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

For some context, I am a L1 with 1 yoe with experience in DevSecOps and was recently transitioned to an ML Ops role on a AI team where they have no CI-CD pipeline infrastructure and I am tasked with setting all of that up for them by myself. My goal is to hold off asking for a promotion until I actually prove myself and achieve this feat first and it’s also my long term goal to stay on this team as an AI developer, so I don’t want to bring this up with any potential negative consequences. I’m curious to hear more opinions on this matter.

I am a junior engineer, and I am worried that the code velocity that I have right now, which is about 1-2 quality commits per week (By quality commits, I refer to ~100-200 lines of core code) is too slow. I understand that not all code is the same, and code quality >> code quantity, and this job is a lot more than just coding. However, I am curious as to on average, how many quality commits would expect a junior vs senior vs staff to churn out in a week? Should one even be asking this question, is there a better way that I can frame my mentality towards this?

They recently rolled out the Booking Career Framework, creating itemized lists on the expectations for each level, so I know what it takes to get promoted. I'm 70% - 80% that I'll get it in the next performance review cycle, but I have some concerns. My main concern is that Booking doesn't have a lot of space to grow, evident by the fact that I spend ~50% of my time on the company's migration effort to move from Perl to Java. The effort for this started in 2014 and is around 30% done. It's not a super high company priority according to my manager, but my team spends a lot of time on it, which worries my prospects about finding scope with better business impact. On the flip side, I had Java experience coming into Booking, so I am well-equipped for this migration work. For example, I was able to solve a deep image loading issue recently that required a strong understanding of default Perl behavior.

My technical lead is excellent but not the best communicator, and by that I mean I don't understand what they are saying 50% of the time. I intend this in the most respectful way when I say that I don't understand the punctuation behind their comments and chats. I ask them about X and before I've even finished they shoot out with a response on Y. I don't think they have ever been able to explain anything clearly to me. It's getting to the point where my manager sees me as incompetent (I think) even though it's clearly a lack on their part. I'm an L3 and they are a critical L5 so the team will never stand up for me but given this economy, I'm starting to get a bit concerned about my career. The difference between their language and others on adjacent teams is like night and day and I'm not sure how to bring this up with my manager without sounding prejudiced. What should I do to help myself and navigate this situation?

I'm pushing for the E4 promotion in the next PSC cycle, and I've gotten some feedback that I could shore up my people axis contribution. Given that, I was wondering how important people is for this promo and how I can get points on this axis as a growing E3. People axis contribution seems harder given the hiring freezes (e.g. it's harder to be a bootcamp mentor) and the fact that the main intern season is over.

I work at a small company with only 10 engineers. Since it’s so small, there’s no real feedback culture - We don't have a formal performance review system. Everything I’m hearing is always positive - Everyone just tells me I’m always surpassing expectations and doing well. However, I know that there's a lot I can improve as I'm an earlier-in-career engineer. I want real feedback so I can get better and understanding the path from junior -> mid-level -> senior: What can I do to start getting this feedback?

I'm positioning myself to go through the process of transitioning to a SWE position, and I've been told that junior developers would be given tasks that are small in scope, well-defined, and with low ambiguity. That said, I would love to know if there are concrete examples of such tasks. For instance, would updating a Makefile before an internal release be within such a scope? Other examples would be helpful in order to get a better understanding. I assume that it would likely be different from company to company as well. Thank you for your time!

I tend to give everything my all, which is what I did back in school. I overdid it back then, so I needed a long break afterwards. I want to make sure I don't make the same mistake with my career - What can I do to prevent burnout while still achieving lots of impact and growth?

Also how to make sure you clear grasp of said fundamentals. I just say this cause it's never really keeping with all the latest technologies it's all about understanding said fundamentals. Also is there some learning path to follow I feel as if I never felt like I'm learning and to be a successful junior I need to find the best way to learn for me.

How do I make sure to continuously improve at a company which does not really give much feedback? We have a meeting once a year where we talk salary and the work that I've done. I have only had one meeting, but they just said they were happy with me and my work. It's a rather small company so we don't have many of the feedback loops that larger companies have (code reviews etc). Since we are a quite small company, every senior have their own view of what good code should look like and I'm not sure which one to listen to.

I'm currently working as an SRE (Site Reliability Engineer). I was, and am still interested in being a Software Engineer. I am interested in switching in the future to a normal software engineering role, but want to make the most of my current situation since I recently joined the company (late-stage startup). What do you think would be some good skills, exposure, things I could learn as an SRE that would be useful to a Software Engineer?

I'm a junior engineer working with one other person on a pretty isolated part of the codebase. I work closely with this one person, but I don't work for an extended amount of time with anyone else. I am part of a larger team, but the work we do doesn't really interact with them (for example, I don't even take part in their sprint planning, and they generally don't know anything about what we're working on, and us them.) As a result I only had a couple of peer reviewers in the last review cycle, and my manager said I would need more peer reviews in order to be promoted. What are some things I can do to plan ahead and assemble more reviewers, given I don't naturally get enough reviewers through my core work? I am trying to review some of my team's PRs and be more active on slack in order to increase my interaction with the team, but I'm not sure that's enough to request peer reviews from others.

Question: "For being promoted from SWE I to SWE II, how do I take the behaviors my company has associated with each role (below) and make that more concrete for a growth plan, taking into account the changing & flexible timelines startups have?" For context, I already have weekly one-on-ones with my manager (who is new at being a manager & is also my mentor), and a growth plan (that I created with him) that roughly outlines (meets most expectations, meets expectations and exceeds expectations for my role). Additionally, keep in mind I work at a startup w/ <30 people so highly specific concrete goals set on a particular date can change in 2-3 weeks as priorities change. Also, my company has defined a series of behaviors as to what each SWE level should be able to accomplish. Here it is. Software Engineer I (<1 year - 2 years) Technical Skill - Broad knowledge of CS concepts - Focus on growing as an engineer, learning existing tools, resources, and processes Getting Stuff Done - Develops their productivity skills by learning source control, editors, the build system and other tools as well as testing best practices. - Capable of taking well-defined sub-tasks and completing these tasks Impact - Developing knowledge of a single component of our architecture Communication & Leadership - Effective in communicating status to the team - Exhibits company’s core values, focuses on understanding and living these values - Accepts feedback graciously and learns from everything they do Software Engineer II (2-6Years+) Technical Skill - Writes correct and clean code with guidance; consistently fellows stated best practices - Participates in technical design of features with guidance - Rarely makes the same mistake twice, begins to focus on attaining expertise in one or more areas(eg. embedded , testing, algorithm, support code, commlink). - Learns quickly and makes steady progress without the need for constant significant feedback from more senior engineers. Getting Stuff Done - Makes steady progress on tasks; knows when to ask for help in order to get themselves unblocked. - Able to own small-to-medium features from technical design through completion. - Capable of prioritizing tasks; avoids getting caught up in unimportant details and endless “bikeshedding”. Impact - Self-sufficient in at least one large area of the codebase with a high-level understanding of other components - Capable of providing on-call support for their area including systems that they are not familiar with. Communication & Leadership - Gives timely, helpful feedback to peers and managers - Communicates assumptions and gets clarification on tasks up front to minimize the need for rework. - Solicits feedback from others and is eager to find ways to improve - Understands how their work fits into the larger project and identifies problems with requirements.

Currently, I'm on a 10 person team, but we only have 3 senior engineers and the remaining 7 are E4s (5 people) and E3s (me and one other new grad). For our upcoming half, they want E4s leading some of the projects for their development. However, I would like guidance, mentorship, and feedback from an E5 or above ideally since they are more experienced. Also, from one of the Taro videos on feedback, one of the points made was to find a way to get feedback from senior engineers at the end of the half who will bolster your PSC packet versus a mid-level engineer who might not hold as much weight (Correct me if I'm wrong)? Anyway to navigate this the right way? Should I avoid certain projects that are led by E4s? Does this even matter?

I'm trying to better understand how to select a company that has good growth opportunties. My priority is to get into a company where I can grow the fastest in my career. Unfortunately, at this time getting into big tech/prestigious companies is not an option for me and I am choosing between typical tech companies I have already watched the masterclass on selecting teams and companies My questions are as follows: In the video, it's mentioned "Growth solved all problems". It's not really clear to me why? Obviously if a company is moving backwards, then I understand, but between a company that ships products every 6 months vs every 1-1.5 years why exactly is 1 company better than the other in terms of how it impacts my growth opportunity How do I know if a company has good growth opportunities?

Sometimes I sit in meetings that I feel aren't really necessary. How can I better identify whether these meetings are necessary and propose a better asynchronous form of communication (slack post, quip doc, etc) if they aren't? Some of these meetings include status update meetings (besides standup), and meetings where people are there just to absorb knowledge. Is it a general rule of thumb to have meetings primarily to get alignment on decisions? Are there cases where we can get alignment asynchronously as well via commenting on a slack post/quip doc, etc.

If you have a new manager joining to manage your team, how can you ramp them up quickly on all the work you have done before them, the impact you have generated, your role in the team.

I'm graduating with my MS this Dec looking for MLE/Data Science roles. I have not had any professional work experience (outside of internships/part time TA) When considering salary, I often look at paybands by SWE level since there's just more entries/data for them. Is it fair to expect the pay equivalent of 2 YoE SWE for an entry level MLE/DS role with a Masters? tbh it's totally fine if not, I just want to make sure I'm not totally lowballing myself when discussing salary.

I m hearing a lot of podcast regarding coding will be dead and we have no need for programmers and all these kind of stuff. So, my question is why to do it then? Why do LeetCode and why to do other stuff for entry level software engineering jobs? What’s the future?

Background: I interned on my current team last summer and returned full-time at the beginning of this year. I've been performing well and have a great relationship with my co-workers, manager, and skip manager. However, I'm not satisfied with the level of engineering in the org as a whole. Specifically, our service does not operate at a high scale and thus the engineering constraints are very relaxed. It feels like we can get away with making poor decisions and I often think that I am not learning good engineering principles by being here. It also feels like my peers are not that ambitious or passionate about engineering which makes me feel like I don't fit in at times. As a result, I'm looking to change teams even though I am only ~6.5 months into my career. I recently did an internal loop with another team that does very interesting work with high-scale and low-latency services. The interviews went well and I was given the transfer offer. I think my mind is mostly made up on joining the new team, but just wanted to ping-pong my situation with the Taro community as a sanity check on whether I am making the right choice. I'm aware that switching teams is essentially a "soft reset" on my promo timeline. I have a lot of substantial work artifacts from my current team such as: code reviews for important feature work and docs that contributed heavily to the service we just launched. I'm okay with taking a hit to my promo timeline because in my mind, if I zoom out and view my career as a 30-40 year span, it won't really matter whether I got promoted from new grad engineer in 1.5 years or 2.5 years. What does the Taro community think of my situation? Am I thinking about this in the right way? I tried to keep some details vague as to not speak too negatively on my current team in a public forum. But I'm happy to provide more details to the best of my ability!

I've raised this concern to manager in almost every 1-1 once even in front of Director of Eng that I'm interested in more roles and responsibilities. Cuz I was not a fresher even when I joined the current company at entry level and now that I've done decent work too at current company. But manager fails to give me a path/timeline of when will I be entrusted with some impactful work. He criticises in public, and has a favourite too who uses this to influence the manager against others. Manager also wants every small thing to be done his way and he presents the whole thing as learning opportunity for me. If junior engineers are not supposed to do anything on their own then why are they even hired as engineers? Should I look for new opportunities? Or how can I take away most from the current situation?

I am a junior engineer at a series A startup. I was interning for the past 8 months and got converted full time, now working as full time junior engineer for the past 3 months. I had been getting "Exceeds Expectation" from my tech lead/manager. But from the past 3 1:1s from the tech lead. He mentioned that 1. My code is not up to the mark to directly merge without taking a much deeper look into. Basically mentioning that my code is not levelling as a senior engineer. There are no senior engineers in my team, I directly report to tech lead. So I really cannot learn how to write better code as he mentioned. Where can I learn this? 2. I have been just crunching tasks or helping someone without understanding the root cause. He mentioned I lack "Product Thinking". I am really not sure what he means by this. I thought helping others would help me grow in my career. By helping others I mean if there is a small task that is required by some other team, I just go and do it without understanding entirely what they want. 3. The founders keep mentioning that there is a lot of growth potential in our company I really work hard every day from 8 AM and late 11 till night but the work I do is not helping me to grow and I want to grow and become a senior engineer. There are not even tests in our codebase, and a lot of problems I see in the way we do things which I don't know I can help solve . How can i grow? how can I tell them that I can be that senior engineer to solve the problems? How can I learn to make good decisions as to what needs to be prioritised in terms of which task needs to be done? If I don't know let's say how to write tests, how can I learn that and cultivate that in the team?

I work on a product that runs on a variety of architectures, with code split across many GitHub repositories. We have a complicated build process. When making changes, I often struggle to find a way to run those changes efficiently (i.e. outside of the CI process). This is made worse when I need to make changes that also change the build process or need to run debugging tools like GDB. When I onboarded, I was told that everyone has their own setup by people who've been on the team since its inception. It seems like people newer than myself have figured it out, even with how messy and changing everything is. However, I've been here for over a year and the team tends to work quite independently. Occasionally, folks will be quite helpful for a point or two, but generally everyone's stretched a bit thin and tends to focus on their tickets. My manager has also rebuffed any requests for collaboration or mentorship since I started, saying that I'm expected to be independent to show I'm ready for the next level. He did say I could that I could try to change the team's culture to be more collaborative if I wanted to take initiative, but that's not what's expected of a software engineer, especially if I want to do well and get promoted. This question may be more about how to correctly get answers answered when you're no longer new, but I also feel that building (CMake, Docker, environment setup, package management, etc.) is slowing me down. Are there good processes for getting more efficient at building components/systems and unblocking yourself faster?

I recently had an interview with a small health care and wellness firm: ~500 employees founded in 2008. The potential pay increase would be significant for me (25-30%; 42% factoring in their annual profit sharing bonus - not guaranteed) and its definitely a promotion for me as its a Sr. Engineer role however I’m torn on whether that justifies leaving my current job. My current company isn’t that competitive with pay and many times I’m restricted as to what I can or can’t do outside of work to make additional money because of potential conflicts of interests for them. I also am a bit tired of having to disclose every financial transaction and personal financial data to them. It’s very frustrating. I do have stability with my company and I enjoy the variety of experience from projects and tech stacks I get to work with. This new firm however, per Glassdoor reviews, seems to indicate that management are strictly top-down decision makers (“my way or the highway”), have a tendency to micromanage with lots of turnover in management as well. Employees, especially a few engineers, have noted how there is a poor work life balance. I’m not confident in their business yet either from what I’ve researched since their product is banned in Australia although they are supposedly in Inc. 500’s list of Fastest-Growing Companies. Maybe I'm only focusing on the extreme negatives. Would love if anyone could weigh in with their $0.02.