Level

Company

Tags

Every time, when my manager asked me to do some changes to the repository that is totally new to me. I became scared. 

I prefer to do research by myself first. But I got lost in the new repo by reading file by file, and don't get the clarity. 

So I ask the repository owner to provide documentation, mostly they don't maintain documentation, and even if they do, it is not updated or it involves a lot of detailed feature-wise documentation, which is usually not relevant to my requirement. 

Then, I call the POC of that repo, but I couldn't figure out what is the right question to ask in the first call. Over time, I ping him asking questions whenever I face hurdles while achieving the requirements. 

Sometimes, I put a debugger or logs to understand the flow of code.

The above processes took a lot of my time.

What is your suggestion to get clarity in the new repo such that I can complete my requirements in less time?

What is the effective way to understand new repository in order to make the required changes in that repo?

Senior Salesforce Engineer at Series B Startup

My goal is to become extremely efficient at coding. I want to build a reputation as someone who is able to deliver tons of high-quality implementation and products very quickly. I want to build actual velocity where the actual rate of code per hour/day is really high as opposed to just being able to accomplish more from working extra hours.

What tactics can I use to level myself up in this way so that my old coding abilities feel unrecognizable when looking back 3-6 months in the future from my vast amount of improvement?

Forward Deployed Software Engineer at Palantir

Some additional questions:
1. Does it vary between big companies and small companies?
2. Do you need to work a lot to be a high performer?

What's the difference between a low performer software engineer and a high performer?

Before I was at Meta, I worked at a networking company for 10+ years. It was very different from Meta as a massive consumer web company. On top of the domain differences, the culture is also very different between these 2 companies.

I'm working on ML at Meta, which is something I'm pretty new to. As a senior engineer who wants to make an impact quickly and make a push for staff, how can I effectively make this domain switch to hit the ground running fast?

What’s the most effective way to switch domains in tech?

Entry-Level Software Engineer [L3] at Google

I see engineers like Alex and Rahul, and they have had many accomplishments with pretty fast trajectories leveling up. I'm wondering if there's a primary common theme among software engineers like that - What are they doing that others aren't?

What's the core insight behind quick growth?

Mid-Level Software Engineer [SDE 2] at Amazon

I have been at SDE 2 for a couple years now, and I feel like getting to SDE 3 is unnecessarily complicated. I've gone through multiple teams, and the recurring theme is that there isn't enough SDE 3 scope for me. You also need a **lot** of documentation (think 5+ pages) to show that you have the sufficient impact to deserve the promo, and that's really daunting as well. Any tips on how I can find that SDE 3 scope and navigate this senior promotion in general?

How to navigate the difficult SDE 2 to SDE 3 promotion?

Alex and Rahul and the other senior people on Taro have consistently emphasized how important good software engineering fundamentals are to long-term career success as a software engineer. This is in contrast to learning the latest popular framework or area of development. Can people define what those fundamentals are and how one should go about acquiring/improving them? 

Thanks!

What are software engineering fundamentals?

Mid-Level Software Engineer at Taro Community

Is sprint planning and agile not a thing at meta? I’m doing a lot of research since I’m trying to see how it’s like as I’m spending time leetcoding and if the vibes there are it’s on you to plan your projects and set a timeline then sprint planning would actually make the engineers not excel in independent planning?

And it seems like it’s against good e4 performance to be prompted to set your deliverables at the end of the sprint? Just not sure how agile is used cuz if it’s on everyone to figure out how to project manage on their own then what’s the point of agile?

Is sprint planning and agile not a thing at Meta?

Mid-Level Software Engineer [Senior Associate] at Capital One

I get a lot of JIRA tickets for bugs where it's not clear what the fix should be. How can I find the problem area and relevant code faster with these issues?

Senior Software Engineer at Series E Startup

I work in as an iOS engineer. My current company is a startup that's scaling up fast. In classic startup fashion, testing was historically not a top priority here. As a consequence, we struggle with lots of manual QAing and low code confidence when modifying pieces of poorly tested legacy code.\
\
This has improved in the past year simply by unit testing every new piece of code by default and by introducing unit tests in legacy code as we touch it, boy scouting style.\
\
At this point, I think we need to step it up and I'm looking forward to formalising a testing strategy for our mobile team.\
\
Here are some ideas I have:

- In the realm of **unit tests:**
  - I want to introduce **API contract tests** because our back-end API lacks documentation. In these tests we'd unit test the way we build our requests to API endpoints, and we'd have a sample JSON response from the server to test that the app can parse it into our data models as expected.
  - I want to introduce **localisation tests** because our app supports many languages but we are always manually testing localisation. In these tests, we'd assert that the outputs of our formatting logic are the ones we want for different locales.
- In the realm of **user interface tests**:
  - I want to introduce **snapshot testing**, because right now the only way we can test that our views are rendered as expected for different view configurations (for example RTL vs LTR, empty content, loading content, content in verbose languages, etc.) is manually.
  - I want to introduce **UI tests** (sparingly, only for key flows) because we have no e2e tests. Currently, key flows are tested manually and frequently to prevent regressions, which takes lots of time.

What other testing strategies can I propose to establish some standard we can use to further improve our code confidence, reduce bugs, and rely more on automated testing?

How do the top tier tech companies approach mobile testing?

What do mobile testing strategies look like at top tech companies?

Hi everyone!
I will join Palantir as a Forward Deployed Software Engineer(FDSE). I need advice on tackling the first 2-3 months at the company to gain team respect and trust. I am excited about this opportunity and want to grow but do it efficiently, if that is even a thing😅.
Jokes aside, All I want is to have a great career at Palantir.

YOE: over 2.5years(including just over 1year of internship).

Stack Experience: Ruby on Rails, Python, some Java

Current Work: Backend Engineer. Building and maintaining APIs

Advice for someone joining big tech from a non big tech background?

I'm sure Alex and Rahul talk about this in their [Masterclass "How To Write Better Code Faster as a Software Engineer"](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/iYpRj8XfyzCSaTYnce3y/how-to-write-better-code-faster-as-a-software-engineer-11192022/), but wondering how to write clean code, particularly in the context of someone who doesn't have technical people available to review my pull requests in my work or in side-projects.

I'm sure this skill is almost entirely developed by working with talented people and writing a lot of code, but is there a place for resources like "Clean Code" the book or courses on Udemy?

How to Learn/Practice Clean Code, particularly by oneself?

I'm defining a career path for my company, and don't know where to start. I would like to see how Meta, Google are doing this so that I can tailor to match my smaller company.

What do career levels structure in big tech company look like? What are the responsibilities for each level?

My goal is to level up to Staff someday, and I feel like I've gotten a lot of very high-level advice and examples that are hard to directly apply. What are some detailed examples of Staff level projects, and what about the execution/behaviors made them Staff?

I would like to get more clarity on what a Staff-level project and execution look like.

Entry-Level Software Engineer [SE1] at Booking.com

Crux is when you’re learning and digging deeper technically. How do you approach taking ownership and growing your impact on not just the project but across the team and larger axis?

Software Engineering Intern at Taro Community

Heard this phrase many times, but would appreciate some elaboration/insights. Let's say I don't have ANY frontend experience in the past, but somehow get hired at a FAANG as a frontend dev. We know onboarding is already tough - meeting new people, understanding new codebase, etc. In the first few weeks especially, how do you manage so many things? You have to go through the onboarding challenges, and on top of that also ramp up on frontend. Isn't that too much to take on? \
\
How to make sure I am performing well and learning new things quickly?

Entry-Level Software Engineer [SEP] at JPMorgan Chase

Sometimes I feel like I didn't get 40 hours "worth" of productivity after a week, and it didn't make sense to physically spend 40 hours working that week. Is it possible to succeed as a software engineer working less than the traditional 40 hours? I imagine it requires being able to get the work done faster - What are some techniques to do that?

Is it possible to do well at a SWE job working less than 40 hours a week?

I recently started at my new gig as a remote tech lead. While I am on the West Coast, most of my team is either on the East Coast or in Europe (+11 hrs). Meetings start at around 7 AM PT and go on until 11:30 AM PT!

Here is my challenge: I am a morning person & like to do more deep & undistracted work during the morning hours (Coding / Reading / Writing) . Screen time in the mornings usually drain me out & my productivity dips post multiple zoom / G-meet calls. What are your thoughts on how could I balance my sacred morning hour time between meetings & impactful work?

Thanks!

How do I optimize my sacred hour at work?

Regular layoffs + cut-down of perks + companies' continued focus on AI may not result in creation of huge number of new SWE positions at Big Tech anytime this year. Just my opinion.

What suggestions do seniors in this forum suggest to AI-proof your career? I agree that coding is not the only thing we do. Then what are other hard skills differentiator for a SWE? Communication, System Design skills will get easier and easier to master given plethora of improved content on the internet.

Should we start integrating AI in all our projects/workstreams in order to stay sharp?

Hi everyone, I have about 0 experience with machine learning and I'm thinking of ways to significantly increase my value in the future. My ideal plan is to get promoted to E5 in &lt; 1 year and then change domains to ML (or ML Infra and work closely with ML engineers). I have almost 0 experience with ML directly, but I think they make much more money in the long run? I'm currently a backend software engineer.

   Basically I want to know if it's worth investing my time & effort this or if it would be better to just eventually go for engineering management in the domain that I am already familiar with.

Is it worth transitioning to become a Machine Learning Engineer?

Join The Discussion

Share insights on complex topics like system design, code review, tech leadership, interpersonal communication, and more.