Team Selection Q&A and Videos

I'm feeling very undervalued at my current position. I've been working on my service the longest and therefore was the one that onboarded most of my team. In 2023 my manager and tech lead have largely been too busy to help. For instance, I only have 1-1s one every 2-3 weeks.

The new members we got on our team were new to the company and one in particular has relatively poor communication skills, so I have had to spend a lot of time onboarding them.

Unfortunately, in my performance reviews the main emphasis is on the work that I am delivering and there is not much emphasis on the impact I've had through the rest of the team. But the couple of months I tried focusing more on my work, I noticed the culture on the team degrading.

The hardest part for me has been that I have found my manager very unhelpful in helping me with my career and other frustrations. There have been multiple times where instead of helping I've felt as if he's blamed me. I have expressed this to them, but they have not changed.

Now I'm in late stages of interviews with 3 companies. I estimate the pay increase would be between 10-25% if I receive an offer.

Our team also just changed significantly, we swapped a mid-level engineer with a senior-engineer and got a new manager. They will be reporting to my previous manager so that manager will still be around.

I'm optimistic that the new manager and teammate will upgrade my situation but given the more than a year of frustration without improvement I'm still leaning towards leaving. Though I am having second thoughts as well.

I'd love to get any advice on how to handle my situation. Thanks so much!

In taro there are tons of great resources for Job Switches, like:

• As Alex explained  Job Switching has some caveats
• As , it is a red flag for recruiters when you switch jobs within 12-14 months.

I understand the point, but what if I choose the wrong company? It's well-known that not all companies can offer the opportunities that we wanted initially. In this case, should I stay longer even if I know that I won't grow there due to factors such as the company structure or lack of opportunity?

I have a goal of reaching senior levels in my career, but to achieve this, I need to gain expertise in certain areas, like

• Strong domain knowledge to make an impact on the product side,
• connections and collaboration
• software craftsmanship.

Currently, my role does not offer me an opportunity to gain experience in the first two areas. As the product is well-regulated and the entire engineering team works on-site, it is difficult for me to connect and collaborate remotely.

On the other hand, this is making me lose my confidence and my ability to make an impact, even though I have gained hard skills and knowledge from my previous experiences in software craftsmanship part.

I am seeking advice on what to do next, should I even care about those red flags in my particular case if I switch the job?

I am a mid level engineer from a small startup and have recently secured a senior FAANG engineering position. Given this I am expecting to have some challenges when transitioning both from startup to FAANG and also from a mid level to a senior position.

Given the above my questions are:

• How can I ensure I find a good manager and team during team match to help me succeed? Particularly, what questions should I ask during team match to achieve this?
• Given the quite situational nature and the focus more so on making the transition easier rather than growing, I assume that my focus should be on finding a team with less pressure. Perhaps an internal team?

Would be good to get some thoughts on this.

Good morning!

I work at a company of around 5000 employees and specifically on a team of 5. The culture and team are great but I feel bored half the time at work and don't see any true growth or progression happening. I work as the front end specialist on the team and feel a lot of the time my work has no impact as it only supports one customer.

My other question is in the current market landscape and given my work isn't even on the medium scale how do I go about transitioning to larger companies and having more impact? For context, my current job takes about 40% effort to complete my work and sprints ahead of schedule.

Thanks!

Breakout startups are basically startups that have found product-market-fit and are growing at an incredible pace. So think of the OpenAIs and Databricks of the world. Back in the day these would've been baby Google and baby Facebook. Here's a link for more examples:

Sam Altman, Dustin Moskovitz and a few others strongly suggest people in any stage of their career to join these startups.

I revisited Taro's course on picking a company, and there doesn't seem to be much info on them. The course does talk about startups but I feel that startups have so many stages that it's hard to make generalizations across them.

From my understanding, it seems like breakout startups are a great place to join:

Pros

1. You get incredible career growth since you're a part of a rapidly growing company
2. TC is usually pretty competitive with FAANG (with a caveat)
3. These startups usually have very strong engineering culture and network, with most people being Ex-FAANG

Cons:

1. Work life balance seems to be worse than big tech on average since there's so much stuff to do (like 20-30% worse on average?)
2. The equity portion of your TC is still paper money, so there's a chance the IPO flops and your TC basically halves
3. Brand name is not may not be as good as big tech, though this is heavily dependent on the company (like you'd definitely interview someone from OpenAI, but I doubt many have heard of Helion). A question I have is how big is the difference in the brand value between your average breakout startup and a big tech? Is it negligible?

The Taro course suggests new grads to pick big tech. Funnily enough Sam Altman laments that someone picked big tech over a breakout startup. I'm not saying that these two pieces of advice are contradictory, but what factors should you consider if you're deciding between big tech and breakout startups?

I'm currently employed as a Computer Engineer. I've been with the company for a while, 5 years now. I find myself in a strange position where I want to explore new opportunities but at the same time don't have enough confidence with the interviews. I study consistently but not sure if it's the most efficient way. Please share guidelines or past experience on what should I focus on. Thanks.

I got offers from Meta, several top hedge funds (Citadel, Millennium, etc.), Series E unicorn and a series C robotics startup and I want opinions on who to move forward with.

From a SWE’s perspective, Meta wins, but 10 years down the line, I don’t see myself as a SWE. I see myself doing (1) a startup, (2) going into VC or working in (3) product management or a more business-focused role. For the first 3-4 years of my career I want to get engineering training, position myself to do interesting and impactful work, networking with a talented team and building the skills that’ll set me up for the 3 career paths that I’ve discussed. I’ve listed companies in order of preference :

1. Series E Unicorn
   1. Company is customer-focused (engineers always talk to customers) and engineers wear many hats. These are skills for building startups.
   2. Getting startup experience is great for going into VC.
   3. I’m working on one of their core products, so there’s a lot of chances for growth. High performers become PMs in 2-3 years
   4. 30-40% ex-FAANG and lots of MIT, Berkeley and Stanford alum
2. Meta
   1. Meta trains you to become a great SWE, and you need to be a great builder for startups
   2. Meta doesn’t seem to prep me for the VC world, but the brand name alone will help get your feet in the door
   3. I have the optionality to climb the corporate ladder to do product management
3. Hedge funds
   1. Hedge funds don’t really train you to be a great SWE or a great VC, but the brand definitely helps
   2. I work really close to PnL for a division that is undergoing hypergrowth, so lots of interesting things to be done
   3. Can also break into management relatively quickly
4. Series C robotics startup
   1. I’m a SWE and the place that makes the money are the robotics engineers, so not really positioned to make a huge change

Unicorn > Meta/HF > robotics startup

I want to join the unicorn since it aligns well with what I want to do in the future, but the brand of Meta is really hard to pass on (only brands I have is MS from T5 CS and BS from T10 CS). On one hand I have a long career down the line, and this is one of many decisions I'll make, and if the unicorn doesn't work out, then it's not a big deal. On the other hand, I feel like if I don't choose prestige and the unicorn fails, I'd have a much harder time in life. It's like messing up an RPG build.

I’m curious what people’s thoughts are and what things I’m not considering?

I am a senior software engineer at FAANG (not Meta), and have found myself in a difficult career dilemma.

I joined the company as a junior and made progress to senior in the same team (say A). The nature of the work was very unique. It was heavily focused on technical analysis of software as opposed to writing one yourself. A significant portion of it was cross functional collaboration across different orgs, probably the reason why I was able to get promoted fairly quickly. The coding part was maybe 30% (you were welcome to pursue more if you have the time). The culture overall was nice with good work life balance. Manager mostly supported things I wanted to pursue. Later, I switched teams (say B) and moved to the one with more focus on development of the software. I loved the technology, projects. However, the expectations were crazy high. I ended up getting a low performer rating, a year after I was promoted to senior in my previous team. The side effects were no bonus, refreshers, salary hike.

I have been working hard since then to manage the expectations. However, I have come to the conclusion that it is impossible to exceed them and thereby pursue a career growth and the next title without throwing your life at work. I can get “meets expectation” for foreseeable future. We are also thinking of expanding our family next year.

I discussed with my previous manager who is willing to take me back. The work there has a high visibility, impact for the next year. I could build strong soft skills - leadership, driving things through others, collaboration there; but, not so much as to actually writing software.

My options -

1. Stick through in my current team for few years because it lets me stay closer to software development and open up opportunities in the future for development roles. But that means financial stress, an impact on family goals. Added anxiety.
2. Go back to previous team. Get that job stability, pursue family goals; but, might get rusted on software development skills. Maybe if I find some ways to keep honing them (also software design skills) then maybe there is that.
3. Looking externally. This is my last resort; but, given the market conditions it does not look pretty. I also like my company in general and would hate to leave. Also not sure of the dynamics of going through pregnancy shortly after joining a new company.

What is the correct mindset I should have? How should I navigate this situation in short and long run.

I have realized that my current role is not aligning with my interests due to various reasons, including unsupportive teammates and limited learning opportunities. I am waiting for the right opportunity to transition to a different team and take on a completely new role. In the meantime, I’m working on building side projects with respect to my new role. This transition might take around 6 months to 1 year.

While I am here with my current team, I am trying to fulfill the minimum job requirements. My question is whether I should maintain a decent rapport with my current teammates during this time, such as having 1:1 meetings.

Additionally, I would like to know what kind of teammates are worth connecting with, and how much time and effort should be invested in maintaining those connections when I know this is not the right place for me.

For background, I’m self-taught and got my first software dev role less than 2 years ago. I want a new job because this job isn't providing me with the skills needed to keep up with the industry/job market, but in part because I don't have those in demand skills I'm struggling to get interviews. At my current job, I was able to negotiate a large pay raise and because of that, for the first time in my life I’m not anxious about finances, so I'm naturally pretty cautious about taking a pay cut.

I code a lot outside of work, so I have skills/knowledge of areas outside of what I do at work, however, it seems most recruiters only value commercial experience with a given tech stack or field.

Is it a smart move to sort of ‘take a step back’ in order to get different commercial experience? Or should I just keep grinding and looking for Jr. roles with comparable salaries?

I'm new to Meta, so I'm currently in team selection. My goal is to choose a team that maintains more critical pieces and are more stable with respect to layoffs/reorganizations vs. (slightly) more moonshotty teams with higher risk/reward. An example of the latter would be a team working on maintaining an ads pipeline while one for the former would be a team experimenting with new UI features.

How can I find a team that meets that bill, and what questions can I ask to help identify this?

I am planning to shift as most of my family would be situated there. But wanted to understand how it is from a growth perspective in terms of career ladder, compensation, and startup culture.

I understand that compensations are a bit lower than US. But how is it compared to places such as India wrt the cost of living there? I was exploring US as well but the long green card process is a bit challenging, especially since I have parents who are a bit older and thus want to be with them at a place where I can have them settle comfortably. Another con I feel is that very few companies sponsor direct H1B visa and don't want to invest two years in masters as well in US.

I'm on a small team attached to a specific fund at a hedge fund (there are many different funds both in the main org and subsidiary orgs). Due to compliance reasons, my specific fund has been firewalled off from the main hedge fund so we don't have leaks and conflicts etc, and as a result our codebase and infra are entirely separate.

Generally, what can engineers do to grow if they've been placed on teams that operate outside the main engineering org? Is the solution just to transfer to the main org eventually?

I recently joined Meta as a junior engineer and my hope is to be able to try out several domains (guessing realistically 2) to see where my interest lies. I’m not on an AI team currently, but given the rise of AI, I hope to be able to explore that area.

However, I understand that switching teams will disrupt my productivity and growth as a junior engineer. I’m wondering:

• When should I approach changing teams/domain? More specifically, is it better to change teams after being promoted to mid-level?
• How should I approach changing teams?

Does working in different area - infra, developer experience, product, backend, frontend over the career period hurt in terms of becoming/staying a staff engineer or manager?

I don't really know what I want to do in my career. I finished university one year ago, and I work as a full stack engineer right now, and I'm quite interested in ML. I'm more frontend-facing right now, but I see low returns on spending too much time learning new frontend frameworks my entire career. I'm more interested in becoming a well-rounded engineer, so I feel that there would be higher returns on digging down into the backend more. I have been looking at trying to join some big tech company as a backend engineer, but I just went on an interview for a small tech company which does quite alot of ML with the hopes that they were looking for another ML engineer. Instead they presented me with a broad-scoped data engineer role which sounded pretty cool.

My strategy up until this point has just been to find cool roles where I get to learn useful stuff as an engineer from people who are way smarter than me. Sometimes I think "If I would make a startup, would this skill come in handy?" Is that a poor framework? Should I have a plan? I don't even know if I ever want to make a startup lol. I'm interested in joining big tech, but other than that I'm not really sure. I just enjoy building stuff, and I see this as an opportunity of learning data engineering really well (which I don't know very well), but that is perhaps not a wise career choice? Any guidance on how to think as a new grad is appreciated lol.

I'm a new MLE at Meta, so I'm in bootcamp. I'm trying to go for a team that’s super in-depth with regards to ML and neural architectures vs. a team that would give me more breadth. How can I find such a team and what questions can I ask to identify it?

Hey Taro community. So I saw on and Alex touched on seed startups being not really good for early careers. I wanted to ask: So I met this person at a tech meet up and we exchanged twitter names over the summer. She’s currently building in health tech now. She made a tweet asking if any engineers wanted to work at a seed stage AI devtools startup (round led by top tier technical firm) and to DM her if you were interesting.

Should I do it or just leave it? Knowing how the climate is now just thought about beggars can’t be choosers.

I'm an E5 mobile engineer at a Big Tech company. Due to lots of manager attrition, I currently report to a hands-off Director with too many reports to have regular 1:1s. I found an awesome EM who agreed to let me join his team and promised me E6-scope projects on his team. My Director is his skip-level, so I'm staying in the same org.

However, before I could make the official team switch, my TPM loaned me to another team lacking mobile resources to meet the TPM's own OKR. He did not bother talking to the awesome EM or me beforehand. My scope on the TPM's project is E5 at most. Now that project is dragging on. It's already code complete, but they want to keep me on that project until it's fully rolled out. We're waiting for mobile adoption to reach a certain threshold before we can do a force upgrade. Due to the code chill around the upcoming holidays, we likely can't do the force upgrade until next year. In the meantime, the project's EM is asking me to investigate pre-existing bugs in their feature. The awesome EM met with the TPM and that project's EM to fast-track my transfer, explaining that he needs me for Q1 planning & our team's own OKRs, but the latter two insisted that I need to support their project until it's completely done, which includes the force upgrade. Am I stuck on this project until January next year or is there a way to switch teams more quickly?

Greetings, everyone,

For the past five years, I've been working as a cloud engineer, mainly focusing on major cloud providers. My tasks have revolved around provisioning instances, configuring logs, and handling various operational aspects. However, I must admit that my job's scope is quite limited, and I find it challenging to discover more engaging opportunities. Unfortunately, the team responsible for automation work, although I occasionally collaborate with them, isn't the most receptive or cooperative bunch.

In light of this situation, I've decided to explore my interests further and pursue personal projects that align with my passion for Data Engineering. I've already started working on some of these projects and find the field incredibly fascinating.

While I'm aware that the current job market is unfavorable, I am not actively seeking new opportunities at the moment. Instead, my focus is on building a robust portfolio over the next year or two, with the intention of eventually pursuing a career in Data Engineering.

I believe that having one or two years of experience through personal projects in Data Engineering will improve my chances of securing interviews, as finding data-related opportunities within my current company has proven to be a challenge.

I'd appreciate hearing your thoughts on this matter!

There is a policy in my company (Tier 2, in the likes of VMWare etc) that the managers should connect PRIOR to the interview.

I personally think this is discouraging, as the current manager can really screw you over if they want to. My relationship with my current manager is ok. Not great. However, I have been standing up for myself a lot as that is causing some under current on my team and with this manager. I found a fantastic opportunity within the company and want to interview.

How can I strategize given this company policy?

My fear is inform manager -> they tank my performance review / bonus / raise ( it is currently perf cycle now) -> interview reject -> Back on this team.

If you receive an offer from a different team, how do you communicate to your manager that you plan on moving to a new team / opportunity at Microsoft. What if you don't have the best relationship with them?

At Microsoft, the current manager does not need to approve team switch, regardless of whether it's a software role or not.

I’ve seen questions recently about people wondering whether to pursue an MBA of a CS Masters which comes at the expense of either maintaining your current tech job or searching for a new one. My question is slightly different: When is it worth taking a learning sabbatical if ever?

By learning sabbatical, I mean I have seen people put on LinkedIn that they did quit their jobs to do a bootcamp in some field (Mobile, Blockchain, etc) or even just self-study on their own. I have a coworker who’s a business analyst and told me he’s quitting to do a data science bootcamp. Doesn’t seem like a good idea to me, but not my decision.

I think the general rule people follow is to have a job while looking for one, particularly in this economy. Still, I’m wondering about what circumstances actually warrant quitting a job to invest in getting one in a different field. Obviously being in a toxic environment is the best reason to get out of a current job. Similarly, if you really need the money, you probably can’t leave the job.

So let’s assume that neither is the case. You don’t need the money and the environment is positive, but you’re really not doing what you’re passionate about and feel like every day you are missing learning cool stuff. Say you’re a business analyst and want to become a data scientist or backend software engineer. An obvious move is to try and switch into these roles within your current company. But if you can’t do that, how to think about taking a learning break?

I had recently joined as an entry-level engineer 6 months ago, and I have been told now that I will be basically working as part of two teams, with half of my time devoted to each one. So I will essentially continue to deliver some work to my current team, while learning a new tech under the same org and delivering to them as well.

The new team I will be working with is still unsure, I have been given two options and have been told about the scope of each of them, I have to revert back with an answer in a few days. I have been told that priorities might change, and adjustments will be made accordingly. So everything is a bit dicey at the moment.

My concern relating to this is:

• Is this an indication of my current team not having sufficient work for an entry-level software engineer like me? It is a database-ops team, already having 2 senior-level developers. Furthermore, is it an indication that I am not delivering at the level they expected and hence my abilities are not of use in the current scenario?
• I haven't explicitly received any negative feedback from my manager or my peers so far, and have been overworking sometimes. However the current change is a bit overwhelming given it is still not sure where I would be used as a resource, or if my work is actually making an impact. Also even though there is no negative feedback, there has also not been a lot of positive encouragement, it is like a neutral situation where I have been told I am meeting expectations, but it feels like I might not be exceeding them, or might just be an average performer.

Just wanted to know if anyone here has faced this before, or have any insights on this. Also since the market is bad, I am a bit concerned that this change might not be an excuse for a future layoff or something like that.