Senior Engineer

So, some context:

I work as a devops manager (amongst some others, each of us managing a specific workstream). I have not really been that busy due to commercial reasons and thus not learnt much.

I enjoy coding and devops a lot (I was a coder before devops so can code too), and in the mean time, I was approached to work on an app with a friend, which I started. Commercially, that does not seem to be going anywhere due to the proposed high running costs in the cloud (despite automation and taking steps to reduce cost, but the scale and ambition of that app will not come cheap). Anyway, the business domain and requirements I got from said friend make it an interesting project and business problem to solve, with a genuine reason to explore techs I have not explored before (and not just for the sake of my CV).

So I am continuing with this as a development exercise for learning, and I am learning a lot as I am approaching the project maturely (doing documentation, understanding NFRs, etc).

However, some people say that personal projects won't help much etc, so motivation is a problem.

What is your take?

Should you take all your allocated PTO at "FAANG" companies or will that affect you when it comes to performance reviews or promotions?

I have worked at two larger companies and two small startups (currently at one). I'm quite content with my current company and role, as I have ample opportunities for growth and a great work-life balance. However, the only factor that makes me contemplate leaving my current position is that I'm earning less than some of my peers. I'm not comparing myself to the exceptionally high-earning individuals; rather, I'm looking at other senior software engineers who are making around $400K in total compensation. Currently, I'm earning around $250K. It's important to note that I recognize my experience level is relatively young compared to those with 20-30 years of experience, as I have only 6 years of experience.

I want to think about the bigger picture and position myself in the best possible way for the future. When I discuss this with some of my peers, they suggest that I should work at a FAANG company at least once to attract recruiters from better companies. While I've always been drawn to roles with high visibility and a need for velocity, I've found that at larger companies, I tend to work at a slower pace with less visibility. However, if transitioning to a FAANG role is indeed the key to opening up new career opportunities, I'm willing to consider it.

Has anyone else faced a similar dilemma in their career? I would appreciate any insights or advice from individuals who have gone through a similar experience.

Context:

• There is little to no documentation
• We are extremely focused on shipping rapidly
• Everyone is occupied to the fullest with their own tasks
• The codebase and architecture is a mess to deal with
• The dev environment is unfriendly to work with

Questions:

• For our success (and survival), we need to keep shipping features and products that bring in business. How do I get onboarded quickly so that I can start shipping too?
• Is there any value in following typical processes and best practices like 1:1s, project planning etc.?

I was earlier part of another team, where all the monolithic apps and microservices are restarted in Production environment every weekend as part of scheduled maintenance.

In my current team, there's no automatic restarts. There are some microservices that haven't been restarted since 2+ years. Isn't this a potential problem? Won't "not restarting services" lead to increased memory consumption at some stage? Don't microservices need frequent restarts as part of maintenance?

On asking the TL, they mentioned that the microservice shouldn't be written in a way that it causes increased memory consumption.

But that's not what we can always control right? Hence we have maintenance windows.

Does your experience with certain technologies matter during your interview or team selection process at FAANG companies?

Does your experience with certain programming languages affect your compensation?

I am asking because I saw that some roles at Microsoft that are focused on C++/C# or other OOP languages have a higher compensation range that roles requiring JavaScript/React experience.

I had a question on how does one exhibit impact and staff level behavior as a Senior engineer.

The staff engineers on the team code as much as me. Although I am a lead for a team, there is distinction between me and how another lead is being perceived. I am happy for them.

They have been in the company way longer, they advocate, question and are not afraid to speak up.

But code wise, I have way more commits. We are both leads, but I can tell they are on the way to becoming staff, and it is the behavior. I am not able to put a pin on it.

How can we be perceived of being extremely valuable and influential to the team without crunching code.

One of my friends recently shared with me that their team works 18-19 hours a day, including weekends. Is this a common practice? I'm interested in working on impactful and useful projects at a big tech or Tier 1 company. Is this level of commitment expected from engineers who are working on exceptionally valuable features or components within the company?

My friend mentioned that their team is composed of individuals with high IQs but low EQs. They suggested that if you find the work interesting and fulfilling, the long hours shouldn't be a problem. I've never worked in big tech or in the Bay Area, but I'm keen on joining a Tier 1 company. However, hearing about this work schedule has made me question whether it's worth sacrificing work-life balance. Is this level of commitment typically expected in order to earn a higher salary or to secure a position at FAANG+ companies?

Hi. Sorry for the long post.

My manager is quite happy with my performance as an IC, so in our 1:1s during feedback sessions, his suggestions for me are usually around increasing my influence within the team. Drive decisions, improve processes etc.

To add some context, Snap has a HUGE L4 band. Bigger than most companies (L5 at Snap is equivalent to E6 at Meta). This means we have a LOT of L4 engineers.

So right now I am in a situation where my team has 6 L4 engineers, ranging from 3 years of experience to 10 years of experience, with me falling towards the lower end of this range. To make matters worse, we also don't have a TL or Principal Engineer in the team. Which means we don't have a "guiding" engineer in the team to help "decide" on important technical decisions.

This has some consequences.

There's a big scope for "showing influence" in the team. Since we don't have a TL, every important decision is an opportunity to influence the team. And literally every L4 engineer is trying to jump on that ship. So we have this situation where people try to out-influence others (not sure if thats a word). This leads to lots of debates, lots of pointless meetings, and people eventually "fighting" over trying to be the decision makers for a decision.

A real example scenario: we recently had some discussions about improving our operational tickets backlog process, and literally every single L4 in the team wanted to write a doc on it to suggest improvements, to introduce a process to make the ticket backlog handling better, to show "influence" in the team.

I guess my question is, in a team like this, how should I try to build my influence ? I realize that everyone in the team is trying to achieve the same, so what can I do different. I know this is not a unique situation and very very common among more senior ICs, so hoping to pick their brains.

I recently got an offer for a Senior Java developer. While the interview rounds were mostly language agnostic, I know the basics of Java and can debug a Java program quite easily.

Not sure how much of the language depth should be adequate for a senior engineer. I've been a C++ engineer for sometime now.

How do I learn Java fast and efficiently? I'm aware that most of the learning will occur in the job itself, but I want the onboarding (a week away) to be as smooth as possible.

I have 2 other developers working with me on a critical project, plus my mental + physical health is not so good.

I really want to move to a more relaxed workplace, but I feel deadlocked. I'm unable to carve out time from my job.

I have recently not been performing as well as I did last year/early this year due to my mental health and some changes in my personal life, and my manager noticed that too. I got promoted this year only, and if my performance drops, I get compared to my performance last year which led to my promotion. So if I try to avoid work, I'll be noticed further.

I'm an E5 iOS at a Big Tech company. There's already an E6 iOS on my team, so it's been hard for me to get enough scope to get to E6. I feel both of us have been fighting for scope. My EM got forced out due to a PIP, so my skip level's temporarily leading the team until he hires a backfill. My skip level knows that I've been frustrated about the lack of opportunities on this team, so he found me a potential E6 opportunity with a different team in our org.

When the new team's skip level found out I could do both iOS and backend, he got very excited and said I could report to the team's EM or him directly. He wants me to mentor junior mobile engineers on multiple teams. He wants me to be the voice for mobile engineers and a thought partner for multiple PMs/teams. He wants me to bridge the mobile engineers to the rest of the new team, which has mostly backend and web engineers. I feel I have better rapport with the new team's M1, but it could be that I was a bit intimidated by the M2. What are the pros and cons of reporting to an M1 vs M2? Would reporting to an M2 make it easier to get to E6?

I understand this question is slightly out of hard core tech.

I am looking for a location to settle long term and originate from India. While I like it in India, wanted to check if there are indeed places with good:

• Software Engineering Opportunities
• Cost of Living
• Earning to Spending Ratio (I am usually a spender on low side, living minimally)
• Safe to live at
• Healthcare, Education and other things needed in life usually

This is really important to me since my parents are getting old and I would want them to stay with me. Thus, it is pertinent for me to decide where I would want to stay so that it becomes easier for them to adapt themselves slowly. At the same time, I don't want to compromise too much in terms of my career as well. I consider safety really important and financial health as a hygine factor.

I am starting this thread/question for folks in various locations to share how their experience has been. Hopefully this can serve as a guiding point for folks in similar situation.

I feel like I'm not using to max the language and its features. Most of the tutorials on the web are for beginners even the advanced classes are not enough advanced for me. I feel like I plateau'ed.

Hey guys, please guide me for the next steps in this journey.

I am currently L5 at social media company (not Meta) and have done Android dev for most of my career. I was a manager for a brief amount of time as well but layoffs took that away. I am on a H1B visa and family is dependent on me (single earner).

From last 4 years or so I haven't done much dev work and have been working with developers/customers/partners to help them in integrating our solution to their Android apps. I can crack LC any day though but might not be able to pass Android round easily. I don't enjoy Android dev too much now but it's a different ask if it becomes a necessity to survive at this level. I used to be really good at it and if I put 3-4 months to it I can pick it up again. I am interested in AI/ML given the popularity, high TC, etc. but also interested because I genuinely believe that it can transform people's lives + it will broader my skillset beyond tech companies and gives me a long run. But I have almost 0 experience in it.

I fear another layoff at my company and it may impact me in next 6 months, or it might not happen either if market or company situation improves.

Question now is: Should I get back to my Android roots OR try to dip my toe into AI/ML? If latter then does Certification course from Standford/Berkley,etc. helps?

I’ve been a senior FEE at Amazon for almost a year now, and I’m still figuring out time management.

Sometimes I get overly involved in others’ tasks, or have too many meetings, or get overwhelmed by all the new campaigns and estimation requests constantly coming through the door while we’re in the middle of meeting deadlines.

How do senior FAANG engineers balance their priorities without overworking or burning out?

P.S. it’d be amazing if Taro can get Steve Huynh (PE at Amazon) to talk about this topic in detail.

I've never worked in big tech or Tier 1 companies but I'm aiming to grow as a engineer and would like to know and learn how different companies make such decisions?

1. Does it vary for startups and FAANG+ companies?
2. How do you answer such a question if asked during an interview?
3. How much autonomy each senior engineer (L5 or L6) has in such decisions?

Could you please share an example case study here? What does the entire process look like? Thank you.

Hey 👋

I’m joining a new company as a senior frontend engineer in about a week. I've found that people like to work with me; they say I have solid communication skills, am friendly, easygoing, etc. That's the feedback I always get from 360 reviews/1:1 with my manager.

The problem is that I struggle with making "meaningful" connections with people outside my team; I'm aiming to get promoted to Staff in the next 1-2 years or so, and for that, I know that I must connect with people outside my team (among other things). I'm also an ambivert.

I'd like to understand/get guidance about better ways to:

1. Connect with people outside my team in a more meaningful way.
2. This might sound silly, but what's the better way to "break the ice"? I can talk for hours if I know the person, but the first interaction is the hardest. I remember that in a previous job, I had to schedule meetings with other people in the org and I struggled a lot.
3. I just realized that this "but how should I break the ice / I probably don't have much to say" mentality is what makes me avoid having 1:1 in the Taro community :(

Thanks!

Update: Add another bullet point.

I've been working as a Sr Fullstack Engineer for 2 years at a Series B startup. I've never received negative feedback, actually, I thought everything was fine until last week. My manager told me that I need to improve my Problem-Solving skills and ask better questions, she kind of implies that I'm a candidate for starting a PiP.

I agree that I struggled in the last 2 months (they switched me to a new project where I'm the only engineer and my manager only has 20% of her time for me), it's been super challenging but I'm trying to make it work. That means that I'm putting in more hours than I should frequently, and I'm starting to feel demotivated and depressed.

Honestly, this feedback took me by surprise, as no one told me anything about my performance during the last two months, I thought that even when I was struggling, they were fine with it because it's a new project and I'm basically on my own and no one is there that I can reach out to for help.

• I have ~6 years of experience and I come from a non-traditional background.
• Her feedback is vague, she says that I need to improve my backend skills, but she hasn't told me exactly what's lacking. "backend" is a big word.
• My manager told me that I should think about how to get better and that is on me to come up with an improvement plan. This feels wrong to me, isn't that her job as a manager? how can I create a plan for myself when I don't know what she wants to see from me?

How can I better navigate this? Should I start looking for a new job? I like my job and it would be sad to leave.

What do you think?

thanks.

I’m an E5 on a platform team at a Big Tech company. I'm under aggressive timelines to create a proof-of-concept (POC) for a partner team. My skip-level emphasized the importance of this POC as well as its timeliness to me.

Our team's E6 is coding our platform infrastructure and is slipping his dates. The E6 said his infra code should be production ready in 2 weeks, but claimed there should be enough there to unblock my POC. I tried to forge ahead, but my POC is now delayed because I spent so much time trying to work around the deficiencies in our platform infrastructure. I eventually decided to prioritize some other parts of the POC to avoid losing more time while the E6 is taking his time with the infra work. How much of this should I communicate to our partner team's stakeholder? I'm hoping that I'll be able to hunker down to get the project back on track without slipping our dates. Another E5 on our team told me that he doesn't like to air our team's dirty laundry outside our team, so he usually says everything is fine until the last week of the project when he suddenly flags delays. Is this a good strategy? Or should I be honest and upfront with cross-functional partners external to my team?

Hello lovely Community! 👋

I am currently working as Senior Software Engineer 1 and I am close to get promoted in the next performance review cycle.

My manager asked me to create a development plan and individual goals to track the progress efficiently.

Wanted to understand how the development plan and individual goals should look like for Senior Engineer?

I recently got an offer for a senior SWE backend role.

A little about my background: Sr backend SWE, 8 yrs of experience

Offer:

• Big city in the Midwest
• 190k base
• 152k RSU (38k a yr)
• 12k bonus flat (they don't do performance bonuses)
• 3 days a week hybrid
• unlimited pto

Total: 240k TC

I was told the base goes up to 225k pre-offer so I'm thinking of asking how we can bridge the gap or land somewhere in between. Planning on using the no-performance bonus as a talking point to get more base pay. Overall my interview performances were definitely strong from my perspective. Company and role-wise everything lines up for what I'm looking for in my career. The initial offer exceeds my expectations but I definitely want to maximize my comp.

Any recommendations or tips?

I am a Senior Software Engineer at a big tech company, and I was reached out by a recruiter at a big-tech equivalent company and decided to give it a shot (also for a Senior SE role). I'm in the final interview stages and expect to receive an offer soon.

My recruiter said I've received excellent feedback overall from all of the interviews. I honestly believe that I would be more suitable for a Staff-level role given the work they are planning to do and has a close alignment with what I'm doing now (working towards a Staff role).

I have a few days until I receive an offer; I'd like to know whether I should kick off the discussion now or post-offer?

Context:

• Opportunity:- A month ago, I interviewed at a recently IPO'd startup for a senior SWE position and did well.
• Uplevelling:- The interviews apparently went so well that they suggested I was a good fit for a staff SWE position on the team and made a verbal offer for that.
• Subsequent Downlevelling:- The actual offer was delayed by 2-3 weeks only for the final offer to be a senior SWE offer.
• Compenstion Issue:- The final offer is a bit (~10%) lower than all my current offers on all compensation components (cash, stock, sign on). Also, I'm still awaiting a couple of more offers that could be even better paying ones.
• Recruiter Constraints:- The recruiter stated that this is the best offer they can do for the senior SWE level. This might be true given the ranges available on Glassdoor but I'm not too sure since there was only 1 data point available.
• My Opinions:- I really liked the team, the manager and the kind of work for this opportunity. But I don't want to leave out on a meaningful amount of money being offered by other opportunities.

Questions:-

• Assuming that the offer is genuinely at the top range, can I still attempt to negotiate given that the team believed I'm suitable for a staff SWE uplevelling?
• If I should negotiate, how do I approach it given that they've stated it's the best they can do?
• Do companies offer compensation beyond the high-senior SWE but below the low-staff SWE ranges to good candidates?

I got an interview call from Meta for SDE position. They asked to send over any names of references I have at Meta. Can you please suggest me any names from Meta to put as references?

Thank you.

Working hard and staying on top of my sprints, I lead a team that focuses on developing tools for customer support to onboard our new features.

Though this work is consistently given priority in team meetings, it is often sidelined or perceived as less critical compared to other product-facing features.

Despite my efforts, I feel I am not acknowledged or seen as impactful and intelligent. I suspect biases at play but cannot substantiate them concretely.

How can I change this perception and ensure that my contributions are recognized and valued within the team?

How can I turn around the situation to be perceived as important and impactful, aligning my hard work with the recognition it deserves?

I interviewed at a big startup that recently IPO'd and was offered a staff engineer role verbally after the interview loop concluded. I've been in touch with the recruiter to get a formal offer for around 3 weeks now but it just keeps getting delayed.

Questions:-

• Does getting the actual offer take such a long duration (2-3 weeks post verbal confirmation) at relatively bigger companies? I've only worked at startups and scaleups before.
• I have other offers that might expire soon but I don't want to take a call without this offer. I've shared this with the recruiter but I feel it hasn't helped expedite the process. Do I keep following up or give up on this offer and work with the rest of offers?

Hey there 👋 For context, I quit a toxic job 2 months ago and I'm back in the job market.

I just finished an interview process with a company I really like, I think it checks almost all the boxes:

• Company size (Series C)
• Culture
• I'll join the team that will be on the spotlight for the next 18 months -> My job will have a major impact.
• I would be able to work on React Native if I decide to (I'm a frontend engineer w/ React expertise)
• I think that I can reach staff level in about a year or two there.
• People I interviewed with are superb.
• Fully remote.

I expect to get an offer from them on Monday (I'm writing this on Thursday night). I know that because the recruiter called me today to touch base and to tell me that things went good! The problem with this company is that the salary is more on the lower side...but it's still on the range I have in mind.

The dilema is that I'm just starting to interview with other companies that pay 50% more, but finishing interviewing with them will take me at least two weeks...and the company I'm getting the offer from probably won't hold the offer for that long.

I have a few thoughts / concerns that I'd like you to help me sort out / discuss:

• I'm thinking that it would be wise to optimize for career growth, I probably could get a better job if I manage to do great things in the company I'm getting the offer from. What do you think? The salary is not as high as the other companies, but it's good money. (FWIW, I live in a low-cost-of-living country)
• I was hoping that I could negotiate a better salary with this company if I had other competing offers, but I got nothing, and I wouldn't get any other offer by next week. Do you have any tips about how to negotiate a better offer even when I don't have the leverage of a competing offer? I understand this might not be possible. I feel that I did a really good interview process though, so maybe I could use that as leverage.
• I really like one of the "slow companies", but they've been just dead slow. I interviewed with their CTO and he said that they will kick off things immediately...but that hasn't happened. Should I ping him? I feel that they should be the ones making the next move, but I'm not 100% sold on that idea.
• The other companies are just fine, honestly, their pay is what makes them more attractive.
• Not sure if this is relevant or not, but I'm 36, I wonder if I should spend my 37-38s working for the company that pays less than the others while chasing career growth.
• I have a good runway, so if don't end up with an offer from any of those companies, I'd be just fine for another 8-12 months.
• I live in Latam, so it's hard to get 100k+ offers, it's not like I have a pool of options to choose from.

Thanks for reading! 😁

What skills are essential for becoming a proficient software engineer which helps them to thrive in any tech domain and adapt to various situations?

Could you provide a list of items that one should be mindful of to excel in real-time scenarios? For instance, focusing on learning front-end and back-end development, knowing basics of web something like that.

Given the current economic volatility and uncertainty as well as the hard-to-measure business value of cost centre teams (like infrastructure or platform), would it be sensible to join such a team?

Hi All, I have a question on competing offers. Do recruiters ask to show the competing offer email or letters when I negotiate? I read it is not legal to ask for it or ask for the previous salary. I wanted to find out more on this, do they ask for more details of competing offers and should I plan to show any details for that?  Also, would you mind sharing your experience on how you handled negotiation when trying to switch teams within the same company and negotiating a better salary within same company with an competing offer from outside the company. Thank you!

I'm part of a team of 10 and my team is barely 3 months old, with many of us having joined this team very recently. I would love to start some initiatives to help our team bond and get closer as a team. For context, the team very distributed (3 different locations) and travel budgets are tight :(

What are some of the most effective tools you've used and/or seen to cultivate a sense of camaraderie amongst teammates?

I was informed by my previous manager that once we move teams, promo is "reset" i.e. only the work in the new team counts for the promo cycle (despite being on the same job ladder of TSC, DE etc).

I am currently at L4 and the role I am going into is scoped for L5 (they were targeting a L5 hire). Given I am changing team mid-year, I am not sure I can get a rating beyond SI in the Jan GRAD cycle.

What is the best way to work with my manager to secure an L5 promo and what timeline is realistic for this promotion at Google (I was targeting next August)?

I am trying to start a conversation to get across my technical proficiency so that the manager is likely to recommend me for an interview at the big tech company. The company has an engineering blog that I have read, but not sure what I should ask. This is for a mid-level (ideally senior) backend role. The manager has said that if I send them a list of questions they would be open to a call to discuss said questions.

Also the company is Uber ->

Hey there, fellow professionals! I find myself at a career crossroads and would greatly appreciate your insights and guidance. 🌟

I've been in the industry for over 10 years now, and I'm torn between two compelling paths: pursuing career growth within my current company to reach a staff position or aiming to join a top-tier FAANG+ company (Google, Netflix, META) as an L5 engineer. 📈💼

Both options require significant time investments. On one hand, focusing on my current company involves creating a strategic plan for success, skill development, and building a strong network. On the other hand, preparing for FAANG+ interviews demands extensive interview prep. 📚💪

I must admit that I feel inadequate for not having reached a staff position yet, and I acknowledge that transitioning from a tier 2 to a tier 1 company is no easy feat. ( though I have done it before, affected by layoff at tier 1 ) There's no guaranteed path to securing a staff position, even with prior experience. 🙇‍♂️

I'm seeking your advice on how to strategize in this complex situation.

(1) Should I focus on attaining a staff position within my current company, hoping to leverage that experience for a staff offer at META, Google, or Netflix?

(2) Or should I dedicate my time to prepare for interviews and pursue growth opportunities in one of the FAANG+ companies? 🤔

(3) And hey, here's a wild thought: Is it possible to explore both paths simultaneously? As a proud parent, I understand the juggling act that life can be, so any advice on maintaining work-life balance would be greatly appreciated! 🎭

Would love to know your insights, personal experiences, and any other factors I should consider in making this decision. Thank you all in advance! 🙏💼🌟

#CareerCrossroads #FAANGOpportunities #StrategicPlanning #SeekingAdvice

I work in as an iOS engineer. My current company is a startup that's scaling up fast. In classic startup fashion, testing was historically not a top priority here. As a consequence, we struggle with lots of manual QAing and low code confidence when modifying pieces of poorly tested legacy code.

This has improved in the past year simply by unit testing every new piece of code by default and by introducing unit tests in legacy code as we touch it, boy scouting style.

At this point, I think we need to step it up and I'm looking forward to formalising a testing strategy for our mobile team.

Here are some ideas I have:

• In the realm of unit tests:
  • I want to introduce API contract tests because our back-end API lacks documentation. In these tests we'd unit test the way we build our requests to API endpoints, and we'd have a sample JSON response from the server to test that the app can parse it into our data models as expected.
  • I want to introduce localisation tests because our app supports many languages but we are always manually testing localisation. In these tests, we'd assert that the outputs of our formatting logic are the ones we want for different locales.
• In the realm of user interface tests:
  • I want to introduce snapshot testing, because right now the only way we can test that our views are rendered as expected for different view configurations (for example RTL vs LTR, empty content, loading content, content in verbose languages, etc.) is manually.
  • I want to introduce UI tests (sparingly, only for key flows) because we have no e2e tests. Currently, key flows are tested manually and frequently to prevent regressions, which takes lots of time.

What other testing strategies can I propose to establish some standard we can use to further improve our code confidence, reduce bugs, and rely more on automated testing?

How do the top tier tech companies approach mobile testing?

Hi all,

I am a newly hired Senior Software Engineer. I worked at FAANG before but have never been in a senior role. I am currently in week 3 of my new role. My manager gave me expectation to ramp up in 3 months but with very little further guidance. The codebase is huge with very little and mostly outdated documentation.

What do I need to do to ramp up as fast as possible and position myself for promotion to Staff within next 1-2 years? I read that there are people ramped up within 1 month into their jobs on Taro. Hope you can share your tips and tricks.

I have a L6 equivalent MLE interview from a FAANG company.

Since last time I had interview for L4. I would like to understand what kind of quality difference does L6 show in an interview (coding/behavioral/system design -- ML)?

How would you demonstrate staff level quality in the interview rounds?

Can you please share strategies in place for career growth ( L5 -> L6)

along side interview prep ( L5 / L6 ) for a FAANG+.

Goal: L6 at FAANG+, either direct or L5 -> L6.

Reason: More TC

Timeline: Not urgent, just waiting for the right opportunity.

Context:

(1) My team owns a service for which we're rolling out a new version with a big revamp of all the public interfaces and a ton of breaking changes.

(2) This is a legacy system that is being refactored to resolve some severe issues that its consumer systems have been complaining about for a long time.

(3) This service has many consumers in our org across multiple teams that depend on it for a lot of critical functionality.

(4) We need to migrate all consumers to the new service. My team cannot parallely support both the versions and the legacy system has to be deprecated before the new service deployment.

Challenges:

(1) Originally, the plan was for my team to roll out the new service and migrate all of the consumers to the new service as well.

(2) Now, we've had a huge scope expansion in the refactoring itself due to which the project timeline has extended massively.

(3) My team feels that working on such a long timeline project is risky and prone to further scope expansion if new consumers start using the old legacy system in the meanwhile.

(4) Another challenge with this is that my team has no context or understanding of all the consumer systems.

Questions:

(1) What approach can I use to now change the plan and convince the managers/tech leads of the consumer teams to own the migration of their consumers code to the new service?

(2) In general, what approach would be ideal for such a large-scale migration - Centralized migration by the service provider team vs distributed migration by all the respective consumer teams?

Hey Everyone, would there be interest in a topic, on how to attract a sponsor who is invested in your growth at least 1/10 as much as we are.

Over the years, I have realized in addition to being sincere and making an impact, we need the right projects to make an impact and the right people to take notice. I feel like I cannot catch a break.

I have been able to uplevel and switch, get an upper level from tier 2 -> FAANG (L5), and stayed there for many years. Thriving. Until my project was canned, and I was laid off.

My current team is at a tier 2 company, and I have already made significant impact, but my manager is hung up on some negative feedback that was given to me early on (3 quarters ago) The current staff even insidiously tried taking away my projects from me. I stood up for myself and got the project back with my managers help.

I have good feedback, on PR, good velocity and mentoring engineers to uplevel. But my manager is still biased.

I strongly believe that actions speak louder than words. Would love to know the series of master classes that can help me with Me and your advice.

Would love to know your thoughts on this when is it time to stay and focus on growth or when is it time to move on and start afresh ?

My eventual goal is L6 at Google / Netflix / Meta - Adjacent

I have been chasing the SDE-3 promotion from last one year. It was denied in the year end review cycle in December.

In this cycle (Jan - June), I have ticked almost all the checkpoints as per the firm's SDE-3 competency matrix and I have a good amount of documentation around it as well which I have submitted to my manager.

I want to let my manager and skip (Director) know that I will leave if I am not promoted in this cycle as I don't think there are any negative data points against me.

Any suggestions about how should I subtly carry out this conversation?

How does one approach switching teams internally without bad-mouthing the old team?

And can we switch and up-level internally? I have usually only seen lateral moves.

I am currently living in the Bay Area and considering moving to Austin, TX for personal reasons (affordability, family, friends etc). I have an option to go fully remote and work on the same team. My team's current setup is a few folks are in East coast, a few in the Bay Area and some of them are remote. So, I don't really see a whole lot of benefit going to the office regularly. Plus, I started during the COVID- WFH time in 2020 and did very well working remote, so I (or my manager) don't have a problem with productivity as well.

That said, I do have a fear that my career growth might be affected if I move out of the Bay Area, especially if I want to find a FAANG equivalent role or startups in Austin. Recent RTO mandates by multiple companies are also making me nervous about long term future of remote work. What are your thoughts on making this move for personal reasons and availability of great roles with remote option or in Austin? Thanks!

I am about to start writing a multi year/multi quarter Tech vision doc for my org. To give a bit of background, my org contains 4 teams (1 front end team, 3 backend teams). All 3 backend teams (~20 engineers) work on a big monolithic service containing around 40 different APIs. Of the 3 backend teams, 2 of them work on Product features and the 3rd team (my team) is the Platform team which works on clearing tech debt, architectural enhancements, migrations, etc. For the last few quarters, the entire Platform team has been working mostly on clearing tech debt added by Product teams. The product team engineers have a very tight deadline, so their designs and code are bad or not well thought through.

My vision is basically to split the monolithic service into 3 services with clear separation of concerns and let the product teams be in charge of their own destiny. The reasoning behind this is that I feel like Platform team has been stuck in a perpetual cycle fixing bad work done by Product teams. There is no time for Platform team to enhance the capabilities of the platform. I spoke about this to my manager and he is very excited for me to come up with a vision doc and offered whatever support I would need.

So, given the context, I have the following questions:

• What does a good tech vision doc look like? What sections should it have? Currently, I have the following sections: Motivation, Future Architecture (Splitting the Service), Deploying in the new world, Automated end - end tests in the new world (we don't have end - end tests currently)
• How do I "sell" this vision to my management chain (my manager is onboard with the general high level idea), Principal Engineers, Product engineers in my org? I know the Product engineers are not gonna like the monolithic service to be split and will push back. How can I convince them?
• What pitfalls should I be aware of while doing this work?
• What upfront legwork can I do before I present this doc to everyone?

Appreciate your help in advance!!

I've seen advices here in Taro that seniors should make themselves very much replaceable so that when this senior is away, someone is able to cover for them and the team could do well, which makes sense.

I thought the fact that people found the advice to be helpful, shows that making yourself replaceable isn't something that's very intuitive the first time. Like if someone didn't read the advice, they probably wouldn't have optimized for that.

I'm not quite senior yet but just curious to understand the situation (and people) better - was this thinking assumes that the amount of scope is in hyper-growth phase? Are there cases where it isn't really applicable / optimal for them to do so (and so they don't make themselves replaceable, and still do well) - then wouldn't they just continue doing it and we can't really blame them? I feel it's rare that people would change their behavior unless they really understand why.

I have about 5 YOE and trying to grow from Senior -> Staff engineer but noticing that the path is taking longer than I'd hope.

This is the case whether I try to speak to other companies and ask about interviewing at that level or try to grow within my own company.

Within my own company: Requirements unclear, seems to be more time based (just keep on shipping). Since we're on the smaller side, we don't have a clearly defined structure like FAANG.

Externally: Due to the YOE, usually discussion of Staff isn't even an option even though I think I'm doing Staff level work. In fact, they usually decline the idea before even having a chance to explain what I'm working on.

The projects I'm working on span the entire org (startup), I have multiple mentees, and org-wide impact. I will be honest and say that I don't think the projects I work on are necessarily insanely technically complex (not going out to millions of users, dealing with hyper concurrency issues, or needing to deal with large scalability issues), but they do have a large amount of scope and senior+ level management required to run them.

I think from the project management perspective, I have things nailed down pretty well.

So I wonder if I'm either missing...

• YOE - Just some sort of arbitrary minimum that is being placed across the board for certain levels to be achieved
• Technical expertise - I definitely admit that I'm not necessarily INSANELY technical. For example, I can admit gaps like: I don't know how to design a concurrent document editing system like Google docs, or I wouldn't be able to write a live streaming service without reading up on the proper documentation and understanding better how those systems work. Are things like this a requirement to be a staff engineer? To just be more aware or know right away how various systems like this are designed, without needing to do research beforehand?

I'm essentially trying to understand what my gaps might be, and the technical aspect is one I'm unsure about how relevant it is.

Would appreciate any thoughts, especially from Staff+ engineers, maybe sharing what they feel makes them a Staff vs a Senior and how much technical skills play a role vs other elements.

Hello Taro community,

I hope you're all doing well. I have a question and would greatly appreciate your insights and guidance.

Background: I joined the company last year (ex-FAANG) as an L5 level and have been actively involved in developing internal tooling for a new product. Recently, while exploring our growth and levels documents, I came across our internal rubrics that outline the expectations at each level.

Situation: After identifying a gap between my current level and the staff level, I expressed my interest to my manager. As a result, I am now leading a team of five individuals in the endeavor of implementing automation tooling from scratch. This effort encompasses setting up everything related to automation.

Additional Information:

While my background is primarily in development, I possess knowledge and experience in quality as well. Given the broad impact automation can have across the company, I am eager to leverage my expertise and make a significant contribution.

However, I am uncertain if my focus on quality within a developer role might put me at a disadvantage when aiming for a staff position as a developer.

I am seeking guidance on how to navigate the path towards a staff role, either by leading projects to completion (quality) within my team (& across) or by continuing to work on internal tooling rather than customer-facing products.

Or should I pivot to product development tasks - How do I navigate this conversation with my manager about this dilemma?

Lastly, how can I show metrics and impact?

I work as an ML Engineer at a company, and I have been part of my team for two years. Unfortunately, the product I was solely responsible for got canceled due to external reasons, even though it was showing good growth. Throughout my career, I have specialized in creating recommendation systems for online content platforms.

Currently, I am involved in less impactful tasks related to migrating our systems. We hope to find more meaningful work in the future, but I'm unsure if our team can achieve significant growth. While my manager sees value in me, I am not considered the best player on the team.

Recently, I learned that the Ads department is actively seeking to hire experienced ML engineers, possibly even seniors. They have ambitious goals and are eager to develop new solutions to reach them. I attended their hiring meeting, and the ML director spoke passionately about the work, which felt risky but exciting.

Part of me believes I should join this team. The expectations would be higher, and the company genuinely values their work. It would provide a greater challenge, and I believe such situations are crucial for personal growth and improvement. Additionally, working in a different department would expose me to different organizational dynamics. In my current team, I'm increasingly feeling complacent and lack inspiration.

On the other hand, part of me thinks I should remain with my current team. I don't dislike my manager, which is not always the case in every job. My current team is also important, and I have respect for my colleagues. If I stick it out, there's a chance I might come across something interesting eventually. However, switching teams would mean losing the relationships I've built and potentially delaying promotion opportunities. Moreover, there are concerns about possible layoffs, so it might be safer to be conservative.

Do you have any thoughts on this matter?

Hi Taro - just wanted to say thank you for the .  I was wondering if you could share with the Taro community your thoughts on how managers evaluate their employees in detail (you mentioned some things like internal tools that one could go and see how many PRs, discussions, comments someone had in Github/JIRA and who all were at the top of that baseline followed by the bottom rankers; so I would like more specifics if possible).

Although no one likes it, it would be good to understand how "stack ranking" works at FAANG - and how some managers evaluate on this criteria, despite it being a practice that sucks. In this way I can just be more sure I'm hitting a baseline - even if it's invisible because I can take daily steps to work on my own visibility and perceived performance.

I feel like the biggest challenge right now is getting critical feedback from a manager / org (and it sounds like some companies in the FAANG space are pretty awful about it).  E.g. I read about a Redditor who got let go without much notice because they weren't up to par (decided by a skip level manager) in terms of their code and daily output (while the direct manager and everyone else had been communicating often that this employee's performance was great). But this goes back to the idea that 'great' is 'average' lately, and it's way harder to hit exceeds and greatly exceeds on performance.

Thank you in advance!

Hey,

I have 12+ years of experience and would like to move to management ladder. I have been working with my manager for over a year to get there.

Couple weeks ago I got to know that my manager is leaving the company. I am worried that with his departure all the effort I put in over the last one year would be wasted. My manager mentioned that he has recommended me as his potential replacement to his skip(Director) but he(manager) is not sure if the company will back-fill the position or not.

My departing manager gave me the following suggestions so that I stay on track with my career goals:

• Have regular conversations with the skip(Director) and VP so that they know I am very much interested in moving to leadership positions
• Keep HR folks in the loop too, so that they can spot/help me with any managerial positions opening up outside of my org(different team in the company)

I have monthly skip level 1:1 & have mentioned this interest of mine(moving to management ladder) to him.

I am not sure how frequently should I talk to VP & HR as well as how to bring this career aspiration of mine to their notice. Should I have monthly sync's with VP & HR personnel too?

I have been working in the industry for almost 8 years, but I often feel like an average engineer. I spend most of my time working, but I haven't achieved any significant accomplishments in my career.

I was able to get jobs at Pinterest and the company that used to be called Meta because I memorized coding interview questions and exaggerated my achievements. However, I don't have the motivation to aim for promotions, and I worry that I don't have what it takes to be an outstanding engineer in the tech industry. I work every day, but I feel lost and unsure about where my career is going.

I'm worried about my future career growth and whether I will find fulfillment. Are there other people who have felt the same way but managed to overcome it and succeed?

I have worked as a software consultant for 4 years at companies like Amazon, Hitachi, etc.

I am been working as a Senior software engineer for quite some time now. To move to the Staff level, one feedback/pointer I got was to start developing opinions on how to do certain things. When people start respecting your opinions, they start to see you as a leader.

The problem I have is, in many cases, I don't have enough relevant experience for the problem at hand. Also, I find, that in discussions I am listening more than I am speaking. Having no opinions, and finding it hard to express opinions for fear of being judged and losing respect in case my opinion is wrong, are the problems I am facing.

Is there any advice on how to develop these skills?

Hey,

I have 10 years work experience, and I have previously worked at a FAANG that had no levels (big clue here!). So regardless of the scope of work, we were Senior. That kinda played at a disadvantage to me when I found my self looking for a job due to a layoff and visa issues.

I believe I am working at staff capacity, leading 5 folks, driving initiative. But I feel like I am unable to "show" Impact. We have metrics at each level. I have addressed the same with my manager, went over the metrics and identified gaps and took action.

I got lukewarm response, at best from other staff engineers and management. No idea if at all I will be considered for promo, and I get no response besides stating, it is a lagging promo.

Right now, I have no visa issues, so I can hop around other companies, I want to move back to a FAANG+ company because of higher pay.

Question is :

How do I ascertain my promotion?

and which of the following is a good bet:

1. Move to staff at Intuit -> Move to (Meta / Google/ Netflix) as L6
2. Move to (Meta / Google/ Netflix) as L5 -> work towards L6
3. Move to staff at Intuit -> Move to (Meta / Google/ Netflix) as L5 (as they down-level, at this point might as well move now)
4. Move directly to (Meta / Google/ Netflix) as L6 ( Highly optimistic, almost delusional )

I've received the equivalent of EE in all the areas of assessment. I'm disappointed with my performance review as I did not get promoted or get a reasonable raise despite my great performance. I (along with many of my peers and my manager) feel that I've already been performing at the next level for the past 6 months. Now it seems that I've to keep performing at the next level for 6 more months before actually getting promoted to the next level - this seems unreasonable to me.

What are my options apart from looking for other opportunities outside my current company?

What should I think about and focus my efforts on when I get a project and a role that's of (1) bigger scope and (2) tighter deadlines than I'm used to?

Context

A reorg has suddenly thrust me into the TL role for a very high-profile project on a new team. This project is part of OKRs 4 levels up the chain and has the eyes of several director level people across different functions. From what I've heard, this project already suffered from "too many cooks in the kitchen" syndrome, and on top of that, this project has delivery date set in Q3, which is quite aggressive from our org's standards.

I've landed in this position because I was transitioning to this team prior to the reorg, AND the EM/TL/PM/2 L5s has been reorg'ed out, and they needed someone who had previously TL experience and was willing to do it.

I've previously TL'ed a team of 4 people, with important but "normal" priority projects. This is clearly a great opportunity for me, but I am afraid I'm not ready to handle it and I'm at a bit of loss as to what I should be focusing most of my effort on. With the tight deadlines I have, I feel like every day will be a battle so any advice on how to approach this will be appreciated.

I have one other L5 supporting me who I trust very much and a new EM who's rumored to be very good. We currently have 4 SWE including me and we'll be getting more at least 4 more engineers, with lots of adjacent teams helping out. I do also have good standing and connection in the org overall and I know how to get a "normal" project in our org over the line (I did an in-org transfer).

What I'm thinking about right now

1. Knowledge Transition: since a lot of critical members of the team are leaving and I am taking over, I feel the biggest priority in the near term is to absorb as much knowledge from them as possible. So far, they have some prototypes, and I wanted to get my hands dirty, so maybe I should focus on is to understand the work that's been done really well, and the design choices that's been made already?
2. Gather support: I feel like biggest personal risk is that I don't know how to show up in higher-stake meetings with directors. Is it any different? Where do you all see the risk is?
3. Enable the team: I know the biggest responsibility I have, more than anything, is to make sure the team is able to work on the project and help us deliver this. Aside from the L5, I don't know a lot about the people. I feel I should putting my focus on ensuring they are as successful as possible, not focusing on my own technical knowledge as much, for us to succeed. Is that a good way to think about it?
4. Self-management: I anticipate I'll be very stressed and pulled in many directions. I already feel this way. What are some tools I can leverage in "crunch time"?

Hello community ✋I am going to start interview preparation for SDE-3 roles. Need your suggestions on what should I prepare and how much should I prepare? How much should I focus on DSA, system design, machine coding etc?

I have experience interviewing for SDE-2 roles but attempting for SDE-3 role first time so need valuable inputs from experienced people here.

I'd like to ask for your feedback on my side project - a full-stack simulation of a ride-hailing app such as Uber or Lyft.

App: 
Blog: 

A bit of background first. I've been wanting to publish a personal full-stack project for a while. These were my main reasons:

• I wanted a platform to explore concepts and tools I don't get to work with in my day job, helping me accelerate my learning.
• I've wanted to break into big tech and thought this project could help me stand out among many applicants.
• I enjoy writing and wanted to get better at it.

Why did I choose a simulation of the Uber/Lyft app? I always found something very attractive about these apps - they're visually appealing and dynamic, with colossal architectures behind them. I thought it would be very cool to re-implement some aspects of such an app. I have also been reading the Uber engineering blog and got a glimpse of the complexity these companies are dealing with.

My final goal with this app was to have an animated map with cars picking up customers, driving them across the map and dropping them off at their destinations. Customers would post ride requests and the system would match them with the nearest drivers. The simulation would run on the backend, and the frontend map would show the action in real-time.

I started working on the project last autumn. I've spent around 300 hours working on it and you can see the result in the links above.

My ask

I'd love to get your feedback to improve or extend this app and my blog, keeping in mind my objectives:

• I plan to apply to big tech companies this summer, and I'd like this project to help me with my applications.
• The project targets both recruiters and hiring managers. With recruiters, the goal is to pass the initial screening and get me to the interview stage (of course, I'll also be trying to secure referrals, but I might not always succeed). With hiring managers, this project might help me score extra points in my final evaluation.
• I might be applying to companies such as Uber or Bolt, but this project is not supposed to impress just the ride-hailing companies.
• I prefer not to put much more time into the project at the moment, as my focus right now has to be on the coding interview prep.

Possible additions or improvements include:

• Splitting the system across multiple machines (perhaps 3), making it truly distributed.
• Adding various components used in large-scale systems such as load-balancer, rate limiter, or message queues. Indeed, these components are not actually needed for the app to function. But by doing so, I could demonstrate my ability to work with them (albeit not necessarily demonstrating deep expertise).
• Adding comprehensive documentation with system diagrams and explaining the choices I made.
• More rigorous testing by adding integration tests (right now, I only have unit tests).

As for my previous background - I've been an engineer for ~4.5 years, most of my experience is from a small startup (series B). I consider myself a full-stack engineer but going forward, I aim to specialize more in the backend. Therefore, the project should strongly communicate my backend skills. For my next role, I also prefer backend positions to full-stack ones.

Recently I watched the great masterclass from Rahul and Alex on side projects. It made me realize that while my project might be interesting from a technical perspective, it has no users. In fact, this app doesn't allow any user interaction by nature. However, what I'm lacking in terms of users, I'm hoping to make up with the degree of technical complexity. Please also share your views on this aspect.

Many thanks if you've read this long post to the end. I'll be very grateful for any tips on how to make this project more appealing 🙏🏼

I am a senior engineer and closely guiding a junior engineer on the implementation of a new micro service. I have provided her the high level design for same and staying consistently involved in any low level design discussion, blockers and code reviews.

However, I am involved in multiple tracks and it’s not possible for me to randomly pause everything and answer her queries right away. Therefore, to keep her unblocked, as there are stricter deadlines, I also setup twice a week invite where she can get my help on any discussion or questions, as required.

Still, in an unofficial feedback she told me that she was blocked on my time and I need to give more time to discussions and PRs. I tried to give some helpful return feedback that she should be asking pointed questions to get quicker help, and also she should do some research before right away asking for help. I also told personal examples from my career journey regarding how I navigated situations when I got blocked on a senior’s time.

However, this resulted in her passive aggressive behaviour towards me. One such behaviour example is in code review - when I commented that local environment specific initialisation code shouldn’t be in the main classes, she responded that she doesn’t see any problem and it’s just unnecessary.

How do I handle this situation better?

I was promoted to E5 in July 2022, and I’ve been working on a challenging and highly ambiguous project since then, where my TL and another UberTL have limited ideas on how to make it a successful project and what direction the project should go. I’ve been getting little XFN support since the beginning of the project but still was able to implement and ship the MVP design I did on my own, but I still got MA rating for this. Starting Q2, things got a little better and the direction is somehow clear for H1 with specific high-level components to implement. My questions are:

1. Given this setup, since my TL has already defined the design and different components to implement, how can I still have high impact as a senior eng on the project? Previously, my EM suggested I look at myself as the CEO of the project and my TL as a consultant, but this has already changed when he got very involved in the project. I already do regular project updates on the project and have been getting positive feedback from all stakeholders that I usually get everyone on board with my positive communication with all of them.
2. My EM and TL have been giving me feedback that I need to move faster and target small wins, as opposed to working on a large goal that takes months of implementing, as was done for the MVP solution. The problem is: my whole team work past working hours up to 12-14 hours/day and sometimes on weekends too, which is not feasible for me, so I’m seeing this issue more as a relative issue compared to my teammates as opposed to being slow in execution. How can I resolve this issue? Can I talk to my EM about this?

Thanks!

Context:

• I'm working on a project that is known and understood to be at risk by most tech and other XFN stakeholders. This project has been attempted a few times in the past but didn't succeed and is being retried.
• There are a few upcoming features having tech dependencies on the delivery of this project but I feel that the stakeholders aren't confident about the success of the project.
• The project might need some support in the form of reviews, brainstorming and stewardship from the stakeholders to succeed.
• As the tech lead, I want to create and maintain stakeholders' confidence in the project so that they're enthusiastic to provide us the support we need.

Questions:

1. What can I do to understand current expectations of the stakeholders better?
2. What communication (or other) steps can I take to create and maintain stakeholders' confidence in the success of the project?
3. Apart from generating confidence, is there anything else that I could be doing to ensure stakeholders' support?

I see many experienced developers finding flaws in the existing architecture and also refactoring them to make it much better. I don't think I have yet gained the ability to identify loop holes in complex projects. However, I am able to fix issues if someone else calls them out pretty quickly.

How can I improve on this? What are some good resources to develop this skill?

Context:-

1. My team is going to work on a new project which involves upgrading a service and migrating/enabling all of the dependents to use the new service.
2. This service provides a business critical functionality for our teams and the new version attempts to solve a lot of high impact pain points with the previous version.
3. We have just inherited this service and none of us have worked with it or any of its dependents before. We have some support from the previous team that worked on this project but only in a consultation capacity.
4. This is a project that has been attempted multiple times by various teams over the years - unsuccessfully or with little progress. My perception is that it's going to be a difficult project with low-moderate chances of success.
5. There is a lot documentation but most of it is somewhat outdated. There are a lot of PRs as well but these are for the unsuccessful attempts so I'm not sure how impactful it would be to go through them.
6. The plans for the previous attempts only had internal milestones for the team and a single big-bang completion milestone for stakeholders.

Questions:-

1. How can I identify smaller, independent high-level milestones that are relevant for external stakeholders?
2. How can I come up with broad estimates and capacity requirements for the external and internal milestones if I'm not clear on what these milestones would require for completion?
3. How can I think about de-risking this attempt of the project and improving the probability of success?

I’m an E5 at a Big Tech company. My team’s E6 does not communicate or delegate effectively. He dives straight into the weeds without providing proper context, then gets frustrated and explodes when people ask questions or do the "wrong thing" because they are lost. I’ve seen him do this to multiple team members, including my EM and another E5 teammate. He always assumes that everyone has the same context that he has and is unable to tailor his communication to the appropriate audience. How can I best work effectively with someone like this? He would delegate tasks to me without providing acceptance criteria or proper context, then explode when I ask questions or do something other than exactly what he had in his mind (but never communicated properly). Is there a way to fortify my questions so he’s less likely to explode on me? My EM thinks that this E6 has a “my way or the highway” approach because he’s not used to people challenging his ideas. The E6’s feedback for me is to drive discussions more. However, I find it challenging because he leaves out critical information, then explodes and shares it only when we pull teeth about it in team discussions. I tried sharing pre-read meeting docs beforehand, but he still waits until the meeting to explode / share his feedback. Unfortunately he's a domain expert in this area, so there's no one else I can extract the context from.

I'm working as a senior SWE at a series C startup. I'm looking to specifically grow my technical skills on priority.

My manager has shared a few projects that are upcoming in the roadmap for my team. Given that the requirements and constraints for these project options are yet to be fully defined, how do I identify which projects will have sufficient technical depth to allow me to push the boundaries of my technical skills?

Big companies have multiple teams across. There will be a team just for the login, a team for backend logic, etc. There are so many teams and microservices and internal jargon all around.

Problem is during team meeting, seniors have more in depth discussion where I'm unable to provide value as good as them.

How do I get familiar with them fast? Or am I focusing on the wrong idea and should just narrow down what I'm working on and just let time do its thing?

Thanks

I’m an E5 iOS engineer at a Big Tech company. An E5 Android engineer (let’s call him A) on my team is very direct & blunt in his communication style. If he doesn’t like something, he’ll definitely let you know. An E5 backend engineer (let’s call him B) on my team is the complete opposite in his communication style. A and I collaborated on an official spec that we shared with our entire team to align everyone. B deviated from this spec in his RFC, but had tagged A and me on his proposed name change in the sample json response in his backend RFC.

A called B “sloppy” for embedding the source of truth in the backend RFC’s sample json response instead of using the official spec as the source of truth. This offended B, who viewed it as “finger pointing”. From B’s perspective, it was an innocent misunderstanding that’s easily resolved since it’s so early in the project that not much code has been written. It’s a single string that can be easily changed on both the mobile and backend sides. B thinks that A is making a mountain out of a molehill.

I worked closely with B last quarter and really enjoyed it. He’s extremely kind, easy-going, encouraging, and puts you at ease. If you make a mistake, he would never call it out explicitly. A seems to be the complete opposite of all those things, but I haven’t worked much with A yet.

Both A and B vented to me privately for support. A thinks that B is “sloppy” for burying the changes in the backend RFC instead of updating the official spec. B thinks that A is “difficult to work with” and “points fingers” over something that can be easily resolved. We’re still in the early stages of this project, and B doesn’t know how he can work with A if A keeps finger pointing.

When I suggested that A sugarcoat the “sloppy” comment, A told me that’s already the sugarcoated version.

B’s planning to escalate this to our EM, since he suspects that A will as well, so he needs to “defend himself”. Any advice on how I can improve the situation? Sadly, I feel that most engineers at this company use A's "direct" approach. I personally get along fine with both of these individuals (so far, at least), so they both confided in me. I think that A is “right” that the source of truth should be in the official document, but the manner that he communicated it could have been improved (not that I’m an expert at this skill either!). Are there concrete actions that I can coach A on to make him a better teammate to work with? When another teammate (E6) previously berated B in front of the entire team, I escalated it to my EM on B's behalf and my EM had intervened. Should I just escalate this to my EM as well? There are some strong personalities on this team that are going to make this project challenging. Sigh.

Say you want to research on a topic for resolving an issue and want to share with the team by creating a Google Doc. How does one master the skill of creating an high quality Doc?

My Senior team member, top performer, is super solid at creating Google Docs and churns out one great doc almost every week. He said he just focuses on just dumping out the thoughts in the first go and fixes them later on. But I feel his velocity in getting that doc out or completely the research on it is very fast. So clearly there is something that I am not understanding.

So I am looking for opinions from experts on Taro :)

I recently joined a team of 20 people split across traditional software development, support personnel, storage engineering, security engineering and more and we're essentially supposed to sysadmin a large number of systems working ~70 hr weeks. The old team we're replacing did not handle well in this environment and it seems like my team needs to focus more so the storage engineers solve storage engineering problems, coders do coding etc so we can bail each other out of this hole faster. Any thoughts on how we can go about this? I'm working ~50hr weeks max and still perplexed at how these 70 hr weeks happen.

I’m a female engineer (E5) at a Big Tech company. I worked closely with a male colleague on the same team for a while. He’s also E5. After our team’s manager resigned, there was a re-org and we ended up on different teams. His team had some attrition, so he recently asked if I would like to join his team. I’m happy with my current team, so I said no.

Over time, there’s been a growing undercurrent of very personal questions and crossing of professional boundaries.

Some questions he had asked me (he asked these very aggressively and kept pushing for answers when I gave hand-wavy responses to some of them):

• What did I do with my company stock? How much did I sell? Where did I put that money? What’s my financial strategy? We both joined pre-IPO, so our stock was worth a lot at one point.
• Do I own a house? Where is it located? When did I buy it? How big is it (square feet as well as number of bedrooms/bathrooms)? How much is left on the mortgage?
• Do I have a boyfriend? Do we live together? When did we meet? How did we meet? What does he do for a living?

Moreover, he keeps asking me to meet him in-person. Back when we were on the same team, I had skipped our in-person offsites due to COVID worries. I’ve never met him in-person, and am now extremely hesitant to. My spidey senses are going off.

He also asked me to communicate via WhatsApp instead of our company slack. Then he sent me a TikTok video with a sexual innuendo. When he recently asked me to use a non-company Zoom account to zoom, I declined and said that I don’t want any more sexual jokes. When he asked me if I’ll report him to HR, I asked him to keep things professional.

We’re in the same org, so I may need to work with him at some point. How do I enforce professional boundaries here? I don't want to go to HR unless absolutely necessary.

Due to unforeseen circumstances from past 6 - 8 months, I've been the Senior most engineer in my team, (I have a total of just ~2.7 YOE). My team consists of ~12 SDE 1s (New Hires) and 2 SDE2s (The other SDE2 being promoted very recently). My manager does a great job filling the role of Senior Engineer which reduces bit of pressure off of me.

However, due to necessity in the team I've ended up being SME in all the services owned by our team. This leads to everyone reaching out to me to help them with their queries, I try to document some of these and add in the Wikis so that it can be easily accessible for others next time. However, when it comes to certain tickets and issues, I end up having to pick that task up myself (Manager does not ask me to, but at same time i know that for someone else the ramp up time required to fix the issue would be too high).

I recently tried to reduce this (2~ months ago), this led to our overall ticket health getting worse and I had to again start looking into them myself and guiding each on-call cycle with right action items for the tickets etc.

This involves me helping them to do the following :-

• Prioritize correct tickets to look into for the on-call cycle.
• A potential fix for the ticket so that they know where to look into.

Due to which it ends up taking 6+ hours weekly to keep this running. I don't really mind doing this; however, I don't feel like this is a scalable solution and would eventually want to slowly scale down from doing this and have my team being able to be self-sufficient.

What's the best way to go about this without affecting my team's ticket health?

We currently have a problem with test flakes happening very often.

Someone is currently working on a systemic fix, but in the meantime, I've taken it upon myself to be the leader in categorizing and assigning people to take on some of the existing flakes as they happen. I am assigning based on who has the most context or who wrote the original test.

My question is: How can I assign these in a way that doesn't cause people to dislike me? I ask as someone who needs to delegate in my role but also needs to get buy-in for various initiatives so its important that people like me.

A couple of things I've tried:

• Trying to be as helpful as possible, showing that as I'm assigning these I've done a little bit of investigation myself to try to fix it (even without much context) or give any info I can gather
• Asking in a polite way (maybe)? Here's a couple examples:
  • "@person, I saw this one flake a few times and noticed you were the original author. Would you be able to take a look when you get a chance?"
  • "@person it looks like we attempted to fix this here (link to github commit) but it seems to still be flaking. If it's ok, I'm gonna assign this one to you."

Any better wording of the "ask" or advice around this situation would be appreciated!

At my current level, my skip level manager expects me to help my team members grow. I have couple of SDE 1s and SDE IIs in my team who are doing good. I am not sure if I can schedule one on one with them to understand their career goals and volunteer to be their technical & career mentor?

Will it look bad if I volunteer myself to be their career mentor? Or should I just mentor people who reach out to me?

Continuing from the post here:

Would the suggestions in that post be different for my scenario? I have added my details below.

I have a total 12 years of work experience. Currently, I am a SDE II at a fintech company. I have worked at this company for 3 years now and had 3 managers in past 3 years. At my current company, I am being asked to constantly move from one project to another every 6 months. For the last 6 - 7 years I have been working on mostly frontend engineering, including hands-on experience in Angular, React, and Backbone JavaScript libraries. I am looking to make a job switch as a Senior Frontend engineer.

I know that to get to the Senior level, I have to show influence at high levels. After reading the answer to some of the questions in the community, I am not able to decide whether I should focus on building web projects or should I start building an Android app. The advantage of choosing a web project is that I already have expertise in modern frontend frameworks. My initial years of experience is in legacy backend systems(mainframes) which I think is not of much use now in Silicon valley companies.

As far as my interest level goes, I am very much inclined toward the web. But I know that app development is definitely something that helps to attract users to your product. I am a bit lost on what I should invest my time on. Considering that I have 12+ years of experience, should I do both? Will doing both Android and web both open a lot more opportunities for me?

Should I focus on building something where I can show the impact with the number of users rather than thinking about the platform (android or web) for which I start building my side projects. Should I even care about doing side projects considering I have 10+ years of work experience?

Should I target full-stack roles instead of front-end roles?

Looking for suggestions. Apologies if this question comes out as too broad and not very clear. I am open for discussion if that can help to narrow down the response.

Current TC: 220 - 240K

Even for the existing money earned and invested, seems like it may face some impact due to the probable hit on US economy due to the same. What can one do best in this situation?

My question is when should I reach out to help someone. If someone new joins, and if it is clear that task might be difficult for person, or there is some context needed etc, and they fail to ask, should you help them? Reaching out early and helping might be hampering their own learning, also at risk of hurting someone's ego. But If I am in other person's shoes, I would appreciate all help so what is right balance here?

Also, should you helping be more visible or private? If it is public, other people can add extra context as they like, but maybe in private conversations, person can ask more follow up question, assuming they are afraid to ask dumb questions. To be more specifically, by public I mean team channel in slack and private would one-one chat.

I am building an iOS team as the lead engineer. Here are the iOS roles I'm looking to fill based on my assessment of the product's requirements:

• Number 2 (capable of handling 60-80+% of my tasks as my right hand)
• Designer Engineer (specializes in dealing with design layouts)
• Real-Time Data Engineer (specializes in dealing with real-time data)
• Automated Testing Engineer (specializes in code coverage and unit testing)
• Bug Squash Engineer (generally a more junior engineer to address menial tasks)

What are your thoughts and anything I might be blindsided on?

I'm an E5 iOS at a Big Tech company. My team has some E6 work that I'd love to take on, but my PM prioritized some E4 work above it. Since the only other iOS engineer on my team is E6, my EM asked me to take on the E4 work while the E6 works on the E6 work. The E4 work is scoped to about a month's worth of work, but I worry that scope creep may drag things out further. I've been at this company for close to 3 years on various teams. For the majority of that time, I've been saddled with E4 work (and sometimes even E3 work) that has taken valuable time away from working towards E6. I was hired as an E5. Is there a way to avoid spending time doing lower-level work to focus on getting to the next level? For what it's worth, I got Exceeds on my latest performance review.

In uncertain times, and given the risk of job security in tech, what are your views on passive income modes or side hustles such as writing a blog?

Can you suggest some of these for someone who is currently a backend software engineer?

Also, I am ruling out hustles such as driving Lyft/Uber as they require active participation.

Hey guys,

I'd appreciate some advice since I'm having the first month in my new company. So far it seems that many processes are neither formal or automated, and there's also a lot of documentation missing. In one of the tutorials and also in my discussion with Rahul, the advice was to not rush towards suggesting improvements right away. However, in my company I see a lot of room for improvement and I have some ideas on how to make things better. What would be your approach?

I have been hearing from my friends about senior engineer's round table meetings happening in their company. I am wondering what is exactly Senior Engineer's round table. (Senior Engineers from the same team and peer teams working for same skip-level manager)
What kind of topics can be discussed at this round table session?

How to initiate such discussions?

I have recently been put into a new project by my manager. I dont like the work in the project and would like to change that before 1 year mark. Its been close to 9 months in my current team. There are no experienced ICs in the project and I dont like the working attitude of others. However, I like my manager and have bonding with him.

Q1 Should I move to a new project?

Q2 How to bring this up to my manager and when is the right time?

Hello everyone,

As a senior engineer L5 in my company for 1 year, I recently found myself in a new team with a new direct manager but report to the same Director in the same Org due to the recent company restructure/company reorganization as part of layoff changes. My Director and I are the direct responsible individuals for the Backend Platform System for the last 1 year. However, I am finding that a significant portion of my time is being taken up by "glue work," such as onboarding new teammates, updating the Wiki, documenting On-call Runbook, mentoring cross-functional team members, providing code reviews for new developers, and unblocking people in their code development. While these tasks seem important, they are making it difficult for me to focus on my own projects.

In my first one-on-one, my new manager expressed a desire for me to take on new initiatives. I am eager to do so, but I need to be able to focus on my own work to make this possible. My manager understood that the frequent on-call support was a blocker for me and asked me to train and onboard a new teammate to take over the on-call support, as well as field requests from users and help others with their work. However, I have still found myself doing a lot of training and providing support even two weeks since my last meeting.

I would like to hear from others who have found a way to balance these responsibilities effectively. How can I prioritize my own work while still contributing to the team's success? I know this will be a difficult decision, and I'm not sure how to approach it. I'm worried that if I stop doing some of these tasks, it may impact my relationship with my manager and team.

If anyone has faced a similar challenge, I would appreciate hearing about how you approached it. Did you stop doing certain tasks and responsibilities, and if so, how did it affect your relationship with your team? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

I'm an E5 at a Big Tech company. My EM's pushing me to lead projects on our team so I can work on getting to E6. This is challenging when the E6 on my team tries to micromanage everything. How do I lead when I keep getting overruled? The E6 usually makes good decisions, but oftentimes struggles to articulate his rationale / justification.

Hi all,

Due to recent changes in the company (Big Tech), my current manager is moving to a new org and a new manager is brought to manage the team. I really respect my manager and they were amazing at supporting me (helped me grow from E3 to E5 in 2 years).

They mentioned the new team has an opening and mentioned that I'd be welcome to join if I wanted to. The new team is our company's top priority and based on initial understanding, their work sounds very interesting to me. Here are some pros and cons I could think of:

Not Changing Team:

• Pro- I have great relationships with IC6s on the team and also junior engineers.
• Pro- I know the codebase well and scope is well defined.
• Con- Been working in this space for 2+ years and feel slightly bored sometimes. Skillset also becomes stagnant.
• Con- Manager mentioned hard to find IC6 scope in the org moving forward.

Changing Team:

• Pro- Will continue the same manager, who I have a great relationship with.
• Pro- Exciting new space and top company priority.
• Pro- Manager considers me as high IC5 and mentioned potential IC6 growth opportunities-(although since manager hasn't joined the new team yet- so I should take this with a grain of salt).
• Con- Having to ramp up to a new team as an IC5 (seems a little risky considering layoffs).
• Con- Unknowns like work life balance, team friendliness, team success etc.

Considering these, I am planning to talk to the senior manager in the new org to evaluate their team and vision. Since this is a unique situation, how should I approach choosing between the two? What kind of questions should I ask? Thanks a lot!

I'm an E5 iOS at a Big Tech company. Our team's E6 backend and E6 iOS tend to dominate our team discussions, often talking over each other. I get the impression that the E6 iOS wants to be the smartest person in the room and enjoys micromanaging all the details, but the E6 backend enjoys challenging him. When I proposed a solution to one of our project's challenges, the E6 iOS quickly shot it down but could not propose any alternatives. The E6 backend challenged the E6 iOS to explain why my idea wouldn't work, but the E6 iOS just talked in circles. It seemed like the E6 iOS just didn't like it because he didn't come up with it himself. How do I avoid making the E6 iOS feeling threatened? I'm a bit hesitant to contribute to team discussions due to this dynamic, but my EM wants me to contribute more.

I was wondering how would one handle situations where a manager makes up a feedback based of half information (or their perception) or even misinformation from others.

There are also no actions attributed to this feedback.

for eg. Person X have to learn how to manage up or navigate office politics or learn how to work well with other. But how? And who are these others?

When asked an example of why this feedback was given, they don't have any good example of what happened ,who said what and why was the feedback not given in the first place.

I know this is not something I can control, and in their mind of course they are giving actionable feedback.

The other part of it when you are surprised by the feedback even after asking for it in every 1:1 before (in my situation my manager was out for most of the time).

It just feels that why did I even work so hard in the first place and a little demotivated.

I'm an E5 mobile engineer at a Big Tech company. Some engineers have a habit of leaving "drive-by comments" in code reviews that are only tangential to my PR. How should I push back on these?

Examples:

• I created some snapshot tests using our existing 3rd party snapshot library. An engineer commented that we should change where the snapshot library stores the snapshot images. I felt that this was out-of-scope for my PR, so I told them to ask our mobile infra team instead. They did not follow up with the mobile infra team. Should the expectation be for me to drive those conversations with the mobile infra team instead of them?
• An engineer requested that I abstract and mock how I log analytics events for my feature. I think there's little ROI because it's unlikely for that to change, but I did it anyway to appease them. When I later looked at that engineer's PRs, I discovered that they never abstract & mock how they log analytics events either! This seemed hypocritical and a waste of time due to the low ROI.

US has a lot of big tech and startups. India has seen some growth in recent past as well. What are other locations worldwide where one can propel their career with good compensation and growth ?

I am thinking about this, more from a long term perspective, in terms of getting a Permanent Residence and moving with my family there.

I run into this from time to time where more Senior and Staff Engineers take interesting projects. I’m usually left with ones that take medium time and medium impact. How do I find projects for myself that expand my impact?

I'm an E5 at a Big Tech company. My team's working on a very ambiguous project. 3 opinionated, vocal engineers (2 E6, 1 E5) tend to sidetrack our brainstorming discussions by playing devil's advocate to shoot down ideas. How do I drive these meetings forward with this dynamic? We often rehash the same discussions over and over. When we're close to reaching a decision, oftentimes someone would throw a wrench into things. Moreover, some engineers require upfront planning and want to finalize all the details before committing, while others prefer to defer the details to future milestones. Both my manager and team are getting frustrated, but are unsure how to fix this.

hi all,

I am a tech lead for my team of 5 engineers. I am also a senior eng intending to climb up to staff level.

My manager is not very vocal or supportive and seems reluctant in terms of helping out a plan for myself. I have been working hard though. How can I work with my manager to create a promotion plan for myself and get buy-in from them?

I am not sure if I should move up the eng ladder or transition to management, but are there any guidelines for creating a written promotion plan and manage up so to speak?

Can you share resources for data-related interviews (applied data science, data analysis, sql, big data, etc). Also, any tips that a former software engineer can best prepare for switching roles to a data engineer.

Will interviews for data-related jobs at FAANG companies be different from general software jobs? Given my most recent experience is in software engineering, how can I best prepare for behavioral questions for a data related job?

I'm an E5 at a big tech company. I've been on multiple projects where stakeholders waited until the very end of the projects to say, "That's not what I wanted." What can I do to prevent this from happening? I got feedback that I "need to navigate ambiguity". Does "navigating ambiguity" mean somehow predicting that stakeholders want something besides what they sign off on? If so, how do I develop this skill?

This seems to only happen on projects led by E6+ engineers or an M2. I have not had this experience when working with other E5's or more junior engineers.

Examples:

• Misaligned OKRs: At the beginning of the quarter, my M2 told me that it was okay to have a multi-quarter effort, so I planned to do an analysis and roadmap in the first quarter, then execute on improving metrics in subsequent quarters. My M2 signed off on my OKRs for the first quarter. When I provided my deliverables at the end of the quarter, the M2 said, "That's not what I wanted." Then he told me that he wanted metrics moved, even though my OKRs clearly said it was just an analysis & roadmap. I asked 2 mentors (a Director & an M2 - both not in my management chain) for a 3rd party opinion and they both agreed that there was no way to read my OKRs as moving any metrics. I'm confused why the M2 signed off on it and didn't say anything about it in our team's weekly OKR review meetings if that's not what he wanted. He gave me feedback that I need to "navigate ambiguity." When I asked him for concrete, actionable steps to navigate ambiguity, he said, "If you need to ask that, then clearly you don't know how to navigate ambiguity." I'm so confused! Please help!
• Low-level design missing on a cross-functional project: The DRI (an E6 backend engineer on a different team) kept talking in circles & refused to answer questions whenever the other mobile engineer and I asked about the low-level design for our project. The other mobile engineer tried escalating to our EM, but our EM did not help us. As a last resort, the other mobile engineer and I aligned on the mobile implementations and built that. During end-to-end testing, the DRI said, "That's not what I wanted." He did the same thing to the data scientist. The project was initially scoped for 6 weeks, but ended up taking 2.5 quarters due to all the churn around "late findings". My EM gave me feedback that I need to have a low-level design before starting implementation.
• Wrong requirements on a cross-functional project: The DRI (E8 web on a different team) provided a requirements doc that was confusing, meandering/disorganized, and hard to follow/understand. An E7 mobile engineer flagged that the doc is not a proper requirements doc at a TSG (Tech Steering Group), but the DRI ignored him and forced me to implement it. I asked for requirements clarification, acceptance criteria, and end-to-end test cases, but he refused to provide any of them. He told me that the requirements doc was all I needed. I escalated this to 3 EMs (my EM, the project's EM, and the DRI's EM) due to my bad experience from the previous project, but none of them helped me. When I asked my EM point-blank how to avoid building the wrong thing, he told me to just make sure I get sign-off on the low-level design in my mobile RFC. I made sure to get sign-off from the DRI before implementation. I also provided TestFlights every 2 weeks for the duration of the project. On the final day that I was allocated to the project, the DRI asked what happens in an error scenario. I said, "Exactly what was documented and signed off in the low-level design of the mobile RFC. Why would it be any different?" Sure enough, he said, "Oh, that's not what I wanted." When I asked why he signed off on the low-level design, he said he missed the flowchart that described the error handling. This happened even though I explicitly tagged him on that flowchart in the Google Doc. So the overall mobile design was about 80% wrong. Turns out his requirements doc said the opposite of what he wanted and that's why the wrong thing got built. The TestFlights had the wrong behavior starting with the initial build, but he missed this as well. His feedback for me: "needs to make sure we build the right thing". How do I avoid this in the future? My EM was unable to provide any advice on how to avoid this in the future. All 3 EMs resigned towards the end of the project.

Got feedback from manager that my rating is just MA and on the border. I was given the context that my project complexity was not that much and it was a lower level project. I worked really hard and was expecting good ratings. What can I do to make sure that I exceeds the expectations next time?

I'm in a difficult situation right now and feel I need some time off to recover and manage, but am also concerned with optics.

I've been interviewing for new roles recently and spent my time off over the holidays (~2 weeks) preparing for a particularly stressful onsite interview. The team I was originally interviewing with no longer has an opening and I'm stuck waiting for headcount to open up and find a new team.

The stress of this situation has been taking a toll on me mentally and physically, and I've been dealing with a lot of health issues over the last month. I think it would be best for me to take at least a couple of weeks off to help reduce my stress and focus on maintaining my health. This isn't extremely extended, but amounts to more like a month off when factoring the recent 2 weeks off for the holidays.

After writing this out, it seems more cut-and-dry that I need to just ask and cite the health issues. I'd be curious to hear how others have navigated asking for extended time off.

How to navigate working with new engineering manager who is away for 1st month?

From my first one-on-one with my new direct manager (M3), my new manager tell me that he will be away 1st month to travel to Asia for family visit. My new manager told me that he would only be avaliable during India timezone so he will not have any one-on-one with me due to time zone difference. So he asks me to work directly with the Director (M4) for this month. I have worked with this director for 8-12 months last year, who are my current Director (M4). Wanted to see if anyone has any thought on how to navigate through the next month while my direct manager is gone and won't be avaliable for me.

My direct manager reassures me that I will still have one-on-one with my skip on a weekly basis, and nothing should have changed since I worked with my Director (M4) before as I was his direct report as Senior Software Engineer.

Wanted to ask if there's anything that I should consider for this 1 month of transition with my new engineering manager?

I was recently laid off but finding getting interviews to be quite difficult. If I cannot get a position in the next 6 months but spend that time focusing on interview prep, will employers view the gap as a red flag?

A senior engineering manager (M2) was leading a discussion circle that I participated in. When it ended, he offered to mentor me with 30 min 1:1s every 2 weeks. He's not in my chain of command, but we are in the same org. He reached out to my skip-level (also an M2) for feedback on me to better coach me. In our first 1:1, he suggested some team activities I can take on to develop skills for getting to the next level.

• What's his incentive for doing this?
• How can I best utilize this time? Are there things that M2s are uniquely qualified to provide mentorship on?

Hi,

I'm a Senior ML Engineer located in Europe with 4 years of industry experience, just about to start my next gig working remotely for a US startup.

On my last team, the way we approached coding was strictly based on OOP, clean code and SOLID principles as defined by Robert C. Martin (aka Uncle Bob). We were also following a strong TDD approach with 100% test coverage. By trying to stick to SOLID, we were also based a lot on abstractions and interfaces with OOP, but sometimes it felt it wasn't worth it.

Lately, I've read some negative reviews on the internet regarding clean code and Uncle Bob in particular, that were both doubting his approach and stated his claims are far from being true in the real world. Also, a lot of folks have told me that 100% test coverage is just crazy and I shouldn't be too obsessed about it.

What are your thoughts? What is your experience in the industry?

Thanks

I've seen multiple E6s point out flaws in others' proposals, but don't offer any alternatives of their own. What's a good way to navigate this? This is extra tricky when we're on the same team and they're the designated code reviewer for my work.

Example: I ran into a limitation with a 3rd-party SDK. I proposed 2 options as workarounds, but an E6 rejected both options due to their limitations. When I asked him for his recommendation, he could not provide any alternatives but still insisted that I find a solution without any limitations. Thankfully an E7 on another team helped me by providing a viable workaround after 3 E6s were stumped by this problem. What should I do if I'm not lucky enough to have an E7 help me next time?

For context, I work in a tech lead role where I am often making recommendation to my manager regarding the projects coming down the line. The EM has the final say on this, but they respect my opinion on this matter so I don't want to mess this up.

I also have 1:1s with my teammates whom I am responsible for about their career growth goals. My teammates are all the same eng level, but have different levels of competence and desire to learn.

Additionally, I also know it's important for me to leave some room/ambiguity in project investigation stages to allow folks the space to grow, while it's also important for me to take on some challenging work and help our team deliver more quickly. I guess my question is really 2 parts:

1. How do I choose what to delegate?
2. How do I choose who to delegate the work to?

As a senior IC, I am included as part of leadership meetings (Director+). I gain a lot of early insights into business direction, which is great. However I would like to see how i can take part in the discussions and have effective conversations?

I am looking for a book suggestion and/or framework to use on how to go about improving on this?

Few dimensions which could impact this -

1. Personality of the individual
2. Awareness/one’s expertise of the topic being discussed

Over the past year, we've focused on developing our product quickly, which has led to a significant amount of technical debt in our codebase. As a result, we've shipped applications without proper architecture and planning. However, when I suggest refactoring or re-architecting to my team, many of the senior developers and the engineering manager are skeptical. In my opinion, I am not just offering refactoring for just sake of refactoring; it's necessary because our current code base lacks abstraction and separation of concerns and has slow development times.

Examples:

• Adding a new column to the database takes 1-2 days
• Or changing some code breaks another part of the application(lack of separation of concerns and abstraction)
• Another example, recently I introduced integration tests to our team because we manually tested a lot of stuff on staging before deployment, in that case, my EM's argument was integration tests are very slow to run on every build.

In those examples, how can I reduce skepticism in my team and bring more productivity, and more good code quality, and best practices to my team?

I am currently burnt out and looking for ways to take a break.

Looking at Google's generous severance benefits, I had thoughts to inform my manager that I am up for the chopping block if there are any foresight of next round of layoffs. Which I think should be good for the company since I am also helping one motivated Googler to not be laid off in the future.

But then, I am afraid it might get rejected and my manager's relationship with me get strained.

Are there any suggestions on getting severance package while indicating my intent to resign?

Additional context

I am currently not on PIP and is considered excellent performer. I was promoted to L5 in mid 2021

Michael Lin's blog discussed on the "preemptive severance package" which is relevant to what I am hoping to do

I am working on a project with sister team under my skip level manager. My manager does not manage that project. How do I approach him to ask that I want to work on a task with end-to-end ownership?

As a Senior software engineer working at a mid-size tech company, I’m still learning how to properly push back when others Sr SWE & managers or Directors from Web or Mobile team tried to get me to do tasks that do not match my own priority.  As much as I like to be nice and support others, I agree that I can only do so much.  I brought this up with my direct manager and my Director (L7 Senior Manager & L8 Director), and they told me to loop them in when I face overwhelming pressures from other engineers/ cross-functional teams. My direct manager also told me they wants me to be able to focus on big project initiative, and they see that I am on track to be the Tech Lead given my current trending.

While I do appreciate that my boss gives me words of assurance and direction and offered to step in to fend off those pressures during my one-on-one call, I recognize that I would have to be the person who is good on establish priorities and be able to push back on people. I cannot really rely on my boss to do the push-back to fend off the pressure given that with the recent layoff, we are short on staff.

Wanted to get some thoughts and suggestions on "How can I push back diplomatically against an overwhelming amount of tasks"?

To folks who have been impacted by the ongoing layoffs, should we be transparent about our ongoing situation with regard to employment? Just wondering if that would tend to hurt one as the interview progresses towards the offer stage.

How does it differ from an entry level engineer to the head of engineering level at each of the levels, given the scope grows as well at each level?

• Software Engineer
• Senior Software Engineer
• Tech Lead
• Staff Software Engineer
• Principal Engineer
• Head of Engineering
• Director of Engineering
• Vice President
• CTO

How do each of the levels ensure they are onboarded as quickly as possible to have maximum impact ?

My manager suggested that I work on the skills below to advance my career. Do you have any masterclasses or other resources to develop these skills? I added links to the resources that I know about.

* Stakeholder management
* Project management
* Design & architecture -
* Communication -
* Leadership -

When working with coworkers, you often have to stay positive and "on" all the time. This can be draining, especially when you see the same people multiple days in a row. Sometimes, when working with someone for 4+ hours, I get the daunting feeling that I am irritating them (perhaps a projection of me feeling irritated) when I'm no longer at my mental peak. I can ramble when I'm tired and forced to talk. What are some pro-social ways of stowing yourself away to recharge?

This quarter, my skip requested/ gave me an opportunity to lead an org wide efficiency initiative as we are at risk of hitting quotas for some internal services (he mentioned potential IC6 scope) and it’s quite urgent to act on it. My role is to start and lead a large team of engineers on this initiative which involves tons of direction to ensure our org isn’t over quota. I would look my role as a hybrid of TL+ TPM with following responsibilities: analyzing data to find opportunities, creating roadmaps for the program, supporting engineers for execution to reduce usage, project management, understanding and enforcing processes, building knowledge on internal services, coaching engineers, setting Eng excellence culture within the org. All that to say, given limited time and a need for someone to lead, I will be focusing on direction and delegate all of the execution work to the squad.

1. How risky is it to have low code output as an IC5? Given the year is just starting, does it make sense to explicitly discuss this with my manager and skip that my code output will be close to zero in Q1?

I did read some accounts (anon post on WP) where EM and skip aligning on low code out out but the IC5 still got MM at the end because they had only 10 diffs for a half. I don’t want to be in that position.

1. Should I deprioritize some direction work and allocate some time for coding on my timeline through P2 projects? This will increase diff count but that just seems not a great usage of my time. TIA!

Recently my company has split up a core team into two teams. One team is to keep on building the core infrastructure for the product and the other team is supposed to be working in an advisory position with other web applications teams that depend on the core infrastructure. Without dwelling into more details, this core team builds, and maintains datastores, that other web applications consume. A big part of the job is to build google search type infra (on a much smaller scale of course) and data processing pipelines.

Now working with other teams is exciting. But just focusing on one task that is doing tickets/changes/investigations that help them implement some specific features w.r.t to core infra, is kinda troubling me. As it puts me in a passive position and does not clearly define metrics for success. It also puts me on the borderline as I am neither doing core infrastructure-related work nor I am completely part of the other team. The idea is to imitate how Staff engineers work across teams. But I am a Senior engineer (just recently promoted).

Though this is clearly a growth opportunity for me, I am a bit worried about falling behind and not meeting expectations. Any advice on working with cross-functional teams?

What I've learned over the years is that the most important thing to do when I realize a project is late is to:

1. Come up with a revised estimate of the task
2. Notify all relevant parties with #1 (E.M., PM, x-function partners, etc.)
3. Tell the people #2 "I messed up, here's what I will do in planning next time to avoid this planning mishap next time". This step especially builds a lot of trust

What other tips do you have?

This half I've been assigned to a new greenfield project and I'm having a tough time believing in the product idea and I think the product team is being overly optimistic.

I'm concerned the problem the product solves isn't important enough, that the solution won't be adopted and that the business value isn't clear. They're also pushing for rushed timelines even before we've decided on what will be delivered.

I'm worried if this thing doesn't get traction and we end up having layoffs that it would make our team a target.

How should I think about this situation? Try to make the best out of it? Try to get out of it?

Some background about my experience. I have overall 10 years of experience out of which first 3 years was in Service based company in India and then 6 years at Amazon/AWS and around 9 months at Meta. I got promoted to Sr. position almost 3 years ago and have been working as Sr. Engineer since then.

Since few months before my promotion I am feeling bit burnt out. Promotion came after lot of hard work and honestly the compensation increment was totally underwhelming. So I interviewed and switched and comp increase was really good but I am not liking work culture now. This made me sort of realize few things:

1. Promotion and level don’t actually mean much. I feel like I am part of a rat race and trying to prove my worth to someone who can whimsically just say yay or nay. This is extremely demotivating.
2. Early days of my career were great, I was making good money and learning ton of new stuff. However, now I realized that most of the stuff I learned is not useful outside and I saved enough money to not feel the need to do job just because of money.
3. It is not worth being loyal to one employer. Even though I changed companies for comp, my new employer (Meta) recently let go of lot of people. Some of them have been there for at least a decade. Plus the remaining of us are now in constant fear of layoff based on performance.

Now I want to get out of this job→money→stress→new job→money→stress cycle but don’t know how. I am planning to move back to India after few months and was hoping to start may be freelancing or some consulting work where I can control my time. I am more than happy to take a pay cut. So I started doing some research:

1. Freelancing: Most of the jobs in freelancing are web development. I have lot of experience with backend and some experience with web development but I am nowhere close to the people on youtube/udemy. I can most certainly build stuff but have no experience to show for and I am not sure if I’ll be able to find any work whatsoever 😟.
2. Consulting: Everybody suggests to build a network and then you can find work through them. My network is mostly SDEs in FAANG who I’ve already talked to. Most of them told me, dude if we know about such work we’ll jump ship as well, but they have nothing. One of my jobs was to build cloud services so I know how to build them at scale. But I have less experience in how to use them, so even if I do certifications I am not sure I’ll be able to find work on this area.

Now last option for me is to find a job which pays less and have less stress which will be okay. I can most certainly say screw it and not worry about getting promoted. But then I don’t know if that’ll be satisfactory, it’ll be more like I accepted defeat and ducked out of rat race but I still have no direction to go on.

Sorry if this all sounds like a rant, but I would love to have some guidance from people who have been in similar situation. What did you guys do and do you have any suggestions for me?

After more than 20 years of IT experience across different areas (analysis, development, operations, architecture, management, ...) in various industries (e-government, healthcare, manufacturing, consulting, ...), how would you organize your CV well? Would you list all the companies you worked in since your graduation from college and what you did in each (and therefore make a relatively long CV)? Or would you detail only the most recent 3 or 4 companies/projects where you worked along the last 10 years and add a summary of what you did in the older years without listing company names and what you did in each one by one (and therefore limit the CV to round 3 pages)? Any other approaches?

My resume is below and a review would be great!

Questions:

1. I tried to be concise and to "show" not "tell". What major improvements can I still make? Lots of progress already from seeing Alex's resume and the masterclass on resumes , but would love more.
2. Does L5 make sense given the resume, or since I have just over 3 years of experience would L4 be worth pursuing as well over my current position? Following up on questions about down leveling , and leaving a startup for big tech .

*Note because my most recent experience is Team Lead and where I don't directly ship, I did break the rules and use bold to highlight earlier impact. I also put skills at the bottom for visual balance.

Team Lead for Software Engineering, Company X ⁓ $450M startup ⁓ 1M monthly active users

April 2022-Present

• Managed 8 direct reports, 2 promoted to Senior (one from the junior), 3 on-boarded
• Proactively addressed underperformance among direct reports resulting in 2 engineers improving their skills to meet expectations
• Empathized with individuals to build trust and understand root causes which included addressing a system problem rather than blaming an engineer for poor performance
• Recognized hard work resulting in high team morale and often completing sprint goals

Android Engineer II, Company X ⁓ employee #18 of 150 ⁓ engineer #4 of 25

May 2021-Mar 2022

• Rebuilt our $125M-revenue driver, a 2D list of games, to be faster, modular, simpler
• Devised a strategy to improve UX through the creation of a bottom sheet and a resizing video solution, lead to a 4.3% increase in D7 profit
• Created a service reminding users when their games are installed, even when outside app, and made a reusable, modular notification system, leading to a 75% decrease in abandonment
• Debugged a $1M bug and presented a brownbag on it

Android Engineer I, Company X

Nov 2019-April 2021

• Presented 20+ architecture and testing docs to my team before building complex features
• Created robust test suites to ensure correct behavior and great UX through fault tolerance

Internships: Zillow, Undergrad Research

Skills: Kotlin, Java, Room/SQLite, SOLID, MVVM, Git, Design patterns, OOP, TDD

I’m considering leaving a startup because of 2 things I’ve seen on Taro:

1. faang+ as a long term investment in your career
2. .

2019 Goal of Joining a Startup

• Learn a lot about how to be a good software engineer

• Be an early employee at a startup that makes it big

• Quickly become an Engineering Manager because I like working with people, helping others

2023 Thoughts on Staying as an Eng Manager or Joining Big Tech

• Dream of being an EM, is happening on small start up scale with a growing number of reports who like my management so far

• The dream is to be early at a unicorn and that is close, but

  • The new standard should be 10B not 1B

  • Doing this with a first job is not necessary and high risk

• In 2-4 years I’d likely still be a engineering manager from a no-name startup

• L5+ engineer in big tech may fit well with my personality right away based on Taro, where I love collaboration, helping people, product and technical challenges

  • I like not just spending 80% of my time heads down coding and that may be possible and expected right away in big tech, no need to be a manager

• Getting a 2 FAANG+ badges on my resume over the next 4 years would be more way more worth it than even a million dollar payout from a startup

  • Could have many doors opened for high level roles at startups OR faang depending on what I feel like at the time

  • Big tech stock offer may also easily be worth 1M in 4 years

Priorities 2019

• Supportiveness of team

• Growth opportunities

• Company prestige

• Maximum outcome (Risk)

• Compensation

• Company ethics

• Product space

• Technical space

• Work-life balance

• Level/title

• Benefits

• Location

• Stability

• Remote work

Priorities 2023

• Supportiveness of team +0

• Work-life balance +7

• Compensation +2

• Company prestige -1

• Growth opportunities -3

• Stability +7

• Company ethics -2

• Remote work +6

• Level/title +1

• Benefits +1

• Location +1

• Product space -5

• Technical space -5

• Maximum outcome (Risk) -10

Taro priorities video is

Startup Stats

• 150 people, 25 engineers (doubled from a year ago)

• Fall 2021 had 50% investment at 250M valuation

• Dec 2022 450M valuation

• Revenue has since doubled in last year to 125M

• Profitable per years with 20% gross margin

• Growing industry

• Not venture backed, so not expecting 20x growth

• Estimated in 2-4 years to sell for 1-2B

How to evaluate a startup video

Current job stats

• Team lead for a year after 2.5 years as Software Engineer

• 0.1% equity, 100k cash

• 18th employee, 4th engineer

• Dream of being an early employee at a unicorn, seems close

• Would lose all stock if I leave before acquisition/ipo

• Biggest point for discussion: ***2-4 years of being manager at a small startup may not qualify me to be an EM in big tech***

FAANG+ Offer

• L4 equivalent

• 190k cash, 350k stock over 4 years, 60k sign on bonus

• Work life balance is supposed to be great

• Great food, big tech lifestyle that I’ve always heard/dreamed about

• Would work to be promoted to L5 in 1-2 years, then manager a year after that.

• Being a new person at a fresh company sounds very exciting now, I know the business fully and the tech stack of the current place to the point where many things Ive see before and feel stale/boring

Questions

1. Based on my write up about values, priorities, liking collaboration, would I like being an IC L4 coming from being a manager where I have solid tech skills but strong soft skills that I enjoy using.

2. If I stay at the start up would I be able to get a big tech EM offer with 3-4 years of management experience at the start up? Note this question shows what I’m learning now as a manager.

3. Should I down level myself from L5 to L4 if I think I could get the offer at L5 but am not sure about the certainty of success? (Question asked separately )

I think I could get an L5 offer now if I pushed for it, but is it fine to level myself at L4 to make things easier on myself? Then I'll try to perform at L5 anyway but it will be a-ok to not quite make it.

To put this into context, the question refers more to people who have already been at the company for a while, not onboarding engineers.

In my experience working only at startups, almost all learning has been the responsibility of the employee. There is a "spike" period where the engineer is given time to come up to speed, but it has always seemed to me a bit careless for managers to just give someone a list of technologies and say "learn this."

I guess this question is really a proxy for asking: how does FAANG approach "bootcamping" engineers on a new and important stack? Are workshops, training courses, and L&D actually effective? Suppose that I am a senior engineer who wants all the junior engineers in my team to learn how to use AI assist tools like Copilot, how would I approach making this mandatory if I really think it's a technology that's as crucial as git?

An E6 and I recently joined an existing team and are working with an E6 who has all the historical context on the project's requirements/limitations in his head. The PM is brand new to the team and the company. The EM and designer are also fairly new. The newer E6 often proposes architectural directions that the more tenured E6 shoots down due to this context. Is there a good way to extract all this context from the more tenured E6? I feel like we're often throwing things on the wall and just seeing what doesn't get shot down -- things get shot down more often than not, unfortunately. The more tenured E6 said it'll take too long to document all the context.

I was watching a video from a well known note-taking influencer/teacher and was curious what everyone used for note taking. In addition- how do you approach note taking?

For me:

• Approach:
  • Everything should be based on keyword search
  • I use tags to organize by project GTD style if need be
  • "Librarian style" (see video above)- clip all sorts of things without too much regard to storing
• Implementation
  • Use evernote for personal notes
  • For personal projects, use Google docs if I need friends to comment (I would prefer quip or paper, but the reality is that the most important thing is to NOT have to inconvenience ppl with new account creation)
  • For structured data, I use Airtable.
    • If I need to display the data in a public way, embed on Medium (see for example
    • If I need to display the data in a semi public way, use Notion's site functionality (not ideal, I would like to ideally embed Airtable within google docs- Quip/Dropbox Paper allows for that)

Apologies in advance for a long question. Not sure how to ask this question without providing deeper context.

I’ve been working with my current manager for the last 1.5 years. While they have recently helped me get promoted to Senior, it’s been a constant struggle. I dread our 1:1 almost every single week because it always run overtime and we are often still not on the same page. 

I see two major issues that haven’t notably improved in the times I’ve reported to them.

(1) My manager isn’t able to coach me, or any of the SWEs on the team. My manager doesn’t seem confident when we have career discussions - I recently asked them what they thought was the difference between good TL and a great one, and they struggled to coherently answer this. Instead, they said they would know better after the next performance calibration.  Additionally, none of my teammate has gotten proper coaching either.  For example, a teammate struggled to submit code due to their poor code quality and thus had low CL velocity, so my Manager simply told them to submit more CLs, which only made them more stressed without a legitimate way to improve. 

(2) My manager lacks technical understanding of our projects and constantly pushes for speed. My manager was externally hired, and to this day, they don’t really understand the complexity of the work our team does. I understand EMs don’t need to contribute code directly, but my manager almost always underestimate how complicated the projects our team takes on are. As engineers, we frequently have to defend our timelines, which is not only frustrating but also pressures some teammates to favor suboptimal design or hastily done CLs that just causes even more churn. 

The weird part is, my manager often seem unaware of their own actions, and when I talk to them about these issues, they are always receptive to feedback and seem willing to improve. However, I simply haven’t seen enough improvement in the last 1.5 years. 

I could leave, since this is having an impact on my emotional well-being. But I do have good standing w/ my own team and the overall org, and I want to use this situation to learn as much as I could. I know that I myself have a lot to learn as a tech lead (Thanks for , it’s really helpful), and I know I can probably get a bit ahead of our projects and start estimating/de-risking earlier, so my Manager doesn’t get overly aggressive with timelines. I know I can also take this chance to more closely mentor my teammates and help them succeed, since they aren’t really getting it from our manager. 

I want to stay, but is it the wrong decision because I have little career support from my manager? If I do stay, what should I focus on so I can really help my team and at the same time learn something valuable for my career?

Sometimes people forget to follow up on their Action Items from meetings. They sometimes misremember meeting decisions as well. To mitigate this, I usually take detailed meeting notes in Google Docs and tag people on the Action Items they're responsible for. However, we don't always have meeting notes (e.g., for an ad hoc situation). What are some best practices for avoiding misunderstandings?

I worked on a large org-level, cross-functional project led by a TPM and an EM. Since there were so many engineers on this massive project, we were organized into smaller pods/subteams with pod leads. The TPM had standups 2x/week, and my pod had standups the other days of the week. My pod was loaned out to help a stakeholder team from another org. The TPM only attended his own standups and sometimes missed some. The EM attended most but not all my pod's standups as well as most but not all the TPM's standups. My pod lead attended most but not all of those same standups as well. The POC from the stakeholder team was not invited to any of these standups. Since the TPM's standups had so many engineers, we only gave high-level updates in that meeting.

In such a situation, how do you keep all the stakeholders (TPM, EM, pod lead, stakeholder team's POC) aligned and up-to-date with any challenges such as scope creep, bugs, delays, etc.? There was a slack channel for the overall cross-functional project and a separate one for my pod, but none for working with the stakeholder team's POC (all such communication was via DMs). When the stakeholder team's POC dropped the ball on things, how do you escalate in such an ambiguous situation? The TPM sent weekly "Weather Reports", but those emails were very high-level.

At my startup I was asked to deliver feature after feature + bug fixes by PMs as fast as possible without much time for proper refactoring work or engineering initiatives. Also it was pretty individualistic where you get assigned a task and only work with other engineers during a tech spec review meeting, code review, and syncing with a backend engineer (as an Android dev).

From Alex’s video on getting promoted to tech lead, I saw how you can 1) drive projects as an L5 engineer (vs a PM putting that together with designers) 2) Not have to know how to implement everything yourself for a project, but work with many others and facilitate the team. This sounds 100x more engineering driven and collaborative than at my start up with few developers. Is this common to many people’s experience of the norm in FAANG?

What I liked about Alex's story is also how he had the time and space to do things like document the differences between iOS and Android, as well as go all the way through to making a data analytics plan for monitoring it himself. Seems like a lot of freedom and ownership which I didn't feel I always had the time for personally. Being able to not have to spend 80% of your time coding but rather doing deep work thinking, planing, designing holistically sounds extremely satisfying and rewarding as an engineer. Maybe this also comes with experience at startups as well?

Hi all

I recently joined an organization as a senior where I was made tech lead within 3 months of joining. This was somewhat related to recognition of my work among product and my peers.

I advocated for good engineering practices such as automated integration testing and established projects for cross org collaborations to help deliver whats important for the organization.

All of this was quickly realized as a super critical projects by the organization. I created tech specs and prototypes for these projects.

However recently the organization hired a principal engineer.

since he was new I volunteered to help him onboard and asked for his advice on the new super business critical project that was next in our todo team pipeline. He is an ambitious guy so he wants to create his mark in the organization.

But for some reason the way he is approaching it doesn't seem right to me.

He plans to create a new team taking over the business critical project while splitting the newly formed team I lead on the same project that I helped him ramp up on.

I opposed to this asking for rationale for a new team.

there seem to be now two impressions of my work:-

1. held by my peers, folks I lead and product manager of good business delivery and product timelines. I am respected among both.

2. the principal Engineer tries to devalue my work in front of senior engg. Leadership saying things like I am overcommitting and under delivering if I do this project with the existing members of my team in public and in front of senior engg leadership.

The automated integration testing project which no one was doing before and we were starting from a basic version to iterate on. This is now communicated to engg management as every team is trying to do their own testing.

My engg management for some reason is siding with him since he has 15-20 years of experience and i have 5. He also is principal and i am 2-3 levels below him.

for some reason I am being micromanaged with no fault of mine.

From engg management perspective I have been just told to lead the project that I am currently leading and just help the team formed by principal engg to start the project.

I have communicated my expectations of being able to continue leading the project. Product is in support of that but engg managment isnt.

I have also tried giving feedback to the principal engineer that his actions are disruptive to the team and becauase of what he is doing he is slowing us down and blocking us from doing critical projects.

My worry is despite doing the hard work the project I have the most context on and I worked on for a while is being given to someone else and second i will not be given credit for the hard work I am doing.

Should I just change teams. I dont want to leave my existing team because I do think they need me but I feel I would rather create more impact where I dont have to swim against the tide. I may also be suffering from sunken cost fallacy here where I knew I led the development of a new critical project

Tia for your help.

I work for a very technical and niche start-up as a Frontend Developer. For context, we have 3 F.E. devs and 3 B.E. devs. I was hired as a vaguely-level intermediate developer, and after about nine months at this company, my F.E. lead is advocating for me to be a Senior developer. The only issue is that the company hasn't done internal promotions before, and they're a bit stalled whilst considering how to best handle the process. There's also some ambiguity in measuring a Front-end developer's skills - especially compared to a back-end developer; Our CEO is also a seasoned back-end developer, so he understands technical skills but is unclear on how it maps to Front-end skills.

What are some things I can bring up to my company's leadership on how to measure my skills and value? Such to help facilitate a conversation around my promotion.

When I've been helpful in the past, word quickly spread and a bunch of random engineers started pinging me for help, sometimes aggressively. Sometimes people would delegate grunt work like asking me to test their PRs that do library upgrades instead of testing them themselves. Or asking me to debug their dev environments because they heard I fixed another engineer's dev environment. Sometimes it'll just be asking for expedited code reviews even though I have no domain knowledge on their PRs. We work on the same platform, but are not on the same team or often even the same org. There are only so many hours in the day and I need to get my own work done as well. How do you decide who to help and under what circumstances? Advice on how to push back without damaging the relationship? As far as I can tell, it looks like anyone from E4 through E7 are the ones making these requests.

I'm an E5 iOS engineer at a Big Tech company. I'm struggling to understand what leadership means. A Director told me Leadership means making sure the project is successful no matter what happens. As a result, I often end up doing other people's jobs for them (e.g., when a backend engineer struggles to get their piece working, I often hand-held them and have even created backend PRs to unblock some projects even though I'm an iOS engineer). However, a mentor told me that E6's don't do the work themselves but delegate it to others to scale themselves. If this is true, then what does an E6 do when working with engineers who are either unwilling or unable to complete their deliverables in the expected timeframe and quality? This becomes even more challenging when working cross-functionally with engineers who are not on my team. Also, how do you lead when you're not the DRI (Directly Responsible Individual) / tech lead for a project (e.g., when the tech lead is an E6 on another team, but is not setting up the team for success by refusing to communicate requirements clearly)?

Hello.

I have a busy senior/manager. We used to have 1-1s twice a week, and now I'm lucky if I even get a single 1-1 every other week. I understand that it's because he has a lot of responsibilities (e.g., coding, managing, scrum'ing) and end-of-year deadlines.

Here are some things I've done to make up for the lack of 1-1's:

• I over-communicate via IMs (even if he doesn't respond) to let him know how I'm progressing so he can "smoke test" my theories if I'm heading the wrong way.
• I present high-level overviews of the code (<15 bullet points) I'm working on to avoid doing deep dives into the implementation.
• I deliver short standup updates with easy-to-remember keywords that my manager has mentioned before.
• I try to offload some of his managerial tasks (e.g., onboarding new engineers) to free up some of his time.

Does anyone else have a busy senior? Should I be doing anything else? Thanks!

Hey guys. Hope everyone is doing well. Also using AI/ML as an umbrella term throughout - feel free to correct if needed.

Into:

Senior Web Developer. Initially started from Software Development. Developed passion for Web Development and made the move. Worked my way up to Senior position. 70% backend, 30% frontend. Currently 80-90% IC, rest managerial responsibilities. 9.5 years overall. Changed companies over time. Been in various industries.

Problem:

Going back and forth about moving into AI/ML. Motivation - high interest and demand. Fear - leaving web development skills behind.

My Current Solution:

Ask reputable sources about AI/ML day to days and job responsibilities. Lots of it seems to be marketing and all that glitters is not gold.

If all checks out and my passion is rooted in evidence then I would like to take few Stanford machine learning courses online. Once fundamentals are solid would like to go for masters degree in applied machine intelligence or similar. Start looking for jobs.

Questions:

• Since this is one of my reputable sources - would you please describe a day to day/job responsibilities for an AI/ML engineer?
• Granted everything checks out - do you think going for Masters makes sense? Given that finances and time is not the problem.
• Would you say I have to leave a large portion of web development skills behind when making the move? What are some of the transferables?
• Would I have to start as an entry engineer? Do you think Masters helps here? Ultimately I would have to pass the interviews but then there is applying for the position and being considered for it afterwards.

These are all the questions I could think of. Apologize for the length, but thought it would be helpful to give context. Please feel free to include anything else you deem helpful. Much appreciated and Happy holidays.

I ran into this issue a few times so far:

1. I need to solve a problem.
2. 2 senior people (could be engineers or managers) tell me to use different solutions.
3. They do not talk to each other directly.

I'm the middleman, bouncing back and forth between solutions. Getting blocked at the PR level (sometimes before that too) by either stake holders.

It's demotivating, I do not get things done quick.

What should I do?

I have realised over the years that I have gained good amount of technical knowledge but I lack great communication skills (in terms of expressing my thoughts). This was okay till I was working as software engineer as my task involved more of coding work which does not require explaining things to large audience. Now as a Senior Engineer my task revolves around making design choices, explaining pros/cons of selecting an approach etc. I realised that even though I am confident on my technical approach, I sometimes fail to express myself and the approach in the right way during the discussion which led to times when my approach is discarded and others as selected as they express themselves better. I need some suggestions on how to improve on this aspect as this will be crucial part going forward in my career.

When software design tasks are given, I spend way too much time in keep looking for other wikis or resources to get information about similar problems.

I don't know when to reach out to senior engineers to get their input because I don't want them to think that I know nothing and how I even got this job. Even after some research, sometimes I can't choose an option over others despite listing pros and cons. I keep thinking about the designs all day and night till the design is finalized. How to take a break and allocate time when solving ambiguous problems?

I watched the video I am particularly interested in the point: "Great TLs sequence their project in such a way that all the highest risk things get knocked out first". Can you please give examples of doing that in a real life? What are some examples of activities that you found higher risk than others and therefore you decided to do them first to minimize the risk?

DoorDash has a tradition where your manager sends a "Dashiversary" email to the entire company on your work anniversaries. The manager creates a Google doc and collects notes & photos from your colleagues and cross-functional partners, then adds his/her own note at the top of the email. Given the impact of Deep Thanks, what should I write in these notes to leverage these opportunities to build relationships?

I'm an E5 iOS at a Big Tech company. I'm in the process of switching teams. While they're figuring out the paperwork, I've been invited to their roadmapping and architectural discussions.

The 2 E6s are dominating the discussions. The E6 iOS has been on the project since its inception a year ago and has all the context; the E6 backend has been helping out our team with the discussions and may eventually join our team. I'm the newest team member so I have the least context. The E6 backend's proposals usually sound like great ideas to me, but the E6 iOS often shoots them down and provides historical context on why those are bad ideas.

In my 1:1, my manager asked me why I'm not participating in the discussions. When I told him I don't have context, he told me to participate anyway. How do I participate effectively when I don't have context?

There's been a lot of talk in Taro posts recently about "being a strong engineer". Is there a single post or could we build one here where we outline all of the must haves of a strong engineer as to form a type of roadmap? I think imposter syndrome hits us all but I kind of want to be able to know am I fulfilling most of the right behaviors?

I'm an E5 mobile engineer at a Big Tech company. Due to lots of manager attrition, I currently report to a hands-off Director with too many reports to have regular 1:1s. I found an awesome EM who agreed to let me join his team and promised me E6-scope projects on his team. My Director is his skip-level, so I'm staying in the same org.

However, before I could make the official team switch, my TPM loaned me to another team lacking mobile resources to meet the TPM's own OKR. He did not bother talking to the awesome EM or me beforehand. My scope on the TPM's project is E5 at most. Now that project is dragging on. It's already code complete, but they want to keep me on that project until it's fully rolled out. We're waiting for mobile adoption to reach a certain threshold before we can do a force upgrade. Due to the code chill around the upcoming holidays, we likely can't do the force upgrade until next year. In the meantime, the project's EM is asking me to investigate pre-existing bugs in their feature. The awesome EM met with the TPM and that project's EM to fast-track my transfer, explaining that he needs me for Q1 planning & our team's own OKRs, but the latter two insisted that I need to support their project until it's completely done, which includes the force upgrade. Am I stuck on this project until January next year or is there a way to switch teams more quickly?

I worked on backend for 10+ years and was a Tech Lead before switching to iOS for the last 10+ years. I was offered an E6 position at a Big Tech company, but I asked to be down-leveled to E5 due to imposter syndrome since I mostly worked at smaller startups and didn't know what to expect. When Leadership later found out that I have backend experience, they started pushing me to do backend. Is it easier to get to E6 doing only iOS or doing both iOS and backend? I'm much faster coding iOS than backend since I know the Xcode shortcuts, a lot has changed in backend over the past decade (e.g., AWS, Kubernetes, etc.), etc.

I'm working on a cross-functional project with a backend DRI (E3) and Android engineer (E4?). I'm iOS, but have a backend background so I could easily code the backend portion if I needed to. The DRI reports to a different EM, who was on vacation for the first few weeks of the project. The DRI was struggling to get the backend piece working, so I spent extra time hand-holding him on how to debug it. I even researched how another feature in the iOS codebase used similar API calls and created a Postman collection for him to troubleshoot his APIs more easily. Is this a good use of my time? What percent of my time should I spend on helping others versus doing my own work? The Android engineer did not help the DRI because he doesn't know backend, so there was no one else to help the DRI.

My manager changed in H2, and my previous manager became my skip. While my current manager has a decent idea on the current projects I am working on and their importance, sometimes I see them mixing up specifics, which could be because they’re still ramping up. With that context, how do I make sure my manager represents my year long performance in upcoming calibrations well? Should I give them context on all my work in our 1:1s, especially my H1 work as they weren’t in my team?

I'm about to be officially promoted to Senior Engineer in a couple of days. At the same time, I've also been been presented with an opportunity to move to a different organization in Amazon that's doing some rather exciting work. This is an opportunity I'm likely to accept.

I deeply value my current manager's support, because he was critical in helping me secure my promotion despite some very tricky circumstances. I'm aware that promotions are just meant to recognize past work, but leaving virtually immediately after a promotion still feels rather unpleasant. Leaving now will also have a bigger impact on my team since we've shrunk quite a bit recently.

What are some tips for structuring and framing the inevitable conversations I will be having with my manager(s)?

Do you have examples of a problem, action, and impact for performance reviews? For example, I was working on a migration from a monolith to a BFF. I was loaned to a different team to help with their extractions. Their engineer gave me an API to use, but their API turned out to have serious shortcomings and I ended up working long hours to reimplement a lot of the monolith’s logic in the BFF. Despite this, we still slipped our timelines. How do I describe the impact of my actions in this case? I feel like my actions had “no impact” because we slipped our deadlines regardless.

After a certain experience there's a certain expectation from Senior Software Engineers, I think because in the beginning of my career I wasn't involved in Development and hence despite being of experience 10 years I think I may not have the design skills required to work independently on a feature.

That said, I am going through LLD questions on YouTube, to understand more about designing from scratch, while I am doing I thought if there's a way to get me upto speed even more. The reason I am asking is because apart from doing Leetcode daily I would like to spend some time daily on design aspect as well.

In summary, I want to work independently, and for that am learning from the internet. I am wondering if that's it or there's something more I can do in my free time to become better developer. Any actionable items would be great.

Do you use some kind of "code reading" techniques? I've always felt the more senior you become, the more time you spend reading others' work, especially across multiple projects. Curious to know if there any recommendations on where to start, gathering context while staying productive.

I'm a new engineer at Meta, and my goal is to find a team with a real product future. Because of that, I'm wondering if there's ways to evaluate if a certain project is going to pick up traction. How can I figure out during the team selection process if a team is doing its due diligence on gathering context and proving out business value before building features or if its just building them for the sake of building them?

I'm a new MLE at Meta, so I'm in bootcamp. I'm trying to go for a team that’s super in-depth with regards to ML and neural architectures vs. a team that would give me more breadth. How can I find such a team and what questions can I ask to identify it?

I'm new to Meta, so I'm currently in team selection. My goal is to choose a team that maintains more critical pieces and are more stable with respect to layoffs/reorganizations vs. (slightly) more moonshotty teams with higher risk/reward. An example of the latter would be a team working on maintaining an ads pipeline while one for the former would be a team experimenting with new UI features.

How can I find a team that meets that bill, and what questions can I ask to help identify this?

Hey all, I’ve been working at a pre-seed startup for the last two months and I think I haven’t “clicked” with the CTO yet (I’m the only engineer right now). To give you some context

1. We’re aiming to launch two experiments per week so they are more MVPs rather than complete features (I’m ok with cutting corners and making things “not the right way”)
2. Each experiment I’m launching sends data to Mixpanel so we can know if it “moves the needle” or not. These experiments are aligned with our KPIs (see #5)
3. My CTO who happens to be the co-founder has little experience working in tech, I assume 1.5 years tops. He's 25.
4. We're trying to find Product Market Fit
5. The KPI we're after are: Retention and Revenue
6. I've received praise from CTO and CEO about the work that I've done, and I'm extremely transparent with everything I do: Share status in Slack, and Linear, I record Looms, share screenshots, etc.
7. We have 18 months of runway.

He has said twice that even though I'm superb technically speaking; he's having a hard time seeing me thinking about the product and how to improve revenue/retention and he wants to see more ownership on my end; and that frustrates me because as I said on #1 and #6, I've successfully launched experiments week by week and have received praised from them multiple times. So IDK what's going on, I find this to be frustrating because from my POV I've done great work, I've spoken to users, shipped and tracked experiments, and improved our development workflow (we don't work with prod data anymore), proposed new things that we can do, etc...

The last time I talked to my CTO about this (this has happened twice now) he suggested that I should think more about "growing the business and taking ownership" without giving me a clear path forward, and I assume that when I meet with him again this week he's going to play that card again (being vague about how to improve/what am I doing wrong)

It frustrates me because it doesn't make sense to me to work in a place where my contributions are not appreciated.

• Have you been in a situation like this before?
• If he doesn't give me a clear path forward, what can I do then? it seems that I missed the point the first time.
• I know how bad the market is right now, but quitting is not out of the table (I have 12-18 months of runway/savings)

Thanks a lot!

I’m currently relatively happy in my current role working on challenging problems, I like my technical peers and management and during my 3 years here I got promoted from entry level engineer to senior engineer (SD1 to SD3).

However, given the scope and impact I provide, it feels like I can potentially make ~100k more (50% increase) with a job hop talking to multiple recruiters.

The worry is that I lose the equity I built in my current role and be exposed to layoffs at the new company. Also, getting promoted to staff engineer for a similar compensation increase would probably take a while. I’m tempted to switch jobs to maximize compensation.

I'm aiming for a promotion in 5 months and to do that I've been told that I need to evidence execution on a few complex projects. As a team we're working on some big projects but I'm not sure how to approach identifying a sub-project, isolating and owning it.

Does anyone have any tips on this?

Hi,

With tons of layoffs already happening and rumors about impending layoffs, is there something one can do to protect themselves? Logically, performing above expectations and being a critical part of the team would make sense. However, recently looking at LinkedIn and other career news, seems like no one can be sure that they’re safe. So, do you have any tips on how to approach this? Does it make sense to stay put within a team where you have great relationship with your manager and skip etc or find a new company to get ahead of this risk? Thanks!

At my company, I've experienced receiving a lot slower code reviews than usual. I think this is because I'm on a Platform team but each individual member is very specialized to their focus area. We're encouraged to tag a specific person (and I've been assigned a specific person for my code reviews) as well as the team for broader visibility.

However, I'm often stuck waiting 24-48 hours before receiving anything and always need to ping the person that has been assigned to my reviews. It felt pretty awkward needing to do that all the time so I brought it to my manager. My manager essentially let me know we don't have a good process around code reviews yet and are still figuring it out, and it could be a good opportunity for me to bring a good process to the table. He recommends pinging people in the meantime and to not view it as bothering. I am open to doing that, but still wondering if there is a better way.

I have 2 questions:

1. What could be a good way to propose a code review process to my team, especially given each individual is specialized to their own area within Platform?
2. In the meantime, what would be a good way to get faster code reviews from my assigned person who is intended to be reviewing them?

Hi,

I got promoted last half to IC5 and have been leading impactful work streams within our team. I am enjoying my new role and work. In our last 1:1, my manager asked if I wanted to lead a very high priority org level initiative that has impact across multiple teams and suggested this could be a potential staff level project. While this is a great and unique opportunity for promotion, I am also nervous about taking this up because:

1. I am scared this might be more challenging than I am ready for and failing this would put our Org's key launches in risk.
2. I just got promoted and didn't want to actively pursue promotion as I wanted some time to settle in and become a solid IC5 first.

Wanted to get your thoughts on this and what you would do in my position? And if I say no, should I be worried about my manager passing me up for potential opportunities in the future? Thanks!

This is somewhat of a rant as well, but please bear with me.

My current level is equivalent to that of an E4 at Meta. A Senior Level in my organisation is almost equivalent of E4 in Meta, while the next level is around E5. I have been trying to work towards a promotion since the last 2 years, working on RFCs, cross team projects, a lot of glue work, upskilling the team, writing a lot of documentation, reviewing outages and RFCs, mentoring junior engineers, delivering common libraries that can be used across the organisation, driving process improvements and writing tons of code. The last few projects were shipped without a single issue in production, despite being full blown revamps for services.

With layoffs happening in a lot of organisations (Twitter/Meta/Lyft/Stripe etc.), I am feeling a bit overwhelmed that it may happen to us as well, especially given the state of market. I am trying to keep my head low and improve myself. Brushing up the fundamentals right now. I am hoping that it would help me to improve in general as an engineer as well as in interviews, if need be.

My company required me to portray the next level behaviour for some time (close to 1-1.5 years) consistently to be considered for an up-levelling. Now with everything going around, Thinking that I may have to do the same for another 2 years in the next organisation hits me a bit. Overtime, there were some feedbacks I tried to fix - went through courses on communication and now it seems a bit unfair, even if out of control. I feel I could be overthinking but just feeling this way.

1. How should one act in such weather?
2. What is the best way to not feel overwhelmed and be sure to do what is best for one's career?
3. Also, are there any advices for the above career context?