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

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 work for a very technical and niche start-up as a Frontend Developer. For context, we have 3 F.E. devs and 3 B.E. devs. I was hired as a vaguely-level intermediate developer, and after about nine months at this company, my F.E. lead is advocating for me to be a Senior developer. The only issue is that the company hasn't done internal promotions before, and they're a bit stalled whilst considering how to best handle the process. There's also some ambiguity in measuring a Front-end developer's skills - especially compared to a back-end developer; Our CEO is also a seasoned back-end developer, so he understands technical skills but is unclear on how it maps to Front-end skills. What are some things I can bring up to my company's leadership on how to measure my skills and value? Such to help facilitate a conversation around my promotion.

I've been working as a software engineer for 9+ years. Even though graduated in CSE, I never put a great effort in learning DSA into deep. Nor did I found interest in solving problems in leetcode. I mostly worked in startup jobs. The expectations are kind of clear here. Build apis and features and deploy. I believe I know moderate amount of system design and build product from scratch using js tech. Have hands on experience in Node, React and AWS. Lead ~4-5 members for a short time. Never had the opportunity to build product which needed a great scale. DB sharding, working in a system that had 100s of micrsoervices is something I have never experienced. I'm making around $75k in UAE. How can I give myself a learning path which would lead me to a better paying job. Ideally ~120k+. Spending 2-3 hrs daily would be difficult because of personal commitment. Maybe 6-8hrs total in a week I can manage. Thanks

My team is quite small but we own a handful of critical services. Because of the small size, our on-call rotation is around 6 weeks or less but the actual load is somewhat manageable. We do not get an intolerable amount of high severity pages but get a lot of low severity tickets. We constantly work on projects that support goals for other teams that always seem to be higher priority while our tech debt grows. We have identified longer term fixes for some of recurring issues but never have the time to implement them. Most of our planned work for the upcoming year involve modernizing infrastructure or migrating existing services. I'm concerned about whether staying on this team would be conducive to my career growth.

Since Dec 2021 to Aug 2022, My managers changed 4 times after and I got promoted from sde1 to 2. Due to multiple projects and managers, I could not take ownership as I was still in ramp up phase but manager was expecting more at the SDE2 level, pointing issues, demotivating. So I took internal transfer to a different team. I am in this new team for 3 months. 1 month - I took to even understand the basics. Manager left and new manager joined. I had to go on vacation for 15 days. I don't have metrics to show that I am performing at the SDE2 level because I didn't get design projects (design phase has already been completed by the time I joined this team). No OPS, this is a new product. There are no operational tasks. Working on beta launch. I am the last person who joined this team. I don't have anyone to become mentor since I have limited knowledge on this new team and work Have not taken interviews due to hiring freeze Worried about Q1 performance cycle in 2023. 2022 was difficult for me to show any impact. Is there anything I can do now to not get low rating in Q1? At this point, I am no more interested in work and just want to leave due to lack of mentorship. I have a buddy who answers questions if I ask in this team but I don't have anyone to mentor me to guide me to see what kind of projects I can work, coming up with the initiatives. I feel stuck. There are no hirings happening outside and inside the company. What can I do to proceed further?

As I gain more experience working at this team, I have been eventually onboarded to work on different projects with different contexts, and finally arrived at a point where multiple bottlenecks kick in at one time. For example, I need someone(s) to unblock me, do knowledge transfers, while they are typically very busy; I need to spend time on building understanding on new stuff on my own; I also need to spend time on undocumented work (being a resource to other engineers for some of the work I have done, unexpected work request (enhancements, API revision...) flows into my plate, technical debt, review PRs, checking in teammates' progresses, planning and retrospect work efficiency improvement, and etc.). The goal is to make sure I am not blocking other's work, and deliver with speed and quality, as well as meeting Team's priorities (not even mentioning books and tutorials learning besides day-to-day tasks) My manager has recently expressed concern on my delivery speed and quality, so what could be my next steps? Thanks in advance.

I was lucky to join a very competent and lovely platform team when I joined my current company. I have been working in the same team for 18 months but due to re-orgs people have moved out and we are currently 3 people and we were 9 people when we started out. We have been doing mostly maintenance work for the past 3 months after re-orgs and recently we were given a choice to work on two projects. There is one project, lets call it Project Hero which my skip level manager wants me to join. I would be the main PIC for this project and it will involve a lot of integration work and system design. This project is with new team mates and a new manager with whom I have not worked but they don't have the best reputation. However, going by FAANG level, they should be good enough to get the job done. Only downside is work-life balance might be skewed if I join here. However, if the project is a success, it sets me up for Senior level promotion. There is another project, lets call it Project Nero. This will be with my existing team but from a company perspective, it's not a very important project. But I will be working with my existing team mates who are both capable of delivering a solid project and a joy to work with. However, my work here will be overshadowed by other Senior engineers on the project. Which project should I join? I personally want to do Project Hero but not with the people present there. Also it will be challenging. Project Nero will be challenging also but more up my comfort zone. Given the current economic climate, I feel being in more important teams will help keep my job.

I just had my last date at my (now former) job. I'm set to start at Instacart next week. Whoot! I'm wondering if I can/should ask to push back my start date by a week. The reasons to do so are: I get 2 weeks of vacation to relax before I start my job. I'd like to do a bit of travel before I start and the extra week would be huge. I won't have 2 weeks of vacation for a long time, so it's a lot. I get more time to beef up on stuff I should know coming into my job. While I would very much like to ask, I'm inclined not to. Here's why: I'm starting on contract with a fellow contractor and I believe that peer just started today. One week behind him is prob better than 2 The contract I signed goes until late December, so I'm not sure they can push back that date even if my start date is pushed back. I kinda already agreed to the start date. When it comes to negotiating pay, the rule is it doesn't hurt to ask. I know that and benefited from it! But in this case, I'm concerned it does hurt to ask as I don't want to seem unenthusiastic about the job or not looking forward to starting or someone whose word is unreliable. What do people think? Should I ask or just chin up and bear it? Thanks!

I've recently joined a medical robotics startup as an Embedded Software Engineer after working for four years in large organizations in the wireless and semiconductor domain. I'm grateful for the full-time role and have already started contributing positively. I have taken the initiative in documenting processes and setting standards, which my manager appreciates. However, my curiosity about the business side led me to arrange brief interviews with all employees, including the CEO. This was well-received by the engineering team, but caused concerns with the non-engineering staff, leading to a reprimand for inappropriate conduct. Previously, I endured a difficult experience as a contractor with non-technical managers who were dissatisfied with my work despite my hard efforts, failing to convert me to full-time. I now find myself in a better situation but am still haunted by past experiences and need guidance to navigate this new environment. Could you provide advice on how to integrate into the startup culture and reconcile my curiosity for learning with appropriate professional conduct? How can I heal from past trauma while embracing new challenges and opportunities in my current role?

I am working in 3 XFN projects (Say Projects A, B ,C) at the same time. Manager wants success in Project A for sure . But he doesn't allow me to be fully dedicated to Project A. He also wants me to come with suggestions to make project A successful. The thing is Projects B & C are huge time consumers and I am left with very little time for Project A. How should I approach my manager to assign me fully to Project A. I have successfully deliver projects in past when I was assigned to a single project only . I am bad at multi-tasking. Project A's success will definitely increase chances of my promo.

My goal is get promoted to senior [5A], and I'm currently working remotely. My manager is okay with me working remote only, but the promo committee might not be as Uber leadership overall is investing into RTO, and my team has gone back to the office for the most part. Do you think this will hurt my chances, and if so, any tips on how to navigate the situation?

I'm thinking there are a few options: Get a role on an AI project/team (internal transfer), learn AI specific engineering expertise on the job (not research) Do part-time masters, land a role in AI research Self-learn, land a role in AI research

I recently received an offer to join an Ads team at Meta at E4 level. The comp was pretty much equal. Here are some pros of my current team: Work life balance is great I've learned a lot and am still learning a decent amount Manager is nice Here are the two big problems I have with my team: I see no path to L6. My org is very L6 heavy, and even more L5 heavy (i.e. no L4's to mentor). There are strong L5 engineers that should have been promoted long ago but are still here. They are always given the promotion level projects (despite still never being promoted). The projects I'm working on feel extremely useless, and there is minimal real impact that product or engineers have on the business. (Few massive enterprise customers with deal terms driving business growth over product) - A lot of features we build are used by tens (yes tens) of users. - Some of our systems are interesting and high scale (we serve content), but are heavily guarded by a group of OG engineers that don't like to involve others. The Ads team at Meta seems bland but impactful, they have concrete incremental revenue goals and are serving a large amount of ads customers. Don't know much else. The manager seems nice and mentioned that "oncall wasn't bad". Here's a few additional twists to my situation: I actually declined the Meta offer already in fear of losing my WLB, but every time I push a commit for a feature I know that at most 10-20 people will care about, I start to wonder if I should try to claw my way back towards another offer (I declined a few days ago) I'm possibly going to need to leave the Bay Area in August 2025 (so my tenure if I switch may be ~1.5 years, probably not long enough for promotion) I'm trying to think of what would put me in the best situation in 1.5 years when I move and begin another job search. Hopefully I'll land in a more senior role by then.

I live in India, I aspire to work in a product-based company in the United States as a Senior Software Engineer. There are a couple of approaches that I know of so I will jot them down: Open-source: Contribute, talk to the community, and build a brand around yourself. This is the higher chance of getting noticed in the ecosystem. (I'm planning to do this in the coming months) Freelancing for example use Upwork & target specific locations. If there is a pathway or any other resources to follow please help.

My team is a fairly distributed team, so I've setup monthly 1-on-1s with everyone to help build up relationships. For 1-on-1s like this, what strategies do you use to build strong relationships quickly? Most resources on 1-on-1s focus on ones with your manager. But I feel like there's a difference here.

Hello everyone, I am currently moving from one team to another. I had an external offer from TikTok but I decided not to take it because it wasn't the right position for me. I want to focus more on AI and Mobile Development which I will get to do on this new team at Microsoft. I tried to get Microsoft to match the offer from TikTok but they said that they won't do that for internal Transfers. My new hiring manager wanted to give me a promotion and match the offer but the leadership denied it. My questions are: What can I do once I join the team to expedite my promotion and try to get exceeds expectations? Is there a way I can target an SSA(Special Stock Award)? I hear getting awarded SSA's are basically a black box. Wanted to see if Taro has any insights on this. Are there any other things that I am not considering?

I came into my role with an advanced degree, so I started out as a mid-level engineer. However, I still need to be able to ask questions as I've never worked as an engineer before. I've seen all the Taro content around asking questions, but my manager has drilled in since a few months into this role that expectations are that I function independently, unblock myself, and don't take up much of others' time by asking questions. That it would count against me in performance reviews (versus for me if I help others with their questions). Given the current job market, I don't know where else to go, but this environment leaves me pretty exasperated. Is it normal in other companies to go to more senior engineers with help getting unblocked? Are questions only really around code, or is it normal to ask for help debugging a feature/bug/test? I worry about becoming a senior with the expectation to be independent and help others when I myself have never received guidance to grow to that level properly.

I'm a mid-level engineer who's struggling with some performance issues at work. A staff engineer on my team has taken notice and has been very generous with offering help and advice, to the extent of basically handholding me through my projects. While I truly appreciate the help, I'm wondering if this will be seen as a negative signal during performance evaluation since I'm supposed to be operating 'independently' at this level.

I m hearing a lot of podcast regarding coding will be dead and we have no need for programmers and all these kind of stuff. So, my question is why to do it then? Why do LeetCode and why to do other stuff for entry level software engineering jobs? What’s the future?

Let me preface this by saying I have extreme impostor syndrome and I am optimizing for most chill company that's easier to survive in. I have offers from cockroach labs, and disney streaming. Both are senior level offers. At my last company (which i was let go from, I believe it was cause I took too long to resolve an outage in their eyes) i was basically doing mid level eng work so I'm not even sure I'm senior material tbh. I have a little over 5 yoe. I've been laid off before and my perf has oscillated from good to bad etc (at times I've had personal things interfere with my work) so I'm very fearful of cutthroat/extremely high expectations environments. From what I've seen, cockroach labs is very highly regarded in the industry, so in the case where I get laid off, it may be better to have a better brand name on my resume. They also do seem to have a good wlb. However, a lot of the people there are coming from other very reputable companies, and I'm very worried I won't be up to the par compared to these people, especially in this environment where performance is looked at more closely. They also did a large RIF last year which impacted low performers. As far as disney, it may be easier to meet the expectations if the talent bar is lower, but they have done a fair amount of layoffs over the last few years, and the streaming unit has only recently gotten profitable. Seems the leadership is telling a story this will last, it's unclear how well the performance of the business will be long term. Cockroach labs seems to be very well positioned from a company performance POV. I say all this because I don't really want to go through another job searching phase for a while, so I'm considering the strength of the business as well in addition to how capable I would be of surviving at the company.

I have received another offer from Company B that is substantially better than my current offer from Company A (which I have signed) in terms of compensation, responsibilities and team. I am curious to know what are some ways to approach this. What is the best way for me to renege the previous offer without burning bridges? Did anyone here show a competing offer to Company A (after signing) and try to re-negotiate or move the needle? Has it worked for you, if you did this in a polite manner? Are there any pitfalls I should be aware of, in the above scenarios? Please share your experiences, if you have done this in the past.

I have 3 years of experience (YOE) working as a Python developer. I've noticed a significant decrease in job postings for Python recently. I'm unsure whether I should consider switching to Java for better future opportunities. In my research, I've found that Java is predominantly used in many large companies which is good for my career. What do you think?

I'm currently working on one of my KR tasks, and have pockets of time available as the project involves cross-time zone communication at this stage. My manager wants me to focus on another KR that I have been planned for in Q4. This project is an important part of my manager's project that he started when he was a TL. My skip manager wants me to focus on a non-KR task of increasing the scope of our team in a different project. If I manage to increase the scope of this project, I can change my KR to this new task in Q4 and lead the whole project is his rationale. I'm confused in this situation as to what to do?

I'm a pretty new SDE 2, and I know that the SDE 2 -> SDE 3 promotion is really difficult at Amazon. Given that, I would like to start working on this promotion as soon as possible. However, I'm new, so I don't want to make things weird for my manager and I. When does it make sense for me to bring up this topic of promotion and start working on a growth plan with my manager?