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

I've recently joined a new company, and I got up-levelled to be a senior swe through the interview process. This would be my first senior engineering role at a large tech company (where tech is a profit center) relative to some of my other experiences.

• What mindset shifts do I need to have?
• How do I go about creating impact?

I'm wondering what does it takes to go from an average senior software engineer to a top senior engineer making more than 500k. Any recommendations on a step by step guide that I can leverage to reach my goal.

Thanks

As a founder of an early-stage startup, what are the top things you look for in your first five engineering hires? Are you searching for people who can handle a bit of everything, or do you prefer specialists in key areas? How do you balance technical skills with ensuring they fit well with your company's culture and vision?

Besides their technical know-how, what personal qualities are most important to you in these early hires? Do you value problem-solving skills and creativity over past experience in similar roles or industries? How crucial are soft skills like communication and adaptability, given the fast-paced and ever-changing nature of startups? And finally, how do you make sure these first hires will not only meet immediate project needs but also grow with the company as it expands?

There are a lot of different side projects, from open source tools to end user apps.

For this question, I would like to know your experience creating and promoting open source projects.

What I think makes sense is:

• You should solve a pain point or problem.
• For nature, mostly of the target users are software engineers.
• You should make it easy to use.
• There should be a decent documentation.

In my case, I created , it's a Next.js boilerplate that helps the developers to start a SaaS web application faster.

I would like to help more developers to get their side projects faster, tho I advise to build your own solution from scratch IF you want to experiment the learning experience completely.

What do you think?

(I'm open to feedback for my open source project, too).

If I would like a feature request, where would I post this? For example, my feature request would be a time elapsed text for Taro course videos. It would be great to see our progress even more visualized as watch videos (in addition to seeing the percentage bar so we know how much time we have left to complete a course)

Tech world is moving as fast as the speed of light 😊, hence the only way to keep up with it is to be fast learner and have a way to quickly review and retrieve information. I was wondering what technique you guys are using to improve learning productivity

About Company: growing mid-size startup, great tech culture, talented people to work with, pays well

Promoted in recent appraisal cycle (2 levels above entry level, similar to L6 at Amazon) but the increment is not attractive compared to what is normally paid at that level (within company). Performance review was great but manager does not have much say in deciding increment percentage. I do see learning opportunities here in future but demotivated by this bias.

How do I renegotiate salary? How to have this discussion with skip manager?

Recently, while working on a project that is very open-ended, I realized part way through the project that the initial solution I had come up with for the problem would work only partially and in order to solve the problem fully, I would actually need double the amount of time I had estimated earlier. Since the initial estimate was in months, I feel really terrible about this. I made sure to report this to my chain as soon as I discovered this, but I'm curious: how common is it for others to miss their estimates? I'd like to gauge whether I am alone in this situation. Furthermore, how do people typically manage the disappointment and pressure that arise from missed deadlines, especially in exploratory or open-ended projects?

Hey Folks,

I have the famous question here : Big tech -> startup : Should I do it?

Context:

I have a pretty toxic leadership. I have even got offers internally, but the leadership played political and I didn't end up switching teams. Also to note, I was told that I have been given "meets most" or the lowest rating a person can get.

This was a pretty horrible, as I was in exceeds in my mid year. I am not sure why they are being nasty.

And rumor is that they will be letting folks with this rating go this month. ( All on blind, and some managers from other teams also confirmed, but I have not been given a last day yet)

Given this a context, I just want to see if I should take up a startup offer.

I have 10+ YOE, and I see that I am not getting as many calls as I used to just 2 years back. And the interviews are much more random. This makes me concerned.

I am not on visa. But moving from big tech -> start up is a huge paycut.

What do you suggest I do?

Hi, I'm currently a software engineer 1 working with a senior engineer trying to ship a new feature. The way it works, the senior engineer I work with has outlined the technical problem, scope, and approach we're doing. She has assigned the tasks and most of it (BE/FE) will be done by the senior and the portion I'm doing involves a BE service I've worked on before.

Our deadline is in a month, as I'll be going on leave. I wanted to do a portion of the FE just to learn more about frontend technologies and was assigned tickets, however my senior engineer has started work on these and it looks like most of the work I'm going to be doing, apart from my tasks, are going to be reviewing/testing my senior engineer's PRs. I've worked with this part of the product before but I was hoping to get more exposure and practice.

I was hoping to really learn more about the frontend aspects of our product so I'm a bit disappointed but I'm wondering maybe if my expectations (which was to learn more about FE) are unrealistic and perhaps unnecessary.

As a new grad, what is the expectation from senior engineers?

Do I communicate this to our manager or should I re-adjust my expectations?

I'm thinking of joining Amazon as an L6 Applied Scientist. The reporting chain they've proposed to me looks something like:

VP -> Snr Dir -> Dir -> Snr Mgr -> Mgr -> Me

Now I've been made to understand that as L6, my official scope is Snr Dir, i.e. impact across teams that sit under Snr Dir. I'm concerned how far down the chain I am here, especially if I eventually want to grow to L7, which would require impact at the higher level (VP). I doubt reporting to the Snr Dir is on the table, but I'm wondering if I can try to convince them to let me report to the Dir. They're telling me that who your manager is doesn't affect your scope, but I'm skeptical. On the flip side, it is Mgr who seems very excited to hire me, and I'm wondering if mentioning this to either him or Snr Mgr (who I have a sell call with next week) will cause problems.

Any advice on how to navigate this situation would be most helpful.

I went through the Behavioral Interview course. Loved it. Thanks for making this course!

I want to understand and need examples for nailing the #1 interview question discussed in . I see that Alex has listed pointers at the end but I don't fully understand how exactly to add the following in my response: organizational complexity, depth of contribution, quality of delivery and attribution. I somewhat understand what they mean individually but I am struggling to bring these in an impactful authentic way in my response.

I would appreciate any detailed examples for this!

Questions for Alex and Rahul which I know were covered in some videos somewhere in snippets, but maybe not all in one question. Taro has amassed a lot of great content in its courses and blogs -- how long did it take to create initial MVP of quiz app before the Taro founders quit their jobs to go and work on Taro full time as a startup entrepreneurs?

• When did the founders pivot?
• How long did it take to create initial content (blogs over the years, lots of videos, powerpoints etc.)?

It's impressive to see the amount of rich content, how long did it take for Rahul and Alex to conceptualize Taro (in its early form, name), what ways did they test the success metrics of various pieces of content for a single feature (video series, single video/blog etc.) - how well did they perform over a given period of time?

I was recently promoted to Senior Software Engineer and am new to mentoring. I've been coaching a mentee who tends to jump into coding without fully considering the trade-offs of his approaches. Despite my instructions to align with me on a planning document before starting, he began working immediately after sending it, without waiting for my approval. He often focuses narrowly on solving problems, missing the broader implications and potential risks, which can lead to inefficient efforts and time wasted chasing incorrect solutions. He is energetic and quick to code, but this sometimes leads to tunnel vision.

In mentoring him, I've employed a Socratic method to prompt deeper thinking about his strategies, but he struggles with creative critical thinking and often reverts to the initial problem or gets bogged down in details instead of evaluating the overall correctness of his approach. I think part of the issue is that I'm not directing his energy efficiently. Perhaps instead of asking him to get alignment with me first, I should give him a clearly defined problem where he understands the steps and approach, while I ask him to come up with solutions for other issues. This would allow him to have a pipeline of tasks he can switch between while waiting for asynchronous feedback from me.

To improve his critical thinking, I've tried encouraging him to brainstorm more about the potential consequences and risks of his approaches. However, he often misses the mark with his strategy—it's not completely wrong, but he doesn't consider the long-term implications, focusing instead on quick fixes. I wonder if I should meet him where he is, doing more of the strategic thinking myself and providing him with the steps and approach so he can focus on execution, which he is motivated by. Alternatively, there may be room for him to develop better brainstorming skills, and I may need to adjust my expectations and provide more targeted guidance to help him think more broadly about the problems he tackles.

I have an offer that's much better than being laid off (actually, freelancing is going well, but let's put that aside)

but much worse than what I think I'm worth (I think I could get 50%+ more comp with 1-3 more months of job search)

so I'm planning to accept and keep interviewing.

How should I message other companies as I keep interviewing?

1. declare my new employer, companies like to hire people that are employed and it outweighs quick-leaving stigma
   1. Note, in case company prestige matters, this is a Tier 2 household name company currently ranking in the top 80 according to
2. do not declare the new employer, continue to signal that I was recently laid off. this might show a 1-3 month gap on my resume but that's better than being a "quick leaver"
3. something else

Context

I have secured a job offer as a Tech Lead at Zepto - a series F startup based out of India.

The company is operating in quick commerce space which is like e-commerce in 10 minutes using Demand Prediction and Dark Stores in a certain region.

Career Aspirations

I have aspirations for career growth as an IC and the HR were rolling out offer for Staff as well, but stuck with Lead Software Engineer for now, so as to establish myself better first and then move towards staff role.

The Hiring Manager mentioned that it is possible to quickly progress to staff role in 4-5 months, which is a pure IC based role while Lead Software Engineer involved some level of team task prioritisation/planning etc. also

I had been trying to move ahead to Lead Software Engineer position in my previous company for a lot of years and did not get enough support.

Thus, I am really grateful to this offer and just want to give my best.

Would love any hear your thoughts on how to succeed as a Tech Lead.

Introductory call with CTO

With the context setup, The introductory calls are being scheduled now each coming week.

The first call being with the Company CTO.

I want to be able to have good learning and career growth at the company.

What are some of the questions I can ask as a to be Tech Lead at Zepto so as to make the best use of my call with him?

I was thinking about the following:

• What are some of the focus areas for us at Zepto in 2024?
• Does this translate to some high level focus areas for engineering teams? - such as building abstractions or a platform using which we can enable business better?
• Are there some technical hindrances that are being faced to achieve the focus areas for the business? or What could be some reasons to not be able to achieve above focus areas? And how are we planning to preempt them?
• Are there some areas of improvement you are seeing from an operational perspective in Tech & Product teams? Are we doing anything towards that?

Would love to hear your thoughts on the above. And hear more about the things I can discuss in the call.

My goal is to succeed as a Tech Lead for my team at Zepto, contribute as much as I can in terms of impact and learn from the experience.

References in comments due to character limit

I'm in the interview loop with few companies, while working on my current job where it's becoming difficult to manage the interview schedules. A recent recruiter scheduled rounds with 5 one-hour slots spread across 1 to 3pm on 2 consecutive days, as the interviews need to happen during working hours of interviewers. Recruiter also asked me to manage the slots provided as there are many candidates and they are looking to fill the open position soon.

While I already politely communicated to the HR that it's difficult for me to take out this amount of time from my work day and provided with alternative options for early mornings or evenings, I was wondering whether the current job market expect candidates to comply with such scheduling requests, even if it creates friction with their current job?

I’ve been e3 for about two years. my manager put me for promo last two halves but it didn’t go through .(due to a bunch of reasons which are ambiguous , the feedback I got both times was - you’re doing 4 work but we have a quota) I believe there was some politics involved but that’s water under the bridge.

I’m going to reach e4 end of this half. I’ve lost trust in my management chain. I do think my team may have good opportunity and everything else is good but I don’t think my manager is invested in growing me.

I’m very ambitious and would like to get to e5 asap. What would be good ways to set myself up for success?

I've been interviewed both for contractor and full time senior software engineer roles at Meta and Apple (by 3rd party recruiters), I have friends at both companies and prefer to interview with recruiters/hiring directors that are native to the company (as opposed to 3rd party). How long does it take to convert from contract to full time?

For Meta, they told me it would take 2 years (which I thought was long since even other entry level programs I heard there would take 1.5 years - 18 months to convert). Most other places other friends get hired full time right away with stock options. I'm easing my way in contracting after leaving my previous company burned out, so don't mind, but waiting 2 years sounds pretty long and I think starting full-time (FT) right away is the better call, but not sure what the standard practice is for FAANGMULA companies.

What the title says...Im getting to hiring manager calls but not advancing (only passed 1 out of 5 calls).

Only feedback I've gotten from one of them is that I didn't seem to have enough experience at scale. I've gone through all the relevant courses on taro and I can't find where the real problem is.

Any advice?

For taro engineers in india, would you be able to shed what the interview process in india is like? im curious how it compares to the US -- is it harder/easier? Do they always just ask hards?

If you could break it down by level/tier that would be awsome!

I have been working on Salesforce technology for the past 10 years. I am interested to change my tech stack from salesforce to backend technology (Java based) and perform as a backend software engineer.

How practical is it to plan for a transition, given that I have spent a decade in current technology? Also if it sounds practical, how should I plan for it.

Best Regards.

Right now, I have to write a growth plan to grow from mid level to senior engineer in my company. For doing this, me and my lead have decided to write down a growth plan for me.

While searching for effective techniques, I found SMART framework and also how to set your goals. But I'm wondering if we have a growth plan expert here? And what framework/template/steps do they follow?