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

I have been in the team matching process with Meta for the last 3 weeks. I have talked to 4 teams and 2 of them did not proceed futher. The other 2 teams are something I would rank in the top of the 4 but I am not completely satisfied with the role at these teams. How long do you think is it good to slow down the team matching for so as to explore other team matching calls? Or would it be a bad move as I can miss out the current available opportunities?

If I go ahead with any of the teams that don't completely align with my interests, how easy is it to switch internally after I join a team?

I’ve been e3 for about two years. my manager put me for promo last two halves but it didn’t go through .(due to a bunch of reasons which are ambiguous , the feedback I got both times was - you’re doing 4 work but we have a quota) I believe there was some politics involved but that’s water under the bridge.

I’m going to reach e4 end of this half. I’ve lost trust in my management chain. I do think my team may have good opportunity and everything else is good but I don’t think my manager is invested in growing me.

I’m very ambitious and would like to get to e5 asap. What would be good ways to set myself up for success?

My onboarding buddy is getting a business phone for email + slack. He says it's important for keeping good WLB and mental health.

Is this standard practice?

I'm a lifelong Windows user, with a bit of Linux/Ubuntu experience as well. Now that I'm at a Big Tech company, I'm using Mac. I feel like all the Big Tech companies use Mac. Does anyone have tips for getting adjusted? Big important things to know would be great.

Here's my first idea: instead of using my Windows keyboard, I'm going to use the MacBook as my primary display and therefore use the mac keyboard as my keyboard. This will force me to use the native mac keys (Command, Option, etc) rather than the Windows equivalents.

Thanks!

EDIT: after spending a day on Mac, I think I got the hang of it. It's not too different, some of the key combos are different, but I think that's about it.

I've got a performance review coming up. It's not my first one at the company, but it will be the first time I'll be actively pushing for a promotion. It's also the first review with a new format, where we'll need to align our accomplishments with company values and our roles' "competencies"—10 in total, which seems like quite a lot to me. In light of that, I have a few questions:

1. How long should a self-review generally be?
2. Should I cover all or as many of these values and competencies as I can, or should I focus on just a few of them?
3. Should I prioritize quality over quantity and share only the strongest achievements? Or does it make sense to include both the biggest achievements and just good ones?

I have 3 years of experience working as a backend developer.

I rejected 2 offers because the salary rise was about 12% and I expect at least 30% salary rise.

And this brought a doubt in my head. That is, if at this moment should I be looking for more money or more knowledge, expand my network, or what should I be prioritizing.

Please, help.

Most of my work in the last 3 years has been on internal tools. It's not quite infra level and its also not quite business level/product focused stuff.

I'm not sure how to quantify impact here.

Right now, I have to write a growth plan to grow from mid level to senior engineer in my company. For doing this, me and my lead have decided to write down a growth plan for me.

While searching for effective techniques, I found SMART framework and also how to set your goals. But I'm wondering if we have a growth plan expert here? And what framework/template/steps do they follow?

I work in Europe but would love to move to the US and work there. I'm employed, but was thinking if becoming a contractor in the US could be a first step towards an H1B visa? I've received recommendations of joining a company in Europe with a large presence in the US, but there are not alot of these companies in my country. And the competition of the few open positions that exist at these American companies here are very high. Since I have a ok network, I don't think it should be a to hard to get a position at an american company. Is it realistic to turn my contractor position into an employement at the company though? Or is it a suboptimal route? What do you all think?

Based on resume course, you have some rough benchmarks for expected career progression paces. For example you said a mid level engineer at 8 yoe is too slow.

Would it be possible to give some industry averages that highlight if you’re moving slower than average or faster than average?

Like green is faster than average yellow is average and red is slower?

These can be super rough and while you did bring this up the purpose is to get a health check if we’re staying at our level too long. Idea is it’s good to know if we’re getting too comfortable.

For more context I know some companies tend to reject candidates if they have not gotten promoted on time so these numbers will help us manage our careers effectively to ensure this doesn’t happen

I'm halfway through and am wondering if his advice in the course changes given that I'm on a contract 6-months to start. What triggered this thought was he says in the video that you should consider yourself "Fully Onboarded" by Month 6 (and therefore take more time before asking questions). Since my contract is 6-months to start, I imagine I should strive especially hard to onboard quickly, but that the advice in the course doesn't really change. There are, after all, human limits to how quickly you can onboard and those don't change whether you're FTE or on contract to start. I believe my situation might be closer to that of an intern. So maybe I should go through ?

Appreciate the feedback!

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:

1. 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.
2. 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:

1. 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
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.
3. 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!

Hi,

I have recently received an E5 offer from RL team as part of the dev-infra org working on developer tooling infra such as debugger, code editor. I have received this offer after a long 2 month wait in TeamMatching. Given the long wait time in team-matching, the recommendation in general is to accept the first offer regardless of your preference and then do an internal hop later.

I have a safe and secure job at Msft L62 right now(about to be promoted in the next quarter), working in developer tooling as well.

Team structure: The team is comprised of 4 sub teams with each sub-team focusing on a vertical and containing 6-8 members. My manager has 25 reportees under him and we have a tech-lead who is overseeing the whole product.

1. Any advice/gotchas in general about work-culture, leadership for the org?

2. Being an infra role, I wanted to know if there would be enough scope for me to succeed in this role ?

3. I see there is less diversity in my immediate team, except me all the other team mates, tech-lead, skip manager are Asian, my manager is Indian. P.S I am not against any race, but wanted to get some perspective if I would be isolated and if I could an impact and survive there.

4. I see that some of my peers are L6 at Amazon and I wonder if it would be difficult to compete with them and have decent job security. P.S: I am on H1B visa

Thanks!!

YOE:9

So I have worked in codebases where there’s one repo per microservice or maybe at most 7-8 services in 1 repo with good CI/CD that’s isolated. Those repos we just develop independently of one another. I’ve seen this throughout my career of 4 YOE. Is it a fair statement to say that “I don’t know what real onboarding is”?

I usually have gotten away with knowing

• the structure of spring boot microservice,
• maven gradle dependency downloading,
• how kafka consumer works in spring
• how rest api typically gets exposed in spring
• high level knowledge of spring bean creation
• how db interactions have been done.
• reading the arch diagram and learning where the infra is to connect dots.

This has made me able to ramp up fast and get productive within 2 weeks and follow discussions.

I don’t know if I just have “had it easy my whole career and I need to step my game up”

Hi how can I ask a colleague for positive review on LinkedIn. My colleagues have worked with me and know what I can do they often say positive things about me.

Yeah not sure how to ask for LinkedIn recommendation. The thing is it would be really helpful to me. In interviews I don't have 10 years of experience just 2 years. But my colleagues know that I learn faster than usual and what I did in 1 year was really a lot compared to average. But someone working at another company interviewing me they don't know. LinkedIn Recommendations from my colleagues can really help me.

But I am worried about asking them for positive review on LinkedIn they might think that I want to leave the current company. Actually sometimes they kind off subtly tell me to leave the company, well some of them.

My mentor at work tells me if I want higher salary it's best to look for different job than stay at 1 job. This will get higher salary faster and I shouldn't tell the manager he told me this. I want to ask my mentor for a recommendation for linkedin.

Also after I ask my mentor this he/ the team might start treating me differently calculating for me likely/potentially leaving the company more so than staying. Giving me less scope.

So how to approach this in a professional way.
Hey, can you give me a LinkedIn recommendation?
Why? So people that haven't worked with me before also know what I'm worth.

Why? you intend to leave this company?
Uh....

I'll be starting at Instacart in a couple weeks as an L4 Data Engineer on contract for 6 months to start. I'm coming from a finance company where things move slowly. I was a high performer in my department while regularly working 3 hours a day or less. Much of my time spent at my old job was dedicated towards finding my new job - applying, interviewing, taking courses, etc.

I know I will encounter a culture shock when I start at IC and want to prepare myself as much as possible for it. Mentally, I am taking the approach that I will put in a solid full-day, 8 hours of work every day and perhaps work some weeknights and weekends as well, although I'd like to minimize the need to do that by being effective and prioritizing work during my regular work hours.

In terms of preparation, from Taro I have gleaned that there are 2 main areas I should be focusing on:

1. Code Quality and Velocity

2. Communication

For 1), I have bookmarked on the topic and plan on doing it before I start working. For 2), I have bookmarked and likewise plan on finishing the course before starting work. I actually plan on doing Rahul's Onboarding Course before Alex's Code Course.

Is there anything else I should be aware of? I have gone through already as well as looked over these threads:

I imagine the advice for me is virtually identical to the above threads, but if there's anything I'm missing, please fill me in!

Thanks!!

I got a job through a friend after getting laid off, but the day I started this new job, I got a full-time offer for another more prestigious company. Do I take it?

I've noticed that my manager often doesn't acknowledge my suggestions or thoughts during team meetings, even though our one-on-one interactions are fine. I feel that high-impact opportunities are given to other team members, despite my requests for them. I am moved to support work recently (manager claims that this is also high impact and there is scope to reduce operational work). Additionally, I received the no salary increment in my team in last review.

I also feel that my manager supports a teammate at the same level as me more than they support me, even though we are both working towards promotion.

I'm not sure what to do—whether to stay and hope things improve or transfer to another team and start fresh. If I change teams, I will need to start working from scratch for my promotion.

Hi Taro Community,

I joined Microsoft in February, and interestingly, my manager started just a month later in March. As we’re both relatively new and navigating uncharted areas, I felt the need for more structured technical guidance. During a recent one-on-one, I suggested the idea of having a mentor or a designated technical point of contact. Initially, my manager acknowledged this need and planned to discuss it further up the chain.

However, the feedback I received later was that since we are in the process of building a new team here in India, we should first attempt to resolve issues internally. Subsequently, for additional insights, I’m advised to engage with the chat group, which includes around 100 members.

Here’s where I find myself in a predicament:

• My manager, being new himself, sometimes faces similar uncertainties, which complicates our internal resolution approach.
• Posting in a large group specific guidance doesn’t always yield practical advice due to its broad focus.

Any insights on managing these dynamics or personal experiences would be incredibly helpful as I look to establish myself and contribute effectively in my new role.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts and experiences.