Junior Engineer Career Development Videos, Forum, and Q&A

Hi all. I have a verbal offer for a contract role. The recruiter said that they are going to send the official offer letter tomorrow. This company moved really fast and based on how fast they moved, they probably expect me to sign same day as receiving the offer.

I am in the final stages for a couple of other companies. I sped up the interviews as much as possible but I can't imagine they can get me an official offer tomorrow.

How should I handle this? I would like to finish these last interviews and see if I get an offer but the timeline is not lining up well.

These days companies are making candidates wait weeks for an offer decision so that they can interview more people. Is it a bad idea to tell them that you have another offer to prevent this even if you don't really have another offer?

Hi! I have an interview with the company that laid me off some months back. The manager who reached out to me for the role claimed that two people who work on this team already know me, so the idea would be to hire me on a contract, then get to work early since I know the system already, and get some quality work done fast. The manager and I have a pre-existing relationship: he was consistently checking in on how I was doing as I was in the process of officially leaving. This manager said he wanted to help me out, and that this role looked "perfect" for me. Given the market these days, I jumped at the idea.

There's one really strange look to this. The recruiter told me from the jump that they're interviewing other people with 3 to 5 years of experience. Although I appreciate the honesty, you can imagine I'm pissed about having to fight other people for the job I deserve to have back (which the manager said I look "perfect" for), but I'm not going to voice that to the company because I'd look arrogant. This recruiter I was speaking with last Friday also said in an email "The interview panel will be mixed up a bit to try and be as unbiased as possible. They are excited to speak with you." Makes sense, because another thing in context here is that I do know quite a few people in that company.

I got the name of who's interviewing me yesterday. I found the person on LinkedIn, and was very perplexed to see that it's some financial consultant person within the company. Someone with a very far from tech background, performing an hour long technical interview? Just ONE person, on top of that. I've seen interviews there where 3 people are grilling the interviewee.

I have no idea what's going on. But I have 3 ideas. Firstly, maybe they're thinking "let's just give you the job and have a random interview you". That'd be nice, but I don't think it'll be that easy, so the second idea is they might be finding a technical interviewer, so they can run a strategy of "behavior cop/tech cop". Or, the last idea: they don't care and are gonna blow me off. Whatever happens, the company I'm interviewing for is opening up a LOT of software engineer spots in my area, so they're gonna try to find me a new position.

I've asked multiple of my friends at the company what this could mean, but no one knows. I'll update this question when I receive an answer, but I wanted to gauge what y'all thought here.

Thanks.

Hey folks, have a question to those who know or have used Pramp before:

I was exploring the platform and it said that if you get a membership - they have a priority job referral feature. Has anyone tried this before? Is their membership ($134/year) worth it?

Thanks much! Appreciate all kinds of advice

I'm a junior SWE at a small company which does not have a lot of standardized culture or process. A lot of inaccurate / non-standard terms get thrown around (for example, we call the entirety of one of our older apps the "backend" because of the way our repo is structured) and I've found that this has caused confusion in meetings, especially with new engineers being onboarded. Even though something like this usually only causes a 10-second confusion which is cleared up with follow-up questions, it feels like such an unnecessary inefficiency that could be easily resolved. Also, in general, I believe this can leak into situation where repercussions are worse like client-facing or investor-facing meetings, where for example a manager might call the old app the "backend" to a client, leaving them confused and thus unaligned on what's going on.

I typically wouldn't care about something of this scope as a junior, but it seems to me that the entire org would benefit from something like this, and that nobody else has addressed it nor will address it. So I've drafted a proposal for standardized terminology, with suggestions for specific terms to use and specific terms to deprecate in our company vernacular.

My question is whether it's appropriate to submit this proposal to my managers. It feels necessary but also not be my place / come across as aggressive. Of course it is hard to answer this question without knowing the specific company culture, but nonetheless, I would like to hear thoughts from seniors about how something like this would come across when coming from a junior.

In, Alex answered that the key insight behind rapid career growth is good communication.

He points the reader to the "Effective Communication for Software Engineers" course and some other resources.

I feel like a ton of effective communication is , and so finding a good way to teach it outside of observing those who are already good at communication in the context a job is tricky. Specific case studies could be really helpful. I think Alex's course and the other linked resources were a really good introduction to effective communication, but if this is the key skill behind great performance I want to learn more! I've put most of the tips and tricks that Alex taught into practice at my current job and it's really improved my performance and my managers' trust in me already. A huge mindset shift for me was that it's better to risk over-communication than under-communication; it's better to be aligned but slightly annoyed by receiving a lot of messages than not aligned.

My question is: What is a good way to go about building my effective communication skills? Are there more really high-quality resources you recommend for building good communication skills?

Hi team, as per my current situation there are cycles for promotion in August and in Feb. I am targeting the Mid-Level title and was told to wait until next Feb for Mid-Level instead of coming August.

I asked for data points and was told I needed more time to mature. I actually would have appreciated some actionable data points if there were any, so that I and my manager can track progress.
I have the following 2 pointers :

1. On a personal front I want to aim for the promotion in Feb and want to let my manager know my intentions and pick up work accordingly however I don't know how to put it across.

2. I would have liked if there were some actionable data points to nail promotion since my manager didn't mention anything explicitly, and I have read and watched guidance about your career is in your hands so wanted to know how can I extract these pointers from my Manager?

I ask these because 1:1's currently . And would have appreciated it if there were actual data points /action items

Would highly appreciate insights from folks on the platform . Thank you :)

Now that PSC for the first half at Meta is nearing an end, do you think it makes sense to ask my manager for a raise in our next 1:1?

Or, given that Meta is a big tech company, are raises purely based on rating?

I have a question about Alex's course, "Get More Interviews: Write a Stellar Resume as a SWE."

Alex mentioned that labeling oneself as a "full-stack" engineer can be a trap for junior engineers, and it's better to focus a resume on either backend or frontend stacks.

I unfortunately fall into this category - I have about 1.5 YOE and take on a role of a full-stack SWE. Though I prefer backend development and feel stronger in it (I'll say its about a 65-35 for backend vs frontend), I feel my backend skills alone are not enough to secure a strong backend role. Given this, I’ve primarily been applying to full-stack positions.

Does anyone have advice on what I should do? I know this question is primarily for Alex but feel free to share your experiences on how I should navigate this!

Thank you!

Hello folks, hope to get some advice on my current situation.

I have started my job hunting process and a recruiter reached out to me with a open SWE role recently.

We had an initial chat and the compensation range for that role was lower than what I had asked for but the recruiter encouraged me to just go ahead and try anyway. I agreed to it, as I wanted to chalk up some interview experience, and managed to make it through the interview stages.

Today I was informed that I got the offer. However, the compensation is too low for me (which is expected). There's not much room to negotiate a substantially higher compensation because it is the budget given for that project (it's a contract role). The recruiter is still trying to encourage me to take up the role and potentially coming across as kinda...pushy. Any advice on how best to reject them? The recruiter has honestly been really helpful and friendly (eg. giving me tips on what the interview could ask etc) so I will still hope to be able to get the help of this recruiter for other roles, but at the same time i really don't want to offend him or make him think that I'm a picky candidate etc.

It's my first time job hunting so would really appreciate advice! Thank you so much

One common complaint I get from my friends to who I pitch Taro is why they should trust a company that is "Selling shovels during a gold rush".

I personally believe there is a ton of value in joining Taro but I can see their perspective since not every coaching/mentorship service has their clients' best interests in mind.

This question is more for Alex and Rahul but others are free to chime in. What is your response to this?

Hi! Will the recording for the chapter 9 of the Taro Book Club: Designing Data Intensive Applications - Chapter 9 (Consistency & Consensus) be available? Thanks!

I am moving teams for the first time in my three-year long career and the team I am moving to is full of very experienced folks(15-20) with the least experienced person with 10 YoE. Some of these folks have also been in the same team for years. I will be new in the team as well as tech stack.

How do I create impact, learn from these people, be able to create my own identity and not be shrugged off as a "junior engineer" who is not given important tasks?

Any additional tips on how can I leverage this move as a fresh start? Like relationship with manager, team and my attitude towards the work?

Hi, I'm currently a software engineer 1 working with a senior engineer trying to ship a new feature. The way it works, the senior engineer I work with has outlined the technical problem, scope, and approach we're doing. She has assigned the tasks and most of it (BE/FE) will be done by the senior and the portion I'm doing involves a BE service I've worked on before.

Our deadline is in a month, as I'll be going on leave. I wanted to do a portion of the FE just to learn more about frontend technologies and was assigned tickets, however my senior engineer has started work on these and it looks like most of the work I'm going to be doing, apart from my tasks, are going to be reviewing/testing my senior engineer's PRs. I've worked with this part of the product before but I was hoping to get more exposure and practice.

I was hoping to really learn more about the frontend aspects of our product so I'm a bit disappointed but I'm wondering maybe if my expectations (which was to learn more about FE) are unrealistic and perhaps unnecessary.

As a new grad, what is the expectation from senior engineers?

Do I communicate this to our manager or should I re-adjust my expectations?

Hello! I am wondering if big tech firms sponsor masters degrees if they are related to your work (eg computer science) in top schools like Stanford if you are an employee? Is it part of the employee perks and is there a bond to fulfil after that? Asking this because it is otherwise very expensive to do masters at these top schools

I'm looking to deploy my project to get some users. I wanted to ask what the best way services to use as I'm only trying to show off the work mainly and maybe get some users once I get unity app on the stores.

Hi Taro Community,

Often times during presentations/demos and other informal calls, I have seen myself being stumbled by questions related to my work that I am unable to answer. The questions seem simple, and I have often felt in retrospect that these are things one ought to have known, or spotted beforehand. I feel there needs to be a modification in the way I approach a problem/bug/user story assigned to me. Does anyone have any tips on how to be more detail oriented and have a holistic view of whatever it is that one is working on? How to approach the work items assigned in a way that one is extremely clear with the basic stuff?

This may be more of a vent than a question so apologies in advance.

I recently had an online assessment with a company that I was excited to interview for. The assessment was comprised of 7 SQL questions each with varying amounts of time to complete them. The questions were more than fair however I completely choked and only passed 1 of 7.

I know the obvious answer is more practice but I'm really frustrated that the penalty is really high if you can't recall the information you need at that exact moment or can't figure out the approach you need right then and there to resolve it before the allotted time. I feel like companies never consider that a candidate might very well have the body of knowledge they're looking for but just couldn't recall what was needed at that exact moment. In other words we're reduced down to a simple "pass/fail". I understand that companies have to use these tools to a certain extent in order to filter out and reduce the candidate pool size but I believe it's such a poor filter and terrible way to determine if someone has the right level they're looking for.

My question is then, how do you over come this? I practice leetcode when I can and read up on concepts that I struggle with but I feel like it's just not enough to break through this hurdle. There's only so much time in the day and my energy is usually sapped after work.

My bottle neck is debugging when you can't run code. When practicing I am able to run code and add prints and trace the code. But often in a real interview you have to debug through pure reasoning which is hard

My performance is getting hit because in DSA I often get an answer 95% correct but the interviewer tells me I have a bug and I find it really really hard to trace the bug especially in recursion problems

I would like some info on how hiring decisions are made. I understand DSA and System Design are important but HMs know these aren't good predictors of performance so I see a disconnect there.

I'd like to understand what goes through the mind of the HM and/or committee before a decision is made.

I know it's a broad and complicated question that has different answers depending on the company, but any info is helpful.

I recently joined a team for a project and I want to be prepared for any feedback I feel can be unfair and sometimes insulting.

Should I just document everything?
I want to be prepared to expect the worst even though I feel I'm doing fine.

I’ve been e3 for about two years. my manager put me for promo last two halves but it didn’t go through .(due to a bunch of reasons which are ambiguous , the feedback I got both times was - you’re doing 4 work but we have a quota) I believe there was some politics involved but that’s water under the bridge.

I’m going to reach e4 end of this half. I’ve lost trust in my management chain. I do think my team may have good opportunity and everything else is good but I don’t think my manager is invested in growing me.

I’m very ambitious and would like to get to e5 asap. What would be good ways to set myself up for success?

For new grads, do you recommend starting career and living in California, despite the high living costs and high taxes?