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

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.

My manager is all supportive of my promo from L4 to L5, but I am worried that my skip might be leaving the company. I can tell my skip is in a difficult position with their boss (director), so if my skip leaves the company, my confidence of getting promo will go down (my direct manager will stay for a while, though). So what kind of considerations should I have? Should I jump ship, just because of the fact that my skip might be leaving? Thank you

I got a P40 offer from Adobe working on some ML-related problems in AEP. The pay is decent. However, I do wonder how it will be seen on my resume.

I am from a mid-size social media company (think of Reddit, Pinterest, Snap, LinkedIn, etc.), so I can shoot for FAANG if I'd like. However, I wonder if I decide to go to Adobe first and then FAANG a few years later, will a stint at Adobe on my resume hurt the optics? I don't care about "prestige" per se but I do wonder how it will be seen from a recruiter or HM's perspective. Worry about potential bias. Thank you!

Hey Folks, I have a System Design Interview with Figma. Is there some fundamental material that I can start from?

TL;DR: is being deeply involved in the details and not a hands off managerial approach to starting companies popularized by brian chesky and paul graham

Nothing much here, just thoughts? Anyone here working in startups going "founder mode"?

Hi, I have joined Goldman Sachs recently (4 months back) and almost close to deliver my first major project (end of week). My main work is in creating data pipelines or using in house sql tools to gather data in various lakes and warehouse for other tools to use them. The Tech part of the whole firm seems super unorganised (they never use agile or change management in past 6 years for tracking work) having so many in house legacy tools, never having generic view of the problem to create generic solution and half the time doing manual reconciliation or data search for expected data fields with super high learning curve.

I feel I should go for switch. What are some of the points I should use to analyse the team and the firm for switching so early? My team is supportive to help me but they are always under pump. In my last company, we were about to be laid off, so I didn't need to evaluate company for switch.

Hello! I am looking to talk to someone who has dabbled in GenAI/Prompt engineering specifically for code migration/tech debt work.

Task:

• migrate from old service APIs to new service APIs.
• There isn’t exactly one to one mapping between APIs.
• Avoid deviating from given instructions as bot adds (incorrectly) some code lines or formatting

Any advice on prompt writing is appreciated or any learnings so far about what works or doesn’t.

I am using Claude 3 Sonnet model wrapped inside tooling for easy usage to run the changes on code repository.

I get that getting users means the project is impressive which makes it a better project which would lead to more interviews.

But why are projects with users better?

Isn't a project with users just giving me signal about your marketing/sales/product skills and not engineering skills? Especially if you're building a utility app/one time use app e.g. background remover. The hard part about getting users isnt the technical stuff its the marketing/sales based on the fact that most apps I've seen ship something small, market it a ton, get users, and then worry about making the app really really good.

Would using no code tools to build a site which got a 1000 users be just as impressive if I used nextjs and nodejs?

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 , and also the .

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!

I am an E4 Machine Learning Engineer working with a (traditional) Software Engineering Tech Lead who lacks a strong understanding of Machine Learning. This gap makes it challenging for him to communicate clearly the needed technical requirements, set a clear direction for my projects, and maintain consistent priorities, which often shift unexpectedly.

As a result, I frequently feel unclear about my deliverables for this half-year and worry that this lack of clarity might negatively impact my performance review.

Do you have any advice or suggestions on how I can navigate this situation?

wanted some advice up here. As of late I have observed myself slacking at work. I used to enjoy doing the work I did but as of late it feels repetitive, and even though there is so much scope to learn, I get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of it and let it go. My coding skills have also deteriorated and I haven’t had any promotion the 4 years that I have been here and am still a mid level engineer.

Had a convo with my manager and he said to create more impact to be a senior engineer. I am going through at the moment but how to overcome getting overwhelmed at work, and take it slow and one at a time? I am also looking into creating my EB1 profile as well but am very confused right now. How can I be a better engineer? Any suggestions and tips to keep in mind to be motivated at work again?

Thanks

I'm about to join a FAANG level company soon, what are some of the best practices to follow and how to create a 30-60-90 day plan for onboarding?

I have an opportunity to work on what could be an interesting side-project.

I was approached by a matchmaker friend of mine to help her with her website. Her website is currently used by ~80 matchmakers and the number of matchmakers is growing. Essentially, the site is a database of profiles that matchmakers can search based on various criteria.

After speaking with my friend, it's clear there are 2 main things that need to be done.

The first is a website migration. Right now the site is hosted on Salesforce which my friend says is expensive, so she's looking to host on something cheaper.

The second thing is she wants to develop a mobile app because so many of the matchmakers matchmake on the go and it's inconvenient for them to use a site that's not optimized for mobile.

This project has a number of great qualities

1. An area of interest (to me)
2. Real users with a real business problem
3. Potential to get paid for my work
4. Ability to make lots of connections and develop my network
5. Grow my technical skills through web-dev and mobile-dev

As it happens, a lot of the plusses are also minuses:

1. I'm a Data Engineer and have never done front-end or mobile-dev, so I'll have to learn a lot and it could be stressful
2. I'm 2 months into a 6 month contract Data Engineer role at Instacart (my first Big Tech job) and really want to be renewed if possible. Working on this orthogonal project in the evening won't allow me to work on work

Overall, I'm learning towards just punting on this, i.e. telling my friend I don't have time for this right now, helping her find someone, and if I change my mind later on, offering to help then.

Am curious if people feel strongly one way or the other regarding what to do.

Thought are welcome!

Thanks!

In my 3rd week at Big Tech, I was over-eager to get my first PR merged (into a particular legacy Airflow repo) so I could complete my first ticket and show some progress. I made probably the most classic rookie-mistake of not properly in staging, and my code ended up causing a sev that took down Prod for about 30 minutes. Since this was a particular legacy Airflow repo, it wasn't the end of the world since only internal workers were affected, only a small subset of the company, and it happened at night. Still, this was a pretty bad look for me to my manager and I've been working hard since to make a better impression.

At my company, for every sev, there's a process to write up a Root Cause Analysis (RCA) Doc where you describe the issue, 5-whys for why it happened, the timeline for how it happened, who it affected, and a few other details. There's technically an SLA of 2 weeks set to each RCA, but looking at other RCA docs, I see a lot of them were never actually filled out.

From my perspective, the reason for the sev was simple: I didn't adequately test in staging. The oncall guy who helped me navigate the issue encouraged me to not personalize it as much and to think in terms of the process, e.g. testing in staging should have been required or canary testing in prod should have caught and rolled back my code.

I have filled out the RCA doc on Confluence and can publish it but am hesitant to do so because I'm concerned about reminding people that I caused the sev.

I have 2 concrete questions:

1. Should I publish the RCA? I can prob get away without doing it since it doesn't look like it's enforced. I guess if someone does decide to follow up and sees I haven't filled it out it could be a bad look, but given that it's been over a month since I was supposed to publish it, it doesn't seem likely.
2. If I should publish, should I look to engage with my oncall mentor regarding implementing some of his feedback for making testing in staging required or canary rollbacks? It seems like a lot of work to do (for myself or others) for something that was a "me-error" and people might get annoyed if they now have to test everything in staging when they don't currently have to. It also takes me away from my current tickets (which my manager prob cares more about me completing).

Thank you for reading this!

I'm not too happy with my current job, I feel like career growth prospects are dim and the work is not challenging enough. Given this, my best career move is to find a job at a different company.

Given that the work at my job is not good, I want to use side projects (which Taro tells me has a ton of benefits) to be able to get "equivalent" job experience so that when I interview at other companies I'm able to leverage the experience with awesome side projects to do well.

More specifically most data engineering jobs want experience with airflow and pyspark. My current job only has me doing SQL stuff, so I want a side project that leverages airflow/spark

Problem: If I focus on just building apps/web apps to get users then that wont help my data engineering career because most apps dont need someone with a full pyspark pipeline with airflow and whatnot

Conversely, if I focus on building an awsome data engineering pipeline, I'm likely not solving any real world issues and have 0 users, but the skills will help.

Problem 2: If I focus on consumer apps I'll have to learn react (which I 100% dont use at work) and spend time doing backend stuff which isnt helping me grow personally as a DE because I read on Taro that you should be going deep, not wide.

Hi, I'm a backend engineer at a major tech company, currently stationed at an international site. I recently received a green card and have one year to relocate. After a four-year tenure with the company and a two-year break, I've rejoined for the past three months. I'm worried that my short time in the current role might affect my chances for an internal transfer, and that me notifying management on my intentions will cause them to just look for a replacement. What’s the minimum amount of time I should wait before asking for an internal move? I’m thinking about waiting until my first performance review, in a couple of months. Should I wait more? Alternatively, I could apply to other jobs, but I’m not confident in my interviewing skills and find preparing for them to be a hassle, but if I can land something better, and don't have to wait so long, I might do it.

Any thoughts or comments would be helpful. How is the job market in the US right now? Thanks

I recently left my company after taking a separation package rather than initiating a PIP. For personal reasons, I'm not looking to start interviewing immediately. However, I'd like to keep the door open for potential opportunities in 3-6 months. What's the best way to communicate with recruiters and companies? Should I say I'm not currently interested but willing to revisit in a few months? And is it okay to use this time to prepare for future interviews? Any advice would be appreciated, thanks!

My employer pulled a bait and switch on me, my job role (SWE) turned into a non-technical one right after hiring and I feel it’s pushing me out of tech. Even moved to another country for this job, I stayed in the job to pay back relocation money & because it was big tech - did not want to leave after 3-6 months in, I’m close to completing the 2 years mark to end the relocation debt. I’m officially an engineer and paid as one, but since the beginning I’ve not been assigned technical work, only small “scripts” or some “data analysis” my manager supposedly needed.

I’ve never seen anything I wrote go to production and it’s hurting my self confidence. I’ve already moved to another team after 7-8 months in - because of the lack of technical work and encountered very weird behaviour there too: supposedly it takes 1 year (!!) to onboard onto this team, I’ve never been assigned to technical tasks to this day - it’s mostly been data curation and localization. Their strategy to keep people is to give them overinflated performance review feedback and a handsome bonus and raise every year so they keep their mouth shut to upper management (other offices within Apple). It’s a disgusting tactic.

For example in my first year performance review they’ve “made up” projects I had not actually participated in. Management doesn’t care, they say it’s product development and it’s equally important to find solutions that don’t involve code, they have a way of justifying their lies. I’m close to 2 years in and am ashamed of the consequences of this absence from the tech field.

In 1:1s with managers or hire ups they always say it’s technical work, but then eventually one finds out it’s data hillclimbing or data curation. I feel my trust has been abused, I’ve moved to another country for this job (jobs in this market are 3 times lower than what I'm paid now so my only chance is remote I guess) and haven’t grown at all professionally.

Thanks for letting me share this here, I never thought I’d end up with this dilemma when I was offered this big tech job. I was thinking of anonymously reporting this (company has an anonymous line for this), as having internationals move over for this job and destroying their careers should not be an option. I wish I could just forewarn people somehow about applying here.

Hello, One of the developers is leaving my team and the company is planning to handover her work to me in addition to what I have been doing currently. Although I can do that, I also want them to increase my pay. How can I ask for this?

Okay I know people mostly say they work on side projects or contribute to open source, but I enjoy self-study & have always done a cert after using a certain technology extensively at work. For example, I was a Java engineer/consultant for years so it appeared only natural to do the OCP cert and keep it updated. In my current job I've used K8s a lot, so after a few training courses from my company, I took the CKAD. I also enjoy filling in the gaps at work (where there's no training or docs from the company) through Coursera courses/specializations, especially ones.

Does all this reflect badly on my resume? I plan to apply to more senior roles, would someone looking at the list of certs/courses tend to underlevel me or dismiss me? Can't contribute to open source because of my company, also can't publish any apps for now. I've also never seen Senior/Staff engineers with courses/specializations displayed on their LinkedIn profile... am I missing something ?