Senior Engineer Career Development Videos, Forum, and Q&A

With tech market at a low, is it a good time to invest in stocks? If yes, what is the best way to get started for a newbie in stock investing?

I'm originally from India. I started working in the US from 2021. My team in the Bay Area is pretty talented and I have been learning a lot from them. I am considering if I should move back to India at some point down the line. I'm worried about the career opportunities in India though.

Given most companies have their headquarters here, Bay Area has plenty of L5, L6, L7 engineers tackling massive scope. Does India also have many Staff+ engineering roles dealing with massive projects? Or are the opportunities in India mostly restricted to L3-L5 levels?

I am moving to a different organization within my current company where I will be working with a new domain and new language (C#)

Looking for some concrete advice to get clarity in terms of expectations from my new manager and also work with him to upskill myself in the new product fast.

I am also looking for concrete tips on how to upskill beyond syntactical on more intermediate and advanced concepts in the new language? How do other engineers approach learning a new language beyond the surface.

In the by Ethan Evans, there's a mention of an app that can show personality & communication style results of a manager. What's the name of this app?

I see some senior engineers getting promoted to staff within 2 years. Whereas other senior engineers take 5-7+ years.

What are some hurdles that senior engineers face when getting promoted to staff engineer? How to watch out for and avoid these hurdles to get promoted within 2 years?

What’s the biggest skill to start mastering or how to set yourself up for success at an early stage to make this promotion faster?

Is it easier to get this promotion in big tech or a startup?

Does changing teams or orgs or companies delay this promotion? 

I have 10 years of experience and am currently laid off. I want to experiment as an entrepreneur and build a product. I have a very basic idea. I am willing to try being an entrepreneur for a maximum of two years.

My question is, if my startup idea fails, how will corporations perceive me? Will corporations be willing to hire me? Will they respect my experience as an entrepreneur? What is the general attitude towards failed entrepreneurs?

If I know I can go back to the corporate world, I will have enough confidence to experiment.

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.

Been on my current team for a half now and working with a teammate on an XFN heavy project. Both of us are E5. While we have split the work into different areas and are owning each area, my teammate is more tenured and has more context on certain common parts of the system, and therefore ends up participating more in the conversations in meetings. As a result, many XFN partners are now seeing my teammate as the lead for this project and independently reaching out rather than communicating with both of us. Skip is also pinging my teammate separately and in XFN groups. How can I take charge and establish myself as an equal owner of the project? Have tried to ramp up as much as possible on the common components and haven’t brought it up to my manager yet, but want to make sure I don’t get dinged in performance review for not driving enough direction. Many times, I’ll message my teammate to discuss an aspect of the project and my teammate will ping my idea immediately to XFN. I’ve brought up establishing clear areas of ownership with my teammate which we seemed to be on the same page about, but things haven’t improved. I have also written most of the docs for the project so hoping to leverage those for direction but want to make sure I don’t get dinged for this dynamic.

For someone starting to study Systems Design for interviews, is there a roadmap we should follow so that we understand concepts in increasing order of difficulties?

I have not actively interviewed in 4-5 years and so not practised algorithms for a while now.

I got a phone screen day after tomorrow. What's the best way I can prepare in the one day that I have to make sure I get through the technical questions asked in the phone screen?

Are there any AI tools or other resources that can provide feedback on systems design answers to specific questions specifically for infra, cloud and devops projects?

I got an invited to a round-table lunch where there will be execs in my field.

How do I make sure I can turn this into a fruitful and effective networking opportunity?

What kind of questions should I craft to ask at the round-table lunch?

Hello I joined a new company as a senior swe earlier this month and have met everyone on my team but I'm new to big companies so not sure how to approach a skip level meeting?

The reason I'm asking is I've seen a lot of people and posts talking about skip level relationships.

1. Am I supposed to set up a meeting myself or wait for them to set it up?

2. Should I tell my manager I'm talking to my skip level ie his manager?

I found out I’m getting an offer for a Senior Software Engineer role, but the recruiter gave me a range to ask for instead of giving me a number. Curious to hear everyone’s thoughts on Brex. I currently have a full time job as a Senior Software Engineer at a Fortune 500 company.

I've been struggling to put my resume together for new senior/lead front end roles. My current position came through a referral and only needed my resume as a formality so didn't really put thought into it. Now that I'm looking for new roles and going through the application process, I've struggled to get any traction. I've gone through the how to write a stellar resume course here and implemented a lot of that thinking. I believe the one thing I'm missing is metrics. Unfortunately they're hard to get at my company but I've built custom features for large clients who use our platform. Is there a way to get around specifying number of users and what are some other metrics I can use?

Hi

I work in big tech ML org, there are just too many layers and I only end up know things on a high level (product hybrid archetype) but lacking deep technical skills in core ML areas.
Would picking a opensource project to learn deeper technical skills help in interviews ? or Just moving to core area team is better even when sub-org changes and is kind of promo timeline reset.

I am the kind of person who likes to evolve my role in Software Engineering by working on different types of things. For example I have worked heavily on Cl/CD pipelines but now want to work on Cloud Infrastructure or Security. How do I find opportunities at work if my current team does not deal with Cloud or Security? I feel like if I voice my desire to work on Cloud and Security, he/she may feel I am not being loyal to my current work/project.

Lately I am seeing lot of videos like end of Tech career.

With the AI tools like , How will the tech industry involve.
What are the other alternatives I have?

Hi there, I'm a senior engineer and I'm looking to apply to startups. I feel like this is a different ballgame compared to working with recruiters at big tech as there is no resume. For example one of my top choices has a job posting that simply asks me to submit my linkedin, github, or website link. How can I stand out?

Many of their engineers are on linkedin, so I can try to start the conversation that way.

Their backend is golang, so I've been working on building backend golang projects and putting them on github, as well as making youtube videos about my process. When I feel like I have enough of a portfolio, I could apply with my github link.

I do use their product, so maybe there is something I can do with that. Maybe I could make a simple website where I introduce myself and link to everything - github, linkedin, live demos of my projects, etc.

Any thoughts? Thanks.

I've been put on a 4-week improvement plan with tight deadlines, but the goals seem achievable if I work extra hours. While my manager appears supportive, I don't fully trust his intentions.

On the other hand, I have another job lined up, which I'm excited about, and it offers a higher compensation. They want me to join early but they are open to waiting the month for me to start.

Do you suggest I wait to be laid off and receive severance (which I estimate would be about 12 weeks' pay), or is there an advantage to leaving the company before the improvement plan finishes?

No kids, no debts, and enough savings to support me for 5 years.

I work in AI and am considering working in my next company, Google, Meta/Facebook, and Apple have all called given my reputation in the industry as a past startup founder and well known open source contributor.

What should I think about in joining a company beyond perks and benefits? Should I optimize for learning with an AI legend in their early stage venture that has raised half a billion but hasn’t built or released a product yet, or go for a larger publicly traded company with many layers of management that has established promotion paths and product market fit. What else should I consider before taking a job?

Over the course of the past few years, a lot of us have noticed an increase in outsourcing to lower cost of living countries. There are a few countries that fit this description, but India clearly stands above the rest. I hold no judgments on our fellow engineers in different countries, and want to focus on how to adapt to the reality we’re in.

From my limited perspective, this phenomenon is not new, with anecdotes going as far back as mid 2000s. However, it seems that the past few years of US layoffs combined with aggressive hiring overseas is becoming obvious if not outright publicly announced. And although Generative AI has created a lot of fear of potential future impact, outsourcing doesn’t seem to get the appropriate attention it deserves relative to the real current impact. The impact is especially felt in the U.S. where there is not a long term social safety net and everything from healthcare to retirement is tied to a job.

So how might we mitigate the chances of being impacted by outsourcing?

I can see at least three strategies, but would need the crowdsourced brainstorming of the Taro community to dig deep:

1. Improving yourself as an individual outside of your company, which may involve switching specialty.
2. Protecting your current job by delivering even more value.
3. Navigating the software industry with the goal of joining a company that doesn’t have plans of outsourcing anytime soon.

I don’t want to limit the boundary of thinking with the aforementioned list, but rather wanted to provide a conversation starter.

This is certainly a national issue for the companies shipping jobs out, but given that location is at the heart of this topic, I would be curious to hear additional thoughts that are specific to major cities like New York and Bay Area here in the U.S.