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

I believe I’m mid-level, as I’m handling low-level design and implementing a new backend pattern based on my performance testing, which led to an architectural change. My manager also had me present to other tech leads in the company, showing recognition of my work. I’m tackling ambiguity in integrating this pattern with technical and business concepts and volume considerations. To ensure thoroughness, I’m scheduling design reviews with senior engineers, creating diagrams and documentation, and exploring multiple approaches. For Tier 1 L4 readiness, is it expected that I be correct in design discussions, or is the focus more on my thought process and initiative?

I want to understand how people approach planning/scoping out complex projects with multiple unknowns and potential blockers. Also, how do you effectively communicate to leadership when working on such projects? What matters to them the most? Do the updates need to be dense?

Recently built a web app to find and understand skincare products. For the purposes of resume and talking about it, what counts as a user? I'm tracking on posthog. Can I count every unique person who visited/used my web app a user? This is imo akin to downloads in the app store i suppose?

This week has been hectic, transitioning from one organization to another, getting acquainted with a new boss, and diving into new projects. How have you handled this situation in your jobs? What has helped you, what has hurt you? I would greatly appreciate any advice on how to turn this situation to my advantage rather than letting it become a setback.

Hi Alex, I recently completed your course, "Get More Interviews: Write a Stellar Resume as a Software Engineer," and found it very helpful! I'd like to use your resume as a template to build my own, but I couldn’t find an editable version included in the course. Could you kindly share it as a Word document or LaTeX file? It would be a great resource to help me implement what I learned.

I'm an e4 at meta with 3.5 yoe and if i had stayed here, my manager would have put me up for promotion in the mid year. However, i decided to switch companies and join anthropic. They hired me as a e4 equivalent, but i don't want to lose the momentum i built at meta, is there anything i can do to speed up my promo at anthropic given that i was so close at meta?

I have been making progress towards meeting senior level competencies. My manager is aligned and wants to put me up for promo at the end of the year. However, I’m looking for a third project in Q4 to really nail down my case. Additionally, I want to provide more impact and learn how to define new initiatives. I love creating “swim lanes” for my teammates and leading projects that grow their scope. How would you recommend: Coming up with a project idea Vetting the project to make sure it has enough scope for a senior level (or staff! I would love to provide more impact) Vetting the project to make sure it has enough impact for a senior level I have a lot of ideas for step 1, but am struggling to choose which are appropriate to pursue. Previously, I built a reusable web component at a company wide scale, and am working with a cross org team who wants to use it. I am also working on a technically complex web authentication project that has potential to be used by other teams. Both of these project were scoped by me (with some guidance from my staff mentor) and my manager has communicated they are senior level projects. I have built good relationships with my teammates, our direct stakeholders, and several cross-org engineers. I’m also exceeding expectations at my current level, so there isn’t anything to worry about there. However, I feel like I’m hitting a wall and need to figure out the next project that will turn my promo case into a slam dunk. Any advice? I’m a frontend web engineer if that helps. :)

I'm joining Meta as a Machine Learning engineer. I've found content on Taro (and other platforms) to be helpful, but sometimes I'm not sure how applicable the advice is for my domain. For example, I won't be working with any designers, and I probably won't touch any UI components in the way a mobile developer might.

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.

I'm on a team of 10 people, including my manager. During our weekly meetings, I struggle to pay attention to what's happening when other people give their updates. I only work closely with 2 of my 8 coworkers. For those 2 coworkers, I already have a weekly sync with our manager on a different day. For the time being, I don't have much to do with the other 6 people on my team. I have 2 questions: Should I try paying attention to others' updates or should I try and reclaim this time and do work during the meeting? One can make an argument that long-term, it's beneficial for me to know what's happening with the other people on my team, but in general, I'm under the impression that the greedy (short-term) approach is best. If I should try and pay attention to others, does anyone have tips for doing so? I'm not sure how normal/abnormal I am in being able to pay attention to people, but I've always been a big day-dreamer. In elementary and high school, I was a good student in spite of day-dreaming during class because school was pretty easy and I was self-motivated to learn from the textbook. In university, I was still a big day-dreamer, but I was no longer a good student because school was hard and I couldn't just learn from the textbook. Now, post-school, I am motivated to pay attention to things that really count. e.g. when my boss wants me to do something, you better believe I'm motivated to pay attention closely to what he says. But by default, my mind doesn't want pay attention to anything unless it knows I need to do it. I can try taking notes, but often times there's so much additional knowledge and context the people working on the tickets have that my notes are kinda useless. Ultimately, this team meeting is only a half hour per week, so it's a huge deal either way, but I'm leaning towards trying to continue working on my tickets during them (i.e. what I know counts).

I have an interview coming up. It comes with a engineering process interview, which is Q&A to learn about your approach to common situations that occur as an engineer, followed by a values and leadership interview, which is about problem solving and team interaction. How can i prepare for the engineering process interview? Can I interpret it as behavioural interview or more on technical Q&A? But I see some overlapping with the values and leadership interview so im a bit confused.

I feel like the projects I get are more generic and straightforward. I want to start making progress towards senior, but the more complex, larger scope projects are going to the engineers on my team that are more senior. What can I do to start getting those projects?

I'm a new engineer at Mercari, and I want to make a big impact. So in terms of OKRs and the overall team roadmap, how do you think about how you can integrate that into your work as an engineer? More specifically, I want to influence the team's product direction instead of only doing the work that I'm given. Do you just need to have a good product sense in order to work in this style?

I want to quit my current job, so I've been applying to 300+ jobs across the span of 6 months. Out of those 300+ jobs, I've only gotten past the resume screening for 1 company, and I got approached by 5 companies that I didn't apply to. The low numbers could be caused by me requiring visa sponsorship, although I suspect that it could be because of the job market. Out of all these 6 companies, I always get eliminated at the screener round (DSA, multiple choice general programming knowledge question about concurrency and multithreading). Should I try to improve my resume screening pass rate through side projects or should I instead focus on leetcode? I don't think I'll have enough time and energy for both, so I try to focus on only 1.

TLDR: How to pick side projects This might have been answered multiple times and a very well-known answer would be working on side projects but I want the answer to be more in-depth so it can be helpful for many engineers. Please don't answer in a generic way but try to answer this by posing in my shoes Let's say you have 1.6 years of experience as a Software engineer and 3 years of experience in IT but not in development now if you want to stick to the SE career. This market is very challenging for me to get a job with 1 plus year of experience. I have to convert my IT experience into developer experience and try. But when I give interviews I tend to fail the Hiring manager rounds because they can see the depth of my SE career. So how to convert my IT experience to SE experience? I have put a lot of effort into Leetcode and now I have gotten to a decent stage the same thing applies to System design as well I have read books blogs etc and getting the depth would be my next target. We can hear a lot of stories in the past where a person who started his/her career as a tester or a QA and got it converted to Senior software engineer etc by working on problem-solving skills but I don't think this works in the current market. So I felt I was missing depth. How to achieve a mid-level engineer status where I can effectively tell a lot of stories and challenges I have faced in my career and show bias for action etc The most simple answer would be to do side projects but selecting a repository and a project is very hard as there are countless repositories and projects. All I need is a small ignition to start on the side projects then I think discipline would take care of the rest as I was at zero questions at LeetCode a few months ago and now I have solved 250 plus with discipline.

I'm at a point where I don't know what to do anymore. I've been having tech interviews for the past year, every time I mess up the leetcode style interviews. They are not specifically hard, but somehow I don't make it to the most optimal solution. When the interview is done, I keep thinking about it and then I figure out the optimal solution on my own, and keep thinking why the heck I could not figure it out during the interview. I don't know, it's as if during interviews, my brain capacity operates at 70%, I become super narrow in my thinking, I cannot think comfortably and I'm tense, I really have trouble coming up with a solution and talking to the interviewer at the same time. How do you guys deal with this ?? Is it even a thing or just me ? It's just too frustrating at this point and it really affects my mental health. I just failed the leetcode screening for a MLE position at Reddit, here I have included the problem in this link with my solution and a potential optimal solution for you to get a better idea :

If I fail an interview for a big tech company, how long should I wait until re-applying to the same company for a different role? I'm worried that if I interview and get rejected by a company I won't be able to re-apply 3/6/9 months later. A quick lookup in their performance tool will show that I failed an interview earlier. Is this concern overblown? PS: I would imagine at startups it is almost impossible to re-apply since the company is small enough that they would easily recognize you. Is this accurate?

Thanks a lot for the great content, Alex and Rahul! Your courses to understand the expectations of various levels is really helpful. AI is continuously increasing the productivity of software developers. AI can now write test cases, automatically fill the code given just high-level description, automatically write a summary in the PRs, add comments to the code, etc. This increases the code quality as well. So, will the current L4 role be the expectation out of an entry-level programmer in the upcoming years? Also, due to AI, do you think the demand for non-AI software developers will keep decreasing over the years, and the job market might move towards other fields such as space engineering, robotics, nanotechnology, dna editing, etc.? As the supply of engineers is increasing with fresh grads coming out every year, and the demand is decreasing due to increasing layoffs, do you expect the trend of reduction in software salaries continuing over the long-term? Or are you expecting a recovery in demand and salaries for software developers?

I'm at a small quant firm and I started working for a new manager a few months ago. Our relationship has had its ups and downs, but last week it suddenly got really weird. He avoided me throughout the entire week. When I'd come up to ask a question he wouldn't even look at me. Then we had our 1 on 1, he was asking me about specific results of my recent projects, which was a bit unusual. It felt like he was digging for reasons to punish me around the next performance cycle, but I can't be sure about that. He also seemed nervous at the end of it, and when I was talking during team standup too. This week, I'd say, was a bit less weird, but he ended the 1 on 1 very early. I could understand that on it's own, but combined with other things, it makes me stressed. My performance has been great so far, and it might be that he just doesn't like me and it doesn't impact my reviews that much, but I don't know if I want to keep working in such dynamic, and if I want to have a manager who is on my back waiting for me to make a mistake. In the past I tried talking to him and asking what am I doing wrong, referring to these non verbal signals. He seemed to have gotten anxious from me asking, said everything is fine and our relationship seemed to have improved after that. I'm afraid that if I ask him again because of what's happening now, he will just avoid me even more and it will make things worse. I'm just stressed out and would appreciate any advice or perspective I could get. Should I switch teams? Thanks.

I am not that efficient in switching language (afraid I might mess up the syntax for Eg which is not used daily at job) for an interview if I have been practicing in eg: Python for the last month

I don't feel as interested in work as much as before after being at the current company for a little bit over a year. Is there something that I'm doing wrong? Do you have any suggestions to get better at this? For some context, I also only stayed at my last 2 jobs for over 1 year, but less than 2 years. I think the current company, co-workers and product are great. I haven't been stressed about work for a while. But I don't feel as excited for work as I was 6 months in.

Hey all, I’ve been at Amazon for a while now and starting to think about what to look for next. I did a lot of innovative UI work on my last team but now have transitioned into fully backend/distributed systems work. The UI work that I was doing was extremely innovative and I felt like I was starting to develop a deep specialization in that space before transitioning to backend (not voluntarily since team priorities changed). I’m starting to casually look for new opportunities and I feel like I’m sort of at a cross roads on whether to pursue a specialized career in UI or focus on becoming a more generalist SWE. I really enjoyed the exciting UI work I was doing but I’m worried that most tech companies do not have enough scope to grow beyond senior levels as a UI engineer. This seems to be the case at Amazon, and my guess is that it’s because the backend always grows in complexity as your user base grows but the same can’t be said for front end. Of course there are some companies like Figma, Netflix that have a lot of UI scope/ambiguity. Im looking to eventually move to Chicago for personal reasons and am a bit concerned about the market out there (always open to remote also). I’ve been getting a bunch of big tech/unicorn/HFT recruiters reaching out. Some would let me interview for front end but there are others that seem to only be hiring backend. I’m comfortable working in both, but I feel like I need to pick a side since that will determine what prep work I need to do. Was wondering if I could get advice on whether it’s smarter to become more of a specialist vs generalist in today’s market. Right now im mostly interested in working at big tech/HFTs/large unicorns instead of smaller startups.

Is it advised to use AI code generators like ChatGPT for building a side project app idea? I mean I’m a bit torn coz my concern is it would not let you learn as much as you would trying to do it all by your own research and coding. But I also feel it is a lot faster to build and ship with AI generated code instead of figuring out everything yourself. Please let me know your thoughts on this. Thanks!

Hi all. I was recently laid off from Meta. I joined Meta 4.5 years ago after my internship. I never touched Leetcode or did interviews when I was at Meta. I know that I there is a lot that I need to study. I am considering enrolling in an interview bootcamp. They are expensive but it would be worth the price if it can help me land another role. Does anyone have experience with software engineer interview bootcamps?