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

I became really ambitious at a young age and was always pushing my boundaries, from high school, through university and now in a professional environment. Ambition is not a bad thing, but I think I picked up an unhealthy maximalism and “grind mindset” which makes the journey really stressful. I’m working on understanding myself & why my personality turned out this way with a psychologist and honestly it’s great (and I recommend this to everyone in tech if you can afford it).

Reflecting back on my journey, this mentality got me pretty far so far (I’m 26), I got promoted pretty much every year (I’m just below staff-level, 5 YoE in ML/AI), I published papers as side projects and finished my Masters degree, most of this in parallel.

Throughout the years I was given several signs that this is not a maintainable pace (relationship ending because of only spending time on professional stuff, health complications like high blood pressure, etc.) and as stupid as it sounds, I just powered through these and carried on.

Exercise is one thing that helped the situation as it turns my mind off for a bit. I’ve been working our 3-4 times a week, but honestly I think the problem is with my attitude, so working out will not help the stress completely.

Recently I think I hit a wall in terms of stress and I had a few panic attacks, which was really scary. It was a wake up call and I decided that nothing is worth experiencing these conditions. After experiencing these I became more stressed and worried about my health which makes day-to-day work pretty tough. I’m also switching jobs soon, which I think added an extra bit of stress to the whole thing, maybe that was the trigger.

Since I think Taro is a collective of people with great ambitions, I’d be really curious to hear if you faced a similar situations and how you managed it.

So I have two main questions to you:

• Short term: If you ever got to this point, what are some strategies to recover? I will be taking 2.5 weeks of vacation between the jobs and I will try to completely switch-off, but I’m curious if you have any other ideas.
• Long term: How do you balance your thoughts and ambitions about “reaching the stars” (whether it’s becoming a staff engineer, building a company, etc.) with maintaining a healthy life?

I am good at Systems design. It comes very naturally to me when compared to DSA in that I exhibit systems-level holistic thinking.

Could this be an indication that I should play up to my strenghts and think about becoming a Product manager or architect as opposed to struggling being a developer?

I have to provide estimate of a story, to the point where I have to tell how much I will be spending for each sub-story.. although I have given them those with buffer since I am new, I notice a pattern with me which is that I usually need some help which I get either at the end of the day or the next day. This can influence the estimate ofcourse but for some reason my manager wants a very aggresive dates, and it's challenging for me.

In addition to that, I am not sure what I will say in order to justify if I can't meet the deadline. This process has sucked the life out of the work for me. I remember giving estimates in my past companies but they were just estimates, and when I shared my side of the story people usually understood my challenges this is not happening here..

Hi all, I'm currently working on GenAI server infra at Meta as an IC5. I'm interested in the space and have had a long standing interest to dig deeper into ML. At a high level, I'm considering the following:

1. Positioned well for E6 scope and exploring interest in people management (M1)
2. Taking an online masters program to brush up on math, ML foundation skills. This can better validate my interests. Alternatively, I can lean into online resources like Cousera, deeplearning.ai
3. Recruit internally as an E5 to a relevant team. Generally internal mobility empowers people to explore and learn new things. However, it helps to have relevant experience.

For online masters programs, I've heard of great things from Georgia Tech, with a ~$7k online program. Alternative options include UT and Stanford, and the latter is ~$60k. Rahul made a great video about his , but this would rather be a part time commitment, and I already have many YOE at Meta for my resume.

I'd also love to hear your general thoughts on navigating career moves into an area with existing, highly talented pool.

I got laid off 3 weeks back after a PiP. I'm looking for new opportunities and talking to recruiters. When asked about your current role and company what should I mention? Is it ok to mention my last company/role?

I work in AI and am considering working in my next company, Google, Meta/Facebook, and Apple have all called given my reputation in the industry as a past startup founder and well known open source contributor.

What should I think about in joining a company beyond perks and benefits? Should I optimize for learning with an AI legend in their early stage venture that has raised half a billion but hasn’t built or released a product yet, or go for a larger publicly traded company with many layers of management that has established promotion paths and product market fit. What else should I consider before taking a job?

Since I’ve only worked in smaller companies, I sometimes feel uncertain about my abilities as an engineer compared to FAANG engineers. How can I identify the gaps between my current skill set and those of FAANG companies?

Tech world is moving as fast as the speed of light 😊, hence the only way to keep up with it is to be fast learner and have a way to quickly review and retrieve information. I was wondering what technique you guys are using to improve learning productivity

Hi,

I am not sure maybe I am going crazy but I think my manager doesn't want my growth. I have been at the company for more than 2 years now. My team was doing very basic stuff. Recently our team direction changed and we got interesting work. My manager was on vacation and that work is now led by some other engineer in the team. I didn't say anything. Also, time and again he tries to find fault in front of the whole team and he does with me only. How should I deal with him?

Recently I had asked a friend who works in DevX analytics (developer experience analytics) about her work and she mentioned that currently there was no other way to measure developer productivity other than lines of code or how frequent, often, and long someone was coding. Isn’t this a bad measure for productivity? Couldn’t someone just be pushing crap code (copy and paste) that has no substantive value to the team? I also thought about this article by the CTO of Carta that also talks about alignment and other ways to understand substantive and more qualitative measures than quantitative factors to evaluate success and I guess productivity?

How does your company evaluate developer productivity and success and metrics? I’ve found talking to former Meta engineers a lot they tend to have some really specific ways to measure success metrics that seem reasonable.

I'm in a difficult situation right now and feel I need some time off to recover and manage, but am also concerned with optics.

I've been interviewing for new roles recently and spent my time off over the holidays (~2 weeks) preparing for a particularly stressful onsite interview. The team I was originally interviewing with no longer has an opening and I'm stuck waiting for headcount to open up and find a new team.

The stress of this situation has been taking a toll on me mentally and physically, and I've been dealing with a lot of health issues over the last month. I think it would be best for me to take at least a couple of weeks off to help reduce my stress and focus on maintaining my health. This isn't extremely extended, but amounts to more like a month off when factoring the recent 2 weeks off for the holidays.

After writing this out, it seems more cut-and-dry that I need to just ask and cite the health issues. I'd be curious to hear how others have navigated asking for extended time off.

Hi all,

I've been working as an application developer since the last 6 years. My work is mostly related to internal technologies for building apps (Oracle ADF, Salesforce, ServiceNow platforms), not much related to Java, Spring, Python, etc...

What should I keep doing to reach to next level? Is this experience good or should I look for more Java/Spring or Python-related work? Or should I start learning AI/ML Stuff???

My interviews are mostly based on DSA/System Design/LLD topics only. Mostly my interview knowledge is not relevant to work. Suggestions appreciated on what I can do to grow.

Hello, I’ve been going for senior level positions even though I was mid level at my previous FAANG company. Before FAANG I was senior level at a startup so I think I can handle senior again. But when a recruiter asks what level I was previously, should I tell them or should I be vague somehow like when they ask for what compensation I’m looking for?

My manager is putting lot of emphasis on documentation .
It consumes lots of time to document almost everything and its equally challenging to keep it updated as well. For example, if we are doing some dev work or exploring a new tool , we are expected to document everything step by step. (I am ok with creating regular design docs, onboarding docs etc).

I believe one has to find a sweet spot (or strike right balance between actual dev work and documentation ) . Any tips on how to deal with this ?

As we all know, Big Tech hiring is drastically slowing down, which includes Meta. However, this means people axis sources like interviewing and being a bootcamp mentor become harder to get.

I'm also fairly new to the company, so it's harder for me to do things like mentor and onboard others for people axis credit.

All that being said, how does people axis work for me and how can I get a good rating there?

I believe I have a good relationship with a coworker. My manager thinks we don’t. Should I ask the coworker to record a formal feedback that we have a good relationship, or are there other standard or recommended data points or actions for making this case?

Recruiters often mention that a staff engineer interview involves a deeper dive compared to a senior software engineer interview, but it's not clear how much deeper it needs to go. Are there any resources that can clarify this?

Large tech companies used to provide a sense of stability and financial security, but with falling stock prices and layoffs everywhere I wonder if joining a hyper growth late-stage startup with a growing business and hefty pre-ipo RSUs is a better choice?

Hi, can you please post the recording for the office hour on "senior to staff"?

I see some senior engineers getting promoted to staff within 2 years. Whereas other senior engineers take 5-7+ years.

What are some hurdles that senior engineers face when getting promoted to staff engineer? How to watch out for and avoid these hurdles to get promoted within 2 years?

What’s the biggest skill to start mastering or how to set yourself up for success at an early stage to make this promotion faster?

Is it easier to get this promotion in big tech or a startup?

Does changing teams or orgs or companies delay this promotion? 

I went through the Behavioral Interview course. Loved it. Thanks for making this course!

I want to understand and need examples for nailing the #1 interview question discussed in . I see that Alex has listed pointers at the end but I don't fully understand how exactly to add the following in my response: organizational complexity, depth of contribution, quality of delivery and attribution. I somewhat understand what they mean individually but I am struggling to bring these in an impactful authentic way in my response.

I would appreciate any detailed examples for this!

I'm currently a full stack software engineer working with React/Typescript for front end, Scala/Java for API design, and AWS. I love what I work with, but my team has had significant changes and I am looking to switch. There is an open role at my company for a data engineering role using python and airflow for ETL and they want someone to automate their pipelines. It sounds like the role is parsing/manipulating data to be sent to LLM models and the role works closely with ML engineers. I'll be honest that automation/data parsing doesn't sound as fun to me as full stack software engineering, but I was wondering if it sounds like a good opportunity to learn some ML for someone with zero ML experience. Does anyone have advice on if data engineering is a good career or will I be siloed away from software engineering forever?

My team has 1 E5 iOS (me), 1 E5 Android, 1 E4 iOS, 1 E4 Android, and several backend engineers. We also have a few web engineers, but I don't work with them.

I optimize for quality even if it takes more time, while my E4 iOS optimizes for speed (often cutting corners, skimping on testing, neglecting edge cases, etc.). My E5 Android's quality is somewhere in the middle of my E4 iOS's and mine, but he takes a lot longer than me on comparable tasks.

My E5 Android tends to push tasks onto others, with the excuse that he "doesn't have time". For example, our team's manager wanted our mobile engineers to learn the backend, so she specifically assigned a backend task to the E5 Android engineer. However, in a 1:1, the Android engineer asked me to take that backend task "if I have time" -- I had finished my iOS tasks early, so I technically had time, but I was hoping to work on a side project to demonstrate E6 scope. When I mentioned that I didn't have time because I was writing a 1-pager, he asked me to share it with him. Then he said we should focus on finishing our existing projects before starting new ones and added a lot of negative comments to my 1-pager, which made it more difficult for me to get buy-in from other engineers.

My team's EM had told me I could DRI a particular project I was excited about. However, the E5 Android convinced our PM that we should finish existing projects before starting new ones, so they forced me to deprioritize the project I was excited about to work on some boring E4 tasks. My E4 iOS was busy with another project, so he didn't have the bandwidth to take those tasks. However, I was hoping the E4 could take those E4 tasks after he finished his current project.

Do you have an tips on how to navigate this? I get the impression that the E5 Android pushes a lot of tasks onto the E4 Android as well, based on the latter's annoyed look in meetings when it happens.

My team will start our H2 scoping soon. Apparently the E5 Android engineer already set expectations with my team's EM that Android will take a lot longer than iOS for that project that I'll DRI.

As a founder of an early-stage startup, what are the top things you look for in your first five engineering hires? Are you searching for people who can handle a bit of everything, or do you prefer specialists in key areas? How do you balance technical skills with ensuring they fit well with your company's culture and vision?

Besides their technical know-how, what personal qualities are most important to you in these early hires? Do you value problem-solving skills and creativity over past experience in similar roles or industries? How crucial are soft skills like communication and adaptability, given the fast-paced and ever-changing nature of startups? And finally, how do you make sure these first hires will not only meet immediate project needs but also grow with the company as it expands?