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

• For early stage startups (< series A)
• Medium stage startups (B-D)
• Unicorns (pre-IPO - IPO'ed in < 2yrs ago)
• F500s
• Public Companies (e.g. adobe, wayfair, quora)
• FAANG

This is for strictly DSA not something like pair programming. This is also for Jr/Mid level interviews

I know about the Pomodoro Technique but I feel that 25 minutes is too short of a time block to get and stay in the zone.

How would you organize your day into time blocks for deep work while maintaining focus and not burning out?

• Four-hour blocks with a break in between?
• One eight-hour block (if there are no meetings)?
• One six-hour block?

Hi, I have a question about answering these prompts for Meta referral

1. How well do you know this person's professional skills within their area of expertise? (Never worked together, just by reputation, worked occasionally, very well)
2. Why do you think your referral should be hired?

How important are they? What are they looking for?

I just had an amazon behavioral interview. I'm a new grad SWE and interviewing for a non technical customer success role.

The interview was 3 behavioral questions. I tried to use STAR as much as possible but the interview was really like 15 ish minutes for the 3 behavioral questions. The interviewer did not follow up for 2/3 questions. At the end I asked 3 questions. total time was 20 minutes. Is it a red flag that my interview was only 20 minutes?

I think I was able to answer the behavioral questions and I mentioned the impact of my work/results at the end though I will admit I didn't go into super depth on the results part and focused more on the actions I think. This was my first real behavioral interview as well.

I want to get started badly with side projects. I feel like I never know how to truly get started with them, and most importantly, planning with scope. I don't know if something is ever too basic or too complicated with my knowledge. I wanted to ask, how do you all really get started with a project most importantly finish?

I've looked at the leadership principles. But it's a bit overwhelming the number of questions that can be asked. I dont want to be caught like a deer in headlights when I'm asked a question. But it also doesnt seem practical to prepare every question.

I'd love to know people's preparation strategy. Are you preparing 5-10 stories and then tagging them to different principles? if so what kinds of stories should I be preparing? i.e. what are the broad topics of each story?

Or Maybe are you preparing 1 different story for each leadership value?

Also If I'm asked "Who was your most difficult customer?" how would I answer this if I'm just a junior and have never dealt with customers first hand? or similar where I'm just like i've never been in this situation

For my Behavioral rounds Preparation.

1. I curated all the questions surrounding leadership principles
2. I also created STAR answers for each question

I try to demonstrate that I have led Projected and Solved challenging problems on my own. But even with that interviewers seem to downlevel me from L5 > L4 (Amzon Levels). what qualities I should exhibit to get L5 level and how should I prepare for it?

If you're at faang but gaining no useful skills because you're in some niche not SWE, but semi coding production sales role does it still have that faang value?

and if you do get into FAANG SWE, how does it change career trajectory?

I got laid off 6 months into my first job out of college. I'm just struggling to land Jr. SWE interviews in this climate.

Other Taro Engineers I've talked to say I have a solid resume with multiple internships, projects, and relevant experience for my level and the people in my limited network are happy to refer me and often say I am a strong fit.

But my guess is that despite having a strong resume for my level I'm a junior so I'll need handholding regardless

BUT, I'm just barely landing any interviews. Even with referrals.

Things I've tried:

• Applying Applying Applying. I spend 1-2 hours a day just applying because well, I'm not getting much interviews and dont have much else to do. ~1 every 150 apps land me an interview
• Networking, attending coffee chats, asking for referrals. But I am only a Junior and my network is fairly small and concentrated at previous jobs who are not hiring anymore
• Often people want to refer me. But their company isnt even hiring anyone with < 3-4 YoE

Fellow Taro members, does anyone have any advice or thoughts on landing interviews in this climate?

Any advice or words of wisdom is also appreciated in tackling this market.

Hello Everyone,

I need some clarification about where to take my career.

My background: I have a bachelor's (Information Technology) and a master's degree (IT management with a dissertation using machine learning). I performed poorly during my bachelor's; to rectify that, I worked hard during my master's and was placed first.

After university, I did gig work for a while and worked part-time at a startup where I was a solo developer (using Django and Flutter).

After 2.5 years, I realised that my career was going nowhere, so I finished the project, quit (on good terms), and got a job as a Junior Full Stack engineer at a small company. I was fired after three months due to low code quality and asking too many questions, so I am unemployed now.

My Conundrum: I need to figure out where to take my career as the market is quite bad. I have heard various opinions from friends and family, making me indecisive. The views that I have heard are as follows:

• Focus on backend-only roles using Python and contribute to open source.
• Focus on Analyst roles instead, such as Data or Business Analyst (Based on my skills from my master's)
• Learn React Native and get rid of Flutter.
• Learn something else instead of Python, such as .Net or C#. I did Java during my bachelor's, so I think I should be able to pick it up relatively quickly.

I should pick one of these and focus on it, but I am having difficulty selecting which.

Which area should I focus on? What would you do if you were in my position?

Any guidance would be highly appreciated. Thank you!

What are some good 2 week, 1 month, and 3 month onboarding milestones for a new grad engineer at a FAANG company? I will discuss these with my manager as well, but I want to first come up with realistic expectations that will set me up for success.

Hello Everyone,

I have one year of experience as a Flutter and Django developer at a startup, but am having trouble finding a new role. I believe the reason is that there are very few Flutter positions in my area.

To increase my chances of landing a job, I plan to build a side project, which would be a mobile application.

Should I build it using Flutter or make a switch to something more popular like React?

My first team didn't work out for me. I was there for less than a year and got the poorest rating, was set up for a PIP. Somehow I made a transfer at the last moment and survived. Certainly, it was the most difficult phase of my life & I am quite grateful to my new team. Now, I'm already in the new team for less than a year and got an average rating last time. The rating was partially influenced by previous manager as I spent almost half of my time there.

Currently working on multiple projects at the same time and grabbing almost whatever task is offered and somewhat gained trust I believe. But the quality of those tasks are not too much complex rather modular & takes more time. I can keep on doing this way but not sure what is the right thing to do. The team is relatively new. Recently started a promo discussion humbly and not pushing it. Manager's review is I'm operating at L3.6 now.

Now,

• What might be the mental model to forget the past?
• Sticking around for almost two years now, what might be the correct time & way to reach Next Level?

I'm curious since you now have the opportunity to design and interview candidates as you see fit, how would you design the interview for your next hire?

How many rounds?

Any takehomes?

how would you source your candidates?

what are things you would do to avoid doing the terrible interview practices companies usually do?

How would you interview a candidate for a backend role vs a frontend role?

I used to try several courses to learn C++ for Unreal Engine, however after I finished all of them, I even can't came up an idea to make a project which matched on personal limited skills. As a result I tried lowering my expectations by finding it the most basic one (I found CS50 - programming with Scratch) to build logical thinking skills. When I did the assignment (the assignment has specific perquisite), unfortunately it turns out I trapped into tutorial hell and I still can't came up an idea. Feeling burnout, I decided to take a break for few days because I believe good idea doesn't come from burnout. But after few days recovered I somehow came up an idea by looking past interest game and turns it into my assignment , however after did a few days, my idea didn't match my knowledge skills. (in this moment I don't know about Jointaro yet)

I understand programming is about doing and doing as this explains and also communication . But I'm struggling to find the solutions based on my current situation. A lot of advice and courses on internet are omnipresent, and the comments more or less just say "thank you for your advice" or "Great video" whatsoever (especially YouTube) . I tried some of them based on my current situation, however I realized there is no progress and I slowly doesn't have principle of life.

Sorry if my questions seems so futile for experienced software engineer. However I want to give it a shot to breakdown my own problem. If you think my situation has something off, feel free to ask so there will be no misunderstanding. Thank you for your attention.

Additional: I also find out whether I write blog or write questions, it takes me a lot of time (maybe 1 - 3 hours or could be more depending the complexity), because I try every possibilities to avoid misunderstanding or miscommunication. I believe people who smart at great university or company might not need take such hours to do so.

Hello Everyone,

I recently joined a small company that advertised a junior position. I cleared the technical task, which was a take-home assignment. In the interview, I was told I was the only one who cleared the assignment.

After 2.5 months, I was told that I was asking too many questions and it was okay for me to make mistakes but not ask questions, so I stopped asking questions. After that, I made a mistake as I misinterpreted how something would work (It turns out both my solution and the instructions given to me were incorrect).

Once the project was finished, I was told I was too junior, my code was not clean, and I was let go from the company. Currently, they are hiring for a senior role with the same job description.

The manager told me he would only give me a referral if I did a non-development-related Google search task during my notice period (which ends in mid-May). He also told me to put my job as contract work. I am having difficulty trusting him to give me a good referral.

My plan is as follows:

• Learn more about clean code and focus on code quality.
• Start working on open source, which might help improve my technical communication skills.
• Build a side project.
• Leetcode
• AWS Certifications

Should I keep the job experience on my resume or not? What are some ways for me to navigate my current situation?

I recently joined Meta as a junior engineer and my hope is to be able to try out several domains (guessing realistically 2) to see where my interest lies. I’m not on an AI team currently, but given the rise of AI, I hope to be able to explore that area.

However, I understand that switching teams will disrupt my productivity and growth as a junior engineer. I’m wondering:

• When should I approach changing teams/domain? More specifically, is it better to change teams after being promoted to mid-level?
• How should I approach changing teams?

I'm just curious about people's opinions from a tech perspective

• Does this impact current tiktok employees?
• Can this affect their RSU/equity?

Any other thoughts are also welcome!

What is the average promotion timeline from an entry-level engineer (SDE I) to mid-level engineer (SDE II)? What is considered great?

What is considered a fast promotion? How do you convince others of impact and take on more meaningful projects?

Hi, a little bit about myself: I am an entry-junior level software engineer. I just graduated from a coding bootcamp 2 months ago. But before that, I had been doing self-studies. I mainly build with JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Express, HTML, CSS, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB. However, I have knowledge in Python, Redux, OAuth, Jest, Docker, Kubernetes, and some services in AWS. I have been sending out a resume that has a long list of technical skills, but I'm concerned that the very long list might make me appear overreaching and amateurish. That said, I wonder if I should make different versions of my resume.

P.S. I have sent out almost 500 applications, and only 4 reached out to me. I made it to the final round with one company, but didn't make it past the final round.

I'm an sde 1 at Amazon and been working there for 2 years. I have changed multiple teams during that time unfortunately. In every team, I have struggled with getting noticed by the team.

I have observed that the best performers talk about active tickets even when they are not on call. How do I balance between my task and working on extra tickets to get noticed?

What else can I do to get noticed apart from my own task and high sev tickets?

Hi! I'm a new member looking to participate in the book club sessions for the Designing data intensive applications book. How can I get a copy of the book?

I've gotten rejected from companies (unicorns, F500s) (in this rough market) because I didn't have experience with their specific tech stack.

I know because one company gave feedback saying that I didn't have experience with a framework that the team uses (though I had experience with adjacent but not similar stuff) and also I was able to get someone to put in a referral, but that person responded back saying HM wanted someone who had experience with the team's language

I'm curious if this is the norm? I've always heard that all that companies want is business impact. They have in-house/custom tooling so it doesnt matter what you used before

Should I also be building projects in other languages just for the sake of showing experience? I'd rather just put in more time at my job and have more impact at work

Because unless a project has sufficient depth which takes months of time, it has little value and time spent at work is 100x ROI compared to a side project

Hello Taro Community,

I've had the first onboarding weeks at my company. My department stack is Angular-Frontend, Java-Backend and Oracle/PostgreSQL databases. While they want me to dip my toe in everything, right now the priority is learning the database section first because the engineer responsible for the database will leave in June.

I've never done database development, and the engineer that is supposed to teach me, can't articulate a curriculum for me and is on vacation 50% of the time until they leave in June. What topics do I have to know to have a good grasp on database development? What courses can you recommend? How can I guide the person to teach me what's necessary?

Thanks everyone