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Should product-minded engineers learn UX design?

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Junior Engineer at JPMorgan Chase

Questions:

  1. Is learning design a worthwhile investment as someone most interested in doing full-stack work at product-based startups?

  2. Might working in a small product-based startup be an effective way to pick up design skills while working as a SWE?

  3. How can engineers build more complex side projects without any design skills?

Regarding #3:

I’d argue that basic product design skills are critical for building any CRUD application. You can’t build something without defining what it’s going to do first. 

Literally - you can’t write code for a feature if you don’t know how the app will behave during a loading state, an error state, a complex edge case from a wonky user flow, etc.

You can wing the design and iteratively dogfood it to improve its UX - but that’s the same as doing UX design while having zero UX design skills. It’s the software engineering equivalent of writing spaghetti code - except you’re not even improving.

Personally, I find that UI libraries like or are most helpful for solving UI problems like designing a button or a modal. However, they can’t help you decide how a screen in an app should work, nor can they abstract away all design challenges for more custom use cases.

Also, any CRUD application built with poor design will inevitably feel like a crappy database client. 

The design problem applies to backend projects, too. Backends exist to service frontends, so you can’t build a backend without knowing what features the frontend needs - and you can’t do that, either, if you don’t design it first!

These are all challenges I’ve faced working on my own projects.

I suspect the best approach is really to just learn UX design and a design tool like Figma. However, that’d be a hefty investment given UX design is a separate field from SWE - especially if it’s just for a side project.

Also, building cool stuff as a semi-competent engineer is tons more fun (for me) than learning design from scratch!

What are your thoughts on my aforementioned questions?

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Posted a year ago
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2 Comments

What are tips for a college student to succeed in interviews and learning?

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Student at Taro Community

What's up everyone, thanks for taking the time to read this.

Over the next year and a half, I’m aiming to take my skills as both a developer and an interviewee to the next level. I’m currently a senior majoring in computer science and statistics, and I'll be graduating this semester to pursue a one-year master's in CS. My goal is to work at a FAANG or FAANG-adjacent company, gain new skills, and make connections in a major city (a bit cliché, I know).

Background: I’ve spent approximately 1.5 years interning at a Fortune 500 company, working on Cloud/SWE projects, and this summer, I'm a Machine Learning Engineering intern at a mid-sized company.

I'm trying to figure out how to most optimally put in my time for success this interview season. Outside of work and lifting, I try to spend. ~10 hours per week on LeetCode, ~7 hours on system design and ~7 on building projects.

I'm mostly looking for tips someone at my stage may not realize in software. For example, there are really ~15 patterns that once you have the hang of coding interviews become a lot easier than doing 50 array and sliding window questions.

Here are my main challenges:

  1. Securing Interviews: Last summer, I managed to get quite a few interviews but none from FAANG or similar companies. I also applied to data science and engineering roles, which increased my interview count but weren’t exactly what I’m aiming for. I’m keen on MLE, cloud engineering, or backend roles. Although I had referrals to a handful of tech companies, most were not software engineers. What strategies have worked to get interviews for you, or what would prompt you to give an intern an interview?

  2. Understanding Concepts/Designs: What resources (books, lectures, etc) have been invaluable for your interview prep, becoming a better developer, or learning fundamentals?

There's a pretty long post, thanks for any advice you can offer.

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Posted 9 months ago
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3 Comments

How to add depth to my career and profile?

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Mid-Level Software Engineer at Unemployed

TLDR: How to pick side projects

This might have been answered multiple times and a very well-known answer would be working on side projects but I want the answer to be more in-depth so it can be helpful for many engineers.

Please don't answer in a generic way but try to answer this by posing in my shoes

Let's say you have 1.6 years of experience as a Software engineer and 3 years of experience in IT but not in development now if you want to stick to the SE career. This market is very challenging for me to get a job with 1 plus year of experience. I have to convert my IT experience into developer experience and try. But when I give interviews I tend to fail the Hiring manager rounds because they can see the depth of my SE career.

So how to convert my IT experience to SE experience? I have put a lot of effort into Leetcode and now I have gotten to a decent stage the same thing applies to System design as well I have read books blogs etc and getting the depth would be my next target.

We can hear a lot of stories in the past where a person who started his/her career as a tester or a QA and got it converted to Senior software engineer etc by working on problem-solving skills but I don't think this works in the current market.

So I felt I was missing depth. How to achieve a mid-level engineer status where I can effectively tell a lot of stories and challenges I have faced in my career and show bias for action etc

The most simple answer would be to do side projects but selecting a repository and a project is very hard as there are countless repositories and projects.

All I need is a small ignition to start on the side projects then I think discipline would take care of the rest as I was at zero questions at LeetCode a few months ago and now I have solved 250 plus with discipline.

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Posted 9 months ago
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2 Comments

Is Investing in a High-Cost Android Course Worth It for Career Growth?

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Mid-Level Software Engineer [61] at Microsoft

I’ve been working as an Android developer for four years and have contributed to two major Microsoft apps with 10M and 1B+ downloads. I also published a small app on the Play Store in just a week and have invested in improving my skills by reading Android-related books and taking courses. With this background, I felt confident about my expertise and began applying for Android roles.

However, I faced multiple rejections during interviews. The interviewers focused heavily on the internal workings of Android APIs—details beyond my practical usage, like understanding the mechanics behind coroutines rather than just knowing how to use them.

Recently, I came across a course by a highly experienced Android instructor (10+ years) who has transitioned to full-time teaching. His demo session stood out because of its focus on internal details, experiments, and case studies. It resonated with me, and I believe it could help me not only crack interviews but also become part of the top 1% of Android developers globally.

The challenge is the cost: ₹40,000 upfront (25% of my monthly salary) and ₹2 lakhs (10% of my annual salary) after securing a new job. It’s a significant investment, and I’m wondering:

  • Is it worth taking this course given my situation and goals?
  • Are there more cost-effective alternatives to achieve the same level of expertise and confidence for interviews?
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Posted 3 months ago
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3 Comments

Thoughts on this app idea?

Software Engineer at Taro Community profile pic
Software Engineer at Taro Community

Rahul hit the nail on the head on the recipe finder app I was thinking about.

  • The biggest blocker for is that I just don't care enough (or I'm too lazy) to try out new recipes. I just default to things I've made before, a ready-made meal, or Chipotle.

The YC founders talk about how "discovery" (music/band/concert/event/apps/food/restaurant) apps a tarpit idea -- everyone thinks of these ideas, realizes its fundamentally broken, but no one can fix it

The reason -- people default to the most common option or things that are popular. And I noticed that with this app as well

My new suggestion is a recipe tracker instead. Paste a link and it organizes/sorts it

Pros

  • Even simpler (is an "L1" idea - utility tool/no need for dataset)
  • Scouted competition. There's 5-7 apps on the play store that do this with 10k-1M downloads and >4.5 stars. So there is demand.
  • All these apps seem to have a freemium model. Either ads or save only 20 recipes which is of course annoying. Taking a page out of Alex's playbook this is a good opportunity

Cons

  • I'm not looking to do this as an android/ios project because android/ios is so far removed from typical ML/backend ML. So I'll want to do this as a web app
  • Concerned getting traction on this as a web app. I'm not sure how to promote it or get people to use it. I don't know anyone who would actually want to use and not use it because I'm asking/making
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Posted 9 months ago
48 Views
3 Comments