Mid-level Engineer Career Development Videos, Forum, and Q&A

I've noticed from other engineers experience that only senior engineers with 10+ years experience get considered for fully remote tech/ big tech jobs. And in my experience interviewing, only hybrid with a little above my current compensation is even offered. What has been your experience in the job market? Should you just quit looking for remote (with decent pay) and only look for hybrid/full time.

I have 5 years experience as an SRE.

I keep on getting comments to move to the latest technology and I’m a little annoyed because based on taro blogs what I hear on here is that whoever is saying this is saying prioritize teams with scope and latest tech can be and seems to be a easy way to get scope. Even with the AI wave for example LLM apps are really business impact driven but it’s not gonna make me outdated as a backend dev.

More context in my team as a case study:

My teams goal is to make most of the users migrate to our new ui hosted on cloud but the legacy ui both our third party legacy and the legacy ui that the rest of the company makes more money is cumbersome.

Theres effort to change it due to a lot of tried and true working proof of concepts for our team since our team didn’t have the baggage of working with that legacy system that the rest of the company works on as an acquisition team. We have some other legacy offering we got acquired with that has some other strategic value to modernizing the company wide legacy. We are migrating both sets of users.

The dilemma I have is that I speak to these in office folks who work on the legacy system that’s honestly spaghetti and I can’t help but think I should want to work there cuz it will teach me fundamental skills. And I need to not get hung up on the fact that it is legacy and old technology.

The concepts are so proprietary not transferable but I have a strong feeling I could get in there create impact and when I switch jobs add the keywords to the resume and explain how I problem solved and handled ambiguity in the interview to show I am employable in a tech stack that’s more common going forward.

I am even looking at our tech stack as a whole and I am starting to think yes what we will do will solve a lot of the problems about this legacy system both the third party legacy that we own and the company wide legacy that makes the company money. But I just can’t help but think okay modernization into the cloud can be good but it must be for good reason. I’ve heard stories of this getting screwed up before because of bad system design.

Idk is this a sign I’m starting to develop mindset shifts? Idk it’s obvious to me after reading all the taro blogs that whether you’re in the latest tech or not does not matter. What matters seems to be that the tech should have scope for ambiguity. Only then In the context of career growth you’re set. Is this a correct understanding?

Both Alex, Rahul, and many mentors in this group are very successful with a wonderful career trajectory.

I'm curious when you generally look back at your career, what are some career choices that you regret making?

Equipped with your current knowledge, if you have the opportunity to start from scratch again, what would you have done differently?

Asking for a friend. What are some good resume review and polish services tailored for Software Engineer roles.

I’m currently working as an L4 Machine Learning Engineer at a mid-sized public company, and I’ve recently finished L5 SWE interview with Google and am now in the hiring committee stage. The recruiter told me that my interview performance was mixed, so the chances for L5 are small, but L4 is possible. According to , I’m expecting around a 20% salary increase (and, of course, Google’s other benefits are much better than those at my current company). However, the new position is for a SWE role working on hardware products, which involves writing C++, a completely new technology and field for me.

Reasons for wanting to stay:

1. I have a good relationship with my manager and teammates, and the work is more interesting and aligned with my strengths. If possible, I still want to continue working as a Machine Learning Engineer in the future.
2. I’m working on software side projects and writing a blog, and I’m worried that after joining Google, these external projects might be restricted.

Reasons for wanting to leave:

1. Better salary and benefits, and a higher salary ceiling (it’s almost impossible to reach FAANG L5-level salary in my current job).
2. I was previously a Googler, so I’m familiar with Google’s culture (though I was laid off in 2023).
3. I have a poor relationship with my current skip manager. We have many technical disagreements, I don’t adapt well to his management style, and he has a negative impression of me.

This position is not in the U.S., so the chances of being laid off again should be lower (but who knows).

How should I evaluate these two options?

And, since my skip manager has a negative impression of me, should I actively look for other jobs, even if it's not Google?

I work mostly with other senior engineers and the tech lead in my team. I discuss any technical stuff, how to implement my projects, what to do next, etc. with them. With my manager, I meet once every two weeks and update what I am doing.

I actually now wonder what's really the role of an engineering manager as tech leads seem to do most of the work in managing the team. Is it to help with people conflicts, hiring, and performance reviews? That doesn't seem like a lot of work.

Balancing these two approaches is crucial depending on the project and our own values.
1. Writing completely messy code that just works. In other words, making spaghetti
2. During a development, focusing on future scaling, readability, and cleanness by spending more time on the code.

Managers often prefer quick development that works from client’s perspective, which aligns more with the first approach. It’s really difficult thing to tolerate for me, as I don’t consider it to be good programming, even if the clients are happy.

Despite client satisfaction, I feel an ethical conflict.

Should I refuse these types of projects and their financial benefits, even though my stomach is empty? 🤣

I have a Master's in Computer Science with a focus on Machine Learning. I currently work at Microsoft, where I have built one large-scale model and spent four years developing a platform for model building and inferencing.

Due to a re-org, I was moved to a non-ML project. Overall, I have more than eight years of work experience, with four years focused on ML platforms and four years in backend development. I do not have experience with neural networks or deep learning at all.

I’m interested in applying for Senior Machine Learning Engineer roles at companies like Meta, but I’m not sure if I have enough depth to succeed ML interview round. Do I need extensive experience in machine learning/model development or deep learning to clear interviews for 'Software Engineer, Machine Learning' roles at Meta?

I'm totally buying the idea of why we should specialise eg. in Android, like Alex mentioned a number of times, because you're more employable for a large company if you're really good at one thing.

I'm less interested in large companies, I want to continue working in startups and at some point start one myself. I've got a background in ML and have been picking up "full-stack" web development over the past year, to be able to make simple products myself. I like the whole lifecycle of a product from talking to users, to design and engineering. Things I like the most though are backend and machine learning development.

Do you think it still makes sense to specialise given my career goals, or perhaps the advices given here were only for big-tech engineers?

I am trying to change my job to a midlevel-senior engineer position and not wait for promotion (which is hard to come by, in my case) and grow in my career, compensation and find a better environment with a better work life balance. My ethics play an important role in my life. In the past month, I have gotten 3 offers- 2 from start ups and 1 from a big tech acquired startup. I rejected all the three. The startups because i felt the chaotic and high stress environment might not be good for my mental health. And the big tech startup one which paid the best and had a great work life balance, with a great environment- everything i could ask for, but it was in the business of something i do not condone due to my value system. Hence i felt conflicted with many second thoughts, hence i rejected. Now, I have 2 upcoming interviews with big tech companies which are famous for having difficult work life balance. But i am determined, if i get any of them, I will accept. I am also open to midsized who will sponsor my visa, but those kinds are hard to convince for the visa. I have 5 months after which i will be financially and reputation-wise desperate to have a job. The problem is that i feel terrible for rejecting the offers. I feel i have taken a big risk. People tell me i should have accepted the best offer but all of them mostly came with a monetary commitment to join and work for at least a year due to high visa fees. So i could not just accept and take the next best opportunity. How do i work with this situation emotionally and strategically?
Context-
SDE1 at Amazon (on focus which i am failing purposely since i don't want to continue there)
Trying to change countries. Offers from the country i want to move to.

When I code, I have a few habits that make it difficult for someone to follow:

1. I frequently jump between functions and files, even if the one I wrote isn't finished.
2. When working through my code, I often find it better to run the code to find and fix syntax issues instead of diligently reading line by line.
3. I often use a random variable (could be the correct one or wrong one) as a placeholder while I type out the logic for some snippets and then update the variable to be the correct one after.

Although disorganized, I find this method makes me the most productive. I am detail-oriented, write test cases, and often refactor so although my methods are disorganized, my code is not. You may disagree, but for this question let's assume the tradeoff is: ease to follow vs output

This behaviour has negative consequences when someone watches me code. During pair programming I don't mind slowing down since high output isn't the objective and my abilities aren't being judged, but I struggle with deciding how much to slow down in live coding interviews. If I code in a more organized way and slow down to make my coding easier to follow, I would have less output. In a white-boarding interview it could mean the difference between a working solution and non-working solution. In a live coding exercise it could mean the difference between getting through all the iterations of a question/task or not.

I am looking for input from interviewers, or scatter-brained devs like myself, on tips on the habits and tradeoffs to make when coding live.

Examples of things I am thinking about

1. Is there negative signal from frequently debugging over proof-reading code, and if so is there some threshold?
2. If you're someone who has interviewed others, do you think there is a way for a candidate to be more disorganized but still clear. For example, if someones goes over the high level approach and says "I am now going to code out the rough happy path, it will take me a few minutes as iron out the syntax and refactor as I go", then I plug away, and afterwards, do a quick walkthrough of the completed code?
3. Which would generally get a better score in a live coding interview? Fully implemented and hard to follow, or easy to follow but not finished?

Thanks!

What are the effective ways or things to keep in mind, to effectively communicate to technical(Data Analyst,Data Science,Software Engineers) and non-technical audience(Executive,Prod Managers).

Hi!

I currently work as a SWE in a consulting company. Previously I worked for a fintech (one year backend: java & spring boot and last 3 in angular). At my current company that I joined in Feb, I worked on a react project but am on the bench since early August and have been told to get my backend skills (NestJS) up to since we will have more of those projects come in. I was doing that but feel like I'm at a cross-border cause I may have to look outside my company for a role soon (many reasons) so I want to also keep my skills up to date for that. After talking to a recruiter today and especially since I want to be more frontend focused, they said they'd rather want depth in React and Node than breadth. But my manager said having all these skills is very essential if I want to uplevel to a senior manager eventually since I might be mentoring folks who could be either frontend or backend. I understand both of their points but I can only focus on one. I may also have to start looking for a new role in few months depending on some factors in the company. Or I'll stay... who knows. What is "enough" backend knowledge and how do I make frontend my focus? I am currently following a NestJS udemy course but what do I do after that? How do I also become a frontend expert? And how do I know I'm getting close to becoming a frontend expert?

Thanks!

I have an interview coming up for a position where the tech is ReactJS, NodeJS, PostgreSQL, Typescript, and Next.js. It hasn't been scheduled yet and I have 1-2 weeks most likely. How can I prepare for the interview and is there a checklist I should follow to make sure I'm prepared? Most likely, they won't do Leetcode based on intuition? And also cause it's an 80 person company. I'm thinking I should brush up on React (the basic concepts) and also be comfortable with the DB stuff like entity relationship. Are there courses or tools I could use to prep? They said the role is fullstack but we can choose a backend or a frontend focus.

Thanks!

I am a mid-level engineer at an HFT company. I've been with my current company for around 7 months and another similar one for 2.5 years previously. My biggest career issue so far has been poor attention to detail, which leads to me to always miss small mistakes I make.

For instance, I always review my own PRs myself before sending to reviewers, and clean up plenty of issues I notice myself. But then my reviewer will point out some kind of bug, or something I forgot to do, and in retrospect it will be immediately obvious to me. Alex often mentions the importance of being able to get most of your PRs accepted in one attempt, but for anything > 30 lines this simply feels like a pipe dream because I am so terrible at noticing things until it's too late.

(For the record, I'm very thorough with test coverage, but when I simply forget to implement something, I of course forget to test it too).

Another more specific example is that our process of verifying features in production is sometimes a bit involved, and requires changing config in several places. I knew what to change, did so and tested everything, then told my manager the feature had been verified. Later on he was looking at the configs (not sure whether he did it to check my work or for some unrelated reason) and pointed out that I did not actually set everything as I intended to, and therefore the feature wasn't verified correctly. I realized mistake I made (ran a command to change a bunch of files in the wrong directory) but only after the fact, and it cost me embarrassment and extra work.

I think I'm quite good at the other aspects of software engineering: coming up with impactful ideas and executing on them independently, picking up domain knowledge and areas of the codebase quickly, fixing bugs (my own or others'), presenting on my work, etc. So I've been able to eke out "meets" and even "exceeds" reviews at my first job because I had significant impact despite blundering all over the place.

But my deficiencies in this area make me fearful for my career, as I am always worried about making just enough mistakes to get PIP'd or fired. Furthermore, we don't have levels here, but I doubt I can make it to the equivalent of Staff or even the senior level with this kind of defect.

Does anyone have advice on how I can "train my brain", as it were, to improve at this ASAP and make sure I don't go down the wrong trajectory? Thanks!

I'm on a 6-month contract with a Big Tech company and am now a little over halfway through the contract. I was hired together with another contractor for the same duration.

If only one of us can be re-hired (I don't know), it should (and probably will) be him, since he's done more and better work (he's also more experienced).

Should I ask about the possibility of a renewal now? Or should I wait another month or two?

My inclination is that I should ask sooner rather than later since there's a decent body of my work for them to judge me on at this point, so not sure how much benefit another month or two would provide.

Thanks!

Hi everyone!

After 14 years of mainly working as a Java backend developer (with about 2-3 years of Node.JS experience), I’m currently taking a few months off due to family reasons and don’t have a job at the moment. I want to make the most of this time by preparing for interviews and finding a good job. Right now, there’s no pressure on me to find a new job quickly.

However, I’ve grown tired of backend development and was doing it just out of necessity. Inspired by your community, I wrote a first version of a mobile app in React Native (while learning React Native), and I absolutely love it. I’ve worked as a senior and mid-level developer so far. I think I would need about three more months to refine my app a bit and get ready to apply for React Native positions.

What do you think? What level of positions should I aim for besides junior, maybe even mid-level? My plan is a bit risky, but I realized I really want to work with UI, mobile, and UX, as it’s much closer to my heart. The market in Hungary is different from the USA; there are plenty of job opportunities, but Java + Angular is still dominant here.

Thank you,

Lajos
PS: I wish Taro had been around earlier so I could have learned with you from the beginning of my career. You are amazing, thank you!

Cursor is an AI first IDE that's been blowing up on twitter recently. I've found it incredibly helpful in increasing the speed of coding especially because it's autocomplete is genuinely one of the better ones ive seen. It's not exactly implementing logic but it's basically autocomplete on steroids

If you edit a variable name it automatically prompts you to hit tab to do edit the names of the other variables of if you do something like change a list to a concatenated string it'll start prompting you to edit references to that variable to instead work with string based logic

It not only adds code it also knows how to delete code, so if you delete a variable it can prompt you to delete other lines of code using that logic. It also seems to follow context from other files so it can remember your past edits and use it to make future edits. The best way to describe it is just feels like it reads my mind 80% of the time

After seeing Ryan Peterman (who I have immense respect for, truly cracked engineer) also talking about it, I'm curious to know people's thoughts on it

Also hearing people talk about how the new o1 model is already being a lot better at coding, the direction things are headed I would assume in 1-2 years there's gonna be cheaper lightweight versions of o1 that can help us with more nuanced coding tasks

After trying Cursor, I realize the value of 80% of my technical skills dropped to zero. The leverage for the remaining 20% of skills went up by at least 10x.

Hi everyone, I am a software engineer since 5 years now.

Over time, I have realized that I am ambitious but not competitive. I do my work as I enjoy doing the same and when my heart is in it. This has two facets:

1. I am not bothered when someone is doing better than me. I am loved by all. Nobody sees me as a threat. I love helping everyone.
2. Without feeling competitive, there are times when I lack the motivation at work. This also means I don't have the heart to snatch or ask for the better projects of my colleagues when I know they really want to do it. I am fairly excluded from the power hunger games.

I want to seek advise on what are the ways you have sustained your motivation at work and your ambition to climb the career ladder if not for competition? How much has a competitive spirit fuelled your career growth?

Hi everyone,

I just recently accepted an offer at Google as an L3. The thing is I have 4.5 years of experience full time and have done a number of internships (that I'm not counting in the 4.5). I didn't do super great in the coding rounds and couldn't get cleared for L4 but managed to get approved at L3. The coding rounds (specifically, algorithm optimization) was the specific reason they gave for the down level.

I firmly do believe I'm of L3 level, my manager did as well. I'm not great at leetcode so that part was off but my performance was very good at my previous company and I hope to get promoted to L4 as quickly as possible.

Anyone have advice specific to someone that was down leveled? I see a lot of discussion on a promotion from L3 to L4 in general which I've been reading a lot on. But I was curious about the down leveled case specifically

Also another thing to note - I'm about halfway through the L3 to L4 course and I'd say my skills line up virtually entirely with what Alex is describing as L4 (I used to do a lot of the L3 stuff but have improved). Is this just a matter of coming in and making sure I perform as highly as I can to speed up the process?

I’ve recently been applying to various jobs, just in case of an unexpected layoff (golden parachute). Lately, I’ve been motivated to upskill as a developer. I’ve now reached the two-year mark at my company. After the reorg, I have a new manager, team, and director, and I really like this team. My performance over the past six months has been better than it was with my old team. Recently, Google reached out to me for an interview, but I haven’t really studied data structures and algorithms (DSA) due to work. My performance hasn’t been great, and now I also have a phone interview with Meta.

On the plus side, my company's stock has surged, and we’ve received bonuses, raises, and promotions. In my last 1-on-1 meeting with my manager, he told me I should be more independent and that my performance is great (hinting at a promotion)—fingers crossed. My family and friends are encouraging me to interview with both Meta and Google, but I don’t really want to leave my current company.

I have weekly meetings with leadership, and they consistently ask more about our timelines and engineering work, which I understand we need to provide.

Having said that, what are some of the questions we engineers can ask leadership/product to hold them accountable for some of the requirements?

What are some of the customer-centric questions we could ask?

I’ve gone through Taro's courses on communication and asking questions, which were insightful, especially in showing how juniors can learn from senior engineers with deep expertise. However, as an MLE, I face different challenges and would appreciate some insights or thoughts from Alex or Rahul.

For context, I majored in math and hold an MS in ML from a top 3 university, so I'd say I have a solid grasp of both the mathematical and practical aspects of ML. Machine Learning can be deeply mathematical, often requiring formal training to fully get it. Some SWEs who transition into MLE roles may lack this foundation, and while they might have been excellent SWEs, the gap in math knowledge can hinder their abilities as MLEs.

Here are a few challenges I face with some SWE-to-MLE seniors:

1. Sometimes, my tech lead asks questions that suggest a lack of understanding of ML basics. While directly correcting them doesn’t seem right, what’s the best way to handle this?
2. This becomes a bigger issue when they set project goals that are mathematically infeasible. Without a strong math background, they rely on intuition, making it hard to guide them away from misguided directions.
3. Their informal grasp of ML can also complicate design documents by introducing unnecessary features that don’t align with the project’s objectives.
4. As seniors, they can get defensive and dismiss alternative ideas, which is frustrating, especially when I would need to work on a project with a high risk of failing.