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

I have a 6-month backup. In my current organisation, I was miserable, and the team was also not good. Opinions were made about me from the start, and that didn’t change in 3 years. Goal: Get into a good company and thrive there. Currently, I have a side project at my brother’s tech consulting firm, but it’s very small and also 1/5 of my salary. But again, this will take out some time from preparation, and it’s project-based—only if a project comes will I get paid. Fear: I will not get job offers when I am on a break I don’t want to get into an organisation where it’s toxic again and start with the “I want to leave this job and prepare” mentality Running out of money (this is low, as my wife is also working, but yes, the fear is there) I am in the final stage of getting a job offer from an early-stage startup, which will give me money, but I’m not sure about the toxicity. Should I seriously take some time to prepare and find a job? I am currently moderately prepared and have reached the final rounds at 4 companies but didn’t get selected. In others, I got eliminated earlier. But once I leave my job, I will focus and prepare for interviews. Based out of: India Update post edit: I am getting a good number of calls from all sorts of companies, but I also fear that if I fail the interview, I will miss out on opportunities.

When it comes to software engineering or landing out features or doing tasks I feel I excel in them but when it comes to showing my task to a wider audience I don't think I do a great job at it. Does anyone have any tips on how to do effective demo of your work? I'm specialized in mobile engineering anything specific to it would be very helpful.

We are a small team of engineers under a tech lead. This tech lead has other small teams under him in addition to ours. The techlead is extremely knowledgeable and is a 10x engineer pushing code everyday. The problem is he does not share his knowledge nor is he approachable. Whenever we try to ask him a question, we get a question back in return which is extremely domain specific and would require his level of expertise to answer in the first place. The morale in the team is low to the point where everyone just avoids asking him any questions until the very end. How does one approach and succeed in this situation?

Rejected for promotion based on one missing metric. Due to some conflicts, I didn't get to work on a project which would have helped me bridge the gap. My manager has insisted on proposing my promotion this quarter as well. Even after not bridging the gap specified in last promotion cycle. What happens if I am rejected second time? Would it affect future promotion cycles?

I am a full stack developer in Apple but mostly focusing on the front end. I have recently started gaining interest in learning more about parallel or distributed Systems. I can take courses which will be reimbursed by my company as part of its career development program. So wondering what are some good courses offered by different schools where I can gain practical knowledge on it.

I recently joined a new company and will have my Dev Talk in a couple of weeks. I'm a mid-level software engineer and rather new in the industry so much of this is new to me (we use a 360 kind of perf review process.) The focus (in my upcoming Dev Talk in a couple of weeks) will be on my goals for the upcoming year rather than my historic performance since I have only been at the company for a month. However, in about 6 months, my EM will go on parental leave for roughly 9 months ~. There will be an interim EM taking over during the leave, and they will start looking for this person in a couple of months. While I'm very happy for my EM, I wonder what I should try to keep in mind to get the most out of my performance review cycle during the upcoming year. My EM has shown an interest in my aspirations to become a senior engineer, and I would very much like to try to reach this level as soon as possible. How can I successfully continue pushing for senior (or possibly be promoted to a senior engineer) while having an interim EM?

I noticed Alex's resume template doesn't have a skills section? is it needed? I know in the vids he says to not have a "skill soup" and keep it focused. But do I even need a skills section?

Hi everyone, I'm planning to apply to Elastic soon for a Mid-Senior role like Software Engineer - Distributed Systems or something similar in the Java,K8s ecosystem. I'm wondering how to best prepare for the interview as I couldn't find a lot of information on how their interviews are structured ? Are they doing DSA, System Design, Behavioral interviews rounds or are their interviews structured differently (maybe focusing on the role and mostly the Java ecosystem)? Do you have any insider info on how technical the roles at Elastic are ? Thanks ! :)

My manager recently asked me to switch gears on the nature of my work. The core deliverables of our team, the bread-n-butter, are in domain, say X. I had been working in domain Y for the past year and a half, where my manager (& skip level) were invested and trying to expand the scope of our team. However, a couple of people working on X recently left our team and so now my manager told me that we will decrease our efforts in Y, and will need me to work on X too. We won't completely be abandoning Y though, he said. I have mixed emotions about this change. I am happy that I will now be involved in the core work of my team. I am also sad because I had just started to make an identity and started being recognised as the go-to-guy for domain Y. I feel the case for my promotion from mid-level to senior would also weaken with this change since I wouldn't have very solid contributions in any domain (i.e. no compound interest). How should I make the most out of this situation?

I have about 1.5 yoe + MS. My internships were at no name companies where I just did some basic SWE/QA work. But because its 2 internships it occupies like 7 lines on my resume (1 line for company, 1 for title, 1 bullet) x 2 + 1 space On the other hand I have a project where I built a discord bot that was used in a large server (15k+ members) to allow for some customized moderation tasks and facilitate commands Now on one hand the internship is actual work experience and work experience counts much more. But the impact from the project is undeniably more so im a bit confused if its worth removing the internship. Plus i feel like keeping internship on the resume is also a bit of a status signal that I did get multiple internships during college. But not sure how much that matters if the impact is mediocre

Situation I was recently applying for jobs at health AI startups after being let go from my previous role. Fortunately, I received three offers: Company A (Series A startup) – Gave me an exploding offer with a three-day deadline after extending the formal offer. They mentioned that since they had given me a verbal indication a week prior, I should have had enough time to decide. Company B (Series B startup) – Offered a reasonable compensation package and gave me a more standard timeline. Company C (Seed-stage startup, my top choice) – Initially made a very low offer, but it was the company I was most interested in. I counteroffered Company C but didn’t receive their response until 10 minutes before Company A’s deadline. By that point, out of fear and pressure, I declined Company A and accepted Company B. Immediately after doing so, Company C sent a much stronger counteroffer—one I would have taken had I known about it earlier. Now, I’ve been feeling regretful, both about how I managed the timeline and the fact that I couldn’t accept the offer I truly wanted. All things considered, all three roles are decent companies with decent roles and with roughly similar comp (in the end). What I’m Hoping to Learn How could I have handled this situation better to reduce stress and ensure I picked the company I truly wanted? How damaging is it to renege on a verbal acceptance of an offer? I hesitated because all three companies are in the health AI space, which I assume is a relatively small and interconnected community. I’d really appreciate any insights or advice from those who have navigated similar situations!

Hi, I am going to have a final round interview at meta next month and just wanted to see what the best courses on the platform would optimize my preparation? I'm looking at the following courses: communication , behavioral, ml systems design. I think there may be an upleveling course from L4 to L5 but also want to gather any additional suggestions. Thanks!

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?

Our company recently got acquihired by another company as we're a team specialized in GenAI in our logistics domain which is rare. Someone who is a manager in another team approached me with interest to use my expertise with GenAI effectively which could save them 2 hours per task (50K tasks in like last 10 years) I've talked with them 2 times now and they're interested in us collaborating , me or maybe also others. Our team wants to collaborate with others and add value. How do I bring this to my current team? Especially the Head of Tech who is like my manager, he often doesn't want me to operate on my own. And am concerned that by sharing this collaboration opportunity he'll say something like he takes over from here or something. The goal is to increase collaboration between teams and also would love to add value across teams, but not sure how that works with tasks on 1 team while also having tasks at another team. I was thinking about sharing in the standup that I've met team x and they are interested in collaborating on y there will be a follow up , I'll keep you informed. And telling product owner that I would like them to be there in the conversation. I feel like the moment I start going across teams I'm acting beyond my role, taking lead and stepping on others toes and not sure who to report to anymore. Thanks in advance!

I have mailed to regarding this last week but haven't received any reply. My intention is not to pollute the the discussion forum but need to get this issue resolved. Apologies If this offends anyone. I'm not receiving any emails regarding live events that are gonna happen. I live in a different timezone and I do have the taro app but I rarely use my phone. I mostly check the emails and if there are anything important I'd add them to my calendar. I don't receive any emails about upcoming live events just at least 2 days before and I only see the live event notification just when they are about to start. When I get back to my phone later that event will be over. This email notification thing is not there or do I need to modify any of my settings to get the emails that I'm missing before? Please resolve this query. Thanks.

Should we bold? What should be bold? Would love to hear thoughts

Background I have started developing an internal task management system based on server actions. The problem is that server actions cannot run in parallel. At some screens using Parallel routes, I am calling more than one server action, and since they run sequentially, it’s hurting performance. ### Question What would be the best course of action here, I found a library that can be used to run server action in parallel While I was reading somewhere that one should not use server actions for GET requests and only for mutations, based on this I am thinking about going to ‘api’ based routes for GET requests and keep the post requests as server actions. Need advice from seniors here who have worked in NextJs before. Also having a codebase following two kinds of approaches server action and API routes seems weird to me because as per my limited knowledge plus what Alex taught in his Code Quality Course, one should follow one pattern in a codebase so that it stays consistent. Would appreciate the help or any kind of advice here.

What are the effective ways or things to keep in mind, to effectively communicate to technical(Data Analyst,Data Science,Software Engineers) and non-technical audience(Executive,Prod Managers).

For the code machine archetype, which Alex mentioned in linkedin, how do you get over the bottlenecks of design docs and code reviews?

Our startup recently got acquired, we'll keep the same contracts. Now I've been asked to write a job description for my role, colleagues told me that it is to evaluate my salary and maybe increase it if needed. But it cannot decrease Is this a common thing? First time I've heard it. It seems to me like the HR is literally asking me to do their work.

I talked with the hiring manager to discuss a role at Oracle. The hiring manager wants me to interview for a Principal SDE role, but I want to interview for a Senior-level position. The interview is scheduled in 3 days. How should I approach him to request a change in the interview level?

I'm currently drafting a design document for a high TPS service in a big tech. I'm surprised to find that this service doesn't have a framework for gradually releasing features from 0% to 100%. Instead, they solely rely on binary switches. The recommendation is that if gradual feature rollout is necessary, it should be implemented using these binary switches. Then I think, why don't I propose to implement a gradual rollout framework for the service? After looking into the existing binary switch configuration, I am surprised to find numerous switches already in place. Features are launched without gradual rollout, yet the service runs fine. Most features try to reduce blast ratio by going through stages like a few customers, a group of customers, regional customers, worldwide customers. Is gradual dial up framework a required feature of a good production system?

I have an interview coming up for a position where the tech is ReactJS, NodeJS, PostgreSQL, Typescript, and Next.js. It hasn't been scheduled yet and I have 1-2 weeks most likely. How can I prepare for the interview and is there a checklist I should follow to make sure I'm prepared? Most likely, they won't do Leetcode based on intuition? And also cause it's an 80 person company. I'm thinking I should brush up on React (the basic concepts) and also be comfortable with the DB stuff like entity relationship. Are there courses or tools I could use to prep? They said the role is fullstack but we can choose a backend or a frontend focus. Thanks!

I'm updating my resume and I want to know if I should put the name of the clients I worked for as a contractor or only the consulting company? I have worked with 3 clients inside this company and the projects were very different between each one.