Team Selection Q&A and Videos

I'm currently considering switching jobs. My goal is to grow to staff eventually. Because staff-level engineers are required to have a deep understanding of the business and create scope based on business goals, having a good understanding of the industry seems to be a good skill to have.

All of my experience is in e-commerce. I have owned products that range from consumer-facing to the internal admin and management side. Therefore if I continue with the e-commerce industry, I will be able to take advantage of my existing experience. One company I can think of would be a good fit is Instacart. However, I believe coming up with creative business ideas and having the focus to dive deeper into the business require curiosity and interest. I've never had an interest in e-commerce and I also came to find the e-commerce industry not exciting. I also have concerns that e-commerce tech companies usually only can provide opportunities and compensation on the lower end of the spectrum, due to the nature of the industry still relying on the unit economy of physical goods, and is usually subject to lower margins. But on the flip side, I also understand that interest sometimes comes after you are good at something, so maybe my existing knowledge will help me to be good at coming up with business ideas, and I could grow interest from there.

Alternatively, the industry I'm interested in the most is fintech. I am into finance, for example, I once built a budgeting tool (similar to Mint) over a weekend for my personal use. However, I've also heard fintech can be pretty tedious. Fintech companies usually integrate with banks, and banks have generally older tech. Outside of finance, I cannot think of any industry I'm particularly interested in. However, I have a general interest in working for tech companies where the product is the software, not using software to sell something physical.

May I get some advice on how I should go about considering the industry as part of my job search journey?

I'm a senior software engineer in big tech and onboarded into my company and role as a team lead for the past 6 months.

The project is almost complete, but work is not technically interesting and does not fit into my long term career goals.

My manager is getting promoted as director to another org, and I wish to join him. He said he fought hard to bring me along with him, but my current director would not allow it due to product/engineering resourcing requirements.

I expressed to my manager this was extremely disappointing news, and it's hard to see a future on this project/org. He said to talk to my director and we can follow up afterwards, because he didn't know just how much I wanted out.

I can't leave the company due to the current job market, my short tenure and golden handcuffs. But I'm afraid if I keep chugging along, I'm just going to burn out.

Any advice is much deeply appreciated.

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 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.

I've been working at a very bureaucratic F500 for 3 months in an SRE position. I don't really code a lot in this role and I want to switch to a dev position but I'll be honest I'm a complete noob at navigating this because this is my first job

The place I'm working at is super slow -- it took me 1 whole week just to get access to the code in my own team and it took 2-3 weeks to get access to all the other tools.

I've heard advice of "just go and ask an engineer on the team and code" but the issue is to even get access to the codebase + tools in my own team its such a long drawn out complicated process, let alone a completely different team. I'm also a bit worried about doing things behind my managers back as I'm worried it'll look really bad.

The other thing is idk how to just "contribute" because to understand the tickets + context and actually code you need the tribal knowledge from your team

Would love advice, I'm pretty lost and I'm not sure how to navigate this -- especially the big don'ts because I don't wanna shoot myself in the foot and do something that's gonna hurt my reputation if done badly