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

To folks who have been impacted by the ongoing layoffs, should we be transparent about our ongoing situation with regard to employment? Just wondering if that would tend to hurt one as the interview progresses towards the offer stage.

As a senior engineer, I want to make sure that my time is spent effectively. That being said, how do I evaluate the business impact a project has and prioritize all the different things on my plate accordingly?

On a side note, how do I make sure that the scope of projects are matching my level or exceeding it?

Additional questions:

1. What tactics can I use to get buy-in?
2. Who do I need to win over? Do I need to convince the director?

I'm doing a soon: I'll use this thread to collect questions and will follow up to answer anything we don't cover within the hour.

I'm Sanjay ( / ) -- I'm a Stanford grad (same as Rahul), where I got a BS in Computer Science and MS in Biomedical Informatics. I've built my entire career in the Bay Area, with the past 5 years at AKASA, an AI healthcare company to help revenue cycle teams.

I'm the Senior Director of Engineering at AKASA. I joined AKASA in 2019 as one of the first employees when we were a seed-stage startup. I originally joined AKASA as an individual contributor, and quickly switched over to management. I built much of the company's early technology as an IC and later as a tech lead / manager. I also started and managed multiple engineering teams at the company, including Platform Engineering, now an org with 20 engineers.

Happy to answer questions about:

• How engineering leaders think about the role of Senior, Staff, and Principal ICs
• How and why to transition from IC to management
• The differences between an Engineering Manager vs Engineering Director
• How to hire and retain great talent
• How to succeed in a startup environment

I can also discuss how to introduce effective development processes (code reviews, agile development, postmortems, planning, etc) in early-stage companies and how to evolve these practices as a company grows.

How do you build up technical skills for a senior engineer? I want to develop that intuition to understand how to choose the proper technical approach and break down the trade-offs. Are there any resources I can read to accelerate this process?

The setup on my team is pretty standard: There's an E6 tech lead that has broken up a big project into multiple pieces, and I own one of those pieces (and the rest of the pieces are owned by other E5s). I'm leading a couple engineers (<5), and I think they're E3/E4.

Zooming out, this seems like decent E5 scope, but I'm sure there's some gaps to turn it into E6 scope. The tricky part is that my org is pretty XFN heavy, so it's hard to get things added to the roadmap, and with the hiring freeze, it's hard to get more engineers onto my team to lead.

All that being said, what are some ways I can find staff scope in this situation?

I'll be going into Amazon as a senior engineer leading a team of 6-7 engineers. I have some anxiety as I have never worked in a FAANG company before, and I imagine the bar is high. Things are also trickier as I'll be in a different time zone from the rest of the team.

How can I make a stellar first impression after I start?

I'm part of a team of 10 and my team is barely 3 months old, with many of us having joined this team very recently. I would love to start some initiatives to help our team bond and get closer as a team. For context, the team very distributed (3 different locations) and travel budgets are tight :(

What are some of the most effective tools you've used and/or seen to cultivate a sense of camaraderie amongst teammates?

I've received the equivalent of EE in all the areas of assessment. I'm disappointed with my performance review as I did not get promoted or get a reasonable raise despite my great performance. I (along with many of my peers and my manager) feel that I've already been performing at the next level for the past 6 months. Now it seems that I've to keep performing at the next level for 6 more months before actually getting promoted to the next level - this seems unreasonable to me.

What are my options apart from looking for other opportunities outside my current company?

More often than not, problems are enlisted in quarterly roadmaps.

From a tech complexity perspective, how do you evaluate problems which are highly complex in nature. If such problems don't exist in my team or if they exist but don't generate high outcome, should I look for outside my team to solve such problems?

I am nearing the end of my 6 months probation. My manager feels that I'm going towards an Approaching rating (like Meets Most) rather than a Thriving rating (Meets All). He feels that I lack in contribution to group level engineering discussions and being technically strong enough to mentor other engineers, which he expects from a senior engineer like me.

He keeps going through the growth and development framework and highlights he is concerned I don't meet B3 senior expectations. He increased the frequency of 1:1s to twice a week.

He didn't mention the word PIP but gave me to do a project with a very tight deadline to assess my coding and implementation skills. Now that I'm making good progress in it after a lot of effort, he brought up weaknesses in the engineering direction and discussion points.

My other team members think I am doing ok and my performance isn't too bad, though there are things I can work on.

It sometimes feels like my manager already made up his mind to make me fail probation and is finding weaknesses even if I complete this stressful project.

He even talked about downlevelling if that's a possibility and being asked to leave. He said extension of probation is not possible due to legal reasons.

What do you recommend I do?

I have been working less than a year at Meta and am just unable to understand and jell with the culture. There are a few main things contributing to me feeling burnt out.

Endless number of things to do...

There is equal emphasis on contributions to all axis and there is barely any overlap in the work that I need to do in order to meet expectations on all of them (except maybe Impact and Direction)

Better engineering projects that my team has scoped out are very separate from Impact projects

For people axis, I have to drive org level impact which is a thing of its own and adds on to the BE projects and impact projects.

Our oncall is extremely tough since we have a huge number of products with code dating back to 10 years ago.

Due to all this it feels like I'm having to do 4 jobs at once.

Process is bloated...

Especially for impact projects that result in changes to the product, there are a huge number of people involved, UX, DS, DE, 2 major orgs who are our customers and their representatives, Content, PM and business leaders. I get pinged for dates and status updates by 5 different people for either the same or different things every day. It is hard to keep up with and as someone who has some ADHD traits (unofficial diagnosis) and an introverted personality, just getting pinged and keeping up with responses feels exhausting let alone the coding aspect. Meta lives by its bottom up culture but in our org it just doesn't seem like its working. In my previous job, process was barely something I had to think of, and mind you we did weekly releases to 3 environments.

Laser focussed PSC conversations...

From having performance conversations 2 times per year to now having them 2 times a month seems like an extreme overkill and adds to the stress at all times. It isn't just the frequency. PSC self reports are so heavily dissected for every single word, every single metric that doing PSC right feels like a project in itself. so now it's 4 + 1 = 5 jobs.

What should I do? PSC season is again around the corner. Practically speaking I have a few options I want to get some thoughts on.

1. Change teams (requires an exception since it hasn't been a year)
2. Leave meta (and payback some comp components and say good bye to crazy TC)
3. Take a medical leave (still risk getting dinged at PSC)
4. Stick it out until the 1 year mark and revisit above options.

I'm a new engineer at Meta, and my goal is to find a team with a real product future. Because of that, I'm wondering if there's ways to evaluate if a certain project is going to pick up traction. How can I figure out during the team selection process if a team is doing its due diligence on gathering context and proving out business value before building features or if its just building them for the sake of building them?

Hi, I'm currently a software engineer 1 working with a senior engineer trying to ship a new feature. The way it works, the senior engineer I work with has outlined the technical problem, scope, and approach we're doing. She has assigned the tasks and most of it (BE/FE) will be done by the senior and the portion I'm doing involves a BE service I've worked on before.

Our deadline is in a month, as I'll be going on leave. I wanted to do a portion of the FE just to learn more about frontend technologies and was assigned tickets, however my senior engineer has started work on these and it looks like most of the work I'm going to be doing, apart from my tasks, are going to be reviewing/testing my senior engineer's PRs. I've worked with this part of the product before but I was hoping to get more exposure and practice.

I was hoping to really learn more about the frontend aspects of our product so I'm a bit disappointed but I'm wondering maybe if my expectations (which was to learn more about FE) are unrealistic and perhaps unnecessary.

As a new grad, what is the expectation from senior engineers?

Do I communicate this to our manager or should I re-adjust my expectations?

Hi,

I'm a Senior ML Engineer located in Europe with 4 years of industry experience, just about to start my next gig working remotely for a US startup.

On my last team, the way we approached coding was strictly based on OOP, clean code and SOLID principles as defined by Robert C. Martin (aka Uncle Bob). We were also following a strong TDD approach with 100% test coverage. By trying to stick to SOLID, we were also based a lot on abstractions and interfaces with OOP, but sometimes it felt it wasn't worth it.

Lately, I've read some negative reviews on the internet regarding clean code and Uncle Bob in particular, that were both doubting his approach and stated his claims are far from being true in the real world. Also, a lot of folks have told me that 100% test coverage is just crazy and I shouldn't be too obsessed about it.

What are your thoughts? What is your experience in the industry?

Thanks