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

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: Code Quality and Velocity Communication For 1), I have bookmarked Alex's Course on the topic and plan on doing it before I start working. For 2), I have bookmarked Rahul's Course on Onboarding 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 Alex's short course on Communication already as well as looked over these threads: Advice for someone joining big tech from a non big tech background? Adapting to Big Tech Culture shock from a small company to Big Tech? 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 am currently working at Airbnb as a contractor for 1 year through a services-based company, with 6 months already passed. I am looking to increase my chances of transitioning to a full-time employee. I am working on a high-visibility project with a small team of 3-4 engineers and one tech lead, and my work is well-regarded by senior engineers and managers. However, I feel there are areas where I could improve, such as generating new ideas for projects and contributing to the roadmap. The next 6 months of plans have already been created by the tech lead. Historically, others from my company who transitioned to full-time roles took at least a year. How can I increase my chances of converting to a full-time role?

I'm literally finding it hard to be consistent with learning various software development concepts and practicing LeetCode. I think a good mentor can help me with this issue, correct me if I'm wrong. What else I can do to target my job search in next 5 months as a mid-level software engineer with 2 years work experience. Do I really need a mentor at this stage?

When does being a code machine act as a disadvantage? I identify as ND (NeuroDivergent) and when I am able to build an app in a day (like hackathon style), fix a bug, solve a problem, the disadvantage I have noticed from time-to-time if I am not highly cognizant of my ability to take breaks (timing my tasks), I forget to eat meals or do basic things (like use the bathroom)? It is much like the stereotype of Poppy Li in Mythic Quest unfortunately. How do we manage this better when there is a value in being productive in output, but an undervaluing of our bodies, and sustainability? Do we need extra reminders on our Apple Watch (or other Smart Watches), pomodoro technique to be able to tell us to take more breaks even if we are on a roll finishing a ton of code? What strategies have worked well for the code machine archetype to get their work done but without burning themselves out?

Hello, I'm currently actively interviewing and more than once, I found myself not progressing due to some knowledge gaps on things that companies seem to expect at my level. I worked as a backend engineer for 3 years after a coding bootcamp, mostly in product features and APIs. Distributed systems is not something I did on a daily basis. I have struggled with system design interview questions asking about databases, concurrency, search, among other things. How can I fill those gaps to the level I can pass these interviews? Here's what I'm going to do, and I'm looking to get advice on whether I should do, stop doing, or do something else that I didn't list. Stanford Databases courses (5 total): Read "Understanding Distributed Systems" by Roberto Vitillo Practice system design interviews with a partner Thank you for your help!

For the core workstream I got put on, there are a lot of potential angles to really move metrics, which I'm excited about. However, they mainly seem to be non-code solutions. I've gotten earlier feedback that I need more coding signal, which has me apprehensive about this current workstream. I know that an E4 needs a lot of coding contribution for Engineering Excellence, but I am pushing for E5 which is more people/direction driven. Is it okay for me to take on this project or should I find something with more coding work?

I've been reaching out to people via DMs and public workplace posts, comments on threads/tasks/diffs, sometimes email. Sometimes it takes 1 week to get a response or I just never get one, despite multiple follow-ups. Unfortunately at a big company like Meta a lot of the stack is proprietary and are essentially black boxes, so I can't just search public documentation or use StackOverflow. Sometimes the documentation/wikis are outdated, so when the team maintaining it is unresponsive I have a hard time gaining traction with my projects. Ideally I'd try to go into the codebase to figure it out myself but it's hard to familiarize myself with another repo quickly especially if it requires special setup to get things running. I also have a sample Workplace post that shows how I'm asking questions and looking for help: [REDACTED TO PRESERVE COMPANY CONFIDENTIALITY]

My manager initially told me we'd probably meet once a month. They manage several teams so we have only interacted once. I'm also on a contract and have a goal to get converted full-time. My "onboarding buddy" who I have weekly 1 on 1s with is not a developer - they're a PM. There's 1 other engineer on the team who is in a completely different time zone - our time overlap is minimal. The rest of the team are data scientists. Who should I focus on getting feedback from if my direct manager is not involved in assigning tasks? the PM? the engineer in a different time zone who does not control my tasks but knows the most about the codebase? Both?

Recruiters often mention that a staff engineer interview involves a deeper dive compared to a senior software engineer interview, but it's not clear how much deeper it needs to go. Are there any resources that can clarify this?

I've worked at meta and stripe but in april I'll be starting a new job at anthropic. At this point i feel comfortable spinning up on new things at large companies where onboarding lasts months and the first couple weeks are just listening to presentations, but anthropic is the smallest company i'll have worked for (~1000 people) and their onboarding plan is a little intimidating. They want me to merge 1-3 diffs in my first week and to be fully spun up after 30 days. What should i do to really hit the ground running that this new job and start pushing code from the start. I'll be on the growth team which is something im comfortable with since i did growth at meta, so mainly just looking for advice on how to learn a new codebase and company that's much smaller than i'm used to.

When I joined my current company, it was a standard 40 hour/week company. Since the end of last year, we’ve been told that we’re all expected to work 55-60 hours/week to get our startup to a successful state (get funding, retain current customers, attract new ones). I’m feeling extremely miserable from the change because the schedule doesn’t allow me to do all the other things that are important to me outside of work, such as spending time with family, cooking and working out regularly, and dedicating time to my hobbies. I have subscribed to newsletters for years to keep up with how the javascript and react worlds are changing, but have stopped reading them. I feel like the work hours have made me less curious about keeping up with tech and growing, which is the thing that I used to like most about this career. We’re asked to track and report our hours working on tickets, and any time we fall short of expectations it comes up in our weekly one on one with our manager. It’s making me want to leave, but the market is tough, I haven’t interviewed in years and never done DSA or system design questions, and it’s hard to start with the schedule I have, because again I’m already sacrificing time with my family for this job and don’t want to sacrifice more. It’s crazy how much the extra 15-20 hours per week is costing me emotionally. How do I get out of a situation like this? I don’t have enough savings to fall back on, my wife doesn’t work, and my state doesn’t provide Medicaid even to households with no income.

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: How long should a self-review generally be? 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? 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'm not even sure if I should use this STAR Method story for a E4 Behavioral interview for tell me about a time that I had a disagreement with a coworker. My concern is this is a xfn disagreement and not a code review or a design disagreement. I think I'm not showing competencies for my level? This was a story from my time at a non FAANG and I'm trying to use this at a FAANG behavioral interview (I never worked at FAANG, and I'm trying to put in lots of effort to make it this time as I got rejected from multiple faangs in the past including 2 Full loops for E4). Situation: I was driving the implementation of a new framework for our platform team, which services 3-5 sister teams. After a reorg in one of the partner teams, a new team member was reluctant to support the project, leading to a misalignment that blocked our launch. Task: My goal was to resolve the disagreement and get the partner team onboarded with our framework. Action: I escalated the issue by bringing in senior engineers from both reorged teams, our senior engineers, and our manager. I facilitated a meeting that included the old and new team members to align on the project’s importance and our support model. I also provided a detailed document and knowledge transfer to demonstrate the framework's feasibility and how it could be maintained. Result: The partner team was convinced, and the project was no longer a blocker. We successfully onboarded the first partner team into our new reusable framework, keeping the project on track. This is obviously abridged, so I'm just confused if this is a valid disagreement for a E4 position. If it has potential, maybe I can answer followups on what I need to tease out to make it better, or drop it if it is not great. I am very afraid to try this story out in my interviews, since I thought I had to resolve it personally for this story to count, and resolving via escalation seems to me like I am essentially cheating.

I'm wondering how companies think about employee compensation for those already in the company. Is it possible to have strong upwards mobility on the compensation side by just staying in your current company and doing great? Or is it better to change jobs?

Hello everyone, I'm reaching out to this community seeking advice and insights as I consider a significant career transition. Currently, I am working in software engineering, but I've recently completed my master's degree with a core focus on Reinforcement Learning and Artificial Intelligence. Throughout my academic journey, I've developed a strong passion for AI/ML, and now, I'm eager to pivot my career in this direction. While I've gained substantial experience in software development, I believe that transitioning to a team more aligned with AI/ML will allow me to fully utilize my skills and contribute more meaningfully to the field. I understand that networking plays a crucial role in such transitions. However, I'm looking for guidance on the best practices for connecting with AI/ML engineering managers. I am particularly interested in learning about: Effective ways to initiate conversations with AI/ML leaders, especially when coming from a different technical background. Strategies to demonstrate my competence and enthusiasm for AI/ML, despite my primary experience being in software engineering. Insights into the challenges and expectations specific to AI/ML teams that I might not be aware of coming from a different specialization. Additionally, I'd love to hear any personal stories or experiences about making a similar transition. What were your challenges, and how did you overcome them? How did you leverage your previous experience during this shift? I appreciate any advice or connections you might offer. Please feel free to reach out to me directly if you're open to a conversation. Thank you for your time and support! Best regards

I'm slated to work on a pretty big project, and because of this, there are 2 other engineers to help out on it, both of them more senior than me. I've broken up the project, and at a very high-level, there's 2 types of work: More straightforward work that I know exactly how to do More technically complex and ambiguous work that I'm not entirely sure how to do This leaves me with the following crossroads as a lead on this project: Do the work from #2 myself to show senior engineer behavior, but it may slow down the overall delivery of the project as it will me more time. Delegate the work from #2 to the more senior engineers, so we can get it done faster and preserve high velocity on project delivery. Any thoughts on which of the 2 paths I should take?

My work will often times span across multiple services within Uber, which means that I need to write code in codebases outside of my team's. Sometimes when I do this, it takes a long time for my commit to land as there's many rounds of follow-up questions, leading to a lot of rebases, revisions, and time spent on my end. I understand that they're trying to be the best stewards of their codebase, but this can be a bit frustrating sometimes. How can I make this process smoother and land these kinds of changes more quickly?

Hi Alex/Rahul! I know y'all have mentioned DSA is somewhat of a parasitic activity, so do you recommend creating side projects to level-up after work / studying system design instead of DSA? I am asking in case I get let go again or if I am looking for a new position after this one. I basically want to future-proof myself. Also, how do I excel in my current position as a mid-level web developer, while having these things in mind? Thanks in advance!

Let's start by mentioning my manager has half the industry experience I have, but has just been longer (around 3-4 years) in the company than me. He comes from a data science background, while I come from CS/software engineering. He's been a manager for almost a year now, during which he's just proven over and over how incompetent he is at motivating employees to do great work. He has done and said the following (I know no-one is perfect, but knowing the standards Apple requires from engineers I just think it is too permissive with its managers) we’ve had conflict over some presentation slides, where he corrected all my slides (presenting my project from a technical point of view) and insisted I read his exact notes on the matter ( like a secretary ). His points were - he knows the subject better than I do period, he has the final say since it’s a director level presentation . I’ve asked what the requirements are for the next level (was underleveled anyway at hiring ) and he bluntly said for me it might take 4 years - if I’m already mid-senior why should I wait that much inside the company to be given opportunities to grow faster ?! I could just take the next job as a senior/staff etc. and be on my way … Talking to other colleagues they’ve said something different : you can go faster but it depends on the projects you’re assigned (impact etc.), so again my career depends on the projects he assigns me to. I’ve been treated like a junior since joining the company - yes I’ve changed tech stack for this job but it doesn’t make me a noob. Also during meetings with other teams- he (the manager) and his “rockstar” would remind me loudly of keyboard shortcuts (simple things like ctrl + F ) which pissed me off because I’ve perceived it as mockery not helpfulness by trying to “motivate” me he’s actually insulting my intelligence every time : for ex. he’s all of a sudden trying to convince me I wouldn’t get better opportunities than I get at Apple “look you get to train an ML model, you can only do this at Apple” - absolutely hilarious, given the multitude of companies that are in the AI field these days … I’ve avoided going to HR with these matters because I don’t feel like I have solid evidence, at the same time I despise working with him What kind of managers do you have or have encountered and what’s your opinion about this ? I would have expected Apple managers to be a bit brighter and self-conscious.

Hi Taro team and community, I'm currently unemployed, living in my parents attic for the last 5 months, and I have been able to persuade a few early stage companies (seed/series A) to offer paid work sample interviews instead of the standard 3-4 live technical interview loops due to the depth of my experience. I have gotten an offer from at least 1 company so far (w/ a $200k base). However, I'm trying to maximize compensation in addition to company fit and so my worry is that because the paid work sample interview approach doesn't scale to the FAANG companies (where the total comp offers there are $280k to $400k + sign on bonus + stock that doubles every 4 years) I'm not actually making progress preparing for those incredibly difficult kinds of interviews (data structures & algos, system designs, behavioral, etc) where the rewards are dramatically higher. In fact, I worry the paid work sample approach is actually counter productive to my goals & growth and therefore maybe I'm cheating myself? 🤷 But at the same time it's hard to turn down $200k offers when one doesn't have an income coming in and is feeling marooned in their parents attic 😂 What advice do y'all have here for me and other fellow Tarodactyls facing similar situations?

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!

I'm starting an API migration project due to a licensing issue and am the primary point of contact for stakeholders. I earned this responsibility by building a relationship with the downstream legacy team and leveraging their solution with ours, using our framework in a novel way. My manager quote said “not that you can you should own the xfn”. This is my first time doing non-technical work. Here’s what I've done so far: Created a step-by-step plan and design document, captured requirements with due dates, and integrated tasks into Agile sprints. Maintain a living document for future technical challenges, and note taking for all steps I outlined. Outlined the battle plan to the po, my manager, and the senior engineer who all gave sign off. Plan to give updates and assist with troubleshooting for client teams. Set a goal to thoroughly test the solution, ensuring an adequate test suite is in place, aiming for it to work on the first try. Questions: For cross-functional alignment, what steps should I take for communication and updates? We have a Slack group with all clients. If there’s a communication template that worked well for similar projects, it would be helpful. If there was one thing you'd challenge me to do in my execution of this project, what would it be? For context, I’m probably mid-level with an interest in learning how to grow.

So, a new situation has come up at work. My lead let me know today that he/she is going on a parental leave around October last week. I did ask them to let me know if I need to step up and need to prepare anything before they leave. Question is How do I handle this situation and work with my directors to get prepared for it. I don't feel prepared to replace them for the next 3 -4 months nor I think I'm expected to do that but the question here is how can I proactively reach out, prepare and help the team in this situation.

I am working in a product, it has been 4 years, started from level 59. Now I am at level 61 for 1 year now. I am reporting to the same manager in these 4 years. I am not excited in the current team and want some change but these factor is holding me: Pros: The product team is expanding, this time they have taken work from US and hiring in India. They are promising for new challenges this year with the product with AI features. Last year, this product was having visibility from CVP, now they are claiming it will be having visibility from EVP. Cons: Last year, the head of UX left the team to join outside firm and recently the head of PM has taken internal transfer. Overall team culture score(known as Thriving Score) is lower than the average score of Microsoft. To be honest, I don't use this product in my day-to-day life, neither my friend does, even my team mates doesn't use. But it has good number of downloads. WLB is sometimes worse for a specific period. Note: Not considering switching to other company as stocks are doubling every year here. Should I switch in-org or outside org or switch to other company?