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

I have often observed that male colleagues become friends quicker over common interests. Men also don't joke as openly with us in fear of offending us in professional setting and humour is an important factor towards friendships. As a woman it takes me atleast an year longer to create a similar bond with a colleague.

I have often seen such friendships creating a major impact on career. There were two instances where two my colleagues paired up and took major initiatives and brought great ideas. Whatever knowledge one had, he would share it with the other. In both these instances, these dynamic-duo pairs had a faster than usual promotion.

It could be a cultural thing, but I wanted to hear from other women in this community if they ever felt like missing out. If yes, how did they navigate through it.

Hi all, I need an advice on quite a random thing. I recently changed teams at Amazon. Since I shared a close bond with my previous team members, I continue to hang out with them sometimes and my ex-manager is quite aware of it. (He was new, and has worked with the team for less than an year)

Is it fine if I continue engaging with old friends, or does it make me look bad from professional aspect?

I'm in the process of transferring teams right now.

What topics should I discuss with my new manager in our first 2-4 1-on-1s?

Topics that come to my mind:

• Working styles
• Strengths, weaknesses, interests
• Career goals
• Onboarding expectations (30/60/90 days)
• The team's mission / goals / KPIs
• Things on the manager's top of mind
• People to meet with / get to know

Hello everyone,

Excited to be a part of the community. I have been out of the work force for a while and have worked on different projects for my own consulting company for a while. I was wondering if I could get my resume critiqued by someone with experience and get some feedback?

All the best,

Rob

I know there are a lot going on approaching the end of year in the company/team for everyone, across different levels people are busy with retrospection and planning for next year. For year-end check-in with my manager, I plan to talk about performance as usual, discuss the promotion timeline/expectations, possibly ask about the bonus I should expect to receive? I am hesitating about asking questions on Bonus which should have settled based on my performance in the past year, is it meaningful to mention Bonus in our conversation, or just show your interest in how to perform better rather than how much bonus you are getting this year and how much more you expect to get.

Besides above topics, what else should we cover in Year-End Conversations? Or probably with whom should we have conversations except our managers, so that we can have better understanding on what we did really well or needs improvements on, and lay out action plans for next year? Thank you!

Hey, currently looking through Google's careers site, seems like the only realistic SWE EU option is Warsaw, Poland, Google Cloud Software Engineer . There is a posting for SWE III and Senior SWE, other than that it's the same department, place, requirements.

If I apply for both the middle & senior positions, it seems logical for a company to only review me for one of them - if I pass for senior, but I'm willing to get paid as Middle, the clear option is to down-level me; and I only have 3 applications/month, so just wasting one of them on the 'same' job posting reduces my chances of getting an interview this month.

On the other hand, maybe it works as a 'boost' for my chances to even get noticed for a position of Warsaw Cloud SWE, as I have 3 applications/month I can make, and I spend 2 on it?

I'm thinking there are a few options:

1. Get a role on an AI project/team (internal transfer), learn AI specific engineering expertise on the job (not research)
2. Do part-time masters, land a role in AI research
3. Self-learn, land a role in AI research

I have been working on writing a case for my promotion and one of the biggest challenge that I face is bragging about my own achievements. I took the advice from Rahul's other post and started keeping a daily todo/brag doc. Its a bullet point list of things that I do on the daily basis and has been helpful.

But when it comes to creating a full blown promo case, I feel there is a need to focus on the impact and actions in a more verbose way and I really struggling with that. Maybe I need to learn more documenting skills.

Any suggestions or even resources I can refer to improve my writing skills would be appreciated.

This question always stresses me because I'm a backend Python developer and the stuff I could learn is a lot that I end up studying/practicing nothing.

I use in my day to day: Python, Flask Docker, and Oracle. I don't know what else I could study or if I need to get better at these technologies.

Feedback

I got feedback on the last two quarters since I joined the company on three things:

Impact - E; Teamwork - M+; Technical Skills - M

Except for that, something that I was lacking was leadership & ownership.

Current Level: Mid-level.

Question Focus

• I wanted here to discuss my struggles in improving my technical skills & leadership. And what mindsets & behaviors I need adopt.

• My focus is more about getting a good rating & having a good bonus. And less about promotion at the moment.

Discussion

1. At the moment, I rely a lot of my lead to make decisions about things I work on & focus on. This is due to following aspects:
   1. I feel part of it is me not having confidence in myself to know what's right. Since my lead has much more experience in this area & I'm very new to it.
   2. The uneasiness of not knowing what's the right approach. It's easy to have another person look at it than dive deep into something you don't look of.
   3. Sometimes documentation is not in English at my company & that is a burden into looking at things deeply.
      1. It breaks my confidence at times & slows me compared to other people who know that language.
2. New tools & languages
   1. C++: I haven't spent much time learning it since I focussed on moving fast & creating impact so far. So that hampered me in setting aside time to learn this language that's used a lot in backend code.
      1. And at times I ask people in help for navigating code than I should do myself.
   2. I'm also haven't worked much in the backend part before being a MLE but now we all have at my current company but I don't feel any new concepts here I need to know.
   3. Design patterns
      1. I see these patterns in the code-base. Like how they use configs & classes. I see some other people in my team figuring it out very seamlessly. But I don't know which pattern they are using.
      2. And I don't know how time I should spend on this. Since reading a whole book on design patterns would be a lot of time. But knowing them would be useful.
3. Algorithms & ML
   1. A big part of my job or my main-job is improving the algorithms & ML models to make more revenue.
   2. A lot of times, I see my teammates reading similar approaches in the company & adopting them to our use-case. Sometimes doing so I find it hard. Since the docs of these approaches are not in english at times.
      1. So I have ask around some folks to translate things. This severely slows me down.
      2. The better way could be to read outside papers/approaches but that takes more time. And may not know if they fit so good to our use-case.

Would love feedback on

• how I can work better on these things
• what mindsets I can adopt here to make more progress.

Last weekend, I got some surprising news from my EM after our team's Pulse review submission was done.
Turns out, I'm getting a 'Meet Most' rating. I've been at Meta for two years now, and my EM thinks it's a good idea for me to start looking outside the company since a promotion seems tough in the next six months.

I'm not really sure what to think about this. Has anyone else been in this boat? I'd love to hear your experiences. Also, Is switching teams within Meta a viable option ?

Hi All,

I have a situation, can you help me on how you'd navigate it?

I have a potential project idea that has staff level scope.

There's a pain point across our company and this project would help the entire company.

I want to lead this project because it'd be a tremendous opportunity for my growth.

Given that I'm mid-level and lack of experience leading projects, I fear ownership of the project will be given to someone else to lead if I speak on it. This project shouldn’t be done in silo, this project needs to be part of the engineering priority because it will span across multiple teams.

Can you help me navigate how to maintain ownership/lead this project?

Hey. I joined Taro's Slack community, and I see neither there, do community resources for such topics exist?

I would love to share my resume for review, is there any way to do this on Taro right now (I can imagine there are non-Taro resources for this, the quality of which may vary, but if you know one which quality is up to Taro's standards, please share them).

Hi everyone,

I received an offer from AWS for a SDE 2 role. I was planning on asking for an additional 50k sign on bonus for year 1. I would justify this ask with evidence of past work (saving on infrastructure costs, mentoring multiple engineers) and being willing to cancel other interviews (mix of onsites and first rounds).

I'm a boomerang and the offer is the same as my TC before I got laid off. I also read some Taro Q&A and negotiation videos but couldn't find a situation similar to mine. The email states:

This will be the highest offer we are able to put forward at this time.

Is this a trick to try to get me not to negotiate?

My last feedback from my engineer manager was, I don't understand the task at work regularly and this is not an isolated incident, it takes too long for me to complete a task. When I seek for help, they point me to a direction to where to look into. After that when we meet at the second time, there is not much progress from where I left off.

It seems like I rely on my senior engineer too much, I feel like my approach was asking them for answers. I don't find it sustainable in the long term.
Obviously, I want to grow in developing my skills but whenever I get stuck, I get frustrated which add more stresses to me so I procrastinate, whether it is sleeping or playing games.

I don't have a computer science degree and come straight out of a coding bootcamp. Maybe that's where I feel lack of confidence or just feel lack of motivation in tackling difficult problems.

I am a bit lost at the moment, but I don't want to repeat this kind of behaviour.

How do I set myself up for success?

I'm moving forward to team matching at Meta for E4 and wanted to ask the community if they had any suggestions for teams with the strongest potential for growth, especially for the New York office.

The recruiter gave me the following survey. I stated I'd be more of a "Product - Generalist" role. Would also be curious to learn more about "Systems - Generalist" as I did the System Design interview as well.

In general from what I've seen, there's a decent amount of opportunity in Instagram, Whatsapp, and Reality Labs (from product announcements and earnings calls). I've also been told to avoid monetization as it's difficult to make an impact there.

Would appreciate any advice or suggestions! Also would appreciate tips on what questions to ask Hiring Managers to assess how they grow E4s.

What is your role? (select the one that applies) 

• Systems - Generalist 
• Product - Generalist  

What type of work motivates you the most? (select all that apply) 

• Infra: Scaling challenges
• UX: Building user experiences
• Growth: Top of line impact
• Integrity: Ensuring platform safety 
• Social Impact: Progressing positive change on key social issues 

Who do you want to build products for? (select all that apply) 

• Consumers: External, individual users of the Meta family of apps 
• Businesses: External business account users of Meta family of products 
• Meta Employees: Users of internal tools 
• Developers: Internal and external engineers using Meta developer products and APIs 

Please select which Meta Pillar(s) you’d be interested in joining? (select all that apply) 

• Family of Apps: Enable optimized enforcement and support of account integrity to foster safe and meaningful communities. 
• Monetization: Empower people and businesses to succeed in the global economy
• Gen AI: bring the transformative potential of generative AI to people and businesses
• Reality Labs: build tools that help people feel connected anytime, anywhere

How would you rank your preference in terms of products? (feel free to use numbers)

• Facebook App
• Monetization
• Privacy
• Messenger
• Instagram
• What’s App
• Reality Labs (AR/VR)

I joined a new company about eight months ago. Up until now, most of the work was more about deploying existing models & doing minor tweaks here & there.

However, I feel the expectation now is to make novel changes to the algorithm. So, I work on a big ML model in TensorFlow. I haven't coded in tensorflow for some time. Theoretically, I read the papers of the code & I understand the model overall. But I don't understand the code; it seems super complicated. It has no comments and does not have the best variable names. I also fear reading it because I've never been that good at deep learning frameworks.

I once asked another co-worker how she/he read the code base. And they just told me it's so easy just to read, which makes me feel more dumb now.

I was thinking of using claude/chat-gpt to understand it. But every time I don't understand anything, it reinforces my mindset of being bad at this.

I don't talk about this to people in my team because I feel dumb asking how basic lines of code work. I feel I want to figure it out myself but how can I develop better mindsets & better approaches for this?

I recently got an opportunity to switch teams and am evaluating whether this is the right move for me.

To help me decide:

1. What's your thought process when deciding when to switch teams?
2. What's your thought process to decide which team to switch to?
3. What lessons have you learned from when you've previously switched teams?

P.S. I'm purposely leaving this extremely vague to not bias your answers. My goal is to discover blind spots in my thought processes, so I don't limit the discussion to revolve around my current scenario.

This will be a bit of a long story so please bear with me, I am willing to give you more context.

I am a foreign student who graduated from computer science. I have been working in the field since 2021, I was more passionate about design and big data over intensive leet code coding. These were the projects I also aced in college getting 90% in Big Data or Front End Design projects and barely passing on coding intensive

When I graduated to maintain my status I had to be employed in an E verified company so I took what I got, a full stack developer position. My mindset was more, maybe it’s a fear once I dive into might overcome it. The company was amazing and so were my managers. I loved every moment working there - I even finished all the assigned projects ranging from maintenance to building full MERN stack apps in 2 1/2 years. I learnt a lot and got more confident in my developer abilities.

Despite getting things done and finishing projects, I did realize I want to dive into UI/UX/ Front End Development or Reporting, because I’ve always enjoyed doing that more than Full Stack. I had a talk with my manager to see if I can laterally move. He gave me a go signal, but I got laid off a month after.

I will take 100% responsibility here that I had got a little complacent with furthering my career “outside “ work hours, and I learnt my lesson which I am willing to change and I got time to think about it after being unemployed 2 1/2 years of all the things I could’ve done better.

It’s been 2 months. I’ve been applying for jobs and haven’t got any, barely got 2 interviews which I didn’t do well in, but I’ll keep persisting

A sticking point I noticed here, generally being introverted I have some discomfort with marketing myself better or more like an imposter syndrome, and I was passive during my last work too which I know is not serving me anymore

What am I doing which is in my control?

• I enrolled in Googles UX certification and plan to get my portfolio ready in 2-3 months so in future I can be transition into my dream career
• Enrolled in a SQL course so I can keep the option of reporting open
• Joined this group because I never had much of a tech industry network or guidance, and I plan to take my career more seriously going in future.
• Applying for jobs everyday, mostly Full stack because that’s what I can explain to the interviewer because I have experience. Since my OPT unemployment starts Nov 15 which I get 3 months of

My questions:

1. What might be the possibilities that I am not getting interviews at all? I am not even applying to big tech, mostly manufacturing companies. Where can I send over my resume for review?
2. I do want to make the change into either reporting or UI/UX, because I am passionate about that and I believe I can kill it In that, how would you suggest an entry-mid level developer going down that path?

I am open to any honest feedback.

My Role is Senior SRE

I received my second performance review and it came in at a -M which means Sometimes meets expectations. This is my first year in big tech and I'm at a loss for words. I worked 12-hour days since I started. The first 6 months I just winged it and did not realize how strategic and crucial these performance reviews were.

So for my second 6 months, I aligned with my team lead and manager. I executed every project they asked me to and even created some projects to help the entire team. I was led to believe I was doing good work. However, this Tuesday I received the news that my rating is again a -M. They said that they did not put me on a PIP because they saw improvement from the last PR.

They told me the reason was that I am one of 3 Sr. Engineers and that two of them are performing more than I am. Since we are rated on a curve I am last. 9 out of my 10, 360 reviews were positive and an M or above. I have a follow-up meeting next week with my manager to discuss my improvement plan. I also set up a call with my manager's manager for a coaching/mentorship call.
Here are my questions.

• I feel like my manager sees others as more proficient than me. Even though other colleagues tell me I am better than the other senior engineers how can I break out of this perception my manager has?
• How can I avoid a PIP? Our next performance review is in 2-3 months due to some changes they made in the yearly PR schedule. I don't think I can make enough changes during that time.
• What should my approach be towards my manager and his manager?
  • I want to be humble but also direct.
  • I feel I am not being treated fairly but I also think the system may be designed this way. I don't want to appear like I am a victim either.
• I fear that I will get a PIP due to my manager's subjective opinion I will lose my job, my apartment, and I will have lost the last 2 years of working myself to the bone. How can I escape being in this state of survival?

Every time I'm assigned to a new ticket. I feel really anxious and afraid of asking questions because I don't know anything about it.

This led to procrastinating and making zero progress during 2 - 3 days.

Has someone else experienced this? How did you overcome it?

Code freeze is coming up next week so everyone is scrambling to ship their diffs in right now. However I am facing a hard technical blocker which can be resolved by a coworker on another team, but he’s too busy with his own diffs to help out. I am unable to reproduce or debug this issue myself as it involves some highly technical details about how a proprietary mobile framework (Bloks) interacts and compiles down to the Android native fragments, and I have minimal experience with either. The coworker wrote that specific part of the Bloks framework and no one else seems to understand it (even the Bloks on-call couldn’t figure it out). What can I do at this point?

I'm at a medium size software company, but still sometimes I find it really hard to get promoted if I don't fight for or create a golden project in the org. With almost 5YOE approaching, I still find myself struggle to advance to next level in my role. People I worked directly on my project are both at least 2 levels above me, they're at Senior II or Staff eng level.

I am now in a really awkward situation where I don't know if I should just interview at other similar level company for senior position or change teams internally.