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

I started full-stack at start-ups and then became increasingly front-end as I often found myself on small dev teams that didn't want to worry about FE and I was happy to fill in. I am wondering if it makes most sense to rotate back to be a full-stack role or lean more into management or product? I haven't met many devs on Front-end who have advanced very far in their career so specializing in Front-end is beginning to look like a dead-end to me.

Hello, I've seen the term "maintenance projects" (basically, projects where you do bug fixing most of the time) and green field projects (projects where you write code from scratch). I've been told that the maintenance projects are generally the ones that you want to avoid since you won't learn much. I didn't see this view against software projects on TARO, like to divide the projects in to these categories from a high level view and I was wondering if you guys can tell me more about this business view of the software projects. Are there other categories besides maintenance and greenfield? How can I avoid maintenance ones or recognize them?

Suppose you are a manager and have 15 direct reports. 7 of them are pretty strong mid level engineers and are all looking for senior promotions. Realistically, promoting even 5 of them within a year would result in too many senior engineers on the team. Additionally, there are organizational concerns about having too many senior engineers on one team. How would you handle this situation to maintain balance?

I’ve been working as an Android developer for four years and have contributed to two major Microsoft apps with 10M and 1B+ downloads. I also published a small app on the Play Store in just a week and have invested in improving my skills by reading Android-related books and taking courses. With this background, I felt confident about my expertise and began applying for Android roles. However, I faced multiple rejections during interviews. The interviewers focused heavily on the internal workings of Android APIs—details beyond my practical usage, like understanding the mechanics behind coroutines rather than just knowing how to use them. Recently, I came across a course by a highly experienced Android instructor (10+ years) who has transitioned to full-time teaching. His demo session stood out because of its focus on internal details, experiments, and case studies. It resonated with me, and I believe it could help me not only crack interviews but also become part of the top 1% of Android developers globally. The challenge is the cost: ₹40,000 upfront (25% of my monthly salary) and ₹2 lakhs (10% of my annual salary) after securing a new job. It’s a significant investment, and I’m wondering: Is it worth taking this course given my situation and goals? Are there more cost-effective alternatives to achieve the same level of expertise and confidence for interviews?

I’m aiming to grow in my career to become a senior engineer and eventually a staff engineer. I often see people on LinkedIn talking about how they read tons of white papers or articles on designing large-scale systems every week. The thing is, I don’t really enjoy reading white papers—I find them boring. I prefer reading things directly related to the problem I’m working on. I’m hesitant to invest time in stuff I’m not actually building, especially since I tend to forget a lot of it later anyway. So, how important is reading white papers and similar articles for career growth in engineering? Can you still grow without it, or is it something I need to make peace with? Would love to hear your thoughts!

Any thoughts/reflections/lessons from the recent incident? TL;DR of the incident (generated by LLM and verified by me) The xz backdoor news refers to a critical security vulnerability discovered in the XZ Utils, a widely used compression utility in many Linux distributions. This vulnerability, identified as CVE-2024-3094, was found in versions 5.6.0 and 5.6.1 of XZ Utils. It allows a malicious actor to bypass SSH authentication and gain unauthorized remote access to Linux systems. The backdoor was introduced by a contributor using the pseudonym Jia Tan, who had been involved with the xz project for two years. The discovery of this backdoor has raised concerns about the potential for other undiscovered backdoors in earlier versions of the library and the implications for the security of Linux systems that rely on this utility. The backdoor was first detected by Andres Freund, a Microsoft engineer, who noticed an unusual delay in his SSH login time, which led him to investigate and uncover the malicious code in the xz utility tarball used in Debian installations. The malicious code was designed to interfere with the authentication process in SSH, a protocol used for secure remote logins, allowing unauthorized access to the system. This vulnerability has prompted urgent responses from the Linux community, with distributions like Fedora, Debian, and openSUSE advising users to update their systems or revert to uncompromised versions of XZ Utils. The incident has highlighted the importance of vigilance and collaboration within the open-source community to identify and mitigate security threats. It also underscores the potential risks associated with upstream supply chain attacks, where malicious code is inserted into widely used software components, affecting numerous downstream users and systems

So I know the code quality course says sweat details for edge cases. However what’s your perspective of a scenario where you as an api wants to handle every case, but it turns into a bunch of one offs in terms of code readability? One approach is to go and gracefully align on a win win solution for client and server. This area is gray and I want to do the right thing here. Is the idea more around the communication with my teammates to resolve these edge cases than having every edge case addressed in every layer?

Hey, currently looking through Google's careers site, seems like the only realistic SWE EU option is Warsaw, Poland, Google Cloud Software Engineer . There is a posting for SWE III and Senior SWE, other than that it's the same department, place, requirements. If I apply for both the middle & senior positions, it seems logical for a company to only review me for one of them - if I pass for senior, but I'm willing to get paid as Middle, the clear option is to down-level me; and I only have 3 applications/month, so just wasting one of them on the 'same' job posting reduces my chances of getting an interview this month. On the other hand, maybe it works as a 'boost' for my chances to even get noticed for a position of Warsaw Cloud SWE, as I have 3 applications/month I can make, and I spend 2 on it?

I work a lot in Python with ETL pipelines. A lot of my workflow goes like this: Work in jupyter notebook to prototype a pipeline. pipeline looks like this data = loaddata() a = transform(data) b = transform2(a) c = transform3(b) savetoDB(c) Now in notebooks due to the REPL like interface, I can pause between agg3 and DB save, check data looks good, then continue. sometimes I notice theres a bug in agg3 so then I update the method in agg3 and continue. Each aggr is an expensive operation so i want to minimize the amount of steps done Now here is the issue I need to: convert this to python scripts to integrate into existing workflows/productionize. Clean up the code Now my python workflow looks like this def load(): pull data def transform(data): a=aggr1(data) b=aggr2(a) c=aggr3(b) return c def save(data) updatedb(data) def main(): data = load() data = transform(data) save(data) Note: i am explicitly keeping functions minimum in notebooks. Because if theres a bug in aggr3, I need to run the entire transform function again. This is because if I define a variable b in transform, then once that function executes, I cannot access "b" variable outside that scope. (lmk if i need to clarify more here) Now I sanity check this before pushing to main 2 things I need to verify: run with large amounts of real world data. As always theres a bug when running with large amounts of data at step b=aggr2(a). Sometimes the bug ONLY happens with large amounts of data. When going from notebook prototyping to productizing into real production workflows there is some edge case I forgot to account for But then if I want to verify, I need to run the whole script again which takes a lot of time and compute. How do I avoid this? I want to minimize the amount of time spent running code not needed TL;DR. in python specifically, I am able to protype fast in notebooks due to REPL like interface, but debugging scripts is tough due to inability to go back and forth within a script. I am not talking about just adding breakpoints because you cannot go back Basically: I am having issues isolating certain parts of code in production pipelines where I need to be careful with how much code I run Note: things are obv simplified here. In reality transform might have 15/20 different steps

Hello everyone. I work for a consulting company. My last project finished 2 months ago and I've not been able to find another project within my employer's clients. People in charge assigning projects asked me if I have experience in a specific set of technologies but they are mostly related to data engineering or AI/ML and I'm a backend developer. How can I increase the chances to find a project. I don't want to be laid off.

I am trying to change my job to a midlevel-senior engineer position and not wait for promotion (which is hard to come by, in my case) and grow in my career, compensation and find a better environment with a better work life balance. My ethics play an important role in my life. In the past month, I have gotten 3 offers- 2 from start ups and 1 from a big tech acquired startup. I rejected all the three. The startups because i felt the chaotic and high stress environment might not be good for my mental health. And the big tech startup one which paid the best and had a great work life balance, with a great environment- everything i could ask for, but it was in the business of something i do not condone due to my value system. Hence i felt conflicted with many second thoughts, hence i rejected. Now, I have 2 upcoming interviews with big tech companies which are famous for having difficult work life balance. But i am determined, if i get any of them, I will accept. I am also open to midsized who will sponsor my visa, but those kinds are hard to convince for the visa. I have 5 months after which i will be financially and reputation-wise desperate to have a job. The problem is that i feel terrible for rejecting the offers. I feel i have taken a big risk. People tell me i should have accepted the best offer but all of them mostly came with a monetary commitment to join and work for at least a year due to high visa fees. So i could not just accept and take the next best opportunity. How do i work with this situation emotionally and strategically? Context- SDE1 at Amazon (on focus which i am failing purposely since i don't want to continue there) Trying to change countries. Offers from the country i want to move to.

Hi everyone, compensation discussions are happening at Google right now, and I'm looking for advice on how to make the most of the conversation. I'm trying to move beyond simply saying 'I deserve more' or 'the increase is less than expected,' which I know isn't very effective. Instead, I want to ask targeted questions that will help me understand the rationale behind my compensation and potentially identify areas for future growth. For those who have successfully navigated these discussions, or have experience in compensation in general, what are some specific questions I should ask? Any insights, examples, or specific question phrasing would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance.

I admittedly got lazy with not creating a design doc for my side project cuz I was wanting to make something for myself. I’m now keeping one to document what I want to do next with it and scope out all the misses. Is this usually how side projects end up going like?

Need help urgently, I will have a team fit interview with Hiring Manager within 24h (final round, Instacart MLE). How to perform well in the team fit interview? Thanks all.

I have recently started at a new company (full-time) but remain interested in continuing to apply as I am uncertain about how much I can grow here. It has been less than 2 months and I would like to ask the community if it is wise to add this new company on my résumé for new applications. I presume I will have to explain (loosely in the least) anyway to interviewers what I am doing currently... There is not anything ‘toxic’ I am experiencing in particular, just that I want to keep looking. Has anyone been in this situation before? Regardless, I would love some advice and (various) perspectives on how one might go about this discreetly (or at all). Thank you all in advance!

Hi I am working on a team where it's been announced that for a big chunk of the next year we'll be doing tech advancements ( i.e. moving over tooling from one suite to another etc ) I like my team but am just concerned of career stagnation Is there a way to navigate through these waters that would allow me to work on an impactful item beyond what has been determined to work on?

Hi! I am working on some side projects and I find it a bit challenging to plan and organize the work in a manageable way. Are there any resources or websites out there which could be used for this without paying a ton of money? I mainly need a place where I can make some initial UI mock designs first and then probably do some basic planning for the tasks. I am not experienced with professional UX/UI stuff and so would benefit from something simple for beginner to make the mocks. Any advice or resources shared is appreciated! Thanks!

I’m an engineer with two years of experience working on a backend team at one of the major US banks. Unfortunately, I feel like I haven’t been learning or growing as much as I’d like in this role. I’ve been primarily tasked with DevOps/infra work and handling observability, which has limited my opportunities to write meaningful code and build my software engineering skills. I’ve tried to move internally to a more development-focused team, but it hasn’t worked out, and I’m feeling frustrated with my current team and manager. Sometimes I worry that my skills are below the level expected of someone with my experience, especially when it comes to writing quality code and solving problems efficiently. For the past three months, I’ve been preparing for interviews and targeting mid-level software engineering roles, including positions at Big Tech and other promising companies. However, I’m nervous about whether I’ll be able to thrive if I land a new role, particularly since metrics like code velocity and code quality are often emphasized at this level. My question is: How can I improve my problem-solving skills as a software engineer while balancing interview preparation? Given that I haven’t had many opportunities to code at work, or tackle problems independently what strategies or resources can I use to ensure I’m ready to succeed in a mid-level role? I’d appreciate any advice, resources, or strategies from others who’ve faced a similar situation or transitioned successfully into a more coding-intensive role.

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?

The architectural principles of one of my projects at work is about to be reused by my teammate. This teammate is about to start depending on me before they start writing code by reading my design docs I wrote, asking me questions, and using that info to create their design docs for their project. They might even ask me for help about potential solutions to the issues they will run into. My goal is to transform this opportunity into a solid STAR story for mentoring in faang interviews (more cushion for being mid level and making the case of a less risky up or out to senior as a long term growth plan for me). However, I know like everything, doing it right is better than tryna stretch the truth. In that vein, my understanding of if I did a good job or not is If they have the tools to ensure their project doesn't need rework due to missed edge cases and all. When I show up early to review design, I act with a vested interest in terms of high level design. I am a sounding board for how they should handle those tough edge cases without getting too involved. If they can do more complex problem solving on their own in the future, and think more critically beyond "wiring everything together". How do you think this approach sounds with maximizing this opportunity for myself?

Are there any suggestions for preparing a mobile app system design? Most of the courses and threads seem to be focused on backend development.

Currently I work at Qualcomm and I have one last attempt remaining at H1B which will I get to know at the end of march next year. I am quite dissatisfied with my salary here and looking to shift. Are there companies which hire on last h1b attempt? I still have more than a year on my STEM OPT left.

I read this other Q&A on being active in meetings, and I like the advice about doing homework so you can be more effective once the meeting comes. However, I imagine there's a potential negative extreme here in spending too much time preparing for the meeting. What's a reasonable amount of time here?

I know proactive job searching is key, can this be extended to saying hey next month there might be activity let’s apply to jobs and take recruiter calls if I get a callback and let them know to reach out again in 8 months for me to get my resume in the door and align my onsite interviews to that target April date? Or do you think there’s a better way to go about this?