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

Hi,

I really enjoy this course. And Louie Bacaj mentioned in this video that he would share his end of year review sample. Where can I find the link ?

Thanks,

Michael

I've been at my current company for about a year and a half, the team I was hired for hasn't worked together until the last two months. because of some organizational decisions all the engineers on that team have been lent to other teams during the period I'm describing. My team didn't have a manager until three months ago, and this manager hasn't been doing a good job either, his onboarding feels slow and he's just started to get closer to the team.

Despite the fact that I don't really "own" anything as I've been working across the org in different initiatives, I'm a top performer in the company. And if things keep going like they are going, I'd hope to get a promotion to Staff in the upcoming 6-12 months (I've gotten meeting expectations once, and exceeding expectations twice).

All that said, I have the chance to join another team with a manager I really like that I've known for about six months, I really like him and I feel that our work styles are quite similar. I worked with his team for about two weeks and it was overall positive, nice, kind talented people.

I'm 90% sure this is the right move for me, but I have a few doubts:

1. Do you think that is going to hurt my momentum to get to Staff?
2. I'll be doing back-end work in this new team, I'm mostly a front-end engineer, but I've done some lightweight backend work in the past, and I'm really excited about working on something different (I'll be writing Kotlin/Ruby), the only downside of this is that I won't be as effective with this new language as I am with my current stack. Should I be worried about this?
3. What key questions you think I should ask this new manager before making the final call?

What do you think about this situation?

Appreciate your insight, thanks!

I have been at a company for 2 years. We measure a metric each quarter. For that particular metric should I average it out and mention it on my resume or should I spell it out separately for each quarter?

I took a break since shutting down my last company and wanted to take some off to recalibrate after getting COVID last year (near death experience) and wanted to make sure I eased my way back into the job market. How long should I consider contracting at a place before moving on to securing the next full time job (40 hours a week but with the expected healthcare benefits, stock options etc.)?

I see many job postings that is say 3 days/wk hybrid in-person and remote, but still expectedly about 40 hours a week it just lacks required in-person working in the office except a few days for meetings. I am thinking that it would take me 3-6 months to settle in the jobs I am interviewing for expect 9 months to a year, and maybe have some benefits, but not the full time permanent position.

Should I contract hourly temporarily just for a few months and try to land the permanent position (full time benefits and full 40 hours a week) at FAANGMULA instead of being on contract for 6-9 months and just break my contract?

Some of these shorter/temporary jobs are coming by way of referral (know friends working at some other startups/companies) or 3rd party recruiter for FAANGMULA or FAANGMULA itself (experimental groups at Meta). I personally want to land something more full time permanent sooner, but the market I know is challenging and it can be tougher to get my first Tier 1 preference, so I'm settling for Tier 2 contract, but not putting 100% of my time into that company so I can spend more time applying to other jobs, refining my side projects/apps to release with actual users and make my portfolio and resume a bit more impressive with other clients or other places to work (household name, but not completely full time).

What is the best approach so that I can effectively land a FAANGMULA / startup company without completely burning myself out and diving into the next job?

About Me

I've been a software developer for more than 20 years. I've been in IT for my whole career. I've worked on mainframes, UNIX systems and all versions of Windows as a Dev and Sys Admin. All my roles have been technical, ranging from what's now called DevOps to Development. I've mainly used the C family of languages: C, C++ and C#. When Angular v1 came out, I transitioned to frontend development full-time from mainly doing C#. About a year after Angular v2 came out I transitioned to that, so I've added TypeScript to that list. During the last 15 years, I've moved countries 3 times and now I'm back in the UK.

I've worked as a contractor most of the time since 2010 when I moved to New Zealand. I've had the odd permanent job when necessary, but contracting allowed me to work in different industries over a shorter period of time than would have been possible had I had permanent roles.

What I'm Looking For

I'm looking for a way to transition from my Angular contracting role to an Angular Architect role.

I imagined myself getting known publicly for Angular expertise and advising companies on Angular application architecture.

This type of role is rare (at least in the UK), so competition is high. I imagined a situation where companies approached me and not the other way around.

I just don't know how to build and execute a roadmap to make that happen.

Any advice would be appreciated.

I am the kind of person who likes to evolve my role in Software Engineering by working on different types of things. For example I have worked heavily on Cl/CD pipelines but now want to work on Cloud Infrastructure or Security. How do I find opportunities at work if my current team does not deal with Cloud or Security? I feel like if I voice my desire to work on Cloud and Security, he/she may feel I am not being loyal to my current work/project.

If I would like a feature request, where would I post this? For example, my feature request would be a time elapsed text for Taro course videos. It would be great to see our progress even more visualized as watch videos (in addition to seeing the percentage bar so we know how much time we have left to complete a course)

Today is my first day at a new role. I am very optimistic about this role.

At the same time, some of the places that I applied are only now following up. One role in particular has the potential for a 100k+ TC increase, or over 30%. This is meaningful to me. What mental checks should I do before accepting the interview?

If I interview and receive an offer, would it be best to accept it and leave or bring this up to my current employer and seek a raise? Would that set a sour tone?

It's easy building relationships within your own team but how do you build relationships across other teams whom you do not work with on a daily basis?

Is it pushy/rude to ask for more concrete feedback if the interviewer/recruiter calls says that I was a very strong candidate but they have proceeded with someone else who had more experience and explained techniques in better ways?

I found the feedback quite vague and felt like the interviewer didn't want to provide more feedback. How do I deal with a situation like this?

Hi

How to evaluate if my current team (new team) will have manager training oppurtunities after 6 months or find a new team which will have better chance of it ? any pointers in this direction will be appreciated. This is assuming I have solid senior experience.

I recently went to a panel event and breakout with directors of engineering at major FAANGMULA co’s and startups that have been around quite sometime (household name brands). 

During the event breakout, I had conversation with people surrounding the idea of metrics used to evaluate lead individual contributors, whether technical or non-technical, but stress the point of “technical excellence” or being considered world class at the top of their friend - friends who are directors at art at companies like Adobe are comparable to research scientists working on foundation models at big name companies who are evaluated on the number of papers published or talks done using AI or other emerging tech product lines. 

During a breakout, one person from Amazon said they only look at group results in aggregate as opposed to individual contribute. Does this really make sense though, aren’t people promoted by an individual basis more than an entire department or team?

I know given the advent of ChatGPT and AI entire teams are being cut (thinking of Salesforce and WorkDay, but that’s mainly for sales being replaced with AI agents), it’s far different than evaluating day, engineers who are building product and foundation models. 

But the response I got was countering my point saying that data engineers and traditional back-end engineers were the ones they referred to like technical excellence didn’t matter to the individual, and they hated how Google and Meta’s quantitative metrics (saying of course we should be evaluated on code quality more than number of commits). It was a very gray area other than when talking about “time for engineers saved on a product” and “time saved to make this workflow more efficient for a massive data migration from a legacy platform to another modern day stack.” I felt a lot of resistance to what I was saying and I’m not sure why since some folks worked at major companies (Netflix, Yelp, Amazon, etc.) and yet some people said they hated even their companies metrics to measure developer productivity even if their company was similar to another’s while another hated it. What is a good way to identify a health culture of a tech company and their developer productivity metrics? (I think deeply about this because interviewing at FAANG this year, I held off on moving forward mainly because I wasn’t ready to commit somewhere with a lower level and salary and had some fear of burnout again after my last startup). 

If someone makes an introduction to someone who is in another country, how do you then nurture that virtual connection if you dont have direct opportunities to work with that person?

What is the difference between an EM and Tech Lead position in terms of amount of individual contribution overall (is this a difference of 80-20%)? Not like a TPM position which is more business facing, but I expect EM to be more cross-functional than Tech Lead.

How is EM similar to Tech Lead, but how does it work with it at a larger company structure wise, and with TPMs on a project? Who has the most 'power' and autonomy?

Context: Previously I was a startup founder and CTO and as I contemplated senior IC roles that I have interviewed for (AI primarily), I'm curious to know the differences here because I could go either way and I'm afraid that EM roles I may be in less code day to day. Does it just mean I have more 1:1s for soft skill stuff to mentor other engineers as oppose to talk to them about the actual nature of the work?

In the by Ethan Evans, there's a mention of an app that can show personality & communication style results of a manager. What's the name of this app?