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

I'm originally from India. I started working in the US from 2021. My team in the Bay Area is pretty talented and I have been learning a lot from them. I am considering if I should move back to India at some point down the line. I'm worried about the career opportunities in India though.

Given most companies have their headquarters here, Bay Area has plenty of L5, L6, L7 engineers tackling massive scope. Does India also have many Staff+ engineering roles dealing with massive projects? Or are the opportunities in India mostly restricted to L3-L5 levels?

I work at a pretty early stage startup and I've historically only done backend. There's been a lot of new scope on the frontend side and so I'm now having to start getting some of the frontend features working as well. But the issue is the codebase seems to be using a lot of the newer frontend techstack like next.js, tailwind CSS and redux and whatnot.

I've never written any frontend so I'm kind of starting from scratch. How do you recommend I tackle this?

I know the common taro advice is to learn by doing but given that frontend is almost a different skillset I'm not sure what's the best approach.

Should I spend some time watching lessons or tutorials or try and hack together a small side project or should I just learn as I go?

How do you build relationship with skip manager (executive) when you do not have any meetings with them and you are working remotely?

If I do carve out an opportunity, I'm also afraid that my boss might question why I am trying so hard to build a relationship with his/her manager given I have nothing shared to work on with the executive. If there was, I and the executive would be atleast in some common meetings where I would get the opportunity to build relationship and demonstrate impact.

In my company, there is an axis called "Strategic Impact", which is separate from product work. The idea is that you add value to the engineering ecosystem through efforts like refactoring and improving internal tools. How can I find great ideas in this area and does anybody have any examples? I work on the mobile side.

Hi everyone,

I recently joined a new company and am in the process of onboarding with a new team. After a week, I’ve noticed several challenges stemming from our team lead’s transition back to an individual contributor role. Currently, there’s no clear roadmap, sprint retrospectives haven’t been conducted for a while, and regular 1:1s with engineers are missing.

While the company is trying to hire a new engineering manager, which might take at least three months, I’m considering stepping up to fill in some of the management gaps. I’ve always been interested in moving into a management role, and this situation seems like it could be a good opportunity.

Do you think this is a good idea? If so, how should I go about offering myself for these responsibilities, or should I wait to be approached? Any advice or experiences shared would be greatly appreciated!

My product team just finished an intense death march project that lasted 6 months and involved collaborating with 2 platform teams. Management pressured us work to nights/weekends. Morale was low because the deadlines were completely unrealistic -- Leadership wanted this project done in 3 months, but it ultimately took 6 months. Any tips to inspire / motivate teams in these situations?

Hi,

I have 5 years of experience but in 3 different companies as SDE1 and now I am joining a company as senior SDE. I was able to crack the interviews as they were generic but I am very nervous on how will I perform as senior SDE. My imposter syndrome is making it worse :)

Any important pointers that you will recommend for my initial few months to onboard smoothly and performing well.

Thanks.

Background: I joined my current team as E5 and I've spent past few months delivering large projects. I've proven my technical ability to the team and got very positive feedback from my peers and my manager. However, since I'm currently the only mobile engineer in the team, I don't have enough capacity to handle all the upcoming projects and my manager decided to hire more mobile engineers. My manager told me that they want me to take on a more leading role and help with different projects.

Before I join my current team, I was E4 at previous company and I only had 1:1 mentorship experience to help mentor other E3/E4 engineers (not at the same time). I got a few questions on my mind and any help would be appreciated.

1. How to do better as a tech lead and mentor multiple engineers at the same time to help them grow?
2. I'm delivering projects with good velocity and quality, but from my past experience I found it pretty hard to apply same standard to others, how should I change my mindset to help team move fast and improve quality instead of just being a good IC myself?
3. I want to give new engineers (probably all E4s) chances to lead tech design. To what extent should I be helping with the designs? Should I delegate more and let them take full credit, or should I be handholding more?
4. When I'm leading projects, how to make sure I get my part of credit while other mobile engineers also get their credits? Also related to this, how to better separate tasks on a project? I want to make sure they have chance to grow while I also get chance to grow.

Questions for Alex and Rahul which I know were covered in some videos somewhere in snippets, but maybe not all in one question. Taro has amassed a lot of great content in its courses and blogs -- how long did it take to create initial MVP of quiz app before the Taro founders quit their jobs to go and work on Taro full time as a startup entrepreneurs?

• When did the founders pivot?
• How long did it take to create initial content (blogs over the years, lots of videos, powerpoints etc.)?

It's impressive to see the amount of rich content, how long did it take for Rahul and Alex to conceptualize Taro (in its early form, name), what ways did they test the success metrics of various pieces of content for a single feature (video series, single video/blog etc.) - how well did they perform over a given period of time?

I want to be able to work at FAANGMULA and am considered an industry leader publishing work in my domain, however I am told the culture of Apple, Meta, Google (all of whom which called to hire me) is not open to this (this is all lower level employees whereas most of my friends who are directors of engineering all say I can negotiate this for my next big work and that I can just disclose this an interview and should be fine). Full disclosure: I've never worked at a larger FAANGMULA company (have either founded startups and worked on small teams, consulting etc.).

I am wondering if it is better to place my autonomy over a bigger salary and stability at a larger tech company vs an earlier stage AI startup (maybe not all the perks in the world), but is friendlier to my contributions outside of work (it is directly related) where they don't care and probably encourage that I do publish. How should I think about this in terms of long-term career growth?

I think that there is a chance the startup fails to productionize faster than I would prefer (they're a market leader already at the very top of FAANGMULA developing new foundation models are some of the OG AI people best in class), I wonder if the path I take is better at a FAANGMULA company who can likely compensate for further graduate studies or cover other benefits/perks and higher salary than at the startup, however, it would mean giving up being able to publish and feeling a sense of autonomy.

Given my 10 years in the tech industry with 8 years in Android development I have never had to study for algorithm type questions or even system design.

I am planning on looking for a new job here in the next few months and I anticipate that these will be a necessity to learn.

I am a self taught developer where my foundation began with mobile development basically from the start. I do want to learn the lower level languages and concepts but I am also extremely nervous because my retention is horrible!

I have 3 young kids as well which right now in this season also is a stressor with making the time to study.

My question comes down to what should I be studying and what are some ways of studying that are proven to help retain?

Question: This may seem like a dumb question but, doesn't a technical person administer technical interviews (coding / whiteboarding and systems design)?

So I had a behavioral screen with Meta some time ago and the in-house non-technical recruiter to my surprise oddly asked me a systems design question (I was expected to answer in like 5-15 minutes max which made no sense), I get that they want to get an idea of the candidate's 'product sense,' but I found it quite odd.

Recently, I came across another software engineering coaching platform I joined and went to their practice of DSA and system design interview prep sessions which they run weekly, which oddly I found that non-technical admins (executive assistants) ran, I think it was helpful for offloading administrative scheduling, but they didn't seem to help much since they're actually non-technical.

Is there any course here on Taro that mentions this topic?

I don't understand the difference between a Software Architecture document and a RFC. Are they the same?

I once heard that one can't get promoted if they have never proposed an RFC.

I've been struggling to put my resume together for new senior/lead front end roles. My current position came through a referral and only needed my resume as a formality so didn't really put thought into it. Now that I'm looking for new roles and going through the application process, I've struggled to get any traction. I've gone through the how to write a stellar resume course here and implemented a lot of that thinking. I believe the one thing I'm missing is metrics. Unfortunately they're hard to get at my company but I've built custom features for large clients who use our platform. Is there a way to get around specifying number of users and what are some other metrics I can use?

I want to know what kind of interview questions can be asked for a Product or Engineering positions at specific companies so I can prepare for them, both for technical and behavioral rounds.

Is there an AI tool that would help us do that?

If not, this might be a good idea for Taro to put on their roadmap :)

I'm unsure if roles like a TA and TPM are becoming obsolete from an organizational perspective. However, I've noticed a gap in effectively screening potential candidates for job placement. I believe I have the skills to excel in headhunting, but I'm uncertain if transitioning to this role is the right career move for me at this time.

Hi everyone,

I'm in the early stages of interviewing for an infrastructure role ("Senior Cloud Infrastructure Development Engineer") at Nvidia. From my initial conversations and research, it seems like the team supports other Nvidia engineers for testing and development. I'll learn more in upcoming interviews, but I'm curious to hear from the Taro community about a couple of things:

• Will this role primarily involve only Devops work & tooling, or will it be focused on developing services and tools?
• Given my background in backend and distributed systems, would a non-revenue-generating role like this offer good growth opportunities at Nvidia?

Any insights you can share about similar roles at Nvidia would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance!

Hi,

I am in the offer stages for a job. The recruiter mentioned that benefits would go in effect on the first of the month. If I am joining mid-June, my health care benefits would go in effect in July. Is this normal?

Question: What other ways can I try to segment my knowledge/info from my long-form content (capture somehow in the short form) that can still be engaging but less exhausting and intensive that can help with channel growth / sales? I'm a Substack creator, writer/author.

Background: I feel like a lot of your successful engineering examples came from people who worked at household name startups and FAANGMULA companies that had bigger followings. Because I never worked for a big household name even if I am considered a market leader/authority in my field, my following is still smaller than I prefer.

I released a book on my subject matter expertise a few years back, feel I did a less good job at marketing after publishing was at over 2.5K followers (I'm at about 6K now on LinkedIn, Twitter and less on IG/FB Fan Pg and haven't broken that 10K mark on any channel which frustrates me), I haven’t seen a ton of growth.

All my friends who broke 100K-1M followers either all have worked at FAANGMULA, or have been asked to model/act professionally so I feel this is at my disadvantage to a degree as I dislike showing my face and objectifying myself further to society’s physical image standard. Some of my Gen-Z friends have lifestyle IGs with 50K+ followers with a lot of engineering memes (short vids) and while I admire them to a degree for their ability to capture a large following, I find that my posts are always much longer form and easiest with Substack, Medium or the written word. For 4 years fans have asked me to livestream, release a podcast, or start a YouTube, all of which is a ton of work, energy, has some value, but I feel a ton of pressure to edit pixel perfect content, be “on” for a performance or get propositioned for dates. Do you have examples of content creators that don't show their face on screen that are able to scale?

I have not actively interviewed in 4-5 years and so not practised algorithms for a while now.

I got a phone screen day after tomorrow. What's the best way I can prepare in the one day that I have to make sure I get through the technical questions asked in the phone screen?

Who (which roles) reporting to whom has the most power to make authority/decisions about day-to-day, vs. technical product architecture vs. business decisions when it comes to early stage venture/YC backed startups (small teams ranging from like 10 employees-hundreds vs. thousands at a larger company)?

I struck up this conversation at the last in-person meetup and got varied answers.

Answer #1: it depends on the company.

Answer #2: management

Answer #3: ICs that revolt against management.

Who has the ultimate authority? Does it depend on the founders and investors (technical CEOs vs non-technical CEOs of major publicly traded FAANGMULA or startup companies makes a difference with the technical/engineering culture right)?

When considering a role (I've been interviewed for senior IC roles, but have a TPM background - Technical Product Manager, which for some folks can translate also into Technical Program Manager) and have been debating back and forth if it makes sense to continue to interview for senior IC roles if I am told that ultimately I don't have 'any' power, but all ex-Meta engineers tell me otherwise. At the same time, many people tell me some companies (like Apple) will privilege management. And yet others, may also tell me that none of that matters, and ultimately all senior ICs/staff engineers/tech leads may tell me is that you won't be able to contribute code as a TPM (you'll be stuck in meetings all day managing people and pointless and endless 1:1s with junior devs on your team a.k.a. babysitting to some and so encourage folks to instead choose being an a senior IC), the reverse are those who tell me TPMs do have interview (even for YC backed AI companies) for product (yes you have to whiteboard and do DSA just like any senior IC would) and actually have a hand in the product (contributing code).

I find myself stuck debating back and forth because ultimately as a past co-startup founder I'm a control freak who probably craves power (natural for management), but I also miss coding a lot (I hated all the business problems with my last company with my non-technical business founder). Any advice on selecting the next role given my dilemma (a need for power/control/authority, but also wants to contribute code)?

I'm currently working closer to the product side (i.e. consumer-facing) on my team. However, I want to move deeper into the infra layer, more into the back-end and away from the front-end, as that's what I'm more passionate about and this area should be more technically complex.

I've brought this up with my manager a couple times, but they said that since I'm already doing great in my current role, they would prefer for me to stay here. How can I navigate this conversation and convince them of this move?

I have 10 years of experience and am currently laid off. I want to experiment as an entrepreneur and build a product. I have a very basic idea. I am willing to try being an entrepreneur for a maximum of two years.

My question is, if my startup idea fails, how will corporations perceive me? Will corporations be willing to hire me? Will they respect my experience as an entrepreneur? What is the general attitude towards failed entrepreneurs?

If I know I can go back to the corporate world, I will have enough confidence to experiment.

There are many directions you can take testing, but just want to understand how to frame the right mindset of "proving" impact for a concept where success is that you prevented or saved risk from the company (no one will know about it essentially if you do your job well).