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

I am in a platform team that has had many senior-level folks since the start. There are many great things already present for our team's productivity like: Automated CI pipelines. ( Deployment is manual - via button clicks though ) Local validation scripts for linting, code generation, testing. Slack bots for sending reminders for PRs. Detailed runbooks for On-Calls Good amount of monitoring stats and alerts. I am the junior-most in my team and want to target for a Senior Engineer role. One way of approaching this is by trying to improve the life of my fellow teammates. But I do not know what I should be adding. Because I do not know what more would be needed. I know this may be a flawed way of thinking. I think it's better if I just keep on doing tiny improvements every day. But in terms of impact, I feel adding some tools / taking initiative here will help. I want to know what can I add to the team's arsenal which can also help me in my journey to Senior Level.

Hello everyone! I am really excited to be joining Meta soon as a partner engineer. I would love some advice on how to get the ground running, making sure I'd make a good impression and start contributing quickly and effectively. I have checked out the amazing questions the community have asked on Taro, and have started looking into the code quality course, onboarding course and also the people-focused onboarding checklist listed here. I am wondering if there are any Meta specific tips or tips on other things I might have missed coming from a non-big tech background? Thanks in advance!

Through a series of unpredictable events, my team has boiled down to just my manager, myself, and many entry-level engineers (SDE 1s). Some of the SDE 1s have some experience (e.g. a somewhat tenured internal transfer) but many are new grads. My manager is being more hands-on with this gap (and I like my manager overall), working through technical reviews and whatnot, and has other plans to shore up the seniority of the team. However, it looks like a lot of responsibility will fall on me to upscale this team and help deliver. This is nice as there's a pretty clear path to SDE 3 for me, but I'm also a relatively new SDE 2, so I'm unsure if I have what it takes. All that being said, is this overall situation good or bad? The growth potential is there, but I'm also afraid of being overwhelmed.

Hi, I'm currently considering a career transition and would appreciate your insights on the best path to take. I come from a non-developer background and I'm torn between pursuing a career as a software engineer or a product manager. My ultimate goal is to ensure a solid growth trajectory in terms of career advancement and opportunities. Given my background as sysadmin/infra person, and now a senior cloud architect, I dealt with a lot of software engineers, including co-designing apps from functional and non-functional requirements. However, haven't had a chance to work as a software engineer myself. I am hesitant in moving to software engineering, due to potential down-levelling so Product/Program managers might be a better fit, but at the same time, a lot of PMs I talked to have SWE background. Is this the red pill that you have to swallow to be SWE first --> PM? What's the best way to transition without being down-levelled too much?

I'm really excited about my new role as a mid-level backend engineer and have been soaking up everything on Taro about onboarding – it's been super helpful! My aim is to ramp up quickly by delivering small wins regularly and asking enough questions to move beyond the newbie phase. I've got a great onboarding buddy and plenty of support, but no one's handing out tasks. Instead, I get to pick from the todo-list. So, I'm wondering: should I focus on infrastructure tasks or feature tasks? The infrastructure work is appealing because it's a chance to dive into microservice infrastructure, something I haven't done before (my last job was more traditional on-prem SOA). But I'm also thinking feature tasks might be better for getting a broader understanding of the system and services. I don't want to be a bottleneck for the team, and infrastructure improvements seem like they could be done in parallel without impacting critical deadlines, but it's also an easy way to get nerd-sniped I'd imagine. Any input is appreciated!

I have only been working at North American tech company for 9 months now. And for most of projects I have worked on till now, I have been super fast and finished my work mostly before deadline/estimate. My question is can this fast work backfire on me? My manager has always praised me but can it be bad like me being disliked by team mates or having problems in future? Should I slow down and finish it slowly (In that case, I am not sure what do I update in project syncs if I have been lazying around and not doing much)? Or continuing at speed will be beneficial for me?

I have 5 years of experience as a “backend Swe” with the first 2 years at a company where I didn't get much chance to learn, and the following 3 years at a mid-sized company (where I have learned much more). Currently, I feel stagnant in my mid-level role and am eager to advance my technical skills. Although I've worked on modifying existing systems and made minor improvements in scaling, I haven’t had the opportunity to design medium to large scale systems from scratch. I’m contemplating whether to join an early stage startup to gain broader experience rather than being confined to a single team. However, I’m uncertain if this is the right step for my career or if it’s just FOMO influencing my decision to leave my current team. I'm also debating whether I should spend more time preparing and aim for other larger tech companies instead (wondering if there is a penalty for having too much YOE and having the expectation of a Senior)

The product managers in my org are pretty ambitious, and that, combined with the fact that we're a startup, leads to a lot of feature work. However, I wish we had more time to do engineering-oriented efforts like refactoring, adding automated tests, and others. The PMs say they want to do it, but this work never seems to be added to the sprint - Any ideas on how I can close this gap and get these types of projects added?

In order to get to senior engineer, I need projects that show creativity and innovation. But I'm not able to get my manager to give me those projects. How do I find projects I can drive that are also impactful?

I'm aiming for a promotion in 5 months and to do that I've been told that I need to evidence execution on a few complex projects. As a team we're working on some big projects but I'm not sure how to approach identifying a sub-project, isolating and owning it. Does anyone have any tips on this?

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: 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. 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?

I know that moving companies is very powerful in terms of compensation and learning new things. However, I'm wondering if it's still effective in the context of trying to get to the highest engineering execution levels like director or VP?

I have 3+ years of coding experience, primarily in Java, and working in a Fintech startup. The backend is primarily powered via Spring Boot here. I heavily use Gen AI services like ChatGPT & ClaudeAi while coding. While this has helped me learn new things, I am beginning to see a mental pattern emerge. I often find myself generating code rather than writing it myself. Sometimes this also leads to drag, as I am left explaining the context to GenAi. The pro is that I perhaps get a more optimal, finetuned code leveraging the large language model's knowledge capabilities. Is that an optimal path I am headed for? Or should I introduce an emergency tweak in how I work to better my career as a stronger, confident software engineer? Thanks.

As a team switcher, I'm worried that I could join a team that is rapidly expanding in headcount but isn’t having a clear business impact so the execs don’t care: As an engineer, would you get punished for this with worse performance reviews and slower career growth? How can you evaluate the business impact of a team? Is it just an educated guess or are there concrete things I can look at to judge this?

I am looking for a new role since layoffs last week and have applied for internal transfers for roles outside my skill set like Ruby on Rails work. Since I have no experience with the tech stack behind these roles, how to I put it in convincing words that: I can adapt to the new languages and frameworks to succeed in their role I compensate for this lack of technical knowledge with me already being similar with platform and tools used at this company

I was talking to someone who was on the fence about buying taro premium. Their main qualm was being unsure if the topics covered by paid portion go into enough depth that they couldnt get for free elsewhere The "barrier" or friction of purchase is pretty steep with Taro. It's either a commitment of 400 dollars or or 60/mo for a 1 month commitment. So to the taro founders mostly or if anyone else wants to chip on their experience with freemium/7 day free trial models

What are the common failure modes you’ve seen for new engineers at Big Tech cos, where they had to quickly exit the company due to bad performance?

Everything is available online. What to do, what not to, everything is there. But still, why do we need mentors and how can that actually help our career to grow? Lastly, where can you find good mentors?

Joining a FAANG (Amazon) as a senior eng after being mid level at another FAANG. The team uses Go programming language which I've never used before. Should I work hard on learning this language (in the week I have before starting) or just relax and wait till I actually start?

As part of my story or task, often times I have to understand and contribute to other codebases or solve bugs that involve understanding flow of other codebases. What is the best way to navigate this when you are suppose to solve an issue where you have to understand an external codebase in order to contribute or fix an issue?

Hi, I recently got an offer for mid-level Software Engineer role from Meta, London. While I'm really excited about the opportunity, due to some personal reason, it's not possible for me to move to London and I'm preferring to work either remotely or any location from India. Is it possible to convince my hiring manager for working remotely? Would really appreciate some pointers on this.

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 levels.fyi, 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: 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. 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: Better salary and benefits, and a higher salary ceiling (it’s almost impossible to reach FAANG L5-level salary in my current job). I was previously a Googler, so I’m familiar with Google’s culture (though I was laid off in 2023). 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 recently accepted an offer as a full-stack developer for Atlassian (P4). I have about 2 years of experience. My first company was about 12 people (all engineers, no teams) and my current company is about 400 people (about 20 engineers, with my team size being 5 people). The team I'm moving to at Atlassian has about 100 engineers in total, and the team I will be on should have around 10 engineers I have been told. The hiring manager said that the teams are made up mostly of mid-level and senior engineers. What can I do to make sure I get up to speed in ample time and be able to make an impact? I would like to become very career focused starting with this job and focus on advancement. My main concern is that maybe my experience in only smaller teams at smaller companies will cause friction for me as it will be a big adjustment.

So I’m the same person who asked how to compare faang experience to non faang and I’m taking the advice to develop the senior behaviors. Again the idea is let’s work on this and as the lagging indicator I’ll be ready for the e4 offer at faang, a senior promotion or the stretch e5 offer when I interview with faang companies at some point. So I think I have a plan in mind. For the 2 projects I’ve effectively got buy in from my manager to own end to end. One of them is just a large volume of coding that basically gave my manager confidence I can craft lower level requirements and cross check my research on the requirements to deliver independently and hold meetings with the po and work with him to confirm my research on the production data. The other I will explain below. His advice when I talked to him in my 1:1 after expressing the desire to learn senior skills was to effectively deliver “here’s the problem here’s the xfn, go”. But is that senior or mid level? I’d imagine this is borderline and if I’m doing this I guess execution has to be flawless. But I think the goal is to go further. I hear the key bit is having that multiplicative project under your belt and think about how to make the space better every year. My proposed path to learn senior behaviors: Basically I have an api migration project which involved technically complex ways of using the internals of a framework to connect to a mandatory interface for the company. I effectively figured the tech on my own and built the partnership with the senior engineer on the xfn team who I’m connecting to without my manager connecting us. It made me look good to everyone and I plan on trying to grow my scope from mid level to senior by coordinating the url switch for the clients who use it I believe there are 4 teams. my multiplicative project in mind is to make data translation and data correlation in a streaming environment config driven so our dev work goes down by like a significant percentage. It’s a pain im seeing . I imagine there might be some complexity involved in managing this. My po mentioned that the skip wants something like this and I’m leveraging work that I seen be a huge hit at my previous company to base my execution off of. Again this is super early, so I’m just checking if my idea is good even though I get that it’s 1% of the journey since execution is the 99% that’s gonna count. I hope this plan is gonna count, any tips to begin this journey will help.