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

Hi all. I am in a 6 month contract role at Meta. I have been there about a month. I am definitely not relying on converting to FTE or even my contract getting extended, but it's worth a shot to try. I am WFH right now, but I am planning to move to MPK for a few months. I amdoing that to increase chances to convert and also to change environment. I am confused about how and when I should reach out to HMs inside Meta. Any other advice is appreciated :). Thanks

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?

In a previous mock behavioral interview, I was asked, "Can you describe a time when you missed a deadline?" Would it be appropriate to share an example of when I came close to missing a deadline but ultimately met it, or are the interviewers specifically looking for a situation where I failed to meet a deadline? From my understanding, it seems that companies would want engineers to deliver results on time, so missing deadlines would be viewed negatively. That being said, I am concerned that providing an example of almost missing a deadline might not fully answer the question. I would really appreciate any insights on this topic. Thank you so much!

For this upcoming half, I'm working in four different areas: reliability, sourcing, delivery, and datastore table. It just seems like it's too much and I'm not building any depth? Feels like I won't be able to build expertise in anything and be unable to contribute as a good team member if I'm working on everything? My TL has also informed me they are struggling to scope out work due to a lack of senior engineers. This has resulted in me getting menial tasks such as better engineering work and refactoring in some of these projects (i.e. delivery, sourcing, and reliability). It's great for my diff stats, but I want larger scope and less narrow work to be considered for E4. I'm discussing with EM, but the EM and TL seem like they are on different pages. I'm most interested in sourcing, but seniors are struggling to scope out work. Any suggestions on what to do here? I feel a bit lost overall and I'm struggling to understand how to get scoped and larger non-menial project work. Should I involve my skip manager here? A couple of questions in this one question but appreciate all the help in advance.

I viewed the resume masterclass video presented by Alex and Rahul, and in the video, Alex's resume was featured. It consisted of three sections: work experience, projects, and education. For a recent graduate without any work experience, is it acceptable to have just the projects and education sections in their resume? Or does it seem too limited, potentially having a downside when applying for jobs?

I'm a support engineer in big data profile working in Amazon web services, and I'm looking to transition into a SDE role within the teams like Spark, Hadoop, Yarn EMR infrastructure, etc At the same time I have been working hard on my promotion from L4 support engineer to L5 support engineer. Given a scenario if I get promoted to L5 support engineer and later, down the line I also get L4 software engineer role within Amazon, should I take the SDE role at a downgraded level, should I look outside or what should be the best route? Somebody I know has been working in Amazon BA and related positions for seven years, however they switched to SDE intern positions within Amazon. Do you think it is a wise move?

My manager told me in my 1:1 that he would like to see me working more independently. He had few points for me like utilize other engineers to unblock and have more discussions on team channel. I feel like I already work quite independently. I drive discussions on my own and involve stakeholders as needed. I speak out whenever I see any issue or I've something to contribute. I'm trying to understand what can I do more here and show my manager I'm already doing what he's suggesting. I'm in process for L5 promotion and I feel this feedback can negatively impact my chances. TIA.

Hello, I am working as an Entry level engineer at mid size product based company. In my end year performance review, I got a feedback that I can work on improving my debugging and technical skills more. As well as, knowledge of other features and overall product as a whole would need to be increased as well. My Tech lead has offered to mentor me by conducting 1:1 sessions to help me improve at debugging and help identify patterns and teach basic principles. 2 other senior engineers on the team also reached out and offered to conduct sessions regularly with me, for which I am really grateful. For more context, all my teammates work remotely, so it is not beneficial to go to office. My question is, how can I best utilize these sessions with the senior engineers on team to improve more and skill up? That is, what kind of preparation/ questions should I have ready to make the most of these sessions?

How can we identify what are the core in-demand "Legos", especially in the context of what we do commonly on our day to day job? As software engineers, we are tackled with new things to build regularly, so I was wondering how I could focus on the components (i.e. "Legos") that are built more regularly and learn to build them with high-quality. I don't have a concrete need for this right now, but I want to be more efficient at work and keep this in mind for when I do get into a new technology. As a web dev, a core in-demand Lego will be like responsive design or something like that right?

This may come off as a strange question. It seems to me that there is a lot of nepotism for hiring and PIP. Teams I have been on seem to have a lot of the same race or religion. I notice hiring managers that have similar background to me are more inclined to give me interviews. My name gives a lot away about my background. I have low YOE but I notice that managers usually PIP people that have a different race and religion. I know this is why companies have committees for big decisions, but one person on the committee that plays favorites can make the difference. Just wondering what your experiences have been with nepotism.

Right now I am helping out at a startup with 0 revenue. It's a fun group to work with, hence I am helping them out. There's a CEO and CTO. CEO has been working on it for 1.5 years, CTO for like half a year. I have just started out for about a month. The company has 0 revenue and 0 investors yet. CEO is just giving a projection of equity sharing. There might be a CMO joining soon. CEO is suggesting following equity share: Founder 1: Himself 57% Founder 2: CTO 16% Soon to be Founder 3: CMO 8% Investors Seed / Series A: 13 % Options Pool: 5% I am like the first developer, and he's suggesting like 0.5% of the option pool. They claim it to be a fair amount since he and CTO have made way more sacrifice so far. Right now I make sacrifices too. I am spending my nights and time in my weekend on it without any pay. And I don't have the knowledge of CMO. I don't know much about reasonable percentage for this kind of stuff it's new to me. But right now we're not getting any profit and I am sacrificing nights and time in the weekend on the project so I think it would be fair for founder 1 and 2 to give me some of their percentage and give me like approximately 10% or something. So far it's been fun: Thinking if things go well, we can all become millionaires. But this 0.5% percentage doesn't fit in with that. It's a rather demotivating percentage.

I've always been the one to dive into problems and solve them without thinking about how difficult they are but recently I've been running into this failure mode where many of the problems I work on involve using old tools that are cumbersome to work with. The result is that it takes much longer to deliver my work compared to those that work on packages with newer tools (I'm talking about native AWS lambda, s3, dynamo, etc) and sometimes I wonder if I'm doing what's best for my career. Some cumbersome tool examples include One package uses an old technology that doesn't allow us to test our changes in our dev desktop before we can submit a PR Another package doesn't map correctly our dev desktop to the prod environment so it's sometimes difficult to reproduce the issue Some non aws tools do not really provide much information to help the user debug their problems compared to the native aws tools My company has at least acknowledged the issues with the above first two bullets and has slowly started deprecating those tools. Oftentimes the senior and mid-level engineers work with newer tools and therefore aren't as familiar with the older ones, which is fine. I could just avoid working with these packages altogether and only work on the packages that involve the shiny new aws tools but I'm not sure if that mentality is what's best for my career.

As I go through the lectures on Taro, it seems like we need to have a lot of ownership, deal with ad-hoc problems to help the team, review a lot of code, refactor, and etc. I feel like this is really hard in a scrum setting where we know what we exactly we are going to do that sprint, and if we do not work on the assigned tasks, our projects get delayed, missing deadlines. I wanted to know what the correct approach is here, do we try to think this beforehand and allocate some sprint points for these tasks? Or as we become higher level engineers, are we just expected to work more? Is it a realistic view that senior engineers could work 40 hours per week, or is that almost impossible? For me, I feel like I have a pattern of getting pulled into these tasks during my sprints and sometimes missing my deadlines by few days and so have adapted to avoiding these tasks. How could I avoid missing deadlines and still work on these tasks, at the same time maintaining work life balance?

I'd love some ideas on how I can provide value to potential mentors and other folks who are further in their careers than I am. I want to form a relationship with these rock stars but I also want to make sure they are getting something out of it as well. Would appreciate any advice from folks who have successful and mutually beneficial mentor-mentee relationships! Thank you!!

Hi everyone, I just recently accepted an offer at Google as an L3. The thing is I have 4.5 years of experience full time and have done a number of internships (that I'm not counting in the 4.5). I didn't do super great in the coding rounds and couldn't get cleared for L4 but managed to get approved at L3. The coding rounds (specifically, algorithm optimization) was the specific reason they gave for the down level. I firmly do believe I'm of L3 level, my manager did as well. I'm not great at leetcode so that part was off but my performance was very good at my previous company and I hope to get promoted to L4 as quickly as possible. Anyone have advice specific to someone that was down leveled? I see a lot of discussion on a promotion from L3 to L4 in general which I've been reading a lot on. But I was curious about the down leveled case specifically Also another thing to note - I'm about halfway through the L3 to L4 course and I'd say my skills line up virtually entirely with what Alex is describing as L4 (I used to do a lot of the L3 stuff but have improved). Is this just a matter of coming in and making sure I perform as highly as I can to speed up the process?

I'm a native Android developer, and I really enjoy doing the work. However, I want to make sure that I'm well setup across my career overall - Does Android have good prospects in tech going forward? On a related note, how does it correlate to future opportunities and growth within Amazon?

I've looked through the code quality course but for the purpose of an interview can I get a checklist of things that the interviewer will be looking for in terms of code quality? For reference I'm a junior SWE and I plan to use Python.

I am an SDE1 that was recently laid off from AWS (~2 YOE total). Lately, I have been reflecting on what I wanted to do/what really excites me. I really enjoy software development and while I do want to get another job one day, I wanted to use this opportunity to scratch my entrepreneurial itch and create apps/websites/side-projects for fun or for many small business owners I know that need someone to create software for their business. I'm not sure how long this "break" will be but I would say ~2 to 3 months time. Part of this is inspired by Alex Chiou's love for side projects. I understand that finding a job will take some time as well, so the total gap on my resume that will be filled by this freelance work/applying might be ~6 months total. I understand that there are other posts on Taro that talk about the impact of a career break but this won't necessarily be a break per se. On my resume I will put this down as freelance work I completed for clients and will be prepared to show potential employers a portfolio of what I did. I was wondering if this would negatively reflect on my application when applying for SDE jobs again/will make it harder for me to land a job. Alternatively, I could begin applying and interview prep now and only work on these projects on the side. Thanks.

I have two offers and am having trouble deciding which one to take Company A: Non-Tech company with ~1500 employees. They have a cloud computing division to manage their infrastructure Position: Cloud Engineer (AWS) - Work would involve provisioning AWS infrastructure, performing maintenance, upgrades, optimizations, migrating environments to the cloud, etc Base Salary: 135k Bonus: 10k (if performance is met) Location: New Jersey Work Style: 2 days in the office Company B: Pre-seed stage startup (2 - 10 employees) Position: Software Engineer - Work would involve building new features for the startup including categorizing and ranking trivia questions by difficulty, etc Base: 110k Relocation: 5k Equity: 1% Location: Los Angeles Work Style: 2 days in the office Founder Background: Used to work in Big 3 consulting. His/her last position was scaling a Series A startup Pre-Seed funding: $2 million Targeted seed funding: $3 - $5 million Traction: The app was launched 5 months ago and has acquired 45,000 users. The business used to be a marketplace and that's when they raised their pre-seed round ($2 million). Now the business is a trivia app for college students What am I looking for? I'm not sure. My top preference is career progression/learning ability and given I don't have a family the startup option does make sense, however ... I greatly value stability - I've been through the tech interview process for many iterations now and it is really tiring to have to start over every year due to internships/bad-culture/layoffs/potential startup failing - Being unemployed for ~10 months now, I would say the majority of my interviews were for startup companies so I feel that getting an offer at a non-startup company is more rare/valuable (maybe?) Any thoughts are appreciated. Thank you!

I got a job offer - It's just the 1 offer, so I don't have much leverage. I suggested a specific amount which I thought was the average salary (which is the amount they offered), but I forgot to take into account inflation going on in Netherlands/Europe. I want to negotiate for a higher salary and less working hours (which is negotiable). I have to negotiate it soon so would appreciate any tips ASAP. What I'm thinking of saying is the following: > I would like to receive xxxx amount because that would make me feel very appreciated and motivate me to work extra hard. I forgot to take into account inflation for the amount I suggested. > > "I would like to work 32 hours. This way I can spend more time on my hobbies and start well rested with the work week after a long weekend. Does this make sense? Follow-up questions: How are my arguments for salary negotiation? Is it better to ask for slightly higher so they can counter offer and we can meet in the middle and maybe get lucky and get paid even more? Not sure whether working hours negotiation makes sense outside of Europe - Is it common outside of here? If I ask for too much will they rescind the offer? All in all the current offer would be great for my current situation, but for the long term, the salary would be kinda low with inflation going on.