Promotion Q&A and Videos

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?

Promotion is one of the most difficult and nuanced topics, so there's no way any course can absolutely cover 100% of all possible scenarios. If you have any questions about , please ask them here! I'm happy to talk about:

• What gaps you may have to get to the next level
• How to create additional scope in your team
• Whether a prospective team you're considering looks good for promotion
• Why you're getting stuck at your current level
• Maintaining that dialog with your manager about promotion

I recently read an existing question "Do FAANG...ever hire M1 from outside?"

I am aware that M1 is usually filled internally. The part that shocked me is that the questioner stated they are a Sr EM with 10 years of management experience. I would expect they would interview for Tier 1 as a Sr EM with that background.

This relates to my own career strategy as well: I plan to move from Sr IC to EM at my current company, gain 2-5 years of experience, and consider interviewing out for promo if I can't achieve internal promo in that frame.

Am I thinking about this the wrong way? We know promo to senior for engineers by interviewing is often easier than internal promo, but is that a poor mental model for EM?

Hello, I have 3 years of experience and I'm an SDE II at Amazon. The Q1 promotion results are out, and I'm surprised to see many fast-track SDE III promotions. It seems to me that when the time is right and stars align, SDE III promotion can be quick, and if you stay in one team long enough, it wouldn't be hard to get to SDE III.

80% of my team are SDE IIs, and I don't see my possibility of SDE III promotion in the next 2 years unless:

1. I find some big opportunities that bring huge revenue to the organization
2. There's a major reorg, and I'm assigned to a new team, and the new team expands
3. My current team shrinks for some reason, I stay, and my team grows again. Interestingly, my team's senior manager and 2 senior engineers actually fall into the third bucket.

What do you think? Should I just relax, keep pace, and grow my skills, hoping for a promotion by job hopping when the market recovers?

I am a 15 year experienced software professional holding H1B. In my last 3 companies, I was a Senior Software Engineer. In my penultimate company, I was due for Staff promotion. Fast Forwarding, I was impacted by layoffs in Jan this year. I had 3 months to find a job in this market. I was applying and passing on my resume through all my network. Most of my applications got rejected quoting they picked another candidate. Some of my applications materialized into interviews , but I ended up not clearing (was in bad form and stress and also didn't get ample time to prepare thoroughly).

Finally, I got my application picked at a company through a referral, but they only considered me for SWE2. I explained them my experience and requested to consider me for SSE level, they said the panel will be open to it. But in the end, they ended up offering me SWE2. I took the offer as I had no choice. I was running out of time and did'nt want to risk rejecting this offer and waiting for a better offer. I took up the offer and joined, but I don't feel happy. I wish I had more time to really choose what I wanted.

I would like your thoughts on how "wise" is it to be SWE2 with 15 years experience. Would my age become a factor for further career progressions as they would prefer younger people? I am confused if I should stick to this, be patient, work smart and work my way up inside, or would it make more sense to keep interviewing and find something that I feel happy about. Look forward to helpful replies or referrals for SSE :)

I was wondering if you need to be part of a specific type of environment in order to make quick jumps in your career? Like to get promoted to senior level in 2 years.

I was asking because from my experience, there seems to be an invisible social hierarchy in every work place. Other people in the team may not allow me to make these jumps since this kind of anomaly will break the social hierarchy:

• There is project specific information, in absence of really god wikis you have to rely on the peers in the team to provide you such information (like how are specific parts in a service working, or how is an obscure internal tool working etc). From what I see, often times they will provide small chunks of information, as much as you need to do your task, but small enough such that they still have the information and you depend on them (probably a measure to prevent others from replacing them).
• Envy might appear between other senior folks if you progress quicker than them and might start to backstab you (For example, you need some information from them about a piece of code they wrote in order to progress, but they might do the knowledge transfer in such a way that it looks like they told you what you need to know, but in reality you got nothing; or might tell you to go debug to figure out how is something working, and you can spend days debugging modules when it would've been an 1 hour stretch if they simply told you or there was any wiki).
• Manager might not want to give you extra money and compensate at your true value.
• If you work too much, or too hard there's going to be problems withe the peers, because you increase the bar and kind of force them to work harder too.

I was asking these things, because I was wondering if I got anything wrong about these fast jumps or in general that I have a broken view about work. My first professional experience was an internship at a big tech and when got there the seniors told me that I have the same knowledge as a senior engineer, but best they could do was another internship next year (still in college).

Ultimately, there is no shortcut to a promotion at this level—it requires significant, consistent contributions that demonstrate your readiness to operate at a higher level of responsibility and impact. And I understand that it might not be easy on those levels, but most of the things described in the official documentation are pretty intense. Is there an easier path to get to the top by doing things smarter and not harder? For instance, there are things that people could do in other companies for bonus points like organizing hike for the team, building Movember type of volunteering event or soccer tournament for the org?

How about the following examples?

Mentorship and Team Development:

Actively mentor junior engineers and contribute to team development. This can include leading internal workshops, contributing to onboarding processes, or providing regular, constructive feedback to peers.

Community and Culture Contribution:

Contribute to the company's engineering culture and community. This can involve contributing to open-source projects, improving internal tools, writing engineering blogs, or participating in company-sponsored volunteer events.

I've raised this concern to manager in almost every 1-1 once even in front of Director of Eng that I'm interested in more roles and responsibilities. Cuz I was not a fresher even when I joined the current company at entry level and now that I've done decent work too at current company.

But manager fails to give me a path/timeline of when will I be entrusted with some impactful work.

He criticises in public, and has a favourite too who uses this to influence the manager against others.

Manager also wants every small thing to be done his way and he presents the whole thing as learning opportunity for me.

If junior engineers are not supposed to do anything on their own then why are they even hired as engineers?

Should I look for new opportunities? Or how can I take away most from the current situation?

I work with a team of 5 engineers amongst whom two are in my timezone. They always work overtime, work over weekends. They dont necessarily create a bigger impact but they are constantly posting on team chat groups about minor issues that they have seen and resolve it over the weekends. And stay late evenings and very late nights talking to the other team members. They spend a great deal of time obsessing over minor details like naming convention, doing repeated tasks.

I cannot keep up with this culture. I would actually like to have a personal life and spend some free time during the week working on side projects or learning something. At some point the opportunities do go to the people who have the most visibility right, no matter how mundane the work they do is? How do I navigate this? I would like to maintain a good reputation and work on interesting things. But I feel like I may be overlooked for promotions due to this. Any advice for me?