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

Does anyone have any tips for interview anxiety? This week I started talking to recruiters and it's going great. I'm at the point where they're asking me to schedule interviews and it's giving me a lot of anxiety because I'm not ready. How far in advance should I schedule the interview and how do I deal with the anxiety of failing?

I have around 15 years experience with background mainly in Java, Restful, Springboot etc. I was impacted by layoffs and I am on a H1B. Hence I have limited time before which I should choose a job. I do not have extensive time for preparing LeetCode in this short time span. I would like to know if there are mid-level companies (not startups, not big tech) that do non-leetcode style interviews. Like, a take home assignment, or some other demo kind of interviews.

I have a recruiter screening with Meta next week for a full-stack software engineer role. What can I expect in the recruiter screening?

This is my first interview after a very long time, I need to brush up my skills. what is latest acceptable time frame to schedule the technical interviews without being considered late?

I recently got feedback from my manager, and they mentioned that to start making progress to E6, I need to come up with new initiatives, which are big projects spanning across multiple teams. This is especially important for us as our team works in a way where we need to come up with the roadmap more on our own in a bottoms-up fashion.

This feedback is one of the core pillars I want to focus on going forward, but it's hard to make it actionable. What can I concretely do to start coming up with these projects?

I am been working as a Senior software engineer for quite some time now. To move to the Staff level, one feedback/pointer I got was to start developing opinions on how to do certain things. When people start respecting your opinions, they start to see you as a leader.

The problem I have is, in many cases, I don't have enough relevant experience for the problem at hand. Also, I find, that in discussions I am listening more than I am speaking. Having no opinions, and finding it hard to express opinions for fear of being judged and losing respect in case my opinion is wrong, are the problems I am facing.

Is there any advice on how to develop these skills?

I have often found platform teams to be quite "tech-heavy" rather than being driven solely by business. On the other hand, it is easier to convey impact for product teams for the metrics that the org cares about much more.

If I am trying to move from Mid Level to Senior Level i.e. Senior Software Engineer to Tech Lead level in my org, what kind of teams should I target?

Does choosing a certain one help you in fast-tracking your career growth?

During session, Rahul mentioned only a few projects are important. I would love to get some concrete examples from Rahul or others on what that looks like. This is my very first question that I am posting in Taro forum. Thank you for the encouragement Alex. Looking forward to everyone's answers.

Hi Taro - just wanted to say thank you for the .  I was wondering if you could share with the Taro community your thoughts on how managers evaluate their employees in detail (you mentioned some things like internal tools that one could go and see how many PRs, discussions, comments someone had in Github/JIRA and who all were at the top of that baseline followed by the bottom rankers; so I would like more specifics if possible).

Although no one likes it, it would be good to understand how "stack ranking" works at FAANG - and how some managers evaluate on this criteria, despite it being a practice that sucks. In this way I can just be more sure I'm hitting a baseline - even if it's invisible because I can take daily steps to work on my own visibility and perceived performance.

I feel like the biggest challenge right now is getting critical feedback from a manager / org (and it sounds like some companies in the FAANG space are pretty awful about it).  E.g. I read about a Redditor who got let go without much notice because they weren't up to par (decided by a skip level manager) in terms of their code and daily output (while the direct manager and everyone else had been communicating often that this employee's performance was great). But this goes back to the idea that 'great' is 'average' lately, and it's way harder to hit exceeds and greatly exceeds on performance.

Thank you in advance!

At my old company, where I worked for many, many years, I wasn’t learning anything new. On my new team, I feel like a junior engineer since everything is new. Because of this, I don’t feel like I’m being taken seriously, even my engineers more junior than me.

I'm trying to stay positive throughout this learning process but would obviously like to build up respect among my team as quickly as possible to start feeling like a heavily valued voice in the room. Any advice on how to do that?

I have been working in the industry for almost 8 years, but I often feel like an average engineer. I spend most of my time working, but I haven't achieved any significant accomplishments in my career.

I was able to get jobs at Pinterest and the company that used to be called Meta because I memorized coding interview questions and exaggerated my achievements. However, I don't have the motivation to aim for promotions, and I worry that I don't have what it takes to be an outstanding engineer in the tech industry. I work every day, but I feel lost and unsure about where my career is going.

I'm worried about my future career growth and whether I will find fulfillment. Are there other people who have felt the same way but managed to overcome it and succeed?

I was informed by my previous manager that once we move teams, promo is "reset" i.e. only the work in the new team counts for the promo cycle (despite being on the same job ladder of TSC, DE etc).

I am currently at L4 and the role I am going into is scoped for L5 (they were targeting a L5 hire). Given I am changing team mid-year, I am not sure I can get a rating beyond SI in the Jan GRAD cycle.

What is the best way to work with my manager to secure an L5 promo and what timeline is realistic for this promotion at Google (I was targeting next August)?

I have about 5 YOE and trying to grow from Senior -> Staff engineer but noticing that the path is taking longer than I'd hope.

This is the case whether I try to speak to other companies and ask about interviewing at that level or try to grow within my own company.

Within my own company: Requirements unclear, seems to be more time based (just keep on shipping). Since we're on the smaller side, we don't have a clearly defined structure like FAANG.

Externally: Due to the YOE, usually discussion of Staff isn't even an option even though I think I'm doing Staff level work. In fact, they usually decline the idea before even having a chance to explain what I'm working on.

The projects I'm working on span the entire org (startup), I have multiple mentees, and org-wide impact. I will be honest and say that I don't think the projects I work on are necessarily insanely technically complex (not going out to millions of users, dealing with hyper concurrency issues, or needing to deal with large scalability issues), but they do have a large amount of scope and senior+ level management required to run them.

I think from the project management perspective, I have things nailed down pretty well.

So I wonder if I'm either missing...

• YOE - Just some sort of arbitrary minimum that is being placed across the board for certain levels to be achieved
• Technical expertise - I definitely admit that I'm not necessarily INSANELY technical. For example, I can admit gaps like: I don't know how to design a concurrent document editing system like Google docs, or I wouldn't be able to write a live streaming service without reading up on the proper documentation and understanding better how those systems work. Are things like this a requirement to be a staff engineer? To just be more aware or know right away how various systems like this are designed, without needing to do research beforehand?

I'm essentially trying to understand what my gaps might be, and the technical aspect is one I'm unsure about how relevant it is.

Would appreciate any thoughts, especially from Staff+ engineers, maybe sharing what they feel makes them a Staff vs a Senior and how much technical skills play a role vs other elements.

The applications our current team develop are targeted for individual users only and most of our projects are centered around building complex business logic rather than scale. So there is less scope to gain experience on concepts such as parallel processing, concurrency, caching or similar. What are my options to become really good at these skills if I am not working on these on a day-to-day basis?

In fast-paced organisations that launch a lot of features on a quarterly basis and teams with large sizes, how should a tech lead or team members ensure that everyone knows about everything or is enabled to get to know about it?

Quite often, whenever a new feature comes in, it could be repurposing technology built for other features as well. But, given the pace at which these are developed, it is often hard to know what everyone is working on. Sometimes, each of these features may have idiosyncracies that may be getting missed out by new joiners, especially due to the volume of information, especially for teams that have been in existence since a long time.

I recall once when changes for a new feature done by a developer reverted some conditionals for an older feature, thus causing an outage. How do you prevent this and ensure knowledge of everything is available to all, especially to people new to an organisation?

Also, are there some general practices to ensure that these are easily discoverable? Video recordings are time consuming to go through, and wikis though they exist, are sometimes difficult to navigate, when you don't know what you are searching for? I am thinking of something like a mind map could help here, but what are your thoughts?

Hi,

With tons of layoffs already happening and rumors about impending layoffs, is there something one can do to protect themselves? Logically, performing above expectations and being a critical part of the team would make sense. However, recently looking at LinkedIn and other career news, seems like no one can be sure that they’re safe. So, do you have any tips on how to approach this? Does it make sense to stay put within a team where you have great relationship with your manager and skip etc or find a new company to get ahead of this risk? Thanks!

I have joined Google as L4 Full stack engineer - Frontend heavy (70% Frontend, 30% Backend). I have joined the GCP Org. I have 6+ Years of Experience and I have worked in Uber for 3.5 years as SDE 2 Frontend Engineer in past.

I am working on google primarily on Angularjs, typescript, Graphql on frontend side and java, sql on backend side. I want to make sure that i perform well and able to reach L5 within next 1-1.5 years. i.e next December cycle.

I have a fair idea from Uber point of view.

But someone who has deeper insights about what to do right and how things work at google it will be great.

Hi All,

Would love to get some advice on how to ask highly pointed questions during a 30 minute conversation with a hiring manager to get the maximum info out of him regarding the team culture and the product.

Regarding my preferences...

I would love to stick fully on the Backend stack. I have experience working with Python, NodeJS, Typescript and a bit of Java, I have experience working with Infra and databases as well. I get excited working with data at scale but do not have stellar industry experience with it such that I can start being impactful on day 1.

Since this will be my first time at a big tech, I want to optimize for a decent to moderate enough ramp up time, good wlb and not being super heavy with oncall at least for my first team.

Once I get used to the pace, I'll jump around to start optimizing for impact, visibility and scope.

Here is what I have in mind for my Hiring Manager meetings but feel free to add/subtract from this.

1. Basics, what is the product/org
2. What is the team size and team structure (how many E5s, E4s etc) and tech stack.
3. What is the code velocity like on average for an E5.
4. Give me a brief idea about what the first project you have in mind for me, if not tell me about a project an E5 is currently working on.