Career Advice About Startups

I've been working on a feature in the app for a while now. I completed the project and it's in the review stage right now. Since I've been only focusing on this project, I've become fatigued with it -- I'd like to work on other tasks or priorities for at least a sprint.

I know this feature is a high priority, but I am having a hard time focusing on it. Should I continue to push through? Or could I ask my manager if I can work on something else for a bit then jump back on it ?

I am working in a project where we have a pipeline which runs automated tests, lint, and other type checks.

But we are merging PRs even if the pipeline fails 😅

On my case, every time I got a pipeline error, I fix it in my PRs, and some of my coworkers are starting doing the same, but still we are merging some PRs with the pipeline failing.

Our manager is a software engineer too, and has the role of merging the PRs.

I tried to convince him to avoid merging PRs if the pipeline is failing, but while he is open to discuss this topic, he thinks that since other teams also need to merge things. He doesn't want to block them because of the pipeline.

More context:

• It is a startup and we want to get the job done faster.
• I have 2 months working there.
• The pipeline was always failing because of another step that was removed recently. I think they got used to ignore the pipeline because of that.

I believe we are paying 10x of the future time, for short term quick time (10 minutes of the future for 1 minute today).

I thing If we continue with this, all will blow up in our faces.

I am tiring of fix the pipeline almost every day, and checking my team PRs as well.

Not sure if I should just keep pushing, or stop worrying if the pipeline passes or not and just see how the things blow up, and then try to convince the team of keep the pipeline passing as a strict requisite to merge a PR.

What would you do in my case?

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’m a senior iOS engineer at my company which has 8 mobile developers total. I believe there’s a lot of opportunity to better understand how our apps perform and crash – for example, we added Bluetooth support in the app which was buggy, but it was hard to diagnose since our logging is insufficient.

Other engineers on the team are supportive of spending time on this project, but my manager and director want us to stay focused on feature work. We have a queue of features for every engineer for the next 6 months, so there’s no time to address tech debt. They’d like us to hire interns to take on some of the feature work, but that doesn’t give us more time. How can I convince the leadership team that it’s worth spending time on this logging project?

Have upcoming screen round with Snorkel AI's HM who is also the director of engineering. Recruiter mentioned its going to be behavioral. How can I prepare better for this round?

I’ve built my career in startups around the world (Asia and Europe), primarily in partnership and business development roles. My goal now is to land a Big Tech job, primarily in the US market.

A lot of my experience has been in areas like crypto, where FAANG companies don’t have as much of a presence. So I don’t have a deep network of folks who can refer me. What can I do to successfully land a BD role in a large, tier 1 tech company in the next year or so?

Back at my previous company, there were levels, so I could create a list of steps to get to the next level. But given that I’m working at an earlier stage company, I can’t really do that. I want to become a senior engineer.

My offer letter had a clause that I’d get a $10K bonus if I did really well. However, “really well” doesn’t seem to be well-defined. What can I do to make sure I get that bonus?

I work on 2 week sprint cycle. Tasks are assigned and expected to be finished within those 2 weeks but we do have a generous leeway.

Since I am the lead Android engineer, the bugs/crashes are reported to me to fix. Solving these takes time because sometimes I am not the one who worked on it. This leads to my current tasks getting deprioritized.

I usually identify the ones that will affect the next release and get on those, but then there are also crucial bugs that affect key flows. I am wondering if I should also try to fix a bug as soon as they come in or discuss each one before fixing it.

When I code, I have a few habits that make it difficult for someone to follow:

1. I frequently jump between functions and files, even if the one I wrote isn't finished.
2. When working through my code, I often find it better to run the code to find and fix syntax issues instead of diligently reading line by line.
3. I often use a random variable (could be the correct one or wrong one) as a placeholder while I type out the logic for some snippets and then update the variable to be the correct one after.

Although disorganized, I find this method makes me the most productive. I am detail-oriented, write test cases, and often refactor so although my methods are disorganized, my code is not. You may disagree, but for this question let's assume the tradeoff is: ease to follow vs output

This behaviour has negative consequences when someone watches me code. During pair programming I don't mind slowing down since high output isn't the objective and my abilities aren't being judged, but I struggle with deciding how much to slow down in live coding interviews. If I code in a more organized way and slow down to make my coding easier to follow, I would have less output. In a white-boarding interview it could mean the difference between a working solution and non-working solution. In a live coding exercise it could mean the difference between getting through all the iterations of a question/task or not.

I am looking for input from interviewers, or scatter-brained devs like myself, on tips on the habits and tradeoffs to make when coding live.

Examples of things I am thinking about

1. Is there negative signal from frequently debugging over proof-reading code, and if so is there some threshold?
2. If you're someone who has interviewed others, do you think there is a way for a candidate to be more disorganized but still clear. For example, if someones goes over the high level approach and says "I am now going to code out the rough happy path, it will take me a few minutes as iron out the syntax and refactor as I go", then I plug away, and afterwards, do a quick walkthrough of the completed code?
3. Which would generally get a better score in a live coding interview? Fully implemented and hard to follow, or easy to follow but not finished?

Thanks!

At my org, peer review doesn’t exist. The feedback is usually delivered by my engineering manager and sometimes my team’s director. Would love to know how can I take the initiative to start an effective feedback process within my team.

At my previous company, I proposed adding in some new JWT libraries. However, there was a lot of pushback from the principal engineers about security vulnerabilities in these libraries. We eventually figured out a path forward, but it took a long time - There was a huge back and forth on how to do things right.

How can I optimize future situations like these, so I can set myself up for success at my new company?

When joining a private startup, there is a lot of risk that your stock might become worthless in the future.

Suppose, Google/Meta is offering you $150K stock per annum. For a comparable risk-reward tolerance, how much equity would you ask for a startup? Is there a formula you would use here based on factors such as the latest fundraising round, employee count, revenue, etc?

There have been issues where another team is not executing properly, so our team needs to lend a lot of engineering cycles to help them fix their issue. This leads to us not having the resources we need to properly do our own work and us sort of owning the components that we helped the other team with as we have now made significant code changes there. Is there a way I can make this relationship between my team and this other team more balanced and less taxing on mine?

I just completed several technical interviews with a company, and the next round will be a behavioral interview with the manager.

I’d like to know what questions I should ask to determine if they are a good manager and to spot any potential red flags. Aside from directly asking, what questions can I ask to better understand the manager's management style?

Additionally, I hope to work from home 2 to 3 days a week (that company has hybrid work policy). How can I ask about their attitude toward WFH without coming across as not being fully committed to work?