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

With AI evolving rapidly, I was curious what skills we can develop as junior engineers to make us AI-proof. Language/framework specific knowledge can easily be asked to be solved by AI I suppose? Few AI-proof skills I have in mind: System design Debugging Soft skills What else?

Hi all. Got laid off from Amazon in April and still looking for a job (I know :/). I don't get any interviews with lower tier companies but I get interviews at top companies. Do you think that lower tier companies avoid me because I worked at Amazon and they know that I would leave when I get an offer from a top company?

A strong theme on Taro is that good testing distinguishes a good engineer from a great one. Thinking of good test cases is not trivial, and I would like to know how the great engineers at Taro approach testing. For example, my company is working on a program (program B, say) that picks up and validates payment requests from program A and sends them to program C, which issues payments, after which program B notifies program A that payment has been issued. I have been put in charge of thinking of test cases, with the biggest concern being duplicate payment issuing. I have only been able to think of 8 test cases that may actually occur in the program. I have been asked to think of 20-30, and I'm finding it quite difficult to do so. I've only written test cases that can occur assuming the program works as expected, i.e. in which the user does something unexpected. For example, at a certain point program B reads data from a file into the database and moves that file into a directory called "archive". I could hypothetically write test cases for the program's behaviour when the file did not successfully move to "archive", but intuitively this seems trivial. I believe I probably am thinking about testing in the wrong way / have insufficient knowledge of testing theory. I approached it by starting with what Alex calls the "happy flow", the way the user is supposed to use the program. I then thought of multiple ways the user could mess up when using the program. My next strategy is to go through the code and see what could go wrong (a sort of "white-box" approach), but this is low-level and time-intensive, so I wanted to ensure that it is a good testing strategy. Most testing I've seen thus far has been "black box", i.e. ignore the code and just play around with different user actions. As always, the advice is very appreciated!

I have been working at Meta for around 5 months now. I’m not very excited about the product and the tech stack (its an internal tool). I have an offer from AWS where I get to work on a T1 GenAI service. I have always wanted to be an ML Engineer and my past work has also revolved around it. I know its not ideal to switch teams until I get promoted to E4 given the tight deadline we have so I’m not sure how long it takes before I switch to a team I would prefer. Also I’m not sure how the growth would look like for an internal tool team. Should I make the move to AWS given that it would be a better career start in ML? Or should I hang in, get promoted and switch? Meta is also aggressively doing performance reviews and I’m worried being new to the tech stack and lesser interest will bite me in the back and I might have nowhere to go. I’m early in career so TC is not a huge concern, I want to optimize for learning and eventually working towards being an MLE.

I'm leading an effort to retroactively build a comprehensive documentation process for a project that started with a small team—and no formal docs—but has since grown significantly. Our lead, who has been with the project from the start, proposed that we integrate documentation tasks directly into our Scrum sprints: gradually write documentation for legacy components while fully documenting new features as they're developed. The project is built with Angular 8, and given its age, we're dealing with the lack of documentation. Here's my questions: Legacy vs. New: How do you prioritize and balance retroactive documentation with the need to keep up with new development within a Scrum framework? Scrum Integration: What strategies or modifications to the standard Scrum process have you found effective for embedding documentation tasks into sprints without hindering delivery? Tooling & Methodologies: Are there specific tools, processes, or best practices you recommend for tracking documentation progress and managing technical debt in this context? Looking forward to your insights and best practices on transitioning from a poorly documented codebase to one that supports scalability and future growth.

Hello, As the title says, I’m stuck as an entry level engineer in FAANG for almost 4 years now. I’ve been reflecting on what I’m doing wrong. My first company I worked for 1 year and didn’t not like it because the lack of mentorship. I joined and my questions never got answered, the tech lead didn’t really care about giving mentorship, just gave me links and bug IDs. I was able to survive for 1 year but I left the company because I felt so lost. My manager mentioned that I was “on track” to getting promoted but I hated the culture. Then worked for 1.9 years on another company, where I received awards for my projects and contributions. I did receive mentorship here, but I was not able to get promoted. At the end of the timeline my manager mentioned I was moving slower and slower. I was working as a full stack and I believe my error here was not playing my strengths, since every time I had to take another project it would be on a different area, such as server on a language I never used before. I had a few discussions with my tech lead and I felt I lost my team trust because they would give a lot of comments, and just get a lot feedback from other people. This kinda demoralized me and made it hard to keep working so I changed teams. My last team I worked for 8 months before getting laid off. Here I also received recognition for my projects. My first project I missed the deadline because the onboarding had nothing to do with my project. I integrated our tool with an external team, so most of the code base I worked was not even ours (the techlead and team didn’t have much knowledge). Then I was given another project where I was starting to get traction, onboarding and project matched, I had to ramp up again on the new tech stack and my manager was getting frustrated with me, my team was very helpful and I was slowly to become independent. I feel like people trusted me here and code reviews would go smooth this time, at the end I was finally getting positive feedback, but was affected by the layoffs. From reflecting, here is what I did wrong: Not communicating well enough my work with my managers. Status updates I was blocked/learning and that would make me look slow. Not very good mentorship, I feel like at the beginning I needed lots of 1:1 to be able to learn our teams codebase. Sometimes I got very good mentorship but not complete. So I learned well parts of the code base where the tech stack applied. Switching projects too much, went from front end, full stack, server side with several languages. Every time I had to re learn a lot of new of the tech stack. I did get several recognitions for my contribution with at least helps me think I’m not completely inadequate for the field. I am looking for a new position, is there anything that could help me perform well as a mid engineer? Thanks

I watched the masterclass on finding a new team and understanding my own priorities to lead a fulfilling career and find a new team within Meta. Currently, I'm being put up for promotion for IC4 (hopefully, I'll know in late Feb about the outcome) and I would like to switch teams. My priorities in order: Work-life balance Supportiveness of team + (most of team in NYC)T Technical space Growth opportunities Product space My technical space interest is mostly in ML infrastructure (partially what my current team works on) and eventually would like to work towards getting to IC5, but more importantly I'm exploring another potential career (i.e. comedy and stand-up!). I would like to prioritize my WLB, so does anyone have any suggestions on how to go about my search (considering Meta is known more for grind culture)? And what orgs/teams to look at within the company?

My goal is to get to this level someday, so I would love to understand more. In particular, how does this dynamic play out at Big Tech/larger tech companies?

In one of Rahul's videos [1], he mentions his interview journey when he had ~3 YOE and how he interviewed for a Meta E5 SWE position. I interviewed for Meta this year w/ 3 YOE similarly and they would not consider me for E5. This is also similar to most other people I know with 3 YOE. Was it because he had a previous internship at Meta as well as his many other internships? I know Alex also interviewed at Meta with 3 YOE and was down-leveled. Rahul also mentioned he received an L3 offer at Google (which makes no sense btw!). I'm curious to know how there was such a large variability in the offer levels. Thanks! [1]

My future manager asked me to read “Effective Java” as preparation for starting. However, it’s really not making sense to me. I have a fear that they’ll ask me how much I understood from the book. How should I answer the question without making myself look bad?

I started my career in a mid-level startup that was on the verge of IPO. I contributed a lot. Learnt a lot in terms of how to deliver big scale features relatively quickly, work within sharp deadlines, owning features and products. I was a high performer. After 2 years of working in that company, I decided to switch to Big Tech for better compensation. While Snap is not exactly a Big Tech company, this is what I had in mind when switching. I immediately started adding value in terms of delivering features and owning products. However, since I come from a mid-level startup, my soft skills are very weak. I am an excellent programmer, but I struggle writing Technical Design Docs. I deliver features quickly, but I don't know how to contribute to the spec sheets and writing launch emails, holding engineering sessions, efficiently using 1:1s. It feels like in my previous company, delivering features on time, writing quality code was enough to be a high performer, but seems like Big Tech requires a lot more. My manager's ex-Amazon, so he values tech docs a lot, and I feel like I am missing a huge opportunity here by not being good at them. How do I adapt better to this work environment ?

I am a senior engineer and closely guiding a junior engineer on the implementation of a new micro service. I have provided her the high level design for same and staying consistently involved in any low level design discussion, blockers and code reviews. However, I am involved in multiple tracks and it’s not possible for me to randomly pause everything and answer her queries right away. Therefore, to keep her unblocked, as there are stricter deadlines, I also setup twice a week invite where she can get my help on any discussion or questions, as required. Still, in an unofficial feedback she told me that she was blocked on my time and I need to give more time to discussions and PRs. I tried to give some helpful return feedback that she should be asking pointed questions to get quicker help, and also she should do some research before right away asking for help. I also told personal examples from my career journey regarding how I navigated situations when I got blocked on a senior’s time. However, this resulted in her passive aggressive behaviour towards me. One such behaviour example is in code review - when I commented that local environment specific initialisation code shouldn’t be in the main classes, she responded that she doesn’t see any problem and it’s just unnecessary. How do I handle this situation better?

I recently joined a startup (just finished my third week about to start my fourth) and I set up a one-on-one last week with my manager to hopefully create a mentor-mentee relationship. That went well and now I’m looking to create a growth plan and a way to measure my performance. We’ll be checking in on a weekly basis so I can get a sense of my performance and how I am growing as a engineer. Given that it is a Series B startup with ~25 people, our goals will be shifting a lot which makes long-term growth plans hard to create. For context, since I joined, my 60 day and 90 day projects have shifted somewhat. So how do I create a growth plan that is flexible and what should it include (Concrete goals vs. more behavior orientated goals)?? Should the growth plan be used separately from judging my performance or would it be the measuring stick for performance? Would really appreciate some insight on this.

I want to be able to plan my work better for sprints, so that I can avoid spillovers or call out anything that might lead to that as soon as possible.

Hey everyone, I've been abit lost in my job recently and feel disappointed by own performance. I'm part of an infrastructure team, and while the primary force pushing me forward is my personal engineering growth, I can't shake the feeling that the domain itself doesn't resonate with me. That said, being an average l4 I'm not in a position to switch teams. What's keeping me going is the goal of self-improvement, which is helped from being surrounded by my incredibly talented colleagues, each bringing their unique strengths to the table. For instance, our senior engineer is an incredible communicator, teacher of concepts and general problem solver, another engineer is a coding machine and works extremely hard, and an L4 who joined at the same time as me is very customer-centric. In particular, it was through observing the L4 leveraging his strengths, while almost neglecting his weaknesses (he doesn't care as much about code quality and is quite argumentative) that I felt uncomfortable with my own trajectory. I've been so busy with trying to improve all my weaknesses that I'm now reflecting on whether I should focus on my strengths. All of that said, I've been here for a year, and I'm struggling to pinpoint where my strengths lie. I'm willing to put more hours than others but for obvious reasons that should in no way be considered a strength (my manager described me as a hardworker, which i don't want to be known as haha). I'm also a very enthusiastic person and very open to feedback, but it leads me to being pulled in different directions. I don't think I can be an engineer that does it all and I think Amazon wants you to focus on your strengths through their conflicting leadership principles (e.g. bias for action versus insist on the highest standards, deep dive versus thinks big). I've been reading this book called Atomic Habits recently and it really focuses on the idea of identity and how that shapes your habits. It seems like everyone in my team has built an identity based on what they're good at, how can I find mine? And are there certain skills that provide higher ROI over others that I can perhaps focus on, given that I don't really have any strengths right now?

Just another laid-off SWE here. I have an interview coming up at a popular tech company. How can I explain getting laid off in the interview? I am concerned that there is a stigma in tech that layoffs target low performers, especially since only part of my team got laid off. They never told us the layoff criteria, but I think I got targeted because I was more junior. I don't want to reveal my level for the company I'm applying to.

Hi Taro Community, I am a new hire for my company and I will have an amazing opportunity to chat with a tech lead. I wonder from a more senior engineer perspective, what some important information or questions are essential to ask or tackle during the opportunity coffee chat? Thanks a lot for the help :)