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

I have been making progress towards meeting senior level competencies. My manager is aligned and wants to put me up for promo at the end of the year. However, I’m looking for a third project in Q4 to really nail down my case. Additionally, I want to provide more impact and learn how to define new initiatives. I love creating “swim lanes” for my teammates and leading projects that grow their scope. How would you recommend:

1. Coming up with a project idea
2. Vetting the project to make sure it has enough scope for a senior level (or staff! I would love to provide more impact)
3. Vetting the project to make sure it has enough impact for a senior level

I have a lot of ideas for step 1, but am struggling to choose which are appropriate to pursue. Previously, I built a reusable web component at a company wide scale, and am working with a cross org team who wants to use it. I am also working on a technically complex web authentication project that has potential to be used by other teams. Both of these project were scoped by me (with some guidance from my staff mentor) and my manager has communicated they are senior level projects. I have built good relationships with my teammates, our direct stakeholders, and several cross-org engineers. I’m also exceeding expectations at my current level, so there isn’t anything to worry about there. However, I feel like I’m hitting a wall and need to figure out the next project that will turn my promo case into a slam dunk. Any advice? I’m a frontend web engineer if that helps. :)

Context can be found below:

I am a 32-year-old engineer with 7 years of experience. For the past 5 years, I've been working at a startup that is around 10-12 years old and recently went public, serving as a mid-level backend engineer.

Despite my time at the company, I haven't seen much career growth. I received my first promotion after a year and a half, but nothing significant has happened since then. I'm feeling lost and unsure about my next steps. The work is unmotivating, and I feel like I'm not learning or growing. I'm constantly occupied with production issues, and my manager frequently cancels 1:1 meetings. Even though I receive positive feedback, I know I'm not fully utilizing my potential, which is troubling as my years of experience increase without meaningful progress.

Currently, I'm extremely demotivated and struggle to find the drive to work each day. I wake up feeling stuck and unhappy with my job. Although I get my monthly salary and perform my duties, I'm no longer passionate about my work. I have the knowledge and skills, but I just don't feel like contributing to this company anymore.

Can you help? I'm not happy with my current situation. I used to be a curious person, staying up all night coding and learning new things. However, for the past two years, I've been merely going through the motions at work. I want to regain my curiosity and sense of empowerment, so that when I go to bed each night, I feel excited about what I can achieve the next day.

I've recently been approached by a startup founder and asked to complete a take-home quiz, which I did. It looks like the founder is leaning towards offering me the Head of Technology position. However, I have a few concerns and questions.

1. How can I assess if the founder is someone good to work with?

   From my initial conversations, I've noticed a few things about the founder:

   • They come across as overly confident, almost to the point of being condescending. Is this a common trait among founders, or should it be a red flag?
   • They strongly believe the product will be successful. I think this is a positive trait for a founder, but I'd like to get your opinions.
   • They think all backend jobs will be obsolete in two years due to AI. While speculation is fine, I believe there should be a balance with reasonableness.
   • They talk more about the history of AWS, the life of Elon Musk, and famous quotes rather than focusing on their own product.
   • They tend to underestimate the complexity of engineering feats. For example, they think developing services like DynamoDB and S3 was easy for Amazon because of their large workforce, which I find undermines the actual engineering challenges.

2. How can I determine if the startup is likely to succeed?

   • What aspects should I be looking at?
   • What questions should I be asking the founder or team?

Any insights or advice would be greatly appreciated!

I’m very scared right now. I was labeled underperforming as a mid level at a FAANG and was on my way to being PIPped but shortly thereafter was part of one of the mass layoffs that happened.

Now after a LONG time of interview preparation I have secured an offer as a senior engineer at another FAANG

I realize maybe I shouldn’t have gone for senior level positions but they were the ones with the most headcount so I was advised to do so based on my years of experience. I was never asked my level at the previous company

Now the company I’m going to doesn’t know I was underperforming as a mid level and yet I’m going to have to meet expectations as a senior.

The silver lining is that my interview performance was amazing so at least they trust that I pass that bar even if I don’t

I plan on following advice to be the “code machine” but I don’t know if I have it in me to actually perform as a senior, both code wise and also the expectation to provide some level of mentorship to junior engineers

Sorry for the very long post but any advice?

I want to quit my current job, so I've been applying to 300+ jobs across the span of 6 months. Out of those 300+ jobs, I've only gotten past the resume screening for 1 company, and I got approached by 5 companies that I didn't apply to. The low numbers could be caused by me requiring visa sponsorship, although I suspect that it could be because of the job market.

Out of all these 6 companies, I always get eliminated at the screener round (DSA, multiple choice general programming knowledge question about concurrency and multithreading). Should I try to improve my resume screening pass rate through side projects or should I instead focus on leetcode? I don't think I'll have enough time and energy for both, so I try to focus on only 1.

Obviously, we need good UX, but I find myself obsessing over small details.

E.g. When the loading animation shows the display flexbox is slightly smaller than when the data loads because of scroll bars added once the data comes in. This makes it a bit jarring

There are other things like messing with colors, UX, animations, transitions, spacing.

Clearly you can spend all day tweaking UX. Where do you draw the line?

What are the best practices for onboarding and being successful at meta MLE ads rankings team (E4)? Please share your thoughts on office culture/how to go along well with manager? tips for successful E4-->E5 track? how to ensure getting projects with Impact (team dominated by members from 1 country)?

Note, I will go through the on-boarding course by Rahul, but was looking for some tailored suggestions, thanks

Hi, I am at the team match stage at meta for E4 (MLE) role at the bay area loc. What could be a decent TC range (checked levels, I know avg is around 300k?)?

Also, how could I maximize it considering I don’t have a competing FAANG level offer at the moment, but I do have an offer from a tier 2 company of ML in terms of comp? note, I believe I did pretty well in all the interview rounds, the team I am hoping to join has a member who was my labmate in my Phd group and recommended me to the hiring manager, who is quite interested to hire me (as mentioned by the hm himself). Furthermore, I already have my green card, so the company doesn’t need to spend for my immigration. How (if at all) can I leverage these to negotiate?

I have looked at Taro's course on , but looking for more case-specific suggestions, thanks in advance.

I am starting to realize that my manager might not be the most competent engineering leader. While he's a nice guy and has been very good to me, I have noticed recently that:

• he does not get much respect from his XFN coworkers
  • a data scientist on the team has confided to me that he does not think that my manager is technically capable
  • other stakeholders (e.g. PMs) do not seem to value his opinions
• he has not been able to show business impact and value for the team, and it's likely that my team will receive additional scrutiny as a cost center
• he always seems to over-promise and under-deliver every quarter, with the excuse that he can always move the goals/timelines around come review time
• my manager also mentioned that he did not get a great perf review rating in the most recent round of reviews, and I'm worried that this might percolate down to my own reviews

In short he seems to be doing the opposite of what Taro advises (both as EM and IC). What do I do at this point? Jump ship to a different team?

[Another recent question asked about toxic managers -- to be clear, my manager has been anything but toxic and I am on very friendly terms with him. I am just worried that continuing to be on his team would hamper my own career growth if he doesn't know what he's doing.]

TLDR: How to pick side projects

This might have been answered multiple times and a very well-known answer would be working on side projects but I want the answer to be more in-depth so it can be helpful for many engineers.

Please don't answer in a generic way but try to answer this by posing in my shoes

Let's say you have 1.6 years of experience as a Software engineer and 3 years of experience in IT but not in development now if you want to stick to the SE career. This market is very challenging for me to get a job with 1 plus year of experience. I have to convert my IT experience into developer experience and try. But when I give interviews I tend to fail the Hiring manager rounds because they can see the depth of my SE career.

So how to convert my IT experience to SE experience? I have put a lot of effort into Leetcode and now I have gotten to a decent stage the same thing applies to System design as well I have read books blogs etc and getting the depth would be my next target.

We can hear a lot of stories in the past where a person who started his/her career as a tester or a QA and got it converted to Senior software engineer etc by working on problem-solving skills but I don't think this works in the current market.

So I felt I was missing depth. How to achieve a mid-level engineer status where I can effectively tell a lot of stories and challenges I have faced in my career and show bias for action etc

The most simple answer would be to do side projects but selecting a repository and a project is very hard as there are countless repositories and projects.

All I need is a small ignition to start on the side projects then I think discipline would take care of the rest as I was at zero questions at LeetCode a few months ago and now I have solved 250 plus with discipline.

Building off my question on , I'm curious what the daily schedules of people at Taro look like. I know that this will differ a lot from person to person (e.g. Charlie is coding and Rahul is doing business) and from day to day. Still, if there is a most-common day (the "mode" of days), I'd love to know what that's like, perhaps at the half hour of granularity (just a suggestion, feel free to provide whatever you want). Alternatively, if you prefer to provide what your schedule was like in Big Tech, that'd also be great to know!

Like my focus block question, my motivation here is learning how the highest performers function at a granular level. I can't physically shadow people for a day, but this is the next best thing, and allows me to see how productivity, health, and personal time come together.

I know this is a somewhat personal question, but any details you're comfortable sharing are good to know!

Thanks!

I'm going through In the lesson on , Alex talks about the value of long uninterrupted periods. Notably, he says that a focus block should be minimum 4 hours.

This got me thinking, what do these 4 hours (or longer) look like? Is it 4 hours sitting down uninterrupted at your desk? Is it 4 hours broken up by getting up every 30-60 minutes to grab a snack or chat with a colleague at the office? Do short walks outside () fit in them?

I'm not trying to be annoying or nerd-snipe, I just want to know what the nitty-gritty behaviour of the world's most productive software engineers looks like :)

For me, I feel like I have a mild case of ADD, so if I score a victory, minor or major, in my code, I get up and do a quick meditation, use the washroom, and/or stretch after ~30 minutes, but my hunch is more productive people sit uninterrupted for longer.

I'm at a point where I don't know what to do anymore. I've been having tech interviews for the past year, every time I mess up the leetcode style interviews. They are not specifically hard, but somehow I don't make it to the most optimal solution. When the interview is done, I keep thinking about it and then I figure out the optimal solution on my own, and keep thinking why the heck I could not figure it out during the interview. I don't know, it's as if during interviews, my brain capacity operates at 70%, I become super narrow in my thinking, I cannot think comfortably and I'm tense, I really have trouble coming up with a solution and talking to the interviewer at the same time. How do you guys deal with this ?? Is it even a thing or just me ? It's just too frustrating at this point and it really affects my mental health. I just failed the leetcode screening for a MLE position at Reddit, here I have included the problem in this link with my solution and a potential optimal solution for you to get a better idea :

Observations after watching the time management course:

I’ve noticed the focus block really takes a lot of activation energy and then it eventually gets smooth. Hence why I think I get the point why it should take 4 hr minimum.

Are you saying that’s how it should feel and therefore that’s why you need a super long block?

I honestly feel this is correlated with sleeping properly cuz then I have the energy to overcome this activation energy.

Is this usually how most productive engineers view productivity and how the focus block fits in?

Hi everyone, I was wondering if it is unethical or rude to not respond to some recruiter messages at all or to random people asking if you're available to start a business on LinkedIn? I have a lot of them and know what's it like to be ghosted by companies as an interviewee so wouldn't want to offer the same treatment, on the other hand it takes me a lot of time to craft even a single answer, what's your take on this ? To be honest some offers are also low-ball offers that it makes me not want to respond at all :)) but I wouldn't want to be rude to people.

Other than for a very specific, time-critical reason, e.g. an upcoming launch or being on-call, is there ever a good reason to "burn the midnight oil" by deviating from one's normal life routine to put in more work hours?

Here's what I see this deviation looking like:

• taking fewer breaks in the day - so instead of going for a walk after 2 hours, doing it after 3
• within a work-bloc, having longer time spent at your desk - so sitting interrupted at your desk for over an hour, for example. If you're following the health gurus, you should be standing up often, and the Pomodoro technique is classically 25-minute focus blocks, but I don't know how practical this is
• cutting out gym time to get more work done - for me, exercise is generally 1 - 1.5 hours of time which I do 3 or 4 times a week, so I can get more keyboard time in if I cut it.
• working later into the night and either cutting into sleep time or just waking up later the next day

These are all examples of trying to eke out more productivity. The last 2 in general are frowned upon from a health-standpoint.

In my case, I'm onboarding and think I'm behind on my first ticket, hence the motivation for my question.

I know quality (spending my time in the right way) is a lot more important than quantity, but quantity is easier to add as so many people have pointed out on this site.

Yesterday, I had a new coworker, someone I had never spoken with before spend 4 hours on the phone with me and that was both practically helpful and psychologically helpful. Getting help like that in general is a lot more productive than just throwing more time alone at a problem. Just trying to add more context.

Thanks!

My main worry is if I’m moving too slow

but I’ve observed that once I come up with a plan of action in my project and break it down I can move at a jogging type pace and submit one individual piece every day. And still look fine to my peers and like not feel exhausted every day.

Even with the coding fluency. Since I’ve worked with off the shelf open source stuff for a bit so I’ve noticed once I know how to get stuff to work (past boilerplate land) the real edge case work usually gets straightforward (avoid npe serialization errors or index) in your single pieces of atomic work and if there’s a more complicated edge case you just handle that separately.

My main concern is if this behavior is fine if ur a mid level. Each day in my daily work I just front load my overarching plan and the one piece I am supposed to do today per my plan and just communicate that accordingly. Also sometimes I am not perfect but I find myself catching silly errors before people notice them but I just don’t tell people I’m done and do it in a safe way like test in staging.

Is it supposed to feel like I’m doing small pieces that add up over time with this practice? I might be wrongfully thinking every day with software I should be treating it like an intense workout instead of a slow jog with sprint bursts when the problem gets hard.

for example there are code changes that can be refactoring but a common use case for refactoring code is finding duplicate code

but that’s inherently easier than performance tuning concurrency or shifting focus in a unfamiliar domain which might take a extra day or two to familiarize yourself with the project.

My behavior would be to set expectations with people around me and give a plan to others so I don’t get overwhelmed thinking I need to work late to deliver on these seemingly harder projects at the same pace I deliver the easier high volume projects.

Is this the behavior you’re expecting of me at mid level?

Im sorry but I’m just feeling icky that sometimes behavior over output also means reaping spoils of doing more with less work even at the execution level

I just got an email from my alma mater, the University of Toronto. They're letting me know they are shutting down my old email address, "@mail.utoronto.ca". They are offering to give me a new email account that ends with "@".

I don't foresee myself ever needing this alumni university account. I haven't used my old uni account much in the 6 years since I graduated. Still, the thought occurred to me, could it ever be valuable to have a different account other than my personal gmail one? I suppose if I graduated from a world-renowned school like Harvard or Stanford there would be a more compelling reason to keep an alumni account - after all, that carry status no matter what stage of career you're in. In my case, U of T does have some clout (it's generally considered a Top 20 school and is the largest school in Canada), but not enough that I ever think I'll use it again.

Does anyone have thoughts on using email accounts in general and on my situation in particular?

Thanks!

I’ve joined a new company a few months ago and the culture is that you’ll have to find a project to work on. The concept of teams is so fluid that there’s no one team reporting to one manager that its members share the same direction. I’m struggling to find new projects as I don’t know where to start, plus I don’t have a name within the companies for the teams to be interested in my joining their projects. I’ve asked my manager to direct me and instead he keeps saying he’ll find me something to work on which I feel is a very junior thing.

I've just started at a new company in Big Tech and have taken over responsibility for a large codebase. I learned that most of the people who were previously responsible for the code base (and who may have developed it) were laid off earlier this year. Is it OK for me to reach out to those people or is this bad form and maybe breaks some rules? The purpose of reaching out would be to get an overview from them on the codebase and perhaps ask questions as they come up.

Hey Taro

I am at this phase in my engineering life, where I want to move to a Bay Area/NYC-based startup in Series A/B or even seed. As an immigrant (with visa sponsorship needs), in times like this, it is quite difficult to get interview calls at all (I have submitted about 200+ startup applications!). If you have insight on how this could be hacked together (I am not super particular about problems the startup solves), I'd love to hear!

Thanks!

I'm a 30-year-old SDE-2 looking to shift my career towards data and machine learning. I’ve started as an Android Engineer and also have experience with React and Node.js. However, I no longer find these areas satisfying. Now, I understand the importance of staying consistent within a domain. For the next decade, I want to focus on a technology that will remain relevant for the next twenty years, without being affected by frequent framework changes.

I've noticed that people around 25 years old are able to build impressive projects thanks to good courses and tutorials. Although they make mistakes, it seems likely that within the next two or three years, they will have overcome these challenges. I find data and machine learning more rewarding because they involve answering meaningful questions. Recently, there was an internal opening in my company for a data and ML role, but I didn’t apply because I clearly lacked the necessary skills. However, I believe it’s time to switch and commit to this new direction. Any advice on making this transition smoothly and choosing the right path would be greatly appreciated.

I just finished my first week at my first Big Tech company. I onboarded with another engineer who I'm working closely with on a series of projects. That engineer was really helpful to me this week in getting my environment set up. He knows the tools and frameworks we'll be using a lot better than I do so I'm really grateful he's around to help me. I've thanked him a lot on Slack privately and on our video calls. I'd like to publicly thank him on the company directory. My concern is that if I do that, our manager might see me as the weaker engineer of the two (which I am right now).

Should I let that stop me from publicly thanking him?

Thanks in advance!

So I passed my interview, and they’re phrasing it as a second phone screen.

However, I can’t help but think I was borderline and they’re giving me another chance.

Is it right to ask recruiter for feedback for this round or is it risky if I’m reading too deep into this?