Learning Quickly

Hi community,

I am a recently joined M/L engineer at Meta and working in ads domain. I am stuck for last few weeks in verifying a change. Essentially, it involves multiple systems built, request routing and looking for the expected changes. Tried reaching out to T/Ls and internal users. Even politely asked team / outside to ramp me up in the domain but nobody responded positively. They all give me pointers to some internal documentation or workplace group to ask questions. I feel I am really stuck. I have regular updates meeting on Monday.

Here's 2 things about how the updates work:

1. I am making some progress everyday but things are moving very slow which is making me frustrated.
2. When sharing updates, everybody shares the impact and good followups where I only share one incremental step like looked at the logging, traffic is low so can't determine the magnitude of the change.

Anyone willing to share their experiences?

Context:

• There is little to no documentation
• We are extremely focused on shipping rapidly
• Everyone is occupied to the fullest with their own tasks
• The codebase and architecture is a mess to deal with
• The dev environment is unfriendly to work with

Questions:

• For our success (and survival), we need to keep shipping features and products that bring in business. How do I get onboarded quickly so that I can start shipping too?
• Is there any value in following typical processes and best practices like 1:1s, project planning etc.?

I'm a Staff Engineer in the satellite telecommunications industry where I am responsible for the strategic success of the software products in my department. My organizational responsibilities and weekly calendar align almost perfectly with the . I'm sure that it will come as a surprise to no one that getting to this point in my career was an intense and conscientious journey. I am self-taught, I fell in love with programming as a child, and I have never attended a University. Things are not even close to perfect, but I am happy with my career so far.

My day-to-day work does not involve much programming, but I spend the vast majority of my time communicating with Tech Leads, Scrum Masters, PMs, TPMs, EMs, etc. to coordinate and accomplish different tasks. The rest of my time is split between communicating and aligning with high-level product stakeholders, such as my boss, and mentoring engineers. When I do code, it is because there is some experiment I want to run, i.e., I might create a prototype of a new product or feature that could massively impact a departmental OKR.

Outside of my day-to-day work, I dedicate as much time as I can to learning and practicing new technical (programming, cloud), professional (LinkedIn Learning), and domain-specific (satellites, AI) skills. I also consume a lot of content here on Taro and I often participate in company and community programs that I believe in (change maker programs, diversity and inclusion programs, etc. as a participant or as a coach).

I would love to have input on this aspect of my career as a Staff Engineer who would like to be a Fellow one day. As I make progress in my career, I find that (obviously) the expectations others have of me, in regard to being at the forefront of technology and really knowing what I am talking about in domain-specific (science-heavy, business-heavy) topics, have grown exponentially. I've already adapted my approach to developing domain-specific skills, for instance, instead of relying solely on MOOCs, I also now have regular sessions with domain experts (business folks with advanced industry-relevant university degrees), something my boss encourages and expects me to continue to do. I have now also considered the prospect of going to university myself, something my employer would sponsor.

So the question is, how can I best invest my personal development time so that as I progress in my career I can continue to meet, or even surpass, exponentially growing expectations?

I'm sure someone will have a great idea of how to approach this challenge. Also, there is a quote I appreciate from Alex Chiou that gives me hope that I can do it.

It wasn't due to natural talent or anything - I'm honestly not that smart.

With learning other languages do you go straight into building or you have to learn some stuff first? I saw a video and the guy was like he just used Go getting started and just built as he go and learned way more from that than a tutorial. Cause there’s a CLI tool I wanna make with Go but I’m tired of the tutorial I just wanna build.

I recently got an offer for a Senior Java developer. While the interview rounds were mostly language agnostic, I know the basics of Java and can debug a Java program quite easily.

Not sure how much of the language depth should be adequate for a senior engineer. I've been a C++ engineer for sometime now.

How do I learn Java fast and efficiently? I'm aware that most of the learning will occur in the job itself, but I want the onboarding (a week away) to be as smooth as possible.

In July, I received a mid-year evaluation indicating room for improvement, with a rating of 2 out of 5 on the scale. My goal is to achieve an outstanding rating by this time next year. Here are the areas my manager provided feedback on for improvement:

He is a college hire, so he is a very junior developer.  He is an enthusiastic member of the team and seems eager to make contributions. He has struggled to learn the fundamental skills required for the job (programming, database, web development).  He will need to improve upon these skills in order to make contributions to the team with little assistance from his peers.

• Company is doing an AWS migration (with lambdas). We're moving away from old IBM architecture.
  • Goal is to move away from SOAP service to build scalable REST API.
• I have limited working experience with AWS but never touched Terraform or have needed to do any migration work at all.
• We'll be building out lambdas and transferring traffic over to our new service
• Team is also new to NodeJS (with the exception of some new folks i.e. me and some other people)

Any recommendations on how to best succeed given the current context?

• General recommendations for succeeding in this ambiguous domain?

• Resource recommendations?

Thinking of skimming AWS docs / AWS course to quickly learn basics but planning on spending most of my time on implementing lambdas with mock data -- goal is to share POCs with team and iterate on feedback before sharing our new service with stakeholders.

I'm a Data Engineer. Within the data engineering realm, there are a lot of tools, just like in the software engineering realm. The modern data stack is pretty popular these days. It includes things like Spark for ETL at scale, Docker for virtualized environments, Airflow for orchestration, dbt (data build tool) for transformations in SQL, Fivetran for automated data connectors, Snowflake for data warehousing, and more.

I'm far from knowing all of these tools well, primarily because I use very few of them in my day job. The main reason I want to change jobs is because of this.

I'm worried I'm caught in a catch-22 situation where I don't know the tools so I can't get jobs that have them, which I guess is similar to the new-grad cold start problem.

My question is, how should I think about learning new tools for job interviews? My current instinct is to learn via failure. That is, I have almost all of the above tools on my resume. If someone asks me about them and I'm not able to give a good answer, I will learn that part about the tool so if I'm in the same situation I can answer properly.

Another approach I can think of is to do Udemy courses of them so I have a deeper understanding of how they work. I've learned to be wary of course not tied to projects, though, so I'm hesitant.

I guess I could do projects to learn more about them, but those take time and right now I'm focused on applying to jobs.

I imagine some answers might focus on what my current problem is: can I get interviews or am I failing interviews? I don't think my issue is with failing interviews right now, and certainly not because of specific knowledge people have called me out for for not knowing these tools. I think my issue is more with sourcing interviews currently.

If there's general advice regarding how to think about prepping for an interview when you only have some of the requirements on the Job Description, would love to hear that too.

Thanks!

Looking forward to some great motivation and career advice. I am 55 years old and work for a local software company as support engineer for the last 5 years. Through out my 30 year old career, I have held jobs as software engineer. But in last few years I have lost my confidence.

I was advised to get into FAANG and for last 1 year I have been going through interview prep resources like LeetCode, AlgoExpert, and practicing from books like CTCI for interview prep. And then thanks to Chat GPT, AI, I lost my interest in becoming a good or even an average software engineer.

So I would like to get motivated, get a software engineer buddy here on Taro, who understands challenges of mindset at my age. I would like to expand my outlook and get energized about software engineering career. Or may be launch a SAAS application of some sort. Thanks for reading.

Greetings, everyone,

For the past five years, I've been working as a cloud engineer, mainly focusing on major cloud providers. My tasks have revolved around provisioning instances, configuring logs, and handling various operational aspects. However, I must admit that my job's scope is quite limited, and I find it challenging to discover more engaging opportunities. Unfortunately, the team responsible for automation work, although I occasionally collaborate with them, isn't the most receptive or cooperative bunch.

In light of this situation, I've decided to explore my interests further and pursue personal projects that align with my passion for Data Engineering. I've already started working on some of these projects and find the field incredibly fascinating.

While I'm aware that the current job market is unfavorable, I am not actively seeking new opportunities at the moment. Instead, my focus is on building a robust portfolio over the next year or two, with the intention of eventually pursuing a career in Data Engineering.

I believe that having one or two years of experience through personal projects in Data Engineering will improve my chances of securing interviews, as finding data-related opportunities within my current company has proven to be a challenge.

I'd appreciate hearing your thoughts on this matter!

What skills are essential for becoming a proficient software engineer which helps them to thrive in any tech domain and adapt to various situations?

Could you provide a list of items that one should be mindful of to excel in real-time scenarios? For instance, focusing on learning front-end and back-end development, knowing basics of web something like that.

How can I effectively prioritize my learning as a software engineer in the early stages of my career? I often find myself shifting focus between different technologies and resources online, making it challenging to stay on track and not get overwhelmed. For instance, one day I may work on an Android project, but the next day, I get engrossed in reading a different blog, causing my focus to shift again. Any tips to maintain focus and manage the abundance of online resources to become a proficient software engineer?

I am onboarding at a new company. Sometimes, I feel I am completely lost when my teammates were explaining something to me. The reasons I can find may include

1. I am lacking the understanding of the architecture or the context
2. Their explanation uses phrases I do not know what they mean or how they work

In this situation, how should I respond to my teammates? Thanks in advance!

I’ve seen questions recently about people wondering whether to pursue an MBA of a CS Masters which comes at the expense of either maintaining your current tech job or searching for a new one. My question is slightly different: When is it worth taking a learning sabbatical if ever?

By learning sabbatical, I mean I have seen people put on LinkedIn that they did quit their jobs to do a bootcamp in some field (Mobile, Blockchain, etc) or even just self-study on their own. I have a coworker who’s a business analyst and told me he’s quitting to do a data science bootcamp. Doesn’t seem like a good idea to me, but not my decision.

I think the general rule people follow is to have a job while looking for one, particularly in this economy. Still, I’m wondering about what circumstances actually warrant quitting a job to invest in getting one in a different field. Obviously being in a toxic environment is the best reason to get out of a current job. Similarly, if you really need the money, you probably can’t leave the job.

So let’s assume that neither is the case. You don’t need the money and the environment is positive, but you’re really not doing what you’re passionate about and feel like every day you are missing learning cool stuff. Say you’re a business analyst and want to become a data scientist or backend software engineer. An obvious move is to try and switch into these roles within your current company. But if you can’t do that, how to think about taking a learning break?

First of all, I'm a huge fan of Alex & Rahul and I want to grow in this community together with mentors, seniors & humans.

But lately being in meetings I've stopped asking much more questions to my seniors because they come with limited knowledge whereas GPT can follow up with me can guide me expertly. Whereas it can even give me expert advise in tech career growth and many such areas.

Even I don't even open stack overflow now.

My was “When given a take-home assignment, what is a reasonable turnaround time to get it back to them?” I now know it’s within a week.

I was given the assignment to create a basic Django app and was told to spend no more than 3 hours on it. Here’s the short text of the assignment description:

Table Metadata Extractor (Python)

Please provide a Python Django application that has one API endpoint which accepts a database connection string from your DB of choice (Redshift, BigQuery, Snowflake, MySQL, Postgres), connects to the database using and returns a list of the TableMetadata data objects (see below) for all tables in the database.

TableMetadata = {

columns: List[ColumnMetadata]

num_rows: int

schema: str

database: str

}

ColumnMetadata = {

col_name: str

col_type: str

}

Bonus points for:

·         Instructive error messages for improper connection strings or other invalid input

·         A solution that is efficient

As a Data Engineer/Analyst, I haven’t done web-dev stuff in years and have never used Django. My immediate instinct upon reading this project description was to find a resource to learn Django online. I’m not sure this is the right instinct, because software is about doing more than learning as Alex has mentioned so many times.

The way I see it, I have 3 ways to approach this assignment:

1. The way I just mentioned. Go down a learning path (hopefully not a rabbit hole), learn about Django and try completing the assignment.
2. Dive right in, try building the solution from scratch, Googling and ChatGPTing liberally.
3. Don’t do the assignment, spare myself the time and headache, and beef up my Python web-dev skills for the future.

The first approach requires the most upfront time. The second might be longer or shorter than the first. And the third doesn’t require any upfront time but requires a commitment to being in a much better position to do the assignment in future.

This is the second time in a couple of months I’ve been in this position since I was given an assignment for a different company to build a Flask app and did a shoddy job with it.

My first question is, which of the 3 options should I do to address this time-sensitive situation?

My second is, how should I address this situation long-term? Building some web-dev projects in Python with Flask/Django/FastAPI seems pretty logical. I don’t get to work with them at work, but I could spend a few weeks building stuff with them. I guess that’s the answer, the key is to avoid tutorial hell.

My third is, how should I think about take-home assignments in general? Should they stretch me a lot in terms of learning new things or conversely, should I be, say, 80% comfortable with what I need to do, just stretching a bit here and there to do stuff?

Thanks!

I just joined a brand new team, formed 6 weeks ago. This job is a big step up in responsibility for me, and it's asking me to operate in a manner that I'm unfamiliar with, such as building OKRs and roadmaps for my team - these OKRs and roadmaps will then be used by our cross functional partners. I feel an immense sense of responsibility that I'm not sure I can uphold my end of the bargain, since I feel like I simply there's so much unknown around product requirements and technical constraints. I don't know if I just power through it by working more to discover some of these constraints (which is what I'm mostly trying to do right now).

For the record, my manager says I'm doing great having recently joined the team. However, I constantly feel like I'm behind because I think I should be giving everyone the feeling I've got things under control, but I don't think I'm giving that impression (because that's not true...). How do I deal with this feeling? I feel like I will be feeling this way for some time since I think I have a lot to learn...

This occurred to me at work today

I was working on a task for which I completed coding and and testing. I showed the code to some of our Staff engineer after standup. The first thing he asked me is why is this fix working. I did try to understand how my fix is working. However after I discussed this with him it was clear that my understanding was superficial. Apart from that, the fix I made even though it works in the current version might break if the library version is upgraded coz I am depending on some internal behavior.

Considering that I have 10 years of experience it felt very disappointing that I could not think of this on my own.

Any advice?

I often find myself in situations with engineers on the level above me (I'm a mid) where they are grasping the mental models, comprehending the code Infront of them and managing to remember a lot of context that helps them as they work through problems. I'm personally left feeling a bit dazed and confused. I was wondering if there are any more senior engineers here who recall having similar experiences when they were a lower level and how they overcame those feelings to move more productively through code when working with someone else.

Some engineers like to code, some like to manage projects, some like to stay close to the users. Software Engineers come in all shapes and sizes.

What are the major archetypes of Software Engineers and how can one identify one's own archetype to double down and improve.

I'm in the processes of writing unit tests for a project that had none. At times I'll need help learning how to work with the mocking library Mockk. My manager has experience and when he has time and quickly unblock. The problem is he is usually at meetings and can only give me so much time. My team is small and from who I've asked only my manager has knowledge of this Library.

What can I do to not fall behind and continue to deliver tasks? I've followed tutorials and articles and even chatgpt but sometimes those don't have the answers to my questions.

Even being a Taro premium user, I'm unable to participate in all the events, though I heavily need mentorship, seems like a roadblock for me because on LinkedIn I see so many posts, it's very difficult to catch up.

Hi! I have trouble what to do if I am in a team with detecting how to tell if the person is genuinely helping and not trying to babysit? To me it is hard to tell the difference, once in my previous company I assumed they helped me, so i always ask for help, but in the end my manager and my team member default reaction is to not letting me to work alone, this is so frustrating and it is hard for me to get into senior position and proud of my work. Now I am in my current company I strived for independence but my manager end up give me feedback that I should collaborate enough, but sometimes I feel that he never let me to work alone.

I read one of your article and I know that we suppose to collaborate and discuss, and I did discussion with some engineers and I can solve the problem, but my manager still says that. I have trouble to see what is the cause, in the end I want to be the person that is great to work with but not spoiled (babysitted everytime). If there are people who tried to babysit you, can you give suggestions on how to react politely, as I don't want to block collaboration and block myself at the same time? Thank you!

I have just joined a new team, and have my first coding task. I am currently terrified about taking the first step and writing some code and testing it.

I have spent a lot of time researching solutions, but have found myself bit in the past because of a lack of testing and research, and also am just terrified of breaking things.

What are some suggestions for getting over this fear, and how can I be more confident that the testing and implementation cover all edge cases and won't have bugs?

What's the right way to think about spending time on your job vs. spending time on side-projects? Once I finish enough work to meet expectations, should I then work on side-projects? Should I think of it more time-bound, and think of my job as the coding I do during the day, and then on my own time I only work on side-projects?

My thoughts are scattered here, but I know that side-projects are key to learning new tech, keeping yourself sharp, and enjoying coding more. On the other hand, linear thinking would say throw yourself entirely at your job, and ride that as high as you can.

Appreciate any insights on the matter.

In lot of meetings I am feeling I am less knowledgeable than others and unable to add value a lot. All my peers are very smart.

When analyzing critically I feel maybe I am spending a lot of time learning and lesser doing.

What works for me is => having focus blocks. Catch is that I am getting too comfortable sometimes not having meetings. This leads to missing lot of context sometimes.

What tips does community have to to handle this pressure?

I joined Tiktok coming from not such a big company & fast culture. I had two projects where I needed to read massive code bases for tasks. The code base is in C++. A language I haven't used in years. How should I go about it?

Should I spend time learning the language before diving into the code or otherwise? I feel under-confident; other engineers scan & understand code even when they don't know the language too well.

What are some of the must read books for new software engineers which will prepare them for the real world?

Especially ones that can help me get acquainted with:

1. Writing high quality code
2. Design patterns (both high level i.e, system design and low level i.e, object oriented design)

My goal is to become fast at going from ideas to working solutions (thinking of approaches, thinking about organization of my code into functions, classes, etc).

I spend a lot of my free time working on personal projects, typically sourced from kodeko, the android developer site, and other & mobile developer blogs.

I often find that these projects are good experience, but not in depth enough to deploy. Are there any resources (or advice for creating ideas & development plans) anyone would recommend for building intermediate and advanced applications?

I'm not sure exactly how to phrase this, but to give an analogy, I love card games (ex: Legends of Runeterra, Race for the Galaxy, Hearthstone, etc). There are a fixed set of rules and a fixed set of cards. I can "grind" games and get better by noticing patterns, picking up new strategies or tactics by playing against a diverse set of players. The outcome of an interaction is usually idempotent (i.e. card 1 interaction with card 2).

In real life, things are quite complicated. Asking a certain question in a certain way to person 1 and person 2 may give wildly different responses, and may even depend on your mood, their mood, your tone, time of day, etc. It's super messy and unpredictable.

I also feel a similar way about system design. The nearly infinite possibility of inputs, outputs, TPS, throughput, scenarios make it difficult to reapply the same set of rules to different scenarios. This is just talking about one component, when we bring in N components, the interaction gets very complicated and the "rules" change" case by case. I'm sure it gets better with practice, but I also feel I have a limited opportunity to learn or practice these on the job.

Has anyone found a way to structure these learnings in terms of a repeated "grind", because oftentimes I feel overwhelmed and don't know where to start. This is a complicated question, so answers regarding either a) soft skills or b) system design separately I will treat as valid answers.

With AI being all the rage and that only becoming more so, I'm trying to predict the future of development along with the rest of the developer community. According to , the next big thing is ChatGPT plugins to your IDE so it has the context of your entire project when you ask questions. This will allow it to generate a lot more code.

Assuming this is the near future, is there any way to prep for that now?

Are there other developments on the horizon that we can/should try and prep for?

Whenever I make a mistake that really upsets me, I send an email to myself about the mistake. By default, the email sits in my inbox for a week, after which I can archive it, but depending on how upset I am about the mistake, I might include in the subject "(2 weeks)", "(1 month)", "(3 months)". The whole point of this is because I don't like having emails in my inbox, I'm continually reminded of my mistake and will hopefully not repeat this in future.

A few people close to me have told me this seems like an unhealthy habit of negativity and that I am beating myself up too much.

For context, almost all the emails I send to myself involve chastizing myself for being too passive, e.g. "next time introduce myself to that exec/important person/girl at the gym, etc." I am naturally not assertive and would like to be a lot more confident and assertive, but am not sure if this is a system for getting there.

On the one hand, it is similar to journalling which is generally considered good. On the other hand, it works off of negative reinforcement. One idea is to just have all my mistakes in a separate doc, but I'm not forced to look at that doc the same way I am forced to look at my inbox. I guess I could have a habit of looking at that doc once a week. That might be the best solution.

Happy to hear anyone's thoughts.

The question I had was regarding building side projects such as a calculator using a tutorial and then modifying it to make it unique.  Is it okay to use ChatGPT or Github copilot to add those modifications or should I try coding those modifications on my own so that I gain better lower level programming skills?

I'm in a dilemma of wanting to change my career from a Data Engineering background to a SWE one.

My dilemma is about me not having too much of a coding background (too much SQL) and not wanting to do badly, alongside with probably having to accept less pay.

Hello. I did kind of ask about this before, but now it's more prevalent dilemma for me as I'm actively interviewing and many of my best opportunities are asking for someone who ALSO has a software engineering background:

Scenario: This past year at working an AWS Cloud Consulting Partner I only grew my cloud and Terraform skills and it was my first professional role. I didn't have any software engineering mentoring and I had very little programming work outside Terraform, but I got to mess with a few different languages in my spare time and still haven't decided on one to main. So I figure it needs to be a language & framework good for an ambitious one-man project (possibly a PWA) that I can be passionate about which would drive my learning, provide a great and productive developer experience so I can build some epic stuff myself and learn from it.

Basically, I need a versatile, productive, "startupy" programming language that can be my "main" and kill two birds with one stone here as I have entrepreneurial ambitions:

What do I like doing? What am I passionate about? Well, game dev with Godot. But it uses GDscript and job prospects with it are nill. So I'm considering making a game website PWA like the old as a one man show. So definitely a scalable full-stack CRUD project. I want my development experience to be as productive as possible, and for that reason I'm now considering mainly the firs two options here:

1. Ruby on Rails (despite it being the butt of many jokes and claims that its dead) . It being "batteries included" and everything else I hear about it is that its super productive and fun. I have not tried it yet though. It might be an ace because I see a number of "remote work from anywhere" opportunities for ruby devs to work on legacy code, i.e Gitlab, but I'm really wary of it being a bad choice to specialize in for my career.

2. Blazor with NetCore C# - Blazor is new tech with inherent risk, but it would allow me to focus on one language and framework while doing the full stack (I think similar to Ruby with the "batteries included" approach.). There's a risk of Blazor being new, but the Net Core skills I obtain will always be relevant. On the contrary, with javascript I felt like what I knew was never enough, there was always another framework or some abstraction on top of React, or new way to do JS I had to learn, which I found extremely frustrating. I'm really not a Javascript fan because of that, but if I had to, I'd probably try Svelte. But the point is, I'm trying to avoid bouncing around the way I have been. I really need to be an expert with one language and framework, and I'd like to be able to "do it all" with that language and framework for it to have an opinionated way with best practices so I can get up and running quickly and learn the skills I building an awesome project.

3. Golang - I started looking at Golang because of it being said that it has an opinionated way of doing things rather than a 20x ways to do one thing which was very appealing to me. Also it's cloud reputation, compiling down to a binary. BUT - it seems its for microservices rather than an impressive full stack startup project. I'm not sure how motivated I'd be making an API instead of a complete project like the PWA game site I mentioned. I really don't want to have to switch to JS for a React front end to get up and running. For this reason, I'm also not sure if Python is a good choice compared with the first two options. I know it has a templating feature, but can I do it all with that?

Can I get some opinions and advice? I'm looking for a new job and need to build up my core software skills fast as possible:

Speed, productivity, specializing in a worthwhile language and learning core software engineering through making an awesome PWA project are my main targets for this.

My team took over a system that we didn't write about a year ago, and it is the only system my team owns. It is a highly critical service in my org.

I was happily making changes to it all of last year, but I broke production twice in a few months, and then almost a third time, and now I have lost faith in my coding ability.

The benefits are that it prevented other teams from experiencing these issues and I took full ownership of resolving them, however, the outages seem to be something that is hanging over my EM's head in spite of it.

How do you get out of this rut?

I'm on-call this week and I'm met once again with a strong sense of not having a clue what I'm doing. I know the majority of the job of engineering is trying to work within a legacy system but I feel like I'm missing tactics to help me make any progress at all. That and having to switch contexts to address alarms and queries has meant that I actually made no progress today whatsoever so this is part rant and part question - any tips on confronting a wall of overwhelm and making progress towards the most impactful bugs?

Regular layoffs + cut-down of perks + companies' continued focus on AI may not result in creation of huge number of new SWE positions at Big Tech anytime this year. Just my opinion.

What suggestions do seniors in this forum suggest to AI-proof your career? I agree that coding is not the only thing we do. Then what are other hard skills differentiator for a SWE? Communication, System Design skills will get easier and easier to master given plethora of improved content on the internet.

Should we start integrating AI in all our projects/workstreams in order to stay sharp?

I'm pretty good at leetcode (was able to pass some 3 to 5 rounds of interviews), I got good at by practicing and continuous learning. Now I want to be good at software engineering in general like debugging, building components, understanding complex things/systems, etc. I see one of the suggestions is to improve on fundamentals of software engineering, how do I do that? and What action items can I follow consistently? Any concrete suggested steps will be great instead of just some general bullet points. Thank you all.

Hey John, I hope you are well. I am really passionate about CS (specifically Software Engineering) and I want to pursue a career in it. But I can't help but be a bit concerned about the future availability of coding jobs due to Al (chatgpt4 and stuff). I understand it's hard to predict how things will be in the next 10-15yrs, but my main concern is that I may be putting in all this hard work for nothing. I'm concerned Al will make my future job(s) obsolete before I even get it. Any thoughts on this?

If you build full "product skills" and use the best tools for the job, which today might be hand coding, but later may be Al guiding, you will probably be fine.

I see....by "product skills" do you mean hard and soft skills?

Software is just a tool to help accomplish something for people many programmers never understood that. Keep your eyes on the delivered value, and don't over focus on the specifics of the tools.

Source:

Saw the above discussion on twitter and it got me thinking with advent of ChatGpt4 and Github Copilot X, what can I do to not get negatively affected by this change.

What are the various skills referred to as "product skills" mentioned in the above discussion and how should we go about developing them?

Big companies have multiple teams across. There will be a team just for the login, a team for backend logic, etc. There are so many teams and microservices and internal jargon all around.

Problem is during team meeting, seniors have more in depth discussion where I'm unable to provide value as good as them.

How do I get familiar with them fast? Or am I focusing on the wrong idea and should just narrow down what I'm working on and just let time do its thing?

Thanks

In tech, there are an endless amount of books and articles to read, and videos to watch. My browser tabs have grown to the point where I use Onetab to bookmark tab groups that I will eventually get around to...

I also have a long list of improvements, tech debt, and ideas for work and personal that I implement when I have the time. I prioritize and accomplish things every week, but I still feel perpetually behind. This is an internal struggle I deal with, and I don't think this feeling will ever go away. What do you recommend I do to finally feel like I am ahead of the ball?

Little Context: I work on a product that is distributed system with ML and large data processing pipelines, with all the fancy terms and components. But I work on a specific component that in itself is not much more complex than a microservice. I do jump on every opportunity to work on cross-team projects in order to expand my knowledge and to be honest, I understand my company's architect very well. At least, I know what is there. Why is it there, that part I am not confident about?

Since I wasn't one of the first few engineers there, I don't know why it is architected the way it is. I haven't experienced the tradeoff that they had to make to build the system, the way it is now. And this learning I have been craving for some time.

I have been reading all about distributed systems for a year and a half. Read that famous Designing Data-intensive applications book page to page, and a few other popular courses and resources. But I want hands-on experience.

What actions can I take to optimize and practice my learning about building distributed systems?

I acknowledge that this "distributed systems" is a highly overloaded term, but ideally, I want to practice building more complex and end-to-end systems.

Thanks.

As part of my story or task, often times I have to understand and contribute to other codebases or solve bugs that involve understanding flow of other codebases. What is the best way to navigate this when you are suppose to solve an issue where you have to understand an external codebase in order to contribute or fix an issue?

I am a frontend focused full-stack engineer with 7 years of relevant experience in the frontend engineering space and a total of 12 years of experience. I am not able to decide where should I invest my time when working on side projects. Should I start picking up mobile (Android/iOS) or continue to sharpen my skills in the frontend development space? To put it another way, should I invest my time in going deep in my current domain or should I invest time learning mobile UI development as that has gained more traction and is viewed as more valuable skill?

I think I am unable to decide whether to go about developing my skills in breadth or depth.

When learning new things, I often find that I don't know this, don't know the best practice in that, and so on. If I go down these rabbit holes, a lot of time is spent and not much progress is made in the original project. If this is a scene at work, usually there are external factors to guide you not to go down these rabbit holes, be it the deadline on a task or advice from colleagues. But how to manage this while building side projects? Especially, time after work is equally precious that you sacrificed doing other things to build a skill, and progress gives motivation. But at the same time, going down these knowledge rabbit holes also builds knowledge, and be more niche. How would you trade off knowing everything vs progress in side projects?

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?

My question is when should I reach out to help someone. If someone new joins, and if it is clear that task might be difficult for person, or there is some context needed etc, and they fail to ask, should you help them? Reaching out early and helping might be hampering their own learning, also at risk of hurting someone's ego. But If I am in other person's shoes, I would appreciate all help so what is right balance here?

Also, should you helping be more visible or private? If it is public, other people can add extra context as they like, but maybe in private conversations, person can ask more follow up question, assuming they are afraid to ask dumb questions. To be more specifically, by public I mean team channel in slack and private would one-one chat.

Every time, when my manager asked me to do some changes to the repository that is totally new to me. I became scared.

I prefer to do research by myself first. But I got lost in the new repo by reading file by file, and don't get the clarity.

So I ask the repository owner to provide documentation, mostly they don't maintain documentation, and even if they do, it is not updated or it involves a lot of detailed feature-wise documentation, which is usually not relevant to my requirement.

Then, I call the POC of that repo, but I couldn't figure out what is the right question to ask in the first call. Over time, I ping him asking questions whenever I face hurdles while achieving the requirements.

Sometimes, I put a debugger or logs to understand the flow of code.

The above processes took a lot of my time.

What is your suggestion to get clarity in the new repo such that I can complete my requirements in less time?

After working for 5 years in startups and small companies, this is my first time in BigTech. I constantly feel that while I am able to get tasks done, I still lack in fundamentals. This sometimes leads to embarrassing situations where I am not able to answer basic questions during normal conversations.

I would really like to not only brush up but master my fundamentals of being a software engineer.

If we were to make a list of fundamentals that strong software engineers have mastered, what would that list look like?

Often I read articles from different industry practitioners & company blogs. While reading, I usually highlight & take notes. But organizing them in a way that groups similar together & makes the article easily searchable for future reference is pretty hard.

I'm curious, what's a good practice you guys follow? What kind of tools do you use for it?

As a mid-level (not senior yet) SDE, what are the core skills I should be consistently developing to grow my career, not only for promotion within the company, but also for personal growth, and to get ready for diverse opportunities years ahead?

I know we have covered lots of topics, like DS & Algo for interviews in case you suddenly get laid off and you are looking for opportunities, communicate well with colleagues to make impact, and manage up to avoid getting into PIP, System Design skills.... But is there a list of Soft AND Hard skills that are core to a engineer's career in long term?

I am a Backend Engineer at a Platform Team.

Our team currently owns 9 micro services which serve as a platform which other teams use through the company.

5/9 of these services are actively being worked on and the rest are just running without any changes/ enhancements.

I have been working for the past 8 months on one of the services but haven’t had much exposure to others.

I want to learn about the others, how the data flows between them and how the overall system design is. I am just going through tons of design RFCs and reading code but with little understanding.

My primary motivation is to

1. Understand more of our scope and work on them.
2. Move out of my comfort zone.
3. Handle On Call tasks better where understanding code is needed more than just following runbook.

How can I better understand at the service level?

The context: I am looking for a startup to join and realized that most of the opportunities are with NodeJS and TypeScript.

I've been working mostly with .NET for quite some time but JS/TS are not new to me. In fact, TS is written by Microsoft and probably because of that, the syntax is very close to C#. So, I don't see big issue here. But NodeJS is a different world. I have some professional experience with it but don't know it deeply.

I understand if you are a good SWE the stack doesn't matter that much. But we are talking about finding a job here. I will have to convince the interviewer I can do it. And the questions will go for sure deeply about Node env. My motto is if the interview is tough, there is a higher chance that there will be more talented people than usual. But tough interview will make it even more impossible to me.

What are the opportunities?

1. Learning it for few months myself? I am sure will help me to understand it better but it's not like having years of experience with Node.
2. Applying for non-senior positions, sacrificing the payment but learning? I am not sure this is possible actually.

Or smth else?

I'm still navigating a career switch to SWE, and I tend to get pretty overwhelmed when looking at code. I already ask a lot of questions, and I want to be more self-sufficient because my full-stack team members are pretty busy. (They are all kind and would all be willing to to take some time out of their day.)

How can I get faster at reading code on my own while balancing a team transition? I'm at the point where I understand the high-level purpose of parts of our codebase but little as to how the moving pieces all fit together.

While I understand that there is likely no magic threshold to determine the point at one needs to ask for codebase navigation guidance, a good rule of thumb would be helpful when possible.

I'm wondering about the dynamics (plusses and minuses) of having a personal mentor. Taro is fantastic in that it gives me access to the best software engineers to answer all the tech-related questions I can think of.

Still, I'm wondering if there are advantages to having a specific mentor, someone a few years senior to me who's in the position I want to be in. The idea would be that they could show me what to focus on to develop my career in a way that is more individualized. I write this as I've just been matched with Orbiit which I'm super excited about, but not sure if that's mentorship so much as peer-to-peer.

I got the mentorship idea from a company called SharpestMinds, which focuses on project-focused mentorship for career switchers for Data and SWE roles.

This question isn't about them, but the idea of personal mentorship more generally.

So to summarize, I have 3 questions:

1. Why should I get a designated mentor?
2. How do I get a personal mentor?
3. What should I do as a mentee in a mentor-mentee relationship?

Both in the context of a data structure and algorithm problem and in the context of a software problem or any problem really it is important to weigh the pros and cons and have arguments to back your decision making.

Having the knowledge to come up with several solutions is challenging - how do you get good at this? Is experience the only answer? Do you have any techniques you put in place to help with this?

I'm sure Alex and Rahul talk about this in their , but wondering how to write clean code, particularly in the context of someone who doesn't have technical people available to review my pull requests in my work or in side-projects.

I'm sure this skill is almost entirely developed by working with talented people and writing a lot of code, but is there a place for resources like "Clean Code" the book or courses on Udemy?

I was watching this recorded session . In that series, Alex mentioned picking a tech stack and sticking to it.

In that case, I work in C# and .net tech stack, however, if I switch companies, and the other company uses Java and its relevant framework, how can I gain expertise in that stack?

Should I look for jobs that use the tech stack that I am strong with?
Or learn and master the tech stack that companies use?

How does it differ from an entry level engineer to the head of engineering level at each of the levels, given the scope grows as well at each level?

• Software Engineer
• Senior Software Engineer
• Tech Lead
• Staff Software Engineer
• Principal Engineer
• Head of Engineering
• Director of Engineering
• Vice President
• CTO

How do each of the levels ensure they are onboarded as quickly as possible to have maximum impact ?

Even though starting to work for a big company like Meta, Amazon, Google, etc. I believe is a hard to achieve (I haven't work for) somehow it looks pretty straightforward. Learn for interview, get the job, level up. Yes, I am sure it's hard and not many will do it but still you know what should be done (yes, may don't know how). But let me tell you a different story:

I work in a not that famous country in the EU and non of the top tech companies is there. Actually 90+% of the companies are outsourcing companies. As a SE with 10 years of experience in the outsourcing world I can tell you how it works: you work on a legacy code which is so old and so bad (hundreds of people have tried write code there) you can't see good practice at all, no code reviews (sometimes there is bad it is very rare), no unit tests, performance review is only about client's feedback and so on, you got the point. It's about the money only and nobody cares if you are good or not if the client is happy. In very rare cases I have started something from scratch but all of my colleagues were so bad progmmers like myself that we messed up all. It's a deadlock. After 10 years I realized I am a bad programmer and I've seen so many bad practices that I have no passion to do anything anymore. Now to the questions:

1. Is it possible to apply best standards in an outsourcing company like those in FAANG and if yes, how?
2. How can I fill all the gaps I have at the moment? Can I fill all the gaps with side projects only? How can I fill them when nobody will teach me anything new. Nowone will review my code and like @Alex said, they are the main source to learn :) How would I know is the code good or not? Could it be better?

The ultimate goal of my career (and maybe in life) is to fill the gap not only in my skills but to create a company (product based or outsourcing) where everyone who join to have a chance to become a great programmer. But before helping others, I need to help myslelf. This is how I found Taro.

One thing I have noticed about competent engineers is that they have a very strong understanding of upstream and downstream dependencies in terms of what are the typical parameters being passed into our API's and what we return and what are the things we pass into our dependencies API's and what they return,

How can I learn the context behind what data is typically being passed quickly? I understand that one of the best ways to learn is to start tinkering, and call the API's myself and see what they return. I was wondering if there is any faster way because surely a staff/principal/TL doesn't have the time to tinker with all of the different dependency services and understand what they take in and return. Is it just a matter of reading documentation and asking around?

To put this into context, the question refers more to people who have already been at the company for a while, not onboarding engineers.

In my experience working only at startups, almost all learning has been the responsibility of the employee. There is a "spike" period where the engineer is given time to come up to speed, but it has always seemed to me a bit careless for managers to just give someone a list of technologies and say "learn this."

I guess this question is really a proxy for asking: how does FAANG approach "bootcamping" engineers on a new and important stack? Are workshops, training courses, and L&D actually effective? Suppose that I am a senior engineer who wants all the junior engineers in my team to learn how to use AI assist tools like Copilot, how would I approach making this mandatory if I really think it's a technology that's as crucial as git?

I've only ever coded in js/ts; however, as I seek to grow my skills in react-native I've been trying to learn swift to deal with bridging. However, after coding a few hours in swift when I swapped back its like my brain stopped working and simple stuff I couldn't remember the syntax. After working in it again it kinda went back to normal; but, is this something that is normal or goes away with practice?

I am a new grad Software Engineer who has completed 6 months ago. There's a lot of internal tech stack and plenty of codelabs. Lately, I have realised that I am not prioritising learning about the stack my team uses (but I do not currently use directly).

I understand it would be helpful in one-off occasions when I have to interact with a new part of the codebase or during on-call, which I am expected to begin soon. However, I always end up prioritising my current work that I have in hand. (It is also because of the fact that I find the codelabs pretty slow and boring)

How should I prioritise learning new things? I remember Rachel's video where she said she spends 20% of her time learning new things and that seemed like a good strategy to me.

I find myself in this confusion as to how and when should I spend time in

1. Interview prep for FAANG or alike(I usually spend 2-3 hours everyday 7 days a week). This includes system design prep too.
2. Learning more about technologies such as and not limited to say kubernetes, new AWS services or preparing for AWS certification? or Docker etc.
3. Learning about ML, or say web 3 etc.

How should one spend time in making sure they are doing deliberate practice for the interviews, but also are in "sync" with the market with all the new tools and technologies out there? Where does one stop? I know my priorities, but I also feel i might loose focus on my interview prep if I start multitasking.

How do senior engineers or mid-level engineers keep themselves uptodate? or do they only learn "whatever is required to get my job done"?

Any recommended resources that I should invest as part of my education budget?

I am Backend software Engineer and I am interested in moving to Staff software engineer role in future.

After a certain experience there's a certain expectation from Senior Software Engineers, I think because in the beginning of my career I wasn't involved in Development and hence despite being of experience 10 years I think I may not have the design skills required to work independently on a feature.

That said, I am going through LLD questions on YouTube, to understand more about designing from scratch, while I am doing I thought if there's a way to get me upto speed even more. The reason I am asking is because apart from doing Leetcode daily I would like to spend some time daily on design aspect as well.

In summary, I want to work independently, and for that am learning from the internet. I am wondering if that's it or there's something more I can do in my free time to become better developer. Any actionable items would be great.

What are some of the best resources to learn front-end development?

I want to build a startup (SaaS).

Often we talk about how, when getting feedback during a PR or Design Review, there are mistakes that I have seen, at least in my case, creep up repeatedly. Any tips to ensure that the learnings stick?

What do you think about certifications in general? And specifically, what do you think about certifications like these

I’ve watched the Lego Model Video and I was wondering: What are current most high demand legos / lego sets/ skills in your opinion?

I’m always impressed by software engineers with strong track record working at FAANG level for long term period (>4 years) as working in these type of companies require dedicating yourself 100%+ to sustain and keep meeting the performance bar..

But I also felt that the “golden era” of working at FAANG have already passed. I think joining FAANG today will still give lots of learning but not as many growth compared to maybe 6-7 years ago when they are still growing very rapidly.

Do you have any tips for junior/mid engineers with 1-2 YOE who feels like their current role does not offer the golden era of FAANG level growth in terms of career opportunity? Feeling like this primarily due to team culture and engineering talent on my current role that is subpar compared to FAANG (I was previously an intern at FAANG and is now working at a startup).

Given the current market situation (layoffs, hiring freeze), getting into FAANG or the next FAANG would be quite challenging.

do you have any tips so that I can make sure I can give my best to whatever I have right now but still have FAANG level of career growth in non-FAANG company?

What are some good resources and learning methods to become a back-end engineer in Node.js?

One thing that I learnt in one of the taro videos is to choose the right project for the career growth. However, I lacked this kind of vision/ability to evaluate. What I can do to improve this weakness? Should I grow more engineering domain knowledge or should I take some business courses to further improve myself?

My mentee is a slow learner. Rest of the team, both tenured and new team members are very much able to make an impact independently and working together as well. But this mentee of mine, is just not there yet even after being in the team for a little more than 6 months now. As a mentor, what approach I can try, to make my mentee become successful in my team?

What is a good way to ask questions in a domain where you lack knowledge? How do you make a question a high effort question when you know relatively little about a topic? Sometimes you're put in a situation where you don't really know the fundamentals. How do you navigate this landscape and ask questions of higher quality? I feel like the more that I learn about a certain topic, the better I get at at asking questions in this area. However, I don't really have a great framework on asking questions when I'm starting out in a new field, so what could one do in these cases?

I think I'm a good generalist with technical breadth and got I ask appropriate questions to learn a new stack. I think I lack in technical depth. Either I haven't had opportunities to develop meaningful technical depth or I haven't known how to leverage those opportunities.

A perceived limitation is I tend to associate these opportunities only with refactoring, which needs buy-in from business, but maybe there's more I don't see. My experience has been business only wants to spend the type of work that applies to covering 80% of the needs and the rest tend to be edge cases that don't get much review during initial design & implementation.

An idea I've considered is deliberately practicing DSA interview questions with the intent to identify concepts that may carry over to other implementations. How feasible does this seem?

Alex and Rahul and the other senior people on Taro have consistently emphasized how important good software engineering fundamentals are to long-term career success as a software engineer. This is in contrast to learning the latest popular framework or area of development. Can people define what those fundamentals are and how one should go about acquiring/improving them?

Thanks!

I'm still in school, but I will be graduating in a couple months. My goal is to get promoted as quickly as possible at a reputable company like Google. However, there are so many ways to get better as a software engineer, and I'm unsure how to prioritize all of this information. What should I focus on since I'm earlier-in-career to really unlock that fast career progression?

Joining a new team/vertical with the company, I often feel intimidated with the sheer expanse of domain knowledge to be grasped. Given that it takes time, what are the best ways to approach it, so that you are the most effective.

As I'm starting to join a team soon(and knowing this answer varies by team, level, and company), I'm wondering how long does onboarding take and what does it mean to be fully onboarded within your team

I'm going to be joining Amazon soon and the team I'm on is going from 4/5 people a month ago to I believe 9/10 people (counting me). Our team is going to be comprised of SDE 2's and 1's (I'm an SDE 1).

I'm wondering what's the best way to have the best onboarding experience during this time.

While it will be nice that I will have a decent amount of people who will be in the same boat as me in terms of onboarding, I'm also worried that my manager and more senior teammates won't have as much time for things like 1 on 1s, answering questions, helping me onboard, etc. if they're also helping other people on our team in addition to their own work.

I am not confident whenever I try to code a new library or a service. I simply copy-paste, look at other samples in the coding repo, and complete my tasks. How can I be better at coding, without copy-pasting? How can I gain confidence in this?

This isn’t really a career question but does anyone have a good recommendation for resources to learn ios app development for a complete noob? I have a lot of experience building backend distributed systems, but other than building one android app back in college 6-7 years ago as part of the coursework, I haven’t really done any mobile app development ever.

I recently made a string of silly mistakes related to a particular project that led to a few bugs being deployed to production. I think I incrementally got more and more overwhelmed and stressed by the project because my initial fix caused a bug and from there I fixed that bug and inadvertently caused others.

I'm concerned about how this might play out with my EM. How I can best approach owning this set of silly mistakes without it having a negative impact on my reputation due to my low code quality mistakes partly caused by the stress of the situation?

My tech lead asked me to write up a mini bug report for our our engineering retro and this morning my EM was asking about what the report was for because I had written it down as part of my weekly goals in our stand ups. My EM has low context on the complexity of the work we do and is far from the code - tending to over index on any signal he come across.

I just went through my performance review and I'm meeting expectations so I don't have a formal review for a while. I'm about to go on vacation for a while so I'm hoping this fades into the past but still I'm not sure exactly how to play this now so it comes out in my favour before I go away.

I'm pretty new to my company, so I've been asking questions and looking for "hand-holding" to bring myself up to speed. I've been having trouble ramping up though - My velocity hasn't been the best, and I've also gotten feedback that I need to be more independent as a senior engineer.

This leaves me a bit confused - I know that in order to onboard, you need to seek out help aggressively and ask questions, but this seems opposite of the feedback around being more independent. How do I think about these 2 ideas? Should I just be working harder and spending more time figuring things out on my own?

The benchmarks I am setting here are people like Robert Martin, Martin Fowler, Venkat Subramaniam (known for agile and Java), Guido Von Rossum (developed Python), Jeff Dean, Sanjay Gehlawat etc.

Latter two are Senior Fellow at Google. Up until a certain point, I understand that promotions are about the scope of impact inside an organisation, but how do you grow yourself outside the walls of it so as to be on your way to be extremely good in your craft and among top software engineering contributors in the world.

Would appreciate answers from as many folks as possible.

I have recently joined a team which works in Go (no frameworks). My team handles multiple backend services ( exposed through REST APIs ) which are like a platform for various other services.

I have picked up the language grammar and have enough understanding to write working code. However, I feel I don't "get" it. I don't understand how to organise the code into a well-defined folder structure and interfaces.

I would like to understand what are some of the good ways to learn a new language. It's been 2 months since I started learning it and feel like I am working with incomplete knowledge. Maybe at 50% level. I know there's no point in understanding all the features of a language but I would like to understand design patterns, best practices and how to write high-quality code.

I really need to be able to ramp up in another month's time.

Majorly need advice on

1. Learning to write high-quality Go code
2. Writing with Dependency Injection in mind
3. Design patterns and low-level system design

I'm a React developer and for the most part am able to accomplish tickets assigned to me; however, what I struggle with is when I have a particular ticket that is heavily logic focused.

For example, recently I had to implement a multi date picker for a booking engine and between the many different cases for user interactions and date comparisons, I feel it took me way longer than it should have.

In order to optimize improvement in this area, would it be worth it to grind leet code style questions? or maybe codewars?

Came across on CSCQ where the original poster asks about what these missing essential skills. One reply had me wondering, how I can actually learn these points:

• How to write things in a way that other people really understand what you're saying.
• How to structure code so that you can come back to it in 2 years and understand it.
• How to show off the work you've done.
• How much testing is the right amount, and not too much or too little.

Android and mobile development as a whole is something I'm very interested in. For example, I see the Taro Android app, and it's pretty smooth and performant while being built quickly. What can I do to get to this level?

I see engineers like Alex and Rahul, and they have had many accomplishments with pretty fast trajectories leveling up. I'm wondering if there's a primary common theme among software engineers like that - What are they doing that others aren't?

My goal is to level up to senior, but it's tricky as I'm not getting the feedback on how to bridge the gap. I have other engineers in the org as mentors, but I haven't been able to get areas of improvement from them. I don't get a lot of comments on code review anymore either - It seems to be going fine there alongside everything else.

My goal is to become extremely efficient at coding. I want to build a reputation as someone who is able to deliver tons of high-quality implementation and products very quickly. I want to build actual velocity where the actual rate of code per hour/day is really high as opposed to just being able to accomplish more from working extra hours.

What tactics can I use to level myself up in this way so that my old coding abilities feel unrecognizable when looking back 3-6 months in the future from my vast amount of improvement?

Whether that be a formal mentor within the company or you have found a mentor outside the company.

e.g. I want to level up as an engineer, have sought out a mentor(s) to help me do so, what are some of the things I should make sure happen that I get the most benefit out of the relationship.

Is it effective when doing this as a tech worker? I'm also wondering how it varies by company type.

I recently joined my team, and I've been sort of overwhelmed picking up this new tech stack which may be leading to some procrastination. I literally have to Google for everything I want to write. Twitter also has certain in-house technologies, which are pretty challenging to learn. I also started working on a critical project recently with strict deadlines due to headcount shortage.

I saw this as an opportunity to make an impact and am trying my best, but I wish I had more time to get acquainted with the stack. I feel like I lost a few days last week unraveling through the ambiguity and getting context, so I didn't make progress with implementation as much as I wanted to.

I am kinda anxious that I will miss my delivery in the first project which is not setting a right impression. In my experience, there is no excuse for missed delivery and it will treated as a red flag. It's a newer company for me and my org is revenue-generating. Given the phase Twitter is going through, this project is critical and hence I am hesitant to push back on the timelines too.

I also see mid-level and junior engineers on the project moving way faster than me right now, because of their tenure and familiarity with codebase and that can be disheartening.

Lastly, should I be transparent and discuss with my manager if I feel a few days haven't been productive? I don't see any way that will help.

I pretty much interact with everyone else through text-based means, which is all really pronounced in this remote covid era. However, I like to learn from other people directly, talking with them. For example, I'm currently working with a senior full-stack engineer doing things like pair programming and that has been helpful.

What can I do to get more of this deeper learning instead of trying to learn almost entirely through text?

I have worked at Meta my entire career (~5 years). I know that Meta is pretty "startup-ey" among the Big Tech companies, but I imagine that it can't mimic startups entirely and there's unique learning value startups can offer. Does switching to startups give big value to career development?

In particular, I'm having trouble figuring out really complex bugs. For example, on my current project, we're auditing a lot of the existing feature set to see what issues they have so we can fix them as we revamp them. I'm happy to find lots of issues, but I have no idea how to fix them, even after finding a code pointer.

I talked with a senior engineer on my team for help, and they were able to get more color on the situation. However, they mainly were able to do this as they have been in the org for a while and knew who to go to for what: I can't replicate that deep knowledge they have as I'm fairly new to the company. How can I create a systemic process I can follow to figure out these situations?

I'm currently working pretty long hours on the weekdays to boost my learning speed, but I know that this isn't sustainable. I feel like my micro-routines can be improved: How can I get the most out of each day? I'm also fairly new to the company, and I want to set myself up for a senior level promotion ASAP - These are 2 big reasons why this is very important to me right now.

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 a completely self-taught software engineer aiming to get a full-time role as an Android engineer. I have no published apps in Google Play at the moment; I'm currently working on a metronome app as I am a musician.

What kind of fundamentals should I know to feel confident, specifically confident enough to apply to jobs? It’s hard for me to feel confident from a non-traditional Computer Science background. I keep doing more and more tutorials and courses to build up my confidence, and it just goes on and on. Is there some roadmap I can follow?

I have realized that I need a very high level overview of the current system and what other systems it communicates with. I have no idea on how to do it; I'm currently planning to have a meeting with my EM.

I have access to the Quip, Google Drive, and some brown bag sessions. I have watched a few of them, but it all seems very fragmented. After I figure all this out, I plan to create a doc which can help others better in the future.

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?

I'm primarily on the back-end, but I've been put on a lot of other stacks. I've worked with www and Bloks and now I need to pick up native Android to debug a deep link issue.

I'm having a hard time with the Android issue. I took a long time just setting up the environment, choosing between VSCode, Android Studio, and OnDemand. I'm now working with adb, which I don't really understand as it's completely new to me. There's not a lot of documentation for my problem area, and it's been rough.

More broadly speaking, how can I do better in these situations and pick up new stacks faster?

Before I was at Meta, I worked at a networking company for 10+ years. It was very different from Meta as a massive consumer web company. On top of the domain differences, the culture is also very different between these 2 companies.

I'm working on ML at Meta, which is something I'm pretty new to. As a senior engineer who wants to make an impact quickly and make a push for staff, how can I effectively make this domain switch to hit the ground running fast?

I try to learn by breaking stuff, but I think that stops working for larger and more complex systems. I also do a lot of grep-ing (e.g. figuring out where a function is called).

I've been able to steadily build my understanding of the Samsara codebase, but I would like to move faster as I have high goals for my internship.

Everyone on my team is significantly more experienced than me. I feel a bit intimidated criticizing the decisions that engineers far more senior than me are making. How can I start contributing?

I am the only experienced Full Stack developer in the team and I felt that the management got a bit excited when they found out. For the first week I was asked to represent my team to the UI review committee to get the UI approval, I had little or no background of the feature but it was kind of rushed out.

Second week, I was told to write the design document of a feature which I was not aware of. I started digging deeper into it, but after 3-4 days I was told there is some other team who is working on something similar so I should stop working on it.

Third week, I was told to again start working on it but then was told to put it on hold. Within the same week I was also told to write the Engineering document for the FE development for the team, this was a bit surprising for me seeing there is almost everything custom at SF, I felt I needed some time to understand the ecosystem, it is the work in progress.