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

I'm considering joining a new ads org, and I was wondering what working in ads was like overall since I've never worked in ads before.

A more specific question: There's a lot of competition in the online ads space nowadays - Will that make ads orgs more prone to layoffs as they find trouble gaining traction in this crowded market?

Hi all,

I was put on PIP today. The PIP period is from 01/2024 till end of 01/2024. He said unsatisfactory performance & had to do this to be fair to others in the team. I think I was being benchmarked against others who work on weekends as outlined in my previous question: .

Yesterday I asked my manager for a 1-week remote and 3 weeks PTO (the company has unlimited PTO) from end of January to 3rd week of February. Do you think this was one of the reasons leading to me being PIP during the month of January?

What should I do now? Should I strive to overcome the PIP or should I find a new job? Anyone successfully overcame the PIP? How do I balance PIP and finding new job?

For more information, my 1st-year stock won't be vested till 06/2024 (so 25% of my RSUs won't be vested till end of the 1st year working for them). I think I'm out looking for a new job, but don't want to lose the RSUs.

For the sake of extreme ownership what could I have done better? If you need more info from me I can definitely provide in the threads below.

Like a lot of E5s, I'm working on a piece of my team's overall project roadmap, which is set by an E6 TL. The piece I own is less technically complex than other parts, but it is quite XFN heavy (great for people/direction contribution). I was wondering if this is still enough to get to E6 or do I need the higher technical complexity as well?

What skills are essential for becoming a proficient software engineer which helps them to thrive in any tech domain and adapt to various situations?

Could you provide a list of items that one should be mindful of to excel in real-time scenarios? For instance, focusing on learning front-end and back-end development, knowing basics of web something like that.

I think I could get an L5 offer now if I pushed for it, but is it fine to level myself at L4 to make things easier on myself? Then I'll try to perform at L5 anyway but it will be a-ok to not quite make it.

One of my core goals is to get to L5, which is senior at Target. However, I'm not entirely sure what is necessary to get to that next level - I've tried to get specifics from my manager, but their answers have been relatively vague. I was wondering if anyone could share more concrete attributes of what a strong senior engineer looks like.

A lot of examples of growing to Staff are more oriented around less technical fundamental/soft skills, including the examples in Taro. However, I'm unsure how to find this scope in my team, and I don't think that kind of behavior works to get to Staff at Apple overall. I spend ~90% of my time coding, and the culture is more top-down at Apple compared to a company like Meta.

Given all that, how can it be possible for me to grow to Staff? Are there paths to Staff that are heavily technical?

Hi all,

I am a newly hired Senior Software Engineer. I worked at FAANG before but have never been in a senior role. I am currently in week 3 of my new role. My manager gave me expectation to ramp up in 3 months but with very little further guidance. The codebase is huge with very little and mostly outdated documentation.

What do I need to do to ramp up as fast as possible and position myself for promotion to Staff within next 1-2 years? I read that there are people ramped up within 1 month into their jobs on Taro. Hope you can share your tips and tricks.

How does it differ from an entry level engineer to the head of engineering level at each of the levels, given the scope grows as well at each level?

• Software Engineer
• Senior Software Engineer
• Tech Lead
• Staff Software Engineer
• Principal Engineer
• Head of Engineering
• Director of Engineering
• Vice President
• CTO

How do each of the levels ensure they are onboarded as quickly as possible to have maximum impact ?

I have been chasing the SDE-3 promotion from last one year. It was denied in the year end review cycle in December.

In this cycle (Jan - June), I have ticked almost all the checkpoints as per the firm's SDE-3 competency matrix and I have a good amount of documentation around it as well which I have submitted to my manager.

I want to let my manager and skip (Director) know that I will leave if I am not promoted in this cycle as I don't think there are any negative data points against me.

Any suggestions about how should I subtly carry out this conversation?

I'm wondering what does it takes to go from an average senior software engineer to a top senior engineer making more than 500k. Any recommendations on a step by step guide that I can leverage to reach my goal.

Thanks

Joining a new team/vertical with the company, I often feel intimidated with the sheer expanse of domain knowledge to be grasped. Given that it takes time, what are the best ways to approach it, so that you are the most effective.

I'm new to the team, and I want to make an impact quickly. How can I quickly gain respect of people on the team? Are there certain things I should do as I act/react to other people?

This half I've been assigned to a new greenfield project and I'm having a tough time believing in the product idea and I think the product team is being overly optimistic.

I'm concerned the problem the product solves isn't important enough, that the solution won't be adopted and that the business value isn't clear. They're also pushing for rushed timelines even before we've decided on what will be delivered.

I'm worried if this thing doesn't get traction and we end up having layoffs that it would make our team a target.

How should I think about this situation? Try to make the best out of it? Try to get out of it?

I joined this new company, and since the beginning things were little off for me. i.e.

• the manager when interviewed me I got a gut feeling that he is not a nice guy, I checked with my friend and got convinced that it's okay
• While onboarding, I talked to couple of my team-mates and they were either disinterested or complete rude to me, I ignored it thinking I might be the most stupid and inefficient one..
• While getting some sessions from senior engineer, the guy always made me feel bad about myself, about how I lacked necessary knowledge and how I should just get things.. I ignored that too thinking it's just me who is not smart enough

Since last couple of days, I talked some of other engineers and found that all my team-mates are pretty toxic and, when he shared some of the past experiences, I got now convinced that it's pretty toxic environment especially for my team. Now my question is that all this time I thought I am the problem.. but it turned out that it was not me.. I am still pretty new here and I am seriously searching for another job now, but what did I miss here..? What could I have done here such that I would have known this earlier? (I know, I could have talked to the other guys earlier but I was not so sure because I had no idea how they would react to that.. I shared my concerns only when it became unavoidable)

I am a senior engineer and would like to get in to MAANG, but I'm rusty in DS. I don't want to give interviews to MAANG companies until I figure that out Are there any power patterns to start with? And what would be the good starting point to solve problems? I am looking for a smart way to achieve this.

In reality most of the Fortune 500 companies I worked in the past, they never dig too much in DS problems. Most care about system design and knowledge about code.

I see few people mentioning solving 200+ problems in LeetCode which is a lot of time consuming process. I'm trying to find answers from few people who already went through this.

Given the current economic volatility and uncertainty as well as the hard-to-measure business value of cost centre teams (like infrastructure or platform), would it be sensible to join such a team?