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

I've noticed from other engineers experience that only senior engineers with 10+ years experience get considered for fully remote tech/ big tech jobs. And in my experience interviewing, only hybrid with a little above my current compensation is even offered. What has been your experience in the job market? Should you just quit looking for remote (with decent pay) and only look for hybrid/full time. I have 5 years experience as an SRE.

Hi, I have my first team match call with a hiring manager this week. I am E4 level. I have compiled a list of questions to ask to try and demonstrate that I am willing to come in and work hard to contribute to the team's success. Would love some feedback:

1. What are some past projects that E4 engineers have worked on?
2. What is the team distribution, everyone's level, and how do people interact with each other?
3. What are the top 3 traits you look for in a candidate to join and be successful to contribute to your team?
4. What do you think I specifically would be working on at the start?
5. What are the specific expectations for my role/level during onboarding / ramp up? How long is ramp up? What are the expectations after ramp up?
6. How does the team celebrate success?

And please feel free to add any questions you think would be helpful to ask!

Thanks in advance!

I know to refactor my commits only based on previous review comments. I code and test it thoroughly most of the time, but it's hard for me to identify places to refactor. How to get good at refactoring or even identifying places to refactor?

At Microsoft, basic criteria for promotion is to deliver at next level consistently. Example: At L62, i need to work and deliver at L63s work level standards.

Should I be focusing initially on quick wins or higher-impact, high-priority projects that could potentially take longer?

I was hired as a mid-level engineer, but I'm performing at the level below it. I had about a year and a half of experience coming into my company but didn't get much from it due to multiple re-orgs. In hindsight, I was a poor hire for my role and have felt this way the entire time. I am not interested in the niche and motivation is a struggle at times. I stayed because the team was really strong and I thought I could focus on the coding and grow technically. That was a mistake. Fast forward a year and a half later (now), my manager tells me informally that my delivery is ok, but the way I go about my work needs improvement and I'm not growing, so I am performing at a level below. I need a lot of help from other engineers. And that I need fewer comments on my diffs and to do more research on problems because I'm not problem-solving well enough to be at my level. He's completely right. The team is full of high-performers and I know that I'm doing poorly by comparison. But I'm already consistently overworking into the evening and weekends. I'm also hitting the limit with my mental health. I am putting in effort, but am being told it's not enough. For example, I spend some time understanding X and think I understand it, but teammate questions me in a way that makes me apply that knowledge and I realize my understanding is not so good or I did not think about it that way, so I am ashamed because I have spent a lot of time working on the task, but have failed to deep dive into this part. Or my teammate asks me for my thoughts on how to make something better, but nothing really comes to mind. How do I work on this behavior? Some other questions: Is this a sign to leave my team or company? And the profession? Despite my best efforts, I'm disappointing my team and it's taking a toll. I haven't been served a PIP yet, but is this a sign that it's coming? Naive take, but is it a bad idea/even possible to ask for a downlevel? The reasoning was that I'd rather keep my job than lose it. Any advice?

I'm trying to figure out the proper level of fidelity here: Should I have very granular estimates or something that's not super structured - Just a high-level idea of projects with some buffer built in. I'm curious to know how to structure this plan to ensure that one doesn't take on too much and get overwhelmed, but is also full enough so that in case of blockers on core projects, there's a pipeline of projects to switch into. Would love to hear everyone's thoughts!

Currently, I am only going through Neetcode's roadmap. I have solved 40+ problems.

My process is: Understand problem Try to solve the problem Try for 10 mins If not, go see the solution video Understand the solution and code up the solution Take notes in an excel sheet for revising later I only read up theory related to the video in case its something I do not know about from before. Only for max 30 mins, so that I do not waste a lot of time reading up. My primary aim is to learn by solving problems.

I am able to solve some problems but I feel I still do not have the intuition for solving new problems.

My questions: Should I be reading up on more theory before I start doing more of the roadmap? Maybe go through Neetcode's courses. Does it simply take solving more problems to build up the intuition? Should I try harder on my own before checking the solution video? How did you build the intuition to solving new problems?

Can I do well at Job and interview prep simultaneously? Would be interested to hear stories from people and strategies employed.

I can use chat-gpt/claude to understand small code-snippets. But I'm not sure how to use it to understand the whole code structure. Are there any IDE plugins that worked for you for this purpose? Especially in streaming/online model service, I can't add print statements to debug. I can only look at tensorboard which isn't helpful in understanding the code-base. How can you better understand with ML models in this scenario?

I am currently on a team where I am assigned to work on a different area of the product(s) in each quarter as per the priorities of the leadership for that quarter. This has resulted in me gaining a good full-stack overview but not much depth on any specific components/technologies. I've been on this team for around 18 months right out of college but 80% of the technical work I've delivered till now has just been pattern-matching based on the existing code and infrastructure, although the outcomes have been impactful for the business. I feel like I'm not learning anything technically significant beyond company/product-specific knowledge which are not transferable to other companies. When I check out job postings from other companies for my level of experience, there always seems to be a focus on having expertise in some technology, which I can't confidently claim. This brings me to the following questions:

1. Should I stay at my current company? My career growth prospects seem great here as I have a very good reputation in my team and sibling teams, and have gotten very good feedback and visibility from managers and seniors. I also work as the lead developer for a legacy product which is not that robust and has hard-to-reproduce customer bugs, but the leadership has taken a renewed interest in adding new features to it, resulting in more potential scope for me. The main downside is low technical-learning as mentioned above, and I've heard this same remark being mentioned by senior engineers who have joined from other companies as well.

2. If I decide to switch companies, how do I bridge the lack of technical expertise that's expected for my level? When a recruiter views my resume, the technologies that I've used at work and as part of side-projects are all over the place, without a clear specialization. Although I'm confident that I can pick up these stacks without trouble on the job if needed, I feel underconfident in them in an interview setting.

Here's a list of tools to build side projects with LLMs for free. NOTE: Italicized sources are no credit card needed

Databases

Free 5GB Postgres via : Free 15GB Postgres from : CockroachDB:

Hosting

Free hosting via Heroku (24 months for free from GitHub Student perks): Render is good: is dirt cheap also: Free cron jobs via / / GitHub Actions / (the founders of this are on taro!)

LLM

Gemini Flash: super generous free tier (1500+ requests/day): Gemma 3: (Best option, 100% free and is very performant) Groq: super fast LLM inference: Cerebras but there's a waitlist:

I'm currently working through a task where I have to write unit tests. These unit tests in theory should test out the entirety of its class isolated from any other classes or function and effectively apply business logic on how these functions/methods are being called. But where do I draw the line in regards to how much testing I'd need to run? Currently struggling with this PR because there's lots of lines of code (bad I know), but I do need to find out what a complete unit test looks like. If you had to ask me, a complete unit test is where all the unit tests traverse through all code path and have both positive tests and negative tests being ran to show how the code should be used. If there's some sort of guidance online, that would be helpful. Otherwise I'm mimicking what unit tests have been approved based on style and usage.

I've heard from my peers at Meta that you should post a lot on Workplace, otherwise it can reflect badly on your PSC. Is this true or more of a myth?

As a fellow keyboard goblin, commit-ing away either from home or the office (depending on the alignment of the moon) it can be sometimes tricky to make sure you're also living a healthy lifestyle.

It can be so easy to fall into bad habits of eating at your desk, snacking excessively, retorting at the scorn of ultraviolet rays hitting your eyes upon waking up 10 minutes before stand-up etc.

How do you mitigate this?

My personal strategy: Maintain high water KPIs Using my lunch to do some laps outside of the office Going for runs (albeit lately, nearly exclusively on treadmills) Never buying bulk snacks (gotta increase the friction somehow) Having a health checklist with a list of items I've determined to be impactful I have also played around with the idea of finding the health "meta" and tracking every single micronutrient via cronometer, basing my diet off of a nutrigenomic report compiled via my gene data, buying every single reasonable health tracker and using that as a success metric etc.

But the above won't be useful if I randomly decide, "today I'm going to only eat pbnj sandwiches bc I'm feeling lazy". Consistency definitely seems key

My skip level manager arranges 1:1 every quarter to know if everything is going good, if I need any help from him or if I have any questions. How can I best utilize this time?

I am a mid level engineer and I work for a manager who has micromanaging tendencies. Some of these tendencies include, Going deep into implementation details of tasks that engineers are working on. I have been in meetings/discussions where proposed solutions by engineers have been ripped apart by this manager without them having enough context about why the engineer is doing it a certain way. This almost always leads into the engineer having to explain the nitty gritty implementation details to this manager to convince them that the engineer is doing the right thing. Overall, the manager shows very little trust on the decisions taken by the engineers. When there arises a situation that the manager wants something from an engineer, they will want it immediately i.e. within the next few hours, eod etc. The manager is aware that the engineer is working on a bunch of things but they will not show any regard for that fact. This means that the engineer has to put everything they are working on aside to produce the thing that the manager wants. The problem is that this happens very often and it results in engineers either having to overwork to get their job done or affecting quality of their work. The manager will put the engineers under extreme pressure to deliver projects on or before the deadline. This includes minor nudges in meetings, lunches, team activities etc. reminding engineers of the timeline to having 2 hour meetings to discuss where we are in terms of meeting the deadline. I have a few questions based on the above context. How to deal with such managers? Is it sustainable long term to work for such a manager? I am considering getting to the next level in my role within the next 2 years, would it be advisable to continue working with this person? Do most managers have more trust on their directs than described in the above situations?

I'm relatively new to Meta, so I'm having trouble processing things in meetings as they happen, making them a substantial waste of time for me overall. I don't want to seem dumb, so I would to avoid asking a bunch of questions during meetings to make people explain what they just said. What can I do to make meetings more productive for me?