A new CTO was assigned in our organisation. If I get the chance to have a sync, what are the things I can and should discuss about ?

What are the points one can discuss in a sync with the CTO of the organisation?

How does it differ from an entry level engineer to the head of engineering level at each of the levels, given the scope grows as well at each level?

- Software Engineer
- Senior Software Engineer
- Tech Lead
- Staff Software Engineer
- Principal Engineer
- Head of Engineering
- Director of Engineering
- Vice President
- CTO

How do each of the levels ensure they are onboarded as quickly as possible to have maximum impact ?

How does technical onboarding differ as you go up the ladder?

1. How do pull requests and pull request comments look like with an increasing level of seniority? 
2. Are pull requests for senior engineers not expected to have any comments for improvements? If yes, then what kind of comments should be there?
3. Also, have seen some principal engineers not sharing their pull requests as they are quite high in seniority and merging it directly. Do you recommend that? If not, who should review PRs for very senior engineers if the team does not have engineers at that level?

Variance in pull requests across levels of seniority?

1. What are the things you can suggest to reduce the turnaround time for onboarding a new engineer within the team?
2. What are the things that can enable them better?
3. How does this differ based on the stage of their career at which the new hire is in?

How do you enable seamless onboarding of a new engineer or intern into your team?

Prepping for interviews always feels detrimental to actual career growth. At the same time, what are the things one should look out for to avoid getting laid off and jump ship when things are about to go south.

One advice mentioned often is to look for finances of the company, but I am not aware how to analyse it. Can you help with resources for the same?

What are the signs of an impending layoff in an organisation that can help an employee prepare themselves better?

I am trying to get promoted to Lead Software Engineer, which relates to an E5 level at Meta, if I am not wrong. I have seen several engineers in my organisation coast at the current level I am.

I wanted to understand if there are some key things I should be doing in order to perform at a Tech Lead level, so that I am promoted to one as well. This would be a bit long question, but please bear with me.

Following are some of the things highlighted in a few discussions:

1. Should have demonstrated complex backend system designs - How do I create this opportunity to build a complex system for myself? Often, the projects we are a part of don't require complex solutions.
2. Have a very strong code quality
3. Mentor other engineers - I started having 1:1s with Junior engineers on how to grow. Have not been doing this with Senior Engineers, but I try to jump in calls with them whenever they need some help. Often, the credit goes hidden, and sometimes it does bother me, but not sure if there is some way around it. What are your thoughts?
4. Handling production outages and incidents - Trying to be on top of it. Recently, have been putting out short term fixes, but alongside working on some libraries to fix it in an extensible way and have a larger impact with other teams as well. Sometimes, having visibility for my work in other teams seems to be difficult, but trying my way around this. If there is something you can recommend, that would be great.
5. Should I mention in my skip levels that this is something I am targeting for myself? - Right now, my focus is to try to uplift the code quality, work on larger designs (a question mentioned wrt this), trying to uplift the team (I have created a channel where I share stuff that can help the team upskill, brief nuggets of information on how to write good code etc. Doing this almost twice a week for around 2 months now), trying to mentor engineers within the team.

Another aspect is that my team would be getting changed soon due to organisational requirements. Given that, How do I make sure I am on the right trajectory to getting promoted ? (One thing on top of my mind is that I would be asking for junior engineers whom I can work with and try uplifting, alongside asking for opportunities/projects that would have large visibility and impact.)

Do you have any other advice for me?

Mid Level to Senior Promotion - What should I keep in mind?

In fast-paced organisations that launch a lot of features on a quarterly basis and teams with large sizes, how should a tech lead or team members ensure that everyone knows about everything or is enabled to get to know about it?

Quite often, whenever a new feature comes in, it could be repurposing technology built for other features as well. But, given the pace at which  these are developed, it is often hard to know what everyone is working on. Sometimes, each of these features may have idiosyncracies that may be getting missed out by new joiners, especially due to the volume of information, especially for teams that have been in existence since a long time. 

I recall once when changes for a new feature done by a developer reverted some conditionals for an older feature, thus causing an outage. How do you prevent this and ensure knowledge of everything is available to all, especially to people new to an organisation ?

Also, are there some general practices to ensure that these are easily discoverable ? Video recordings are time consuming to go through, and wikis though they exist, are sometimes difficult to navigate, when you don't know what you are searching for? I am thinking of something like a mind map could help here, but what are your thoughts ?

How do you deal with the explosion of features and ensure that the knowledge is widely distributed/discoverable by the team?

For example: If an organisation does not value quality code but no. of features shipped, I feel it would eventually face difficulty in adding new features. Thoughts ?

How much is the tech culture within a company a predictor of its overall growth?

I have gotten this feedback from my managers couple of times. Problem is - in the past (in some other companies), I have been on the receiving end of negativity. Often times, being reprimanded for asking a question, in some of the other teams I was a part of. I recall that I was shouted at in front of everyone because I was too tired during one of my on-calls and dozed off, missing an on-call call at 3:30 AM. I recall these events getting escalated to VP level. It impacted me deeply.

While it was hard, I moved on from such teams and now I try to be kind to all engineers, especially junior ones. I make sure that their onboarding journey is as fast as possible and they are granted help that is required. Extending it further, as a part of calls with other stakeholders as well, I often tend to be with a softer tone. It has been mentioned by my manager that - "You often come across as too kind. If you know that you're right, then why are you not speaking it with confidence." 

How do I improve on this aspect ?
Recently, I did [this course on assertiveness](https://www.udemy.com/course/assertiveness-basics-the-30-minute-communication-guide/) but thinking if there are some other tips from your end.

I often struggle with conveying more in lesser number of words. As a result, my slack messages often go in multiple paragraphs and bullet points. 

I find a need to explain myself in detail, especially when trying to resolve some queries from other domains such as product managers and QA engineers. Are there some ways to make communication succinct and to the point, at the same time conveying what is necessary.

This was a feedback I have gotten once from my manager as well, though when I asked if he had some suggestions on how to work on the same, he mentioned - "Keep it short!" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Now, I try to vet my messages after I type them before sending, but thinking if there are some ways to improve on it further.

How to make communication succinct and more impactful?

Joining a new team/vertical with the company, I often feel intimidated with the sheer expanse of domain knowledge to be grasped. Given that it takes time, what are the best ways to approach it, so that you are the most effective.

What is the most effective way to onboard yourself to a new team's domain?

The benchmarks I am setting here are people like Robert Martin, Martin Fowler, Venkat Subramaniam (known for agile and Java), Guido Von Rossum (developed Python), Jeff Dean, 
 Sanjay Gehlawat etc. 

Latter two are Senior Fellow  at Google. Up until a certain point, I understand that promotions are about the scope of impact inside an organisation, but how do you grow yourself outside the walls of it so as to be on your way to be extremely good in your craft and among top  software engineering contributors in the world.

Would appreciate answers from as many folks as possible.

How do you grow yourself to become a great software engineer who is well respected outside of your job?

1. My new manager has worked with me in the past for around 2 years (6-8 months as a manager and rest as a teammate) after which his team got switched.
2. I have been working for the last 2 years (since the last time I got promoted) towards a promotion and even though organisational requirements need my team to be switched, I still want to target a promotion in upcoming year end review cycle. 
3. I have brought in several process improvements in the previous team and have tried to uplift my previous team forward in the last 2 years as a mid-level engineer. Given that the new team I would be joining is in a similar scenario in terms of code quality/processes etc. as my previous team was sometime back, what all should I do to get maximum leverage for a promotion?
4. Do you suggest is it better to look for an up-level outside of the organisation or stay put ? What factors does it depend on?

Things to keep in mind while switching teams and targeting promotion to Senior Level?

If your organisation is not promoting you, what can be the possible reasons? 
Does it make sense for one to join another organisation at a higher level or is it a recipe for failure?

Interviewing and joining a higher level in career ladder

1. Should one keep multiple offers till a week before the joining date as a safety net ?
2. What are the steps one can take when an offer gets rescinded?

How should one deal with offer being rescinded ?

I have recently joined a team which works in Go (no frameworks). My team handles multiple backend services ( exposed through REST APIs ) which are like a platform for various other services.

I have picked up the language grammar and have enough understanding to write working code. However, I feel I don't "get" it. I don't understand how to organise the code into a well-defined folder structure and interfaces. 

I would like to understand what are some of the good ways to learn a new language. It's been 2 months since I started learning it and feel like I am working with incomplete knowledge. Maybe at 50% level. I know there's no point in understanding all the features of a language but I would like to understand design patterns, best practices and how to write high-quality code.

I really need to be able to ramp up in another month's time. 

Majorly need advice on 
1. Learning to write high-quality Go code
2. Writing with Dependency Injection in mind
3. Design patterns and low-level system design

How to learn a new programming language when you join a new company ?

Grab Holdings Inc., commonly known as Grab, is a Singaporean multinational technology company. It is the developer of the Grab super-app, which provides users with transportation, food delivery and digital payments services via a mobile app.

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Senior Software Engineer

Any C-level person in a company will have a much higher level vision for the company and the CTO for the technology organization. If I were in your shoes, I would focus on trying to get an idea of how they think about their vision for the company/org. Based on the company size, in most cases they'll not be able to dive into details of your daily projects. The other thing you can do is to figure out how you can provide them with value so that you can keep meeting them, maybe once a quarter or once a half? I've been able to talk to C-level leaders about systemic issues that I see and give them my recommendation on how to address it. Be sure not to spend the whole time just complaining about things, that's not as useful. Identifying 1-2 things that you would address if you were in their shoes is far more important. Ensure that you are thinking about the "global maxima" not just solving the problem for you or your team.

Hope that's helpful!

Eng VP at Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, ex-Meta, ex-Yahoo

Girish Patangay

There's more to working in tech than just shipping software. It's vital for your career to build deep professional relationships and make real friends at work, especially if you're looking to grow to senior levels.

At the end of the day, working in tech, or anywhere really, is all about working with other human beings. Communication is the core skill necessary to make this collaboration effective.

It's hard to fully replace the value of talking to others in person. However, meetings are expensive - Every software engineer should know how to get the most out of them.

Senior engineers have proven themselves to be extremely capable at shipping high-quality, complex software efficiently. This collection breaks down how they operate and how you can get to this level too.

What are the points one can discuss in a sync with the CTO of the organisation?

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Discussion

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