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

My Role is Senior SRE

I received my second performance review and it came in at a -M which means Sometimes meets expectations. This is my first year in big tech and I'm at a loss for words. I worked 12-hour days since I started. The first 6 months I just winged it and did not realize how strategic and crucial these performance reviews were. So for my second 6 months, I aligned with my team lead and manager. I executed every project they asked me to and even created some projects to help the entire team. I was led to believe I was doing good work. However, this Tuesday I received the news that my rating is again a -M. They said that they did not put me on a PIP because they saw improvement from the last PR. They told me the reason was that I am one of 3 Sr. Engineers and that two of them are performing more than I am. Since we are rated on a curve I am last. 9 out of my 10, 360 reviews were positive and an M or above. I have a follow-up meeting next week with my manager to discuss my improvement plan. I also set up a call with my manager's manager for a coaching/mentorship call.
Here are my questions. I feel like my manager sees others as more proficient than me. Even though other colleagues tell me I am better than the other senior engineers how can I break out of this perception my manager has? How can I avoid a PIP? Our next performance review is in 2-3 months due to some changes they made in the yearly PR schedule. I don't think I can make enough changes during that time. What should my approach be towards my manager and his manager?

• I want to be humble but also direct.
• I feel I am not being treated fairly but I also think the system may be designed this way. I don't want to appear like I am a victim either. I fear that I will get a PIP due to my manager's subjective opinion I will lose my job, my apartment, and I will have lost the last 2 years of working myself to the bone. How can I escape being in this state of survival?

I'm primarily on the back-end, but I've been put on a lot of other stacks. I've worked with www and Bloks and now I need to pick up native Android to debug a deep link issue. I'm having a hard time with the Android issue. I took a long time just setting up the environment, choosing between VSCode, Android Studio, and OnDemand. I'm now working with adb, which I don't really understand as it's completely new to me. There's not a lot of documentation for my problem area, and it's been rough. More broadly speaking, how can I do better in these situations and pick up new stacks faster?

I had a career discussion with my new manager during my one-on-one meeting. I did ask him if he is ready to put me up for promotion to senior software engineer. He said he will gather feedback and get back to me next week. In the following one-on-one discussion, he brought up a few points as feedback. I have to do independent projects: (I have already delivered three independent projects right from design to shipping to prod. My old manager knows about this and he had given me the highest rating). I have to mentor juniors: (I have already mentored two juniors in my team). He pointed out saying that I took more time to lock my recent design: ( We took over a project from another team, and the design had many open-ended loose strings. I took the initiative to fill those gaps apart from designing my module.) From this discussion, I feel like my new manager is either less informed or he lacks knowledge of the previous impact that I delivered. I am actually upset and demotivated. How can I handle this situation? How to move forward with my new manager regarding career discussion?

I was recently laid off from AWS. I see few open roles for SDE-1s but descent number for SDE-2 roles. Should I study system design and apply for SDE-2 roles or focus on SDE-1 roles? I have not studied for system design interviews. I estimate that I will need 2-3 months of studying before I can pass the interviews. My YOE is low for SDE2 and I might be wasting my time applying for SDE2. Here is a breakdown of my experience: SDE-1 at AWS: 1 year 9 months (not including 2 months for WARN) SDE intern at NASA JPL: 1 year Undergraduate Researcher: 3 years. Co-author on 3 papers. First-author on 1 paper. All reputable journals. My manager at AWS was telling me that I should apply for promo in the next few months (after finishing a project). I got laid off before I could apply. Is there anything I can do now to make me stand out as an SDE2? For example, contributing to open source. I want to try being an entreprenuer but I know few ventures make more money than working at FAANG so maybe it's not a good idea.

Hey, I hope you all are having a good one. I was curious how do you network on LinkedIn to find Internships/jobs. Specifically: What is a good approach to reach out to VPs/Hiring Managers recruiters in your target companies? Being an Entry level/Mid-Level developer what are some ways you can provide value to them too? What are some "Don'ts" of this approach Thank you in advance.

Obviously, we need good UX, but I find myself obsessing over small details. E.g. When the loading animation shows the display flexbox is slightly smaller than when the data loads because of scroll bars added once the data comes in. This makes it a bit jarring There are other things like messing with colors, UX, animations, transitions, spacing. Clearly you can spend all day tweaking UX. Where do you draw the line?

Last weekend, I got some surprising news from my EM after our team's Pulse review submission was done.
Turns out, I'm getting a 'Meet Most' rating. I've been at Meta for two years now, and my EM thinks it's a good idea for me to start looking outside the company since a promotion seems tough in the next six months. I'm not really sure what to think about this. Has anyone else been in this boat? I'd love to hear your experiences. Also, Is switching teams within Meta a viable option ?

What sort of documentations should we have for our 1 on 1s? Is there a video on having a 1 on 1 doc? My previous manager at Workday told me to discuss
Wins, What I am focusing on, Blockers, Personal Development, Action steps and created a shared google doc for us, but it seemed kind of status-reporty. Is there another recommended format for our 1 on 1?

Hi I am thinking that if I also start to show the basics of a staff engineer, it might be helpful to reach a senior engineer status.

My goal is to level up to senior, but it's tricky as I'm not getting the feedback on how to bridge the gap. I have other engineers in the org as mentors, but I haven't been able to get areas of improvement from them. I don't get a lot of comments on code review anymore either - It seems to be going fine there alongside everything else.

Definitions: Backend: Distributed Systems, scalable applications, fault tolerant systems, control plane applications, API development, uses higher-level languages like Java/Python. Low-Level: Database Internals (Query Optimization, Transaction processing, Data/Storage engines), Compilers, GPUs, latency sensitive software, accelerators. Usually C/C++. Which is better for long-term career growth and compensation?

I'm currently a mid-level engineer, and I've already made a good amount of progress towards senior. However, I'm looking to change teams as I don't like the work too much on my current team, and I want to minimize the progress "loss" as much as possible in my new team by finding one that sets me up well for the mid-level -> senior promotion. What’s a good team composition for this? Do you just want a good mix of all levels? What other factors besides team composition should I look for when it comes to evaluating a team on this axis?

Hello! Just joined this community yesterday and the information I've seen so far is invaluable! This platform truly is unique! My question is about the overwhelming and sometimes contradicting information for front-end engineering. I was a backend engineer for 1 year and then switched to a frontend engineer within Mastercard since I love the design and visual aspect of it. It is much more gratifying. We work with Angular in mastercard but I feel like my skillset is very specific to our codebase. I am good at debugging (cause that's what most of my work is recently) but I don't know how that can transfer to other jobs. I also feel like Angular is an older framework. I want to join a proper tech company next year (outside fin-tech) as a senior front-end engineer. What do I need to do to get there? Should I dive deep into Angular and make tons of projects with Angular? Should I learn React or some other frameworks and make projects with those? Should I look into full-stack roles and brush up on backend (Java)? All of the above?? I am a bit lost and any guidance would be appreciated! Thank you!!

I am a mid-level developer. I am attending a tech event for the first time. Could you provide some tips on how to network effectively in the event? I feel like I don't have anything to talk about. Mostly my mind goes blank.

In quarterly conversation with my manager, for questions like how I’ve contributed to Quality or any other sub dimension I got response that I should talk about team and not only how I (as an IC) contributed. And I honestly struggle here. Any tips? How I upgrade myself to talk about impact at team/bigger level and not only at personal level?

I have a couple years of experience, so I'm thinking if it makes sense to go down the engineering manager path. I'm well-positioned to start this journey at my current company as well; I'm a very early engineer on my team, and I have the ability to build up the team and mentor those new people. However, I'm unsure if this is the right way for my career to go and how much of my job I want to be people management - How can I figure this out?

There were some great tips on this question, that was previously asked. Our team is pretty good at steps 1 & 2 that Alex mentions regarding setting an agenda and sending the invite beforehand. However, the team really struggles to make sure the meeting agenda is achieved. We have a lot of great discussions but they are not related to the objective of the meeting. How can we bring the discussion back to the main agenda without being rude and cutting potentially important tangents?

I need to practice questions for multithreading/ concurrency topics What resources to use for the practice? What type of questions am I expected to use it - leetcode type, low level design type? I need a few examples to know what to expect for Rubrik interview? Or any company that says they would ask those questions in system design round.