What’s a good model for personal branding that you would recommend for L6 and L7 engineers?

Staff Software Engineer & Tech Lead at LinkedIn

eventually-consistent

I think it's definitely possible to identify bad companies based on what Rahul, Alex, and others have suggested in this post. However, once you have weeded out the bad ones, the rest is going to be hard. There are tons of good companies that don't succeed out there, and there is no one magic formula to tell which ones would.\
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Along with other heuristics mentioned, I would look out for:

- Smart and generally kind peers.
- Backing by good VCs.
- Transparency during and after the interview process. 

LinkedIn

Senior Software Engineer

What's a "mini bug report"? Does it also include a retrospective of what happened, how it could have been avoided, and what safeguards you will take in the future to prevent it? In my opinion, a retrospective doc would help a lot in conveying the complexity of what you were working on, showing ownership of your mistakes, and demonstrating leadership and accountability by planning out and implementing the safeguard(s). Any reasonable manager would know that mistakes happen. If they have been in the industry for a while, they have seen their fair share of mistakes done by the smartest of engineers, and most likely they have been part of their fair share of mistakes too. It's what's done after the mistake that counts.