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

i am thinking this is the path for software engineer: junior -> mid level -> senior -> staff -> principal. where does tech lead fit into this path? is tech lead an optional path on the way to rising up to principal? i would think tech lead needs to manage people and would be less hands on? thanks.

I worked 3.5 years on the backend for a large applications with the stack of java, spring, hibernate and mysql + bunch of internal frameworks. Now I switched to another company and for 3 years I worked on the backend for another large applications (thousands of users) but with multiple languages. There were microservices in python, go, java and C++. I was also required to write some react code. While I was able to hack around (not the top notch code) and ship things that work, I was wondering if this kind of experience will damage my profile in the job market, since everyone wants someone that is specialized.

Other than for a very specific, time-critical reason, e.g. an upcoming launch or being on-call, is there ever a good reason to "burn the midnight oil" by deviating from one's normal life routine to put in more work hours? Here's what I see this deviation looking like: taking fewer breaks in the day - so instead of going for a walk after 2 hours, doing it after 3 within a work-bloc, having longer time spent at your desk - so sitting interrupted at your desk for over an hour, for example. If you're following the health gurus, you should be standing up often, and the Pomodoro technique is classically 25-minute focus blocks, but I don't know how practical this is cutting out gym time to get more work done - for me, exercise is generally 1 - 1.5 hours of time which I do 3 or 4 times a week, so I can get more keyboard time in if I cut it. working later into the night and either cutting into sleep time or just waking up later the next day These are all examples of trying to eke out more productivity. The last 2 in general are frowned upon from a health-standpoint. In my case, I'm onboarding and think I'm behind on my first ticket, hence the motivation for my question. I know quality (spending my time in the right way) is a lot more important than quantity, but quantity is easier to add as so many people have pointed out on this site. Yesterday, I had a new coworker, someone I had never spoken with before spend 4 hours on the phone with me and that was both practically helpful and psychologically helpful. Getting help like that in general is a lot more productive than just throwing more time alone at a problem. Just trying to add more context. Thanks!

I know that launching a product with bugs shows a reactive approach. Similarly, if a reviewer catches an issue you missed, that’s also reactive. But what if you’re thorough in writing and testing your code locally, and you catch a missed dependency before even raising a PR? You fix it yourself without anyone else noticing. Does this reflect positively on you for solving it on your own, or does it still look bad because it was missed initially? Taking it a step further, say you forget a simple null check, causing errors in your unit tests. You catch this yourself and fix it, but technically, you were still being reactive. So, how do people realistically measure “reactive” vs. “proactive”? And how are scenarios viewed where you catch and resolve issues on your own while writing code?

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've recently been getting more into open-source to contribute back to the community and to just make cool stuff. But I'm interested in various ways of how to market these projects without coming off as "shilling". I would presume there's less of a likelihood for this to happen due to the free & open framing as opposed to a for profit venture(?) The meta seems to have a huge focus on becoming an "influencer" with creating short form viral content as a springboard to long form for then that to be your marketing funnel for any type of CTA. But are there any other tried and tested ways that don't involve so much of this strat?

I joined the company 8 months ago as SRE in UK. i got an mentor helping me to onboard to the team and I joined the team with lots of senior which i think i can learn a lot from them. However, starting end of last year, my mentor resigned and got an offer to elsewhere. Then the other senior is also resigning. Both got a job offer and quit. I originally thought it is normal as they have been staying the company for 5 years. As two members left, it seems my team didnt get any backfill, and resources have been heavily invested in India. In terms of project wise, I am currently working a non critical project, later found out in all hands it is going to be decommissioned after 2 years. I asked my manager that I wanna to work on the organisation priorities project, but it seems my team have no ownership and my manager reassured me that if we have this opportunities in the future, he will put me into the project. in terms if performance review, i got an average rating (meeting expectation) now my team is left with 3 members and i felt like i do have any impactful projects, it is very hard to get exceeding expectation and also very scared to be put in piped. in this scenario, should i trust my gut feeling this team is shrinking and i should start to look for other job or it is a normal to get a non-critical project and I still be fine as long as my manager are happy with my performance?

I feel like everyone's talking about getting into FAANG all the time, and I've been thinking about it as well since I haven't worked at a FAANG company yet. I see people with really short stints on their resume - Is that really okay? Overall, it's all a lot to take in and I'm just wondering how to best think about my career and get away from all this job switching noise.

I recently got to an onsite round of a company for a backend engineer role (I have got no front-end experience so far) and they mentioned having a product architecture round which assesses how I can articulate user stories, come up with functional requirements and how I effectively collaborate with the tech lead of the team. Does anyone have any recommendations on how to prepare for such a round? I found some helpful videos on YouTube and I would like to hear from the Taro community on what's the best way to prepare and approach such interviews and if you all have any personal tips/ways to structure how you tackle various things in such interviews.

Hi - I am selected as Senior Engineer in Linkedin Marketing Solutions team. I have close to 12 years of experience and masters in US. I want to be prepared as the recruiter is working towards my package. My question is: Generally, Senior Engineer maps to IC3. But, I have confirmed with the recruiter that I am selected for the IC4 role. Does this mean, my comp will be comparable to Staff Engineer? For Ic4 Staff level, Looking at levels.fyi, the comp range is from 380k to 500k. Please guide the fair comp to ask for?

I'm curious what everyone else's experience with internal transfer was like? At Bloomberg, I failed to internally transfer onto 3 other teams in the company (1 of which I had a working relationship with). They essentially put me through a full interview process like hiring for another company (coding, system design, talk through a big project you worked on). I believe I failed these because I didn't know understand how to sell myself as a senior (these were senior internal transfers) and had never done a system design interview before which actually eventually led me to Taro.

Just curious. I personally dont because it distracts me. But i see a lot of people do Do you find it helps? what kind of music do you listen to when coding?

Hey folks, I'm wondering if you all have experience working short-term contracting positions concurrently with a full-time position? My main motivation is to meet short-term expenses that came on the radar. Let me know your thoughts, thanks!

I am not great with numbers so capacity planning part for storage, memory, cache, bandwidth takes 5-10mins as part of the initial requirement gathering Is there a way to keep it short or you just have to memorize some bytes and 1 million request/day = 12 request/second conversions?

I have been trying to get back to studying DSA and Leetcode. What's a good study plan and order?

While onboarding to my first Big Tech company which represents a huge boost for me in terms of comp, learning, and company prestige, does it make sense to put my social life on pause for a few months? I'm single and have few other responsibilities. The logic here is to put myself in the best position to succeed by working extra on weeknights and weekends and not getting distracted. The argument against doing this it could lead to burnout and be counterproductive. I figure there's a balance here. Maybe focus hard on my job for 3 - 6 months and after that relax a little? I.e. be more proactive about having fun on weekends and dating.

Hi everyone, I was wondering if it is unethical or rude to not respond to some recruiter messages at all or to random people asking if you're available to start a business on LinkedIn? I have a lot of them and know what's it like to be ghosted by companies as an interviewee so wouldn't want to offer the same treatment, on the other hand it takes me a lot of time to craft even a single answer, what's your take on this ? To be honest some offers are also low-ball offers that it makes me not want to respond at all :)) but I wouldn't want to be rude to people.

Hey Taro I am at this phase in my engineering life, where I want to move to a Bay Area/NYC-based startup in Series A/B or even seed. As an immigrant (with visa sponsorship needs), in times like this, it is quite difficult to get interview calls at all (I have submitted about 200+ startup applications!). If you have insight on how this could be hacked together (I am not super particular about problems the startup solves), I'd love to hear! Thanks!

I have an interview with PayPal next week for a Senior Software Engineer role. Since many of the PayPal engineers in Taro are currently unavailable, I'm posting here for advice. The interview consists of four rounds: coding, system design, object-oriented programming (OOP), and behavioural questions. While I am confident about the Software Engineer 2 level, I view this Senior role as a more ambitious challenge. Initially, I was hesitant to ask for guidance, but after reviewing "Acing the SE Interview," I gained some confidence and decided to reach out. Any insights or advice on preparing for these rounds would be greatly appreciated.

I'm a Database Administrator and I'm looking how I should proceed further as I see many companies especially big tech don't have a DBA role but Data engineer or Data Scientist or Data Architect. I tried talking to interview kickstart about what roles I can apply to and I'm told to choose one of the above mentioned Data * roles. Can you guide me here on what will be a better approach here? Thanks

Background : Been working at a Big tech company for the 1.5 years. But recently made a sub-team switch within the larger team, 6-months ago. We're currently working on a greenfield project. Question : How do you go about finding / brainstorming work with high leverage, or that increases the team's productivity ? I often find myself in a state where work is mostly passed down by manager / TL. I'm looking to make a mindset shift where I can start coming up with ideas, and proposing things myself.

If I talk about the following weaknesses: My sometimes I prematurely propose pocs in my code that didn’t yield the right benefits I optimized for code cleanliness in a complex problem w multiple edge cases and got pointed out in pair programming to make control flow explicit but repeated Could I do well with those sorts of examples? It turns out I have a bunch of these examples. I’m tryna make sure these don’t make me look incompetent for my mid level target level for a big tech interview. If they are good the theory is I have a lot of stories to do some real interviewing practice and refinement to make it better over time.

Whether it's mentoring a junior or writing documentation, I'm not sure how to best balance the level of information sharing with the speed of development - especially regarding new features or projects. At the moment, I share information as it's required or wanted, but I feel like it's easy for people to dismiss learning anything new, which leaves me uncertain as to whether or not I should push for others to learn about work or handle it on an as-needed basis. If this is related to a team's culture, then what kind of practices should I be advocating for?

I'm currently studying for software engineering interviews, but I'm having a hard time deciding how to divide up my time between doing LC problems and going over system design concepts. It can feel overwhelming since both categories have so much to cover. I also have a family, so most of my studying gets done after my kid goes to sleep at around 7 PM. Since my team is in the west coast and I'm in the east coast, I do get some extra time in the morning to work out at the gym and go through some LC problems. I'm currently going through Neetcode's course as a refresher. For those of you who have aced your interviews, how did you divide up your time on different topics? Did you mostly spend your time on LeetCode? I'd be happy to hear any recommendations. My main goal: I want to be interview-ready no matter what. I currently work at a big tech company and I've been there for 4 years now, but I haven't seen much growth and now I'm seeing that I could have negotiated more when I first got my offer. I was asked 2 LC-type problems, and I feel I got lucky with them because I hadn't extensively gone through all the different patterns and data structures. It was my first time getting RSUs and I wish I had known more about negotiation tactics as well. I feel that if I be ready for interviews, I can apply and definitely increase my comp by a lot. The motivation is for me to overcome the fear of DS&A problems and not stop myself from applying to positions just because I'd be asked LC-type questions. I also know that I can double my comp with the right negotiation tactics and with my years of experience.