Editor's Choice Q&A and Videos

Basically what the title says. Market seems really bad right now for entry level and junior engineers. Any tips on how to become a better applicant and stand out?

Does anyone have any tips for interview anxiety? This week I started talking to recruiters and it's going great. I'm at the point where they're asking me to schedule interviews and it's giving me a lot of anxiety because I'm not ready. How far in advance should I schedule the interview and how do I deal with the anxiety of failing?

I'm currently working through a task where I have to write unit tests. These unit tests in theory should test out the entirety of its class isolated from any other classes or function and effectively apply business logic on how these functions/methods are being called.

But where do I draw the line in regards to how much testing I'd need to run? Currently struggling with this PR because there's lots of lines of code (bad I know), but I do need to find out what a complete unit test looks like.

If you had to ask me, a complete unit test is where all the unit tests traverse through all code path and have both positive tests and negative tests being ran to show how the code should be used.

If there's some sort of guidance online, that would be helpful. Otherwise I'm mimicking what unit tests have been approved based on style and usage.

What’s the best way to learn really good front end engineering? Specifically what frameworks / languages are useful, design patterns, and some projects to get hands dirty?

my motivation for learning front end is to build products that people would actually use :)

Recently I got pulled into an org wide project which is basically a tussle between senior architects.

There is a lot of back and forth on the approach, cost, implementation and roll out. Every point being presented by one is being contested by other.

What inputs can you give me to how to disagree and share my inputs and to steer the conversation to a conclusion.

I became really ambitious at a young age and was always pushing my boundaries, from high school, through university and now in a professional environment. Ambition is not a bad thing, but I think I picked up an unhealthy maximalism and “grind mindset” which makes the journey really stressful. I’m working on understanding myself & why my personality turned out this way with a psychologist and honestly it’s great (and I recommend this to everyone in tech if you can afford it).

Reflecting back on my journey, this mentality got me pretty far so far (I’m 26), I got promoted pretty much every year (I’m just below staff-level, 5 YoE in ML/AI), I published papers as side projects and finished my Masters degree, most of this in parallel.

Throughout the years I was given several signs that this is not a maintainable pace (relationship ending because of only spending time on professional stuff, health complications like high blood pressure, etc.) and as stupid as it sounds, I just powered through these and carried on.

Exercise is one thing that helped the situation as it turns my mind off for a bit. I’ve been working our 3-4 times a week, but honestly I think the problem is with my attitude, so working out will not help the stress completely.

Recently I think I hit a wall in terms of stress and I had a few panic attacks, which was really scary. It was a wake up call and I decided that nothing is worth experiencing these conditions. After experiencing these I became more stressed and worried about my health which makes day-to-day work pretty tough. I’m also switching jobs soon, which I think added an extra bit of stress to the whole thing, maybe that was the trigger.

Since I think Taro is a collective of people with great ambitions, I’d be really curious to hear if you faced a similar situations and how you managed it.

So I have two main questions to you:

• Short term: If you ever got to this point, what are some strategies to recover? I will be taking 2.5 weeks of vacation between the jobs and I will try to completely switch-off, but I’m curious if you have any other ideas.
• Long term: How do you balance your thoughts and ambitions about “reaching the stars” (whether it’s becoming a staff engineer, building a company, etc.) with maintaining a healthy life?