if they are not communicating well or upfront from the beginning).

I'm an E5 iOS at a Big Tech company reporting to an M2. I'm leading the mobile side for a multi-quarter product project that leverages work from 2 platform teams. Most of the complexity of this project will be on the mobile side. My backend lead is an E6 full-stack web engineer reporting to an M1 who reports to my M2. The M1 is on parental leave until late Dec / early Jan. This E6 has been an amazing partner and teammate.

The 2 platform teams have missed a lot of their timelines. One dependency is about a month behind schedule. They often give us deliverables that are dev-complete and not tested (e.g., compilation errors, etc.). We have sync meetings 2x/week, but 1 platform team has never attended any of these meetings. The other platform team doesn't always send the same engineers to the meeting and doesn't always know the status of their own deliverables. That platform team's EM got terminated for performance reasons before this project started, so their M2 and a TPM have been tag-teaming to fill in the gap. That means sometimes their M2 attends the sync meetings, sometimes the TPM attends, sometimes both attend, and sometimes neither attends. The TPM sends a weather report on that team's deliverables every other week, but hasn't sent one in the past month. In his last email, he listed my E6 and me as the DRIs for their team's deliverables. When I confronted him about it, he said it was a mistake and he'll fix it in future emails. How do I bring visibility into these delays to external stakeholders?

I created a shared Google Doc to track all the dependencies, including when our team needs the deliverables, the other team's ETAs, and any notes. However, it's been challenging getting ETAs from the other teams. When I tagged them in the Google doc asking for ETAs, they just ignore me.

My manager gave me feedback to "influence engineers to hold up their timeline than push for hard commitments". Do you have any concrete advice here? I'm not sure how to do this.

After I escalated the 1st platform team's unresponsiveness to their Director (3 levels up), the E6 iOS DRI became very responsive. Escalating to that E6's skip level had not been effective. Should I just keep escalating everything or is there a better approach?

I’d like to be a very senior research engineer in a FAANG company. I’m currently a senior engineer at my medium-sized company but I want to move closer to the research side as a more senior IC. What does it look like to be Staff+ research engineer vs software engineer? How can I build those skills now?

I was just laid off. I don't think being laid off is a motivation for applying to any particular company. I will have additional reasons for that. I realize that knowledge of the layoff might lead a company to try and lowball me.

On the other hand, I fully expect to get multiple offers, so I am not too worried about the lowballing concern.

Being laid off isn't something I would blurt out in an interview unless I was directly asked, but I am also active on social media and I am planning to share my layoff journey in real time as opposed to hiding it.

Are there other reasons I am not considering that make it a much better idea to keep this quiet(er)?

I'm working on a cross-functional project with a backend DRI (E3) and Android engineer (E4?). I'm iOS, but have a backend background so I could easily code the backend portion if I needed to. The DRI reports to a different EM, who was on vacation for the first few weeks of the project. The DRI was struggling to get the backend piece working, so I spent extra time hand-holding him on how to debug it. I even researched how another feature in the iOS codebase used similar API calls and created a Postman collection for him to troubleshoot his APIs more easily. Is this a good use of my time? What percent of my time should I spend on helping others versus doing my own work? The Android engineer did not help the DRI because he doesn't know backend, so there was no one else to help the DRI.

Which path to choose after spending 5+ years as a developer in product based company??

What are the factors to consider or questions to ask myself before choosing the path??

Please Suggest.

We currently have a problem with test flakes happening very often.

Someone is currently working on a systemic fix, but in the meantime, I've taken it upon myself to be the leader in categorizing and assigning people to take on some of the existing flakes as they happen. I am assigning based on who has the most context or who wrote the original test.

My question is: How can I assign these in a way that doesn't cause people to dislike me? I ask as someone who needs to delegate in my role but also needs to get buy-in for various initiatives so its important that people like me.

A couple of things I've tried:

• Trying to be as helpful as possible, showing that as I'm assigning these I've done a little bit of investigation myself to try to fix it (even without much context) or give any info I can gather
• Asking in a polite way (maybe)? Here's a couple examples:
  • "@person, I saw this one flake a few times and noticed you were the original author. Would you be able to take a look when you get a chance?"
  • "@person it looks like we attempted to fix this here (link to github commit) but it seems to still be flaking. If it's ok, I'm gonna assign this one to you."

Any better wording of the "ask" or advice around this situation would be appreciated!

I was looking in the questions but couldn't find anything about it. There is a ton of info in the internet about bottom-top approach but still can't understand how it works in reallity. Any actual example projects would be great. I read many times that you as Senior/Staff should convince team/teams in an idea/project, and this is one of the ways to get promoted. An example - Staff Engineer created scope for 20+ people and worked on feature X. So my questions there:

• How does it happen?
• Is there any management involved here?

I've always worked for top-bottom companies and even if we have an idea for a feature/improvement, eventually the management decides if we should go for it or not. After all, the management is the one "holding" the budget.

Been on my current team for a half now and working with a teammate on an XFN heavy project. Both of us are E5. While we have split the work into different areas and are owning each area, my teammate is more tenured and has more context on certain common parts of the system, and therefore ends up participating more in the conversations in meetings. As a result, many XFN partners are now seeing my teammate as the lead for this project and independently reaching out rather than communicating with both of us. Skip is also pinging my teammate separately and in XFN groups. How can I take charge and establish myself as an equal owner of the project? Have tried to ramp up as much as possible on the common components and haven’t brought it up to my manager yet, but want to make sure I don’t get dinged in performance review for not driving enough direction. Many times, I’ll message my teammate to discuss an aspect of the project and my teammate will ping my idea immediately to XFN. I’ve brought up establishing clear areas of ownership with my teammate which we seemed to be on the same page about, but things haven’t improved. I have also written most of the docs for the project so hoping to leverage those for direction but want to make sure I don’t get dinged for this dynamic.