Team Selection Q&A and Videos

Hi all

I recently joined an organization as a senior where I was made tech lead within 3 months of joining. This was somewhat related to recognition of my work among product and my peers.

I advocated for good engineering practices such as automated integration testing and established projects for cross org collaborations to help deliver whats important for the organization.

All of this was quickly realized as a super critical projects by the organization. I created tech specs and prototypes for these projects.

However recently the organization hired a principal engineer.

since he was new I volunteered to help him onboard and asked for his advice on the new super business critical project that was next in our todo team pipeline. He is an ambitious guy so he wants to create his mark in the organization.

But for some reason the way he is approaching it doesn't seem right to me.

He plans to create a new team taking over the business critical project while splitting the newly formed team I lead on the same project that I helped him ramp up on.

I opposed to this asking for rationale for a new team.

there seem to be now two impressions of my work:-

1. held by my peers, folks I lead and product manager of good business delivery and product timelines. I am respected among both.

2. the principal Engineer tries to devalue my work in front of senior engg. Leadership saying things like I am overcommitting and under delivering if I do this project with the existing members of my team in public and in front of senior engg leadership.

The automated integration testing project which no one was doing before and we were starting from a basic version to iterate on. This is now communicated to engg management as every team is trying to do their own testing.

My engg management for some reason is siding with him since he has 15-20 years of experience and i have 5. He also is principal and i am 2-3 levels below him.

for some reason I am being micromanaged with no fault of mine.

From engg management perspective I have been just told to lead the project that I am currently leading and just help the team formed by principal engg to start the project.

I have communicated my expectations of being able to continue leading the project. Product is in support of that but engg managment isnt.

I have also tried giving feedback to the principal engineer that his actions are disruptive to the team and becauase of what he is doing he is slowing us down and blocking us from doing critical projects.

My worry is despite doing the hard work the project I have the most context on and I worked on for a while is being given to someone else and second i will not be given credit for the hard work I am doing.

Should I just change teams. I dont want to leave my existing team because I do think they need me but I feel I would rather create more impact where I dont have to swim against the tide. I may also be suffering from sunken cost fallacy here where I knew I led the development of a new critical project

Tia for your help.

I've been on ~5 teams during my ~4 years at Meta, and I'm wondering if I need a mindset shift when it comes to choosing a team and staying there. Is it more on Meta that teams don't fit or should I make a bigger effort to stay on teams longer and establish myself there? I'm also looking to get to E6 someday, so the team switching makes things tricky.

While talking with developers I heard a lot that most of them prefer to be on backend as compared to frontend?

I know it’s everyone’s choice who love to do what. But still in my experience developers are more biased to be on backend side compared to frontend.

I've been on my current team for around a half, working primarily on the back-end. Unfortunately, I discovered after I joined the team that Android work is very interesting to me, so in order to pursue this, I would need to switch teams. There is actually a team fairly close to mine in my org where there's compelling Android work.

Right now, I'm heads down on a big project, so my immediate instinct is to wait until that's done to bring up this conversation with my manager, who I have a very good relationship with. Is this the right thing to do or should I have this conversation sooner rather than later?

I'm about to be officially promoted to Senior Engineer in a couple of days. At the same time, I've also been been presented with an opportunity to move to a different organization in Amazon that's doing some rather exciting work. This is an opportunity I'm likely to accept.

I deeply value my current manager's support, because he was critical in helping me secure my promotion despite some very tricky circumstances. I'm aware that promotions are just meant to recognize past work, but leaving virtually immediately after a promotion still feels rather unpleasant. Leaving now will also have a bigger impact on my team since we've shrunk quite a bit recently.

What are some tips for structuring and framing the inevitable conversations I will be having with my manager(s)?

Hi Taro community,

Seeking your help in evaluating two offers that I received from two start-up companies.

• (1) In general, in such situations how do you suggest researching about the companies and determining which company and offer is better.
• (2) I am also concerned how my future job potential will be affected and so I want to take the decision accordingly.
  (3) In this particular case, my offers are as follows,
• company A
  • Unicorn (post money valuation: $1B-$10B), Industry: Ad Tech (ML and cloud infra based), Last funding type: Series C, Total funding amount: $190M, Estimated revenue range: $1M - $10M, Founded in 2013 by ex-googler,
  • I have seen several folks joined from FAANG companies (eg, Google)
  • Offer: base $160K, bonus: 24K, Equity: $88K (not sellable now, but the company is expecting to go for IPO in one year)
• company B
  • Emerging Unicorn (post money valuation: $500M-$1B), Industry: Healthcare/AI, Last funding type: Series B, Total funding amount: $120M, Estimated revenue range: $1M - $10M, Founded in 2017
  • Among big techs, I have found just one person from AWS who joined this company
  • offer: base $190K, no bonus, Equity: 114K (not sellable now, the company is expecting to go for IPO in 2-4 years). I may be able to negotiate this offer.

Thanks in advance for any kind of suggestions/comments.

Here's a recent example: I took 2 months to finish bootcamp, and I was very indecisive throughout that time, talking with various managers and tech leads. I initially talked to real time ads infra, then streaming areas, and many others. Even after picking a team I feel FOMO that there’s a better team I could have joined instead. How can I feel better about my decisions?

These days, I hear a lots of news about the new AI tools like Chat GPT, Bard and so on. Will we see a decline in requirements for software engineers in the foreseeable future? Will companies begin to prioritize AI-domain engineers over software engineering?

Some context, last July after getting laid off I started searching for new work with a particular focus on FAANG.

I garner traction with a few companies but am elated when hear from a FAANG head hunter.

I passed the first interview. Scheduled the second and it wasn’t until the confirmation email of the second interview that I saw “Contract”. I was greatly disheartened though I figured I might as well go through the interview process and decide after I’ve lined up all my options. And after talking to the hiring manager I was promised a chance to convert the contract is up.

It was a hard decision, but ultimately I passed up on a well paying senior role at smaller company to take a stab at FAANG.

And I loved it. The engineers I work with are brilliant, the products impacting orders of magnitude more clients than I ever have before and I'm learning.

However, after shipping our first project, the hiring manager that brought me on board switched teams. The projects I've been reassigned to have been largely tech debt and non technical. I have had no direct manager for 4 months with no new one stepping in in the foreseeable future. While conversion is supposedly still on the table, there is no one tracking my contributions and there is a new stipulation of “if the market permits” tacked on top, meaning they have an excuse to prolong the contract rather than give a chance to convert.

The cherry on top of all this is, recruiters from this company have reached out multiple times over the past two weeks but pull out after I inform them that I'm currently contracting for them. This is due to the understandable “external” vs “internal” hiring conflicts.

So I guess the question is, should I quit and open up the chance to once again start applying externally? Or would it make more sense to stick around and try for the mythical conversion or even just maintain and study for the inevitable interviewing at the end of the contract? Maybe try being overemployed?

I have tried asking the stand in managers, but they have much bigger fish to fry than the ambitions of a contractor so I would really appreciate some opinions on how I might navigate this period of contracting.

Thanks for the read and your time,

E

After getting an offer, what's a reasonable amount of time that I have to decide whether to accept or reject? What's the upper limit on this reasonableness?

And how many different (current) members on the team is it reasonable to ask to speak with?

Looking forward to some great motivation and career advice. I am 55 years old and work for a local software company as support engineer for the last 5 years. Through out my 30 year old career, I have held jobs as software engineer. But in last few years I have lost my confidence.

I was advised to get into FAANG and for last 1 year I have been going through interview prep resources like LeetCode, AlgoExpert, and practicing from books like CTCI for interview prep. And then thanks to Chat GPT, AI, I lost my interest in becoming a good or even an average software engineer.

So I would like to get motivated, get a software engineer buddy here on Taro, who understands challenges of mindset at my age. I would like to expand my outlook and get energized about software engineering career. Or may be launch a SAAS application of some sort. Thanks for reading.

I’ve been at meta for about 6 months now as a new graduate and my team recently got re-orged. The project of the new team is very uninteresting to me and honestly I realized that I’ve chosen an “easy” work team.

I recently got advice that I need to do more meaningful work such that my skills develop and I can create credibility. I don’t think the work on my current team or the new team makes me excited or even happy in anyway.

I would love to explore the metaverse org as I was heavily involved in VR/AR development work in college.however, I’d have to wait until July to start this process+ this would mean I moved 3 teams in 1 year implying I spent more time ramping up than doing meaningful work.

I’m also considering switching companies. I am able to secure interviews from a few companies that seem interesting to me.

Does anyone have any suggestions ?

Some background about my experience. I have overall 10 years of experience out of which first 3 years was in Service based company in India and then 6 years at Amazon/AWS and around 9 months at Meta. I got promoted to Sr. position almost 3 years ago and have been working as Sr. Engineer since then.

Since few months before my promotion I am feeling bit burnt out. Promotion came after lot of hard work and honestly the compensation increment was totally underwhelming. So I interviewed and switched and comp increase was really good but I am not liking work culture now. This made me sort of realize few things:

1. Promotion and level don’t actually mean much. I feel like I am part of a rat race and trying to prove my worth to someone who can whimsically just say yay or nay. This is extremely demotivating.
2. Early days of my career were great, I was making good money and learning ton of new stuff. However, now I realized that most of the stuff I learned is not useful outside and I saved enough money to not feel the need to do job just because of money.
3. It is not worth being loyal to one employer. Even though I changed companies for comp, my new employer (Meta) recently let go of lot of people. Some of them have been there for at least a decade. Plus the remaining of us are now in constant fear of layoff based on performance.

Now I want to get out of this job→money→stress→new job→money→stress cycle but don’t know how. I am planning to move back to India after few months and was hoping to start may be freelancing or some consulting work where I can control my time. I am more than happy to take a pay cut. So I started doing some research:

1. Freelancing: Most of the jobs in freelancing are web development. I have lot of experience with backend and some experience with web development but I am nowhere close to the people on youtube/udemy. I can most certainly build stuff but have no experience to show for and I am not sure if I’ll be able to find any work whatsoever 😟.
2. Consulting: Everybody suggests to build a network and then you can find work through them. My network is mostly SDEs in FAANG who I’ve already talked to. Most of them told me, dude if we know about such work we’ll jump ship as well, but they have nothing. One of my jobs was to build cloud services so I know how to build them at scale. But I have less experience in how to use them, so even if I do certifications I am not sure I’ll be able to find work on this area.

Now last option for me is to find a job which pays less and have less stress which will be okay. I can most certainly say screw it and not worry about getting promoted. But then I don’t know if that’ll be satisfactory, it’ll be more like I accepted defeat and ducked out of rat race but I still have no direction to go on.

Sorry if this all sounds like a rant, but I would love to have some guidance from people who have been in similar situation. What did you guys do and do you have any suggestions for me?

I'm considering a team switch, but I'm wary of the effect that it will have on my E3 -> E4 promotion timeline, which I know we have to do within 2 years. I've been at Meta for around a half - Does the timing for a switch work out here and what other factors should I consider?

This seems to depend very heavily on the company culture. Which one do you think is the right way to think about the field, and which one do you prefer?

Hey, I work at a large IT firm (can be compared to Big Tech in the west, similar culture, similar scale of work), currently in the process of switching teams, interviewed with a bunch, ended up with a choice of 2.

The first team has great growth potential (they are young and intensively hiring), and it directly works with money, so it seems like a good place for an SWE to do projects that are meaningful on the scale of a company & to have an opportunity to grow as a manager (more opportunities to pick up an intern, as they hire - to become a mentor of new hires and lead projects with them as a part of my virtual team). They have an analytics team which prospects the important tasks, and when the tasks are done, the results are measured to calculate the profits.

The second team is special in that it deals with the subject area that interests me the most - they develop an analogue of Facebook Games (or ), and it hits home, as I got into SWEing to be a game dev (before I found out they get paid pennies ). This team has less potential for growth, to the point them may have no headcount for an intern, and the hiring of new members will be slower. Also, they do not work with money directly, rather with target metrics defined by business. But they also have an analytics team which proposes the tasks based on the projected metrics growth & they measure profits on task completion, so the aspect of delivering the measurable profits is present here as well.

I'm trying to choose the best team for my career goals - long-term growth from L4 -> L6. As far as I understand, that may be done through team-leading of through tech-leading. I fully understand I'm not going to develop any games myself in team #2, but the fact that the subject area is the one I understand makes me feel like I'll have some morale boost in that I'll have an understanding of usefulness of the tasks i'm doing, as well as I'm seriously considering overworking for the next 1-1.5 years to perform better than peers & grow from L4 to L5, and it just feels like if I have more connection to the area of work, it'll be easier to pour extra effort, opposite to the area which I have little emotional connection with.

But this point about the "morale boost" might just be me wearing the rose-colored glasses, and I may be making a mistake trading a team with better potential for the one with seemingly more interesting scope.

In your experience which is better long-term - the team where work is work, but it's better for career goals, or the team where the work seems interesting, there's less direct career opportunities, but you feel like you are more likely to make your own via being more involved into the project you work on?

I got a job through a friend after getting laid off, but the day I started this new job, I got a full-time offer for another more prestigious company. Do I take it?

For me i am looking for promotions. I architected, led a staff level project successfully with 5 engineers working with me over a period of 5 months.

Nor one person had a bad thing to say about me or the project and everyone agrees it was a major step for our team.

To be fair, I had a troubled relationship with a principal engineer who namecalled me in a public meeting with my engineering manager in that meeting and I decided to stop talking to him (i would avoid going to meetings with him instead of confronting him)

The principal engineer gave my managers feedback that I am trying to hoard information.

Now my manager is giving me the feedback that I don't go along well with more senior engineers (which is not true, it is just 1 person). I was denied promotion even though more senior engineers than me who I led are getting promoted.

There is also some resume driven development going on at the management level and pe level which is what I was asking questions about.

This was the reason for strong resistance against me and product.

From my end I have tried to normalize my relationships. But it seems my hard work may be better rewarded elsewhere.

I don't want to say all this but am curious how would one let their managers know that they are looking outside within the company. The reason for letting them know is they will get an email when I apply internally.

TL;DR Contribute to Open Source ML or do side projects for ML. Which do you suggest is the better option?

I just started a new job, but due to circumstances (visa, tough market), I had to take the first job I could take and I ended up in a devops/production support role where I cant really write much code or write any production code (literally dont have access to dev code). I dont plan to stay here long (>6 months).

I read the infamous "" post and wanted to do side projects so that I am not rusty

Context on me: 80% of my background is in Applied ML/Data Science and 20% is software engineering. I am interested in pursuing as an ML Engineer/Data Scientist

Open Source

Pros

• Tons of open source ML stuff supported by big tech companies
  • Meta has a ton of OS projects
• Huggingface is open source
  • Lot of companies use ML models from huggingface (for e.g. BERT for NLP). Would contributing to this on huggingface be seen as impressive?
• Exposure to working on large codebases, good software engineering practice as well

Cons

• Minimal Impact
• Hard to showcase my achievements, especially on LinkedIn

Projects

Pros

• Ability to make and measure impact
• easy to showcase
• learn a lot

Cons

• For ML, projects with impact is hard to do. Most ML applications is based on improving current products using existing data
• Experience from building ML projects might not translate to what I would do on the job as a lot of it involves working with Engineering around data
• It takes time and a lot of effort to have a ton of downloads
• Can end up taking a lot of non-ML work work (web design/frontend) which is not relevant to MLE

Final question: If I were to do open source, what is the best way to showcase on LinkedIn?

• Do you suggest adding the company you did OS for under the experience section and saying "Open Source Contributor"? My concern with this is that it may sound scammy/shady

Hi,

I currently work in a large enterprise firm as a software engineer.

What do you think of moving into early stage startups at this time?

Given the economic climate and the possible transition to a more mature AI space (read organisation restructuring / layoffs), do you think its risky?

The question mentions the details. Given the uncertainty around, how to choose your next organisation?

I've been at this small startup (~100 engineers) for about 8 months.

I've worked on 2 different projects/teams (2 months + 6 months) for various reasons. This constant ramp up process is limiting my ability to make significant impact.

Now my manger is about to move me to another totally different project because my current project scope is transferred to another team.

The startup hasn't done a layoff yet, but the possibility is there this year.

I think I need to stop paying the ramp up cost and stick to my current area (meaning switching to the other team) so I can make bigger scope impact and avoid getting laid off.

How should I navigate this conversation with my manger?

I have been working at Meta for around 5 months now. I’m not very excited about the product and the tech stack (its an internal tool). I have an offer from AWS where I get to work on a T1 GenAI service. I have always wanted to be an ML Engineer and my past work has also revolved around it. I know its not ideal to switch teams until I get promoted to E4 given the tight deadline we have so I’m not sure how long it takes before I switch to a team I would prefer. Also I’m not sure how the growth would look like for an internal tool team. Should I make the move to AWS given that it would be a better career start in ML? Or should I hang in, get promoted and switch? Meta is also aggressively doing performance reviews and I’m worried being new to the tech stack and lesser interest will bite me in the back and I might have nowhere to go.

I’m early in career so TC is not a huge concern, I want to optimize for learning and eventually working towards being an MLE.