Editor's Choice Q&A and Videos

Hello Community,

I hope you're all doing well. I'm reaching out to this community because I value the diverse experiences and perspectives we share, and I find myself in need of some advice.

Recently, I've been going through a challenging period due to some personal and family issues. Without going into too much detail, these challenges have started to impact my work performance and my ability to communicate effectively with my team, especially during on-call responsibilities. While I strive to maintain professionalism, I've noticed that my current situation has made it more difficult to manage my work communications as effectively as I would like.

I understand many of you have likely navigated similar waters and may have valuable insights or strategies that could help me improve my communication during this time. Specifically, I'm looking for advice on:

• Balancing Transparency and Professionalism: How much should I share about my personal situation with colleagues or management to explain my current performance without overstepping professional boundaries?
• Requesting Support or Adjustments at Work: What's the best way to ask for flexibility or support from my team or management, ensuring I can manage my responsibilities without compromising the team's objectives?
• Maintaining Productivity and Focus: Any tips for staying productive and maintaining focus on work tasks during personal turmoil?
• Self-Care Strategies: How can I ensure I'm taking care of my mental and emotional health, so I'm in the best position to perform my work and communicate effectively?

I'm committed to overcoming these challenges and continuing to contribute positively to my team. I would greatly appreciate any advice, tips, or resources you could share based on your own experiences or knowledge in this area.

Thank you so much for your time and for any guidance you can provide. This community has always been a source of inspiration and support, and I'm grateful to be a part of it.

I'm a Data Scientist looking to switch company and move to a role closer to ML/LLMs. My plan is to build a side project fine-tuning LLMs to familiarize myself with this field and leverage that experience on my resume. I was wondering if anyone here has experience building similar projects or went through a similar learning process - it would be very helpful to get some insights on skill acquisition and finding a job in this area. Here're some examples of what advice I'm looking for, but please feel free to share other aspects as well - anything will be greatly appreciated:

1. What are some good resources to learn about building LLMs? (currently mostly learning from HF, reddit, and googling)
2. What's the best tech stack to build personal fine-tuned LLM projects? (I'm planning to use Runpod or similar services like Vast for training and inference, but was wondering if there's other better options)
3. I'm looking to get into an early stage company in this field. What kind of project should I build to maximize my chance at getting into such companies? My plan rn is to fine tune a model using literature works (novels, poems, proses, etc.) since training data is relatively abundant and it's aligned with my interests. Are there more impactful use cases (for job hunting) out there?
4. What are some things I should keep in mind when producing deliverables to better showcase my technical and learning abilities? I'm planning to make a series of blog/social media posts documenting my experience building this project. Is there anything in specific that would draw companies' attention?

Thanks in advance and please feel free to share your thoughts!

In an 8-hour workday, how much of it should be spent actually working? Caveat: I know this will vary for people. But what are the "bounds" if they exist?

I officially have a 1 hour lunch break. However, I like to add a half-hour walk in the afternoon and a half-hour nap. So now I'm only working for 6 hours.

Maybe try to limit to one recommendation to fuel the discussion

I'll kick it off.

The Unfair Advantage by Ash Ali & Hasan Kubba

Audiobook: Yes (Audible)
Synopsis:

Like a video game character, each of us have innate advantages and disadvantages and this book is about how those can be leveraged to stick out from the competition or how your mindset can be shifted to flip what you think is just a disadvantage into a secret advantage!

I'm currently employed at a startup where we're building bookkeeping tools. My work mainly involves Python, some database work, and a lot of business logic wrangling. Due to the small size of our app and engineering org, I don't have many opportunities to gain the necessary experience in distributed systems. I'm seeking advice on how to transition to distributed systems. Any guidance would be greatly appreciated.

I just did but we can also collect questions here that I'll answer afterward.

Work history

I recently joined Databricks as a Senior Director of Engineering. Most of my career has involved Machine Learning, and I've managed teams ranging from 2 to 200 engineers/research scientists.

Previously, I was the Head of FB Reels and Video Recommendations (Director of Engineering) at Meta, from 2019 - 2023. Before that, I was a Senior Staff Software Engineer and Tech Lead working at Google in Mountain View. I hold a PhD in Computer Science from Penn State, and my publications during that time have accumulated almost 9K academic citations.

Some questions I've heard:

• How Fair is Performance Evaluation for Tech ICs vs Managers?
• Can you give some examples of effective communication? What channels are used, level of abstraction, tone, etc?
• Any advice for a new grad to progress faster in their career?
• What are interviews even like for Director+?

Other

I've started writing detailed notes in blogs titled TLDR0. Slightly cheesy, but it stands for Tech Leadership - Direct, Respectful, Zero Ego. See the full details on my .

• Substack:
• Medium:

I started working at Shopify in the product side. It's backend API development focused with some full stack elements. However with AI popping up everywhere, I get the feeling that to be employable in the future, I need to get a job as an AI engineer or work on a team that focuses on it. With Shopify heavily relying on rails as well which is seen as an older framework, I don't know if I'll have a competitive edge in the future.

How do I find edge cases in DSA problems?

Are there some common edge cases that everybody knows about?

Is there some sort of method or procedure to find those edge cases?

I've had 5+ friends leave Meta or quit software engineering altogether after E6. Either the responsibilities and stress were too much or what they were being asked to work on wasn't really aligned with their core interests. Business needs are always changing, so it can be a common occurrence to take a lot of ownership over a project you don't have personal interest in.

It's important to be adaptable, but I think intrinsic motivation can be hard to sustain if the people, project, or priorities are in flux.

For the older crowd, what really typifies career longevity in a software engineering?

I have a recruiter screening with Meta next week for a full-stack software engineer role. What can I expect in the recruiter screening?

This is my first interview after a very long time, I need to brush up my skills. what is latest acceptable time frame to schedule the technical interviews without being considered late?

As a followup to the talk I gave 2 weeks ago, , I'd like to give y'all the chance to ask me any question. Whether that is about interviews, engineering, career, or general interest.

Work History

• Apple Music Android (2016-2020): Worked on migrating code from the legacy Beats to a new app, creating the tablet version, constructed the general platform level code, and initiated the migration to Kotlin and other general app modernization.
• Uber (2020-Present): Lead the construction of the donation feature () that got run during the Super Bowl. Currently migrating our codebase from Buck to Bazel. Frequent complainer on Google's Github repo.

General Interest

• Spend too much time studying investing. Returns are pretty okay.
• I have 2 cats: Lina and Shadow
• Represented the US in France and Poland for fencing in 2009 for the Cadet World Cup.
• Dota 2 burnout (last ranked Divine 2). Watching TI though.

Born in Ohio, raised in Bay Area, went to UCLA, came back to Silicon Valley to work at these places:

• PayPal (2014 - 2015): Got really good at foosball here
• Course Hero (2015 - 2017): First Android engineer/tech lead, engineer #25 or so. Built their Android app from scratch, grew it from 0 to 100k users and the team from myself to 4 devs total. Course Hero is now Learneo and valued at $3.6B
• Meta (2017 - 2021): Built the voice assistant on Portal (🪦) and then went to Instagram Ads and scaled story ads from a $1B business to $5B+. Mentored a whole bunch of engineers from E3 -> E5, had as many 1 on 1s as a manager by the time I left
• Robinhood (2021 - 2022): Revamped settings + profile, worked on Robinhood Spending Card, finally replaced my spaghetti Java skills with spaghetti Kotlin skills
• Taro (2022 - ???): Building random stuff with my buddies and to make engineers' lives better.

Other facts about me:

• I've built
• I own way too many board games
• Currently procrastinating life responsibilities with Genshin Impact, Marvel Snap, and Borderlands 3
• Somehow got ~75,000 people to

I probably shouldn't be doing an AMA when we haven't shipped threaded replies yet, but YOLO 😎

I have often found platform teams to be quite "tech-heavy" rather than being driven solely by business. On the other hand, it is easier to convey impact for product teams for the metrics that the org cares about much more.

If I am trying to move from Mid Level to Senior Level i.e. Senior Software Engineer to Tech Lead level in my org, what kind of teams should I target?

Does choosing a certain one help you in fast-tracking your career growth?

Hey all, I’m a new grad who has been working at JPMorgan Chase for ~3 months, and I would really like some perspective on my experience so far. This essay question will be long, but the overall theme is that my growth feels stagnant and I’ve unfortunately grown to dread coming into work. I’d really appreciate any new perspectives or advice.

For reference, my current career goal is to grow to senior engineer at a startup/Big Tech company as quickly as possible (because a) I like working towards long-term goals and b) software engineering is lots of fun).

A quick timeline:

• I joined JPMC in early August on a React + Spring Boot team

• The first 4 weeks were solely dedicated to training and getting access to stuff

• Thus, I’ve been with my team in full capacity for ~8 weeks now

A core problem is no one is really interested in how I’m spending my time or enabling me to be productive, even with me trying to upwardly manage. For instance:

• On my first day, I had to actively ask my manager and TL for my first task, but they had no immediate plan for me or the other new joiner(s)

• During my first couple weeks, I (nicely) bugged my TL for work so I can get my hands wet and start learning the codebase, to no avail

• Recently, I had a full week of no tasks assigned to me, and no one minded (I had stopped bothering asking for work)

I’ve considered the following:

1. Self-assigning myself work

   1. This won’t work because a) I don’t think that’s allowed and b) I’m not yet onboarded enough to be independently productive

2. Asking to pair program

   1. I’ve mentioned this to two engineers, to no avail

   2. Everyone seems to be focused on getting their own JIRAs completed, and pair programming will inevitably slow them down

Also, because my TL is so busy, it’s hard to get immediate, synchronous help whenever I get blocked, which leads to me having much downtime. In fairness, I understand people are busy and can’t drop their work on a whim, and I should have taken the initiative to get help from other team members too (to not overwhelm my TL).

In any case, the handful of tasks I have been given have tended to be very menial in nature - the type you could better offload to ChatGPT. For instance, adding 1-line changes to business logic or writing unit tests for existing code (that I only partially understand). Most of the work hasn’t helped me develop a mental model of how the system works or learn the business domain.

Here are a few other traits about my team that I’d like to mention, to provide more context in debugging my situation:

• My TL and manager spend most of the day pairing up to deal with production issues

• My manager doesn’t have 1-on-1s with anyone (even new grads)

• Everyone else on the team is busy, as if I’m the only engineer without much to do

• The engineering culture often seems middling at best - unit tests are often written without asserts (solely to reach 80% coverage) and code often has buggy execution paths

The whole experience is unfortunately becoming really frustrating to me. For comparison, I worked on a React/TS + Firebase side project over the summer (it couldn’t have been more than 80-100 hours of work, tops) and I learned so much stuff really quickly - not merely in terms of code velocity, but other higher-level concepts like the tradeoffs of SQL vs NoSQL, data modeling, reading documentation, how to keep a codebase organized, etc. and I also gained much more confidence in my technical abilities. The experience I gained of building something has given me more context to understand how software engineering works. Also, it was tons of fun (like grinding in an RPG, but productive).

On the other hand, I’ve spent almost three months at my first real job and I’ve objectively learned very little. As a result, I’m finding it hard to be motivated to take extra initiative and apply myself when it seems like the environment I’m in has turned out to be so stagnant and slow-moving.

Beyond this, the other major problem is I don’t feel like I’m providing value to anyone (including myself) when I go into work. My only incentive has (unfortunately) become running down the clock so I can leave, which, coupled with the boredom from a lack of work and a 2+ hour round-trip commute, is incredibly draining. It’s really silly - my primary goal right now is to get good at software engineering, yet I’m currently doing the opposite!

I have considered starting a dialogue with my manager and bringing up (some) of these concerns, but there are a few problems. Mainly, I doubt my manager would provide the best insight:

• He directly equates hours worked with productivity and suggests ambitious JPMC engineers should probably work 10-11+ hours early in career

• He suggested using my downtime to do some kind of arbitrary training (unclear what he is referring to), instead of finding real work to learn from

• He doesn’t seem to understand that the work I’ve been assigned is not very meaningful

• He spends all his time coding and very little time managing

• My manager (as part of JPMC for decades) seems to be in the siloed-off JPMC bubble where engineers join and stay for decades - so growth discussions would be centered around being the best JPMC employee, not the best software engineer in general

I don’t mean to criticize - my manager is actually a cool, friendly dude.

Plus, not everything is bad about my experience. There are several green flags:

• Most of the other engineers seem to like their work

• There appears to be some camaraderie in the team culture

• My manager seems flexible and understanding regarding people’s schedules

• My TL/manager have given very positive feedback on the code quality of my (few) contributions so far

• During my placement conversation, it sounded like there’s tons of work/scope available

Nonetheless, it still feels like I’m in a no-win state where my options are:

1. Stay until the tech market improves

   1. It feels really bad to intend on spending a minimum 1-1.5+ years working at a job where I’m learning very little and accomplishing almost nothing. It seems like it would hurt my career growth (and continue to be a really taxing, sucky experience).

   2. It seems like the only two things I’m getting out of this right now are a) income and b) resume continuity.

2. Switch jobs

   1. It feels almost as bad to want to look for a new job after ~3 months, given JPMC’s tech side is so large and reasonably well-known.

   2. Also, job searching as a junior in this current market would be very RNG-heavy, and I don’t want to have a short stint on my resume if I can avoid it.

3. Switch teams

   1. Internal mobility isn’t an actionable option because the program managers want us to spend at least 12 months in our first role.

   2. Also, to switch, you’d need to both find another team via internal networking and have your current manager sign off on the transfer.

4. Quit

   1. The large amount of downtime means I have to spend significant parts of the day running down the clock by simply sitting in my chair and doing literally nothing - which turns out to be far more mentally grueling than one might expect.

   2. The WLB on my in-person days is poor because I have a 2.5 hour round-trip commute, so I have little energy to do anything useful in my free time.

   3. I’ve tried to use my downtime to read books (like Designing Data-Intensive Applications), but this doesn’t remotely replace doing actual work.

   4. I have no expenses so I could quit, though that isn’t the best option. I only mention it because staying at my job comes at the cost of continually enduring this.

What does the Taro community think of my situation? I’d appreciate any and all suggestions on how to fix this.

I recently had my first interview round with a firm I was targeting. I wrapped up the first question in time, but fumbled with the second one. I told the algo and the time complexity, but just couldn't code it in time. I could have done it if given more time since I knew what to do, but just had trouble organizing my thoughts in the given time constraint.

I feel really bad about it. It was a great opportunity for me, and I have started having imposter syndrome now. It feels that landing a job is really hard, and I wonder how I managed to pass interviews earlier.

Does anyone else feel the same way?