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What are some good ways to approach getting referrals to top companies I want to apply to? Is it even worth spending the time pursuing the referral, or should I just apply?

I have a L6 equivalent MLE interview from a FAANG company. Since last time I had interview for L4. I would like to understand what kind of quality difference does L6 show in an interview (coding/behavioral/system design -- ML)? How would you demonstrate staff level quality in the interview rounds?

I'm not sure exactly how to phrase this, but to give an analogy, I love card games (ex: Legends of Runeterra, Race for the Galaxy, Hearthstone, etc). There are a fixed set of rules and a fixed set of cards. I can "grind" games and get better by noticing patterns, picking up new strategies or tactics by playing against a diverse set of players. The outcome of an interaction is usually idempotent (i.e. card 1 interaction with card 2). In real life, things are quite complicated. Asking a certain question in a certain way to person 1 and person 2 may give wildly different responses, and may even depend on your mood, their mood, your tone, time of day, etc. It's super messy and unpredictable. I also feel a similar way about system design. The nearly infinite possibility of inputs, outputs, TPS, throughput, scenarios make it difficult to reapply the same set of rules to different scenarios. This is just talking about one component, when we bring in N components, the interaction gets very complicated and the "rules" change" case by case. I'm sure it gets better with practice, but I also feel I have a limited opportunity to learn or practice these on the job. Has anyone found a way to structure these learnings in terms of a repeated "grind", because oftentimes I feel overwhelmed and don't know where to start. This is a complicated question, so answers regarding either a) soft skills or b) system design separately I will treat as valid answers.

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: 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. Have a very strong code quality 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? 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. 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?

How do I demonstrate that I am seasoned in a way such that if a Big Tech company decided to give me a chance, I can put them at ease and show that I'll be successful? How does that look like across various levels?

I just did a live Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) 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 LinkedIn profile. Substack: Medium:

I'm in the processes of writing unit tests for a project that had none. At times I'll need help learning how to work with the mocking library Mockk. My manager has experience and when he has time and quickly unblock. The problem is he is usually at meetings and can only give me so much time. My team is small and from who I've asked only my manager has knowledge of this Library. What can I do to not fall behind and continue to deliver tasks? I've followed tutorials and articles and even chatgpt but sometimes those don't have the answers to my questions.

What are some ways we can bring ourselves to work that makes it easier for others to "root" for you? (Inspired by the first line of this question)

We maintain a healthy suite of E2E tests, which does catch regressions sometimes before release. It is hard to keep track of it all manually, but I believe that each time a regression is caught before release, it's overall positive on time spent. Each instance of this happening saves time which would have spent hot-fixing the issue in production if the regression wasn't able to be caught early by the tests. How can I verify my hypothesis and make sure that this overall E2E testing effort is well-run, impactful, and net positive with engineering time investment?

I have been seeking to develop habits / follow a system to increase code quality, both in terms of readability and number of functional issues. I have come up with a few ideas I have listed below but I am curious what other people have been trying out! Have any of the below worked for you? What specific steps do you take to ensure code quality? More awareness while writing code: it's tempting to write a rough draft version of the code thinking you will polish it later but oftentimes it's easier to spot mistakes while your attention is on the erroneous line of code. Example of this in action: search for where the method you're modifying is used in the code base before making changes to it. Do not submit the code for review immediately after writing the code. Give yourself a short break, come back and review your code with a fresh mind, which will make spotting bugs easier. Write down the possible edge cases in a notebook before submitting the PR for review. For medium to large PRs, the process of writing itself can help you consider more edge cases than simply keeping them in your head.

I'm working on my side project. A web app. I know a little of html and css just the basics but now I want to extend my app and make it more visually attractive and I noticed I went to Udemy to look for Modern CSS course etc. It will take me 20+ hours just to know what to do plus the time I take doing the work. This approach is not working for me and not gonna finish the project by the deadline I set myself. What are your thoughts? How you learn something while applying it at the same time?

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?

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.

I recently made a string of silly mistakes related to a particular project that led to a few bugs being deployed to production. I think I incrementally got more and more overwhelmed and stressed by the project because my initial fix caused a bug and from there I fixed that bug and inadvertently caused others. I'm concerned about how this might play out with my EM. How I can best approach owning this set of silly mistakes without it having a negative impact on my reputation due to my low code quality mistakes partly caused by the stress of the situation? My tech lead asked me to write up a mini bug report for our our engineering retro and this morning my EM was asking about what the report was for because I had written it down as part of my weekly goals in our stand ups. My EM has low context on the complexity of the work we do and is far from the code - tending to over index on any signal he come across. I just went through my performance review and I'm meeting expectations so I don't have a formal review for a while. I'm about to go on vacation for a while so I'm hoping this fades into the past but still I'm not sure exactly how to play this now so it comes out in my favour before I go away.