Learning Quickly Q&A and Videos

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?