Most important is to stay calm!

Most people make stupid decisions during this time because of the noise on Twitter and watching every Joe freaking out, hence concluding they should freak out as well.

As an engineer in a volatile environment, I would recommend spending time upgrading your skills, being relevant, and building skills to add value for the current and potential new employer. 

Ex @Meta @Microsoft, Founder Algolab

Touseef Liaqat

You can look up the company at [crunchbase](https://www.crunchbase.com/) to learn about its funding round, news mentions, and recent leadership changes. 

Check Blind, and Reddit for what people are saying about the company. (keep in mind that people share more negative things, so take it with a pinch of salt)

Check LinkedIn if any 1st connection worked at this company and send them a message asking this same question.

Watch all the interviews by the founders on youtube to learn about their philosophy and vision.

Go in-depth on the careers page and learn about their Core Values / Leadership Principles. Each company has its own core values and they want to see if you fit in them. 

Do the exercise of acting as CEO of the company, and making these decisions;  cutting the cost, adding a new product feature, improving product quality, and increasing customer satisfaction. 

In the interviews, bring enthusiasm, excitement, and energy. Not many people like to work with dull and sad faces.

Have weekly 30-minute 1:1 with your close team members on zoom.

Have monthly 30-minute 1:1 with outer circle colleagues on zoom.

(duration and frequency are not absolute. Act and adapt to what works for you).

Show up early in the team meetings with your camera always on. The first few minutes are a good time to say hello and check on your co-workers.

Fly/drive to meet the team once per month or twice per month. If you live in a different city, ask the manager to reimburse transport.

Start an internal newsletter on product updates, technical designs, or other topics that others might like to learn about.

Dedicate some time every day to participate in slack threads, emails, and discussions at other tools. Be intentional in sharing your voice and unique perspective.

Get a mentor and become a mentor of someone. Openly ask or offer your help. 

There is a backslash after layoffs and it is common to say that "company is not your family", which is true for company (legal entity), but your coworkers are humans and it would be great to have close friendships with people at work. Together we enrich each other's lives and elevate each other. Keep that in mind.

I would suggest going and helping that person in private proactively. 

Many people are not comfortable asking others due to their backgrounds and experiences. Don't hold this habit against them. 

Go to them with a mood of care, collaboration, and respect. Don't worry about hurting the ego.

Build a connection with them and give them the confidence to ask you when they need help in private or public. 

Start privately and show them why asking in the team channel can get them answers quickly from others, and also help other engineers as well.

Your kindness might change the life of this engineer and set them up for a great career.

You can always request a reschedule of the interviews and move them to next week when you are not on-call. My experience is that most recruiters are considerate of different life circumstances. Also, they want you to be successful in the interviews and it is in their best interest to accommodate you and your schedule.

I recommend looking at Notion if you are not using it already. \
It has decent UX and search functionality. I use the chrome extension and mobile app to send content to it. Once a week, I clean and reorganize things in it. 

I have heard great things about <https://www.buildingasecondbrain.com/> but haven't done this course myself. 

Here are a few ideas for side income hustles. These are not quick rich schemes. They will start giving you returns after a few years of constant nourishing.

- Make udemy courses
- Start a youtube channel
- Write on a blog/newsletter/twitter/linkedin
- Write Books

Ali Abdaal has a great video I recommend on this topic: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GY9lNl3EO1I>

Make friends with coworkers (engineers, PMs, Designers, anyone who works in your company). Share and teach about the skills you have, your unique culture, hobbies, etc.  And learn what they are doing and their backgrounds with genuine interest. Diverse perspectives help you grow.

Learn to the identity comfort zone and complacency in yourself, and kill them as soon as you find them. 

Other things you can do are: Get a mentor in and out of the company. Read books on technical topics. 

Start writing. Lamport once said, "If you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking." and that means writing helps in thinking. If you are not writing, then you are not thinking (kind of). If you are not thinking, then others are thinking for you.

As an SRE, you can learn a lot of skills that'll be useful for software engineering. System design, automation, scripting, monitoring, debugging, troubleshooting production issues, infra as code, containerization, cloud computing - all these skills can give you an edge when transitioning to a software engineering or data engineering role.

I have been in platform teams for the majority of my career. Their time frame is usually long, and it can take one year or more to see the fruits. The work is usually initiated and driven by engineers compared to product teams where PMs will be driving mostly.

Platform teams need to think strategically about how to create an ecosystem that benefits multiple customers/partners. They need to think holistically about how the platform can be used to create value and how to encourage customers to use it. And they need to think about the long-term implications of their decisions. Once you expose an API, it is available for many different stakeholders to use, and their use cases might be totally different than what you imagined. Many assumptions you make can go down the drain and add to tech debt down the road.

Engineers have to take ownership of decisions and be willing to say no to certain requests from the partners if those requests can harm the long-term ecosystem goals.

Upfront planning is important. It depends on team to team how long they plan for. Work with TLs, managers, and partners on the vision of the team and what is required. There is no one answer. You will get better at it by thinking about it intentionally and being adaptive. 

I believe it is important to identify a partner's problem and build for them, and later sell that solution to other teams.

Ex @Mata @Microsoft, Founder Algolab

Start with listing down APIs; these services expose for inter-service communication. The interaction between these services will help you see the overall design, critical paths, and scope.

Pick one service per week to go over its recent code commits, reported bugs, and discussions on those bugs and commits. Depending on the company culture, you may ask the owner of the service if there is a minor bug you can help fix.

Talk with the product managers to go over the history of the project and different services. They will happily share the context and background on why/who/when of the service.

Be proactive in investigating issues reported by tools such as DataDog and Sentry. Even if you are not on-call, you should take the initiative to examine the issue yourself and participate in the discussion with the on-call person to help them out. This could be the most critical work item you can take to answer your question.

There is one more similar question on should an engineer get a master's degree or not. Please search for it as well.

First of all, define motivation to do the master's degree. Be very clear about it. What benefits you might get from this degree? Is your motivation to get a title to show to potential future employers? Is your motivation to get better at computer science fundamentals or specialization? Are you interested in research and potentially Ph.D. afterward? Or to go aboard on a student visa and find better opportunities in the world?

Based on the motives, the answer will be different. 

For title, don't bother. The future employer who will be impressed by a title is not worth having you. Ignore such employers. They are backward and will not help you grow.

For knowledge, don't bother as well. You are far better off in terms of saving time and money by doing a targetted study at an online course website like [udemy.com](http://udemy.com) or doing a short boot camp (on the algorithms, distributed systems, data engineering) at places like [algolab.so](http://algolab.so).

For research and Ph.D.: Definitely yes.

For getting a visa to go abroad: Definitely yes.

I went to do a master's from Germany in the hope to do Ph.D. and also getting to see the world. It was worth it for those two reasons. I didn't end up doing Ph.D. but the theoretical courses I did were very enlightening and helped me appreciate theoretical computer science. But those courses didn't help that much in my job. 

I hope it was helpful.

You are right that trust is a 2-way street. But there are some nuances that need to be taken into account. 

Trust has a context. For two people, there could be multiple contexts in which they operate, and each context will have a different trust level.

For example, I trust my mother will make a perfect biryani every time. But I don't trust her to fix my computer problems or grill a perfect steak. 

Your manager might trust you to be a reliable person for DevOps work, but they might not have trust yet to hand over a large critical project.

They might expect you to trust them for guiding you in your career and take care of your career ladder. Here comes another distinction, I like to keep in mind. 

Trust is a promise: To be more precise, it is an implicit promise by the trustor on the trustee (borrowing these terms from legal but used differently). Trustor believes that the trustee will hold on to an implicit promise. That promise from a manager to an employee could be that they will give a promotion, assign a better project, represent positively, take care of the employee's interests, and help them grow and become a better person.

But the manager has made a similar promise to 5 other employees. The manager has also made a few promises to their management as well.

If considering this, then it is obvious that the manager is in a tough spot to fulfill all the promises. They will break some promises because of conflict with other promises, or for just being a human who could not keep up with all the implicit promises they have made.

Good managers will keep you updated on their performance on these promises to you. They will break some promises and make new promises. Breaking a promise does not equal to total breakage of trust. It is not binary.

Trust is built by making promises and fulfilling those promises. Both parties will need to keep making promises and fulfilling those promises. The trust will not stay in one place, it will go up and down as we do this exercise.

Now, back to your original question, should a manager trust you, yes they should trust you to be a great engineer. Most managers will trust you to put all effort to deliver results. But will they trust you to give you a critical project, on which their own performance is evaluated? It will require building up trust over time.

Make promises and fulfill those promises.

It is a great idea to get feedback from the old team.

Schedule 1:1 meetings (in-person or via zoom) with the individuals to talk about feedback. I don't recommend having this conversation on chat or in a group setting.

In the meeting, go with a mood of enthusiasm, gratitude, and new beginner. Share your vulnerability to improve yourself and level up through their feedback.

Remind yourself that the feedback is just an assessment by them. That assessment might be grounded or not grounded. And you permitted them to share the feedback. No need to get defensive or counter-respond. Listen with patience and an open heart. With this mood, you will get far better feedback which you can process later. Lastly, do not make gestures that show that you are not in agreement with the feedback.

It is better to ask open-ended questions to let the other party share as much as they want, and they might go in directions which you might not have thought about.

Some example questions:

1. What did you like most about my work on project x?
2. What suggestions do you have for improvement?
3. What are the three things I can do to level up?

In the end, you may be asked for feedback in return as well. Be ready to respond with thoughtful answers with care for them. Feedback is a gift.

Founder

Most recruiters and hiring managers only scan your resume for 30 seconds to one minute. Most of the time, they look for core skills required to do the job. 

Soft skills are mostly assessed in the interview process. If your CV, highlight your unique set of skills and experiences that make you stand out from 100 CVs the hiring manager is reviewing. 

You don't need to Master's degree. I did my master's degree, and the idea was to do PhD after it. I didn't do PhD, and my master's studies have not benefitted me as much in my professional career. The best outcome of my master's degree was to get out of my home country and the great friendships I made. 

If you need to get out of India, then a master's degree from Europe might be a path. If you want to do research and a PhD then master's is an excellent path. Some jobs, for example Data Scientist at Amazon, will most probably require a PhD.

If your only goal is to get better at your software engineering job, then a master's degree will be waste of time and money.

Think about how much power you have in this team. If this legacy project depends on you and leaving this company will be a huge cost for the company, then one way to approach is to ask for favours in return for your staying here. The favours can be 20% time for you to work on emerging projects of your choosing, salary bump, bonus etc. Many people don't ask and don't get it.

Back to your original question. In today's fast-moving world, it can be dangerous to be the dinosaur that does know the latest technologies, processes, and trends. 

Our parents used to work for a company all their lives. Last two decades, that shrunk to 3 to 5 years on average. Now, time with a company is shrinking even more; the reason is the fast-moving projects, technology updates, and other dynamics.

If it is hard to find another job for you right now, then you should cover that base and overcome this shortcoming. Don't rely on your current company to keep you forever. Build capacity to get a new job, and then stay here on a free will of working here instead of working because you don't have any other option.

How important is it for you to stay in this team? You said, *"I don't want to leave my existing team because I do think they need me"*. This does not seem like a very strong reason. Please list a few more to have more clarity.

If this is the only reason you would stay, I suggest talking with your manager about your future in this team. And if there is no silver lining, then think about leaving this team and finding another opportunity. 

But even before that, learn to collaborate with the new senior engineer. See how both of you can work together. A partnership between you two can be a great win for the company and you two. So, invite him to lunch to declare the breakdowns. Bring a mood of optimism, a new beginning, and possibility. Also, invite these moods for that engineers by sharing that you are coming with these moods. Help them see the potential for both of you as you both work together in a powerful way. 

You can learn a ton from him as a mentor and under his leadership. See if you can come to some agreements. As a new person in this team, he needs allies more than anyone else. Both of you could become a force of nature in this company brining great ideas and implementations.

If both of you cannot see it, and you both cannot come to a collaboration mood, then life is too short to fight such battles. If the management is already favouring the senior engineer, then you don't have much hope here. You will keep trying, but in the end, you will feel bad that you are not valued enough. 

Switch now instead of later. Many people spend too much time trying because of the sunk cost. If this company lays you off, would you feel the same?

You are already in a good direction. \
I would ask one question: For the sake of what?

The goal to achieve a high-performance team should be a by-product of the bigger goal. 

I would suggest thinking about the care of your engineers. 

It is not ideal for focusing on getting the best output from them and triggering their motivation buttons. Let us treat them as humans instead of machines.

Genuine relationships are built on **care** and building **trust**. Can you be that manager they have been hoping for all their lives? Can you see beyond the performance and see them as humans who have challenges, ambitions, and concerns? 

When this care and trust are established, you will be able to inspire them, listen to them, and help them in their career.

Happy engineers with back from a manager will give you all when needed. Take care of them, and they will take care of you and the company. 

Care and trust are the starts; then there are other sensibilities you need to build afterwards, which I will post another time.

Definitely, you can switch EM roles later in your career. Many people get promoted into EM roles from IC roles in big-tech companies. Also, there are people who switch between EM and IC roles and back over the years to keep themselves challenged in different roles.

If you wish you become EM sooner then later, I recommend having this conversation with your manager. Ask them to mentor you in becoming a EM. They will assign you tasks that can help you in the EM role and also can provide opportunities to mentor/lead juniors and interns.

Without focus, you cannot do anything effectively. 

If you are preparing for interviews, then do just that. But have a deadline to join a new company. You cannot prepare for interviews all the time. After 2 to 3 months of interview prep and actual interviews, you should be free to do other things like you 2) and 3). I met some people who are always in interview preparation mode and never get anywhere. Don't be that person.

After you have joined a new company, the best case scenario is that you work on a project for the company that needs AWS, docker, Kubernetes, ML or (put your buzzword here) and you will do the learning and get paid as well. But this does not happen all the time.

There would be cases where you think your work project doesn't have the opportunity to learn about new technologies. Here many people miss out. There are many times opportunities to improve the CI/CD, build process, and better tooling.

Feedback is a gift for anyone you work with. It's a gift that needs care and thought.

You should have the correct stage set for the feedback. It would be best if you did not do it in haste and in the middle of another conversation. 

Also, it is recommended to ask for permission to provide feedback. If there is no permission to share the feedback, then your gift will not land correctly and will be returned. 

In your 1:1 conversation, start by asking the manager, "can I share some feedback to you"? On their agreement, share what you have to share with them. Give examples for any point you share to make sure that this feedback lands as genuine and with a grounding. Feedback without an example would sound groundless. 

Positive feedback will help the manager recognize it if they don't know about it and do more of it.

Good work in thinking about it and helping your manager grow.

As Alex said, you don't have much leverage in this situation because they are looking for a few strong yeses. 

You can move on to other interviews. But you can also try creating perturbations for this company. Here are a few things you can do to improve your chances with this company and have them think more positively about you.

First, get the recruiter on your side; you can do that by being proactive in communicating with the recruiter and showing eagerness and interest in what they do. You don't want to sound needy, but instead, you should come across as someone who is already interviewing with other competitor companies, but because of X, you are more interested in this company. That X can be the project they are working on, their culture, or anything else they are proud of and aligned with your goals.

Second, you can offer them another interview to get that strong yes from them. There is no harm in trying this, as you don't have much to lose. Giving this option adds to the first point that you are confident about your skills and happy to add another interview.

Remember that the hiring committee and recruiters are comprised of other humans and have emotions and biases. In your interactions, you should show up as someone who they would love to work with. 

In any case, other companies are hiring. I wish you all the best and a powerful career.