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

As a new hire, I want to make a strong first impression.

On the other hand, if I go the extra mile and overachieve early, will I be setting a bar for future expectations so that when I return to normal effort I might be perceived as not as effective as initially thought, or decreasing in performance?

That's the main question. More generally, should we ever over-exert? If the answer is "sometimes," then how do select the cases?

Do you think that by being in a remote setup, it would be harder to learn skills like communication, building trust, and aligning people behind decisions? I'm interested in these skills for my work of course, but I also do have aspirations of building my own startup someday and I imagine these skills are useful there too.

Seeking Advice on Choosing the Right Team

Hello everyone,

I’m currently at a crossroads in my career and would appreciate any insights or advice. Here’s the context:

Background:

• I work at a company that primarily deals with payroll and HR services for companies.
• I was originally on the payroll team, which has now been absorbed into a larger payroll, taxes, and payments vertical.
• Earlier this year, I was loaned out to help another team set up a new service and architecture.

Current Situation:

• Our company underwent reorganization, and my old team is now part of a different department with the same manager but a different director and VP.
• I recently spoke with my skip-level manager, who praised my work and mentioned that several teams would be happy to have me. I also have the option to stay with the team I’ve been helping recently.

Teams Available:

1. Growth Team: Works on tools for prospective customers (estimates, self-enrollment, etc.).
2. Accounting Firm Team: Services accountants who handle payrolls for multiple companies, focusing on admin ops tooling.
3. Payroll Team: My old team. Not sure how things will change post-reorganization, but I had a good relationship with my manager and team.
4. Integrations Team: Handles integrations with multiple product teams. Not too many interesting problems to solve.
5. Leave and Absence Team: Deals with leave/work schedule-related matters (PTO, holidays, work schedule, etc.). This is the team I was loaned to recently. The new manager appreciates my work, and I get along well with the team, although they tend to work slower than I’m used to.

Considerations:

• I feel a strong inclination to stay with the Leave and Absence team due to high visibility and good relationships with the current director and SVP.
• Career growth and self-fulfillment are important factors in my decision.

Question:

• For those of you who have had to make similar decisions, what type of team did you choose to join and why?
• Any advice on factors to consider in making this decision?

Thank you in advance for your insights!

I hope this helps structure your thoughts and gather valuable advice from others.

There are so many changes in the pipeline for my projects every single day - Everyone can bring in what they want to change and what they want to update.

I work on the front-end, and a lot of the time I'll get mocks, start building them out, and then get a big change in assets/copy a few days later. I also present to leadership sometimes and get pretty much feedback that warps the look and feel of the product after I've built most of it out.

How can I make this overall situation smoother?

I was a former startup founder and companies like FAANGMULA (Meta, Google, Apple in particular) have reached out to interview me for senior SWE positions, how should I chose any one company (these options or others), that I think might want me to recreate the type of IP that was in my startup paying me a salary instead of acquiring me (if I were to do my company again), which they can cheap out on? If my goal is to have my own company again someday, should I work somewhere else less related to my expertise (just need it to pay the bills for a few years before trying again)? Or do I go somewhere, think I can learn, won’t necessarily get promoted or get paid more and sacrifice my IP that these companies (or other smaller startups), could actually end up owning?

Meta recruiter said he would reconnect with me next month. Realistically, how much time does that give me to study?

My startup is doing well and there's a high probability of it being worth a large amount and it still has potential for more upside.

What are common regrets from people who left successful companies before their full vest? (And maybe more interestingly, what are regrets from people who only stayed to finish their vest when they wouldn’t have otherwise?) What’s a reasonable discount factor when considering opportunity cost of illiquid equity?

I am moving to a different organization within my current company where I will be working with a new domain and new language (C#)

Looking for some concrete advice to get clarity in terms of expectations from my new manager and also work with him to upskill myself in the new product fast.

I am also looking for concrete tips on how to upskill beyond syntactical on more intermediate and advanced concepts in the new language? How do other engineers approach learning a new language beyond the surface.

I'm an engineer with about 4.5 years of experience. I've had 2 jobs since graduating university. The first was a small startup (<10 people) where I did backend engineering and worked like a dog. The second (and current) is a large (~1500 people) company that's far more chill.

I've heard, read, and generally understand that recruiters (and probably hiring managers as well) like to see career progression when reviewing resumes. Makes sense.

My questions are:

1. rather than calling myself "Backend Engineer" for my first job on my resume, should I say I was a "Junior Backend Engineer"?

2. for my current job, rather than calling myself a "Data Engineer", can I call myself "Senior Data Engineer"? My company isn't technically advanced to the point where they formally use the title "Senior" engineer for anyone (although engineers definitely are paid differently based on tenure, impact, negotiation skills). Hence I feel like I have that lee-way. Heck, it might even be better to arbitrarily take the 3 year block at the company and pick a point around the 2-year mark where I say I became "Senior", so I can have Junior -> Intermediate -> Senior on my resume.

There's irony in down-leveling myself for my first job, although I really was junior and titles are fungible. As for up-levelling myself in my current role, isn't the point of a resume just to get an interview? And are people really going to check with my employer and say "aha, caught you! you said you were a Senior Engineer, but really you were an Engineer!" and even if people do, I would imagine it's a small number, that's offset by the upside of demonstrating that progression, even if it is a little messaged'

Finally, to address a question that will probably be asked, I definitely feel like I have learned a good deal since I started 4.5 years ago, technically, but more importantly knowing what to work on. Prioritization, time management, etc.

Thanks!

I am looking forward to grow as senior engineer soon. I realised one of the improve my areas as I become senior is to be more independent and onboard to new projects effectively.

As someone who likes to understand things deeply, I am taking more time to get started and contribute to new projects when introduced to new frameworks/languages/tools. How should I become more effective?

I get the idea behind measuring quantifiable impact but what are the concrete steps you take to track and measure metrics if your product manager and leader are not interested in measuring quantifiable impact?

For someone starting to study Systems Design for interviews, is there a roadmap we should follow so that we understand concepts in increasing order of difficulties?

Curious to hear about what archetypes you think AI teams follow.

For ex: I think Specialist, Tech Leads are pretty common for AI teams. But we probably have a few archetypes like fixer that are slightly different in the skillset (dig through data, analyze common usecases).

Did meta have any additional archetypes for AI eng types?

I already have great working relationships with several staff engineers in my org, but I'd like to take it a step further and enter a formal mentorship with them. How can I go about this in a natural way?

I'm a well paid software engineer at a big tech company but I'm based in Canada. The US market is much more lucrative, and my company allows internal transfers to the US and is willing to adjust pay accordingly. However I'm concerned my RSU grant will still be the same, so is my only option to switch companies or perhaps boomerang back in the US? I'm relatively new to the company, so I wouldn't consider moving to the US till I hit the 18 month mark.

Thoughts?

Question: Why don’t you consider Substack a top funnel channel that could be more top funnel if there are more AI newsletters created in the last year and VC newsletters being the most popular and others profitable (I read somewhere that The Pragmatic Engineer is estimated at making 1.5M with 727K subscribers if they monetized a good chunk of their subscriber base?...not sure how true that is). 

One of my Substacks has open rate is 40-60% with a varied click thru rate depending on content/ask (I have had Substack for a year now, that was based on an email list I maintained for 9 years). I know there are often less subscribers that actually are paid on Substack.

Hi everyone, for next 6 months, I will most probably be working on projects which are C/C heavy. For example, project may involve discussing things with A and B teams, finding an engineering design from the abstractions the teams are using and execute it. There might not be much complex items from code perspective and execution may look simple.

While projects like these would give me good credits in terms of cross-team collaboration and communication, I want to be technically competent. Looking back after next 6 months, I don't want to feel bad that from code/eng perspective, I didn't do anything complex.

I understand that probably I should ask my manager for complex/craft heavy item, probably at least once per half but I see some engineers in queue for promotion so there is no guarantee for that.

Any suggestion from the community would help a lot. Thanks!

I'm currently working at Amazon as a contractor. There's 2 questions on my mind:

1. I approached my manager for the possibility of converting to full-time and they said that headcount wasn't available. However, several full-time engineers joined the team recently in a similar role to mine. Should I approach my manager about this? If so, how do I frame the conversation?
2. Is it a good time switching to full-time in general? What are the pros/cons of contract vs. FTE?

I often find myself in situations where I need to optimize Spark scripts for processing large volumes of data. However, I frequently encounter challenges such as memory failures or excessively long evaluation times, which can lead to significant costs.

What are the best strategies you employ to test the performance of Spark jobs that handle heavy workloads without incurring substantial expenses? I'm particularly interested in methods that can help identify bottlenecks and optimize performance effectively while keeping costs low. Any insights or recommendations would be greatly appreciated

Hello I joined a new company as a senior swe earlier this month and have met everyone on my team but I'm new to big companies so not sure how to approach a skip level meeting?

The reason I'm asking is I've seen a lot of people and posts talking about skip level relationships.

1. Am I supposed to set up a meeting myself or wait for them to set it up?

2. Should I tell my manager I'm talking to my skip level ie his manager?

In my previous company, I joined as a junior (L3) and rose to L5 level. People around me listened to my ideas sort help for any new patterns. But now after moving to the new company, I am feeling insecure about proposing any new ideas or suggest any new stuff. Going over some videos at Taro, I realised I need to gain respect by improving my code quality and be communicative about my work.

In a few scenarios I try to put my ideas in a meeting or a group. But If I feel like I cannot fight/convince with my ideas. In such scenarios, I let someone in the team/meeting take over their idea. When we go for the implementation, I feel I should have pushed more on my idea over theirs.

I would like to understand how to become a better influencer.

Hi There,

I am based in the UK and have been offered a staff computer vision engineer position at a growth-stage startup. The offer has already been finalized, but the company's CTO has requested my previous employer's recent payslip. This is unusual in my experience, as no one has ever asked for my payslips before.

I initially thought they might use the payslip to determine my compensation, but that has already been decided and communicated to me. I negotiated a signing bonus based on my expected salary expectations and a "made-up current salary (range )" because the base salary offered was not appropriate for the market rate.

During the interview process, I mentioned my current salary, which was not the exact real number (as per Rahul's advice). However, now that they are asking for my payslip, it will reveal my actual salary. I am concerned that this might leave a bad impression and create trust issues with the CTO, potentially affecting our working dynamics.

I love the team and the project, and everything else seems promising. However, I am unsure about how to proceed with this situation. The recruiter mentioned that the payslip is required for administrative purposes, but I am still hesitant. Any advice on how to handle this would be greatly appreciated.

As I pick up larger projects that require driving alignment across more and more teams, I’d like to understand any tips or advice on effectively driving alignment with those teams and being able to drive those outcomes faster. One recent example is that a partner team came back to us days before the launch of a feature pushing back on one of the core functionalities of the product. While they were consulted earlier in the project planning process and did not have pushback then, what is the best way to make a strong case to push forward while avoiding too much back and forth?

I'm senior level MLE but I have getting a lot recruiters reaching out on LinkedIn for staff level engineering but I don't feel like I have what it takes to succeed at that role. I'm not sure if there is guidelines or training program to prepare for this type of role?