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

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.

I'm pretty new to my company, so I've been asking questions and looking for "hand-holding" to bring myself up to speed. I've been having trouble ramping up though - My velocity hasn't been the best, and I've also gotten feedback that I need to be more independent as a senior engineer.

This leaves me a bit confused - I know that in order to onboard, you need to seek out help aggressively and ask questions, but this seems opposite of the feedback around being more independent. How do I think about these 2 ideas? Should I just be working harder and spending more time figuring things out on my own?

I run into this from time to time where more Senior and Staff Engineers take interesting projects. I’m usually left with ones that take medium time and medium impact. How do I find projects for myself that expand my impact?

Prepping for interviews always feels detrimental to actual career growth. At the same time, what are the things one should look out for to avoid getting laid off and jump ship when things are about to go south.

One advice mentioned often is to look for finances of the company, but I am not aware how to analyse it. Can you help with resources for the same?

Hey there 👋 For context, I quit a toxic job 2 months ago and I'm back in the job market.

I just finished an interview process with a company I really like, I think it checks almost all the boxes:

• Company size (Series C)
• Culture
• I'll join the team that will be on the spotlight for the next 18 months -> My job will have a major impact.
• I would be able to work on React Native if I decide to (I'm a frontend engineer w/ React expertise)
• I think that I can reach staff level in about a year or two there.
• People I interviewed with are superb.
• Fully remote.

I expect to get an offer from them on Monday (I'm writing this on Thursday night). I know that because the recruiter called me today to touch base and to tell me that things went good! The problem with this company is that the salary is more on the lower side...but it's still on the range I have in mind.

The dilema is that I'm just starting to interview with other companies that pay 50% more, but finishing interviewing with them will take me at least two weeks...and the company I'm getting the offer from probably won't hold the offer for that long.

I have a few thoughts / concerns that I'd like you to help me sort out / discuss:

• I'm thinking that it would be wise to optimize for career growth, I probably could get a better job if I manage to do great things in the company I'm getting the offer from. What do you think? The salary is not as high as the other companies, but it's good money. (FWIW, I live in a low-cost-of-living country)
• I was hoping that I could negotiate a better salary with this company if I had other competing offers, but I got nothing, and I wouldn't get any other offer by next week. Do you have any tips about how to negotiate a better offer even when I don't have the leverage of a competing offer? I understand this might not be possible. I feel that I did a really good interview process though, so maybe I could use that as leverage.
• I really like one of the "slow companies", but they've been just dead slow. I interviewed with their CTO and he said that they will kick off things immediately...but that hasn't happened. Should I ping him? I feel that they should be the ones making the next move, but I'm not 100% sold on that idea.
• The other companies are just fine, honestly, their pay is what makes them more attractive.
• Not sure if this is relevant or not, but I'm 36, I wonder if I should spend my 37-38s working for the company that pays less than the others while chasing career growth.
• I have a good runway, so if don't end up with an offer from any of those companies, I'd be just fine for another 8-12 months.
• I live in Latam, so it's hard to get 100k+ offers, it's not like I have a pool of options to choose from.

Thanks for reading! 😁

I've been working mostly as a Backend Engineer. I'm growing interest in ML. I have a few questions:

• Will my SWE knowledge help me, or will it complement with ML? Or being MLE is a totally different/separate field?
• Is there overlapping between ML and SW?
• Would be recommended to do a Masters or Practice/Courses?

I have been working for small companies for the past 5 years where the focus was on shipping the product fast and not necessarily on quality. I am now interviewing at big tech companies where the focus is on code quality and code scalability. I am concerned that even if I make it through the interview phase it will be hard for me to maintain my position after having bad coding practices for many years.

How can I get started in learning how to write clean, reusable and scalable code? I work primarily with JavaScript and Java. Can you point me to some resources to learn how to improve my code and apply best practices that will make me a great engineer? I am familiar with concepts like DRY, SOLID principles but I am looking for something actionable not some abstract concept.

Due to unforeseen circumstances from past 6 - 8 months, I've been the Senior most engineer in my team, (I have a total of just ~2.7 YOE). My team consists of ~12 SDE 1s (New Hires) and 2 SDE2s (The other SDE2 being promoted very recently). My manager does a great job filling the role of Senior Engineer which reduces bit of pressure off of me.

However, due to necessity in the team I've ended up being SME in all the services owned by our team. This leads to everyone reaching out to me to help them with their queries, I try to document some of these and add in the Wikis so that it can be easily accessible for others next time. However, when it comes to certain tickets and issues, I end up having to pick that task up myself (Manager does not ask me to, but at same time i know that for someone else the ramp up time required to fix the issue would be too high).

I recently tried to reduce this (2~ months ago), this led to our overall ticket health getting worse and I had to again start looking into them myself and guiding each on-call cycle with right action items for the tickets etc.

This involves me helping them to do the following :-

• Prioritize correct tickets to look into for the on-call cycle.
• A potential fix for the ticket so that they know where to look into.

Due to which it ends up taking 6+ hours weekly to keep this running. I don't really mind doing this; however, I don't feel like this is a scalable solution and would eventually want to slowly scale down from doing this and have my team being able to be self-sufficient.

What's the best way to go about this without affecting my team's ticket health?

I have worked at Meta my entire career (~5 years). I know that Meta is pretty "startup-ey" among the Big Tech companies, but I imagine that it can't mimic startups entirely and there's unique learning value startups can offer. Does switching to startups give big value to career development?

It seems at Apple that getting promoted past ICT4 can take ages. My manager has 3x my YOE and many reports, but we're both ICT4. There is no leveling rubric that I can find, so it's unclear to me what differentiates an ICT5 from an ICT4 here. I'm thinking it might even just be worth abandoning the promo goal for the duration I work here, then aim to be hired into a promo at the next gig in a few years.

I was curious to learn your take on strategies to push back when the expectations are not realistic. I want to expand my scope and feel that there is lot more scope for me to learn and navigate better. According to me, data and communication plays a major role here.

More specifically in my case, I am wondering how to account for me not being well versed with tech stack and constant context switching between clarifying requirements as they keep changing with each question of mine. How to politely and effectively communicate that although this may seem like a small increase of scope, given that I have to figure tech stuff it will be stretch.

Adding more context: It's trickier as I'm pretty new to the team and tech stack. I feel like I'm discovering a new requirement with every question I ask. I've set up recurring pair programming sessions to increase my velocity, but I'm not sure if that's enough.

Follow-up question: What research should be done before establishing the conclusion that expectations are not realistic?

I work with a team of 5 engineers amongst whom two are in my timezone. They always work overtime, work over weekends. They dont necessarily create a bigger impact but they are constantly posting on team chat groups about minor issues that they have seen and resolve it over the weekends. And stay late evenings and very late nights talking to the other team members. They spend a great deal of time obsessing over minor details like naming convention, doing repeated tasks.

I cannot keep up with this culture. I would actually like to have a personal life and spend some free time during the week working on side projects or learning something. At some point the opportunities do go to the people who have the most visibility right, no matter how mundane the work they do is? How do I navigate this? I would like to maintain a good reputation and work on interesting things. But I feel like I may be overlooked for promotions due to this. Any advice for me?

Hey guys. Hope everyone is doing well. Also using AI/ML as an umbrella term throughout - feel free to correct if needed.

Into:

Senior Web Developer. Initially started from Software Development. Developed passion for Web Development and made the move. Worked my way up to Senior position. 70% backend, 30% frontend. Currently 80-90% IC, rest managerial responsibilities. 9.5 years overall. Changed companies over time. Been in various industries.

Problem:

Going back and forth about moving into AI/ML. Motivation - high interest and demand. Fear - leaving web development skills behind.

My Current Solution:

Ask reputable sources about AI/ML day to days and job responsibilities. Lots of it seems to be marketing and all that glitters is not gold.

If all checks out and my passion is rooted in evidence then I would like to take few Stanford machine learning courses online. Once fundamentals are solid would like to go for masters degree in applied machine intelligence or similar. Start looking for jobs.

Questions:

• Since this is one of my reputable sources - would you please describe a day to day/job responsibilities for an AI/ML engineer?
• Granted everything checks out - do you think going for Masters makes sense? Given that finances and time is not the problem.
• Would you say I have to leave a large portion of web development skills behind when making the move? What are some of the transferables?
• Would I have to start as an entry engineer? Do you think Masters helps here? Ultimately I would have to pass the interviews but then there is applying for the position and being considered for it afterwards.

These are all the questions I could think of. Apologize for the length, but thought it would be helpful to give context. Please feel free to include anything else you deem helpful. Much appreciated and Happy holidays.

I was wondering if you have any thoughts about how to run a meeting/brainstorming session effectively keeping a time check and also ensuring that everyone in the meeting gets a chance to speak. Although this is not a new situation, I have struggled with cutting people off when they sort of hijack the meeting taking all the time leaving others checked out. They don't necessarily mean any harm most of the times or don't intend to steal the thunder but as an organizer it is my responsibility to ensure that everyone gets a fair chance to speak.

The main challenge is that most of the times what they are talking makes sense atleast 70-80% of the content so I find it difficult to cut them off easily without being rude or disrespectful. Being rude/disrespectful is the last thing I want to do! And a few are fast speakers that don’t catch cues of someone attempting to say something. Again, not at all a new situation and I think I do an okay job if not a great job in navigating through this but was curious to know additional thoughts and perspectives.

In uncertain times, and given the risk of job security in tech, what are your views on passive income modes or side hustles such as writing a blog?

Can you suggest some of these for someone who is currently a backend software engineer?

Also, I am ruling out hustles such as driving Lyft/Uber as they require active participation.

I have a L6 equivalent MLE interview from a FAANG company.

Since last time I had interview for L4. I would like to understand what kind of quality difference does L6 show in an interview (coding/behavioral/system design -- ML)?

How would you demonstrate staff level quality in the interview rounds?

Hello everyone,

As a senior engineer L5 in my company for 1 year, I recently found myself in a new team with a new direct manager but report to the same Director in the same Org due to the recent company restructure/company reorganization as part of layoff changes. My Director and I are the direct responsible individuals for the Backend Platform System for the last 1 year. However, I am finding that a significant portion of my time is being taken up by "glue work," such as onboarding new teammates, updating the Wiki, documenting On-call Runbook, mentoring cross-functional team members, providing code reviews for new developers, and unblocking people in their code development. While these tasks seem important, they are making it difficult for me to focus on my own projects.

In my first one-on-one, my new manager expressed a desire for me to take on new initiatives. I am eager to do so, but I need to be able to focus on my own work to make this possible. My manager understood that the frequent on-call support was a blocker for me and asked me to train and onboard a new teammate to take over the on-call support, as well as field requests from users and help others with their work. However, I have still found myself doing a lot of training and providing support even two weeks since my last meeting.

I would like to hear from others who have found a way to balance these responsibilities effectively. How can I prioritize my own work while still contributing to the team's success? I know this will be a difficult decision, and I'm not sure how to approach it. I'm worried that if I stop doing some of these tasks, it may impact my relationship with my manager and team.

If anyone has faced a similar challenge, I would appreciate hearing about how you approached it. Did you stop doing certain tasks and responsibilities, and if so, how did it affect your relationship with your team? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

I am trying to get promoted to Lead Software Engineer, which relates to an E5 level at Meta, if I am not wrong. I have seen several engineers in my organisation coast at the current level I am.

I wanted to understand if there are some key things I should be doing in order to perform at a Tech Lead level, so that I am promoted to one as well. This would be a bit long question, but please bear with me.

Following are some of the things highlighted in a few discussions:

1. Should have demonstrated complex backend system designs - How do I create this opportunity to build a complex system for myself? Often, the projects we are a part of don't require complex solutions.
2. Have a very strong code quality
3. Mentor other engineers - I started having 1:1s with Junior engineers on how to grow. Have not been doing this with Senior Engineers, but I try to jump in calls with them whenever they need some help. Often, the credit goes hidden, and sometimes it does bother me, but not sure if there is some way around it. What are your thoughts?
4. Handling production outages and incidents - Trying to be on top of it. Recently, have been putting out short term fixes, but alongside working on some libraries to fix it in an extensible way and have a larger impact with other teams as well. Sometimes, having visibility for my work in other teams seems to be difficult, but trying my way around this. If there is something you can recommend, that would be great.
5. Should I mention in my skip levels that this is something I am targeting for myself? - Right now, my focus is to try to uplift the code quality, work on larger designs (a question mentioned wrt this), trying to uplift the team (I have created a channel where I share stuff that can help the team upskill, brief nuggets of information on how to write good code etc. Doing this almost twice a week for around 2 months now), trying to mentor engineers within the team.

Another aspect is that my team would be getting changed soon due to organisational requirements. Given that, How do I make sure I am on the right trajectory to getting promoted ? (One thing on top of my mind is that I would be asking for junior engineers whom I can work with and try uplifting, alongside asking for opportunities/projects that would have large visibility and impact.)

Do you have any other advice for me?