Startups Career Development Videos, Forum, and Q&A

Hey folks,

I'm currently facing a tough decision - whether to ask for a raise at my current company. I am unsure if it's the right time to do so or not. Here's a little context to help you understand my situation

My timeline in the company:

• In 2023
  • I joined the company as a Sr SWE II (L4)
  • I joined the company nine months ago on August 23'
  • I made it to the second review cycle of the year (mid-October), and I got a "Consistently meeting expectations." My manager then said that he was very impressed that I managed to get so much done in that short time and that he could see strong signs of a Staff Engineer (L5) in me.
  • I shipped the most important project in Q4, 2023, on time. I even ended up as the technical lead of that project (the Staff engineer in that project got pip-ed, but that's another story)
• In 2024:
  • I mentored a Sr SWE I (L3) on her first project as a lead.
  • I'm the lead of the web working group
  • I'm interviewing candidates almost on a weekly basis
  • I'm one of the owners of the Design System initiative
  • I just got a "Consistently exceeding expectations" in our current review cycle. I've been praised for how easy it is to work with me, my technical quality, my communication skills, and my thoughtful PR reviews. And that I should keep working on my influence across the organization.

How things are right now:

• My previous manager quit to join another startup, and I got an interim manager (we're hiring another manager for my team)
• I ended up talking about salary adjustments with my previous manager the other day (there, I didn't ask for a raise; it was just a casual conversation). He told me that the company does a compensation review every January and that I wasn't considered for the one that happened in January 2024 because I didn't join earlier than July 2023.
• The next performance review will happen in mid-Oct 2024.
• I will be leading a new tiger team (6 engs) until the end of Q2.

Questions I have right now:

• Is this the right time to ask for a raise?
• I've never asked for a raise.
• I know for a fact that an L3 has a pretty similar (<5%) salary to me, and I know that another L4 has a >5% salary than me.
• Should I wait until I finish this new project, the next performance review, or my first anniversary?
• We're in the hockey stick growth stage.
• I also really like working here, and the market has been bad lately.

Thanks!

I am a mid-level machine learning engineer in the advertising field, and I often need to provide PMs with performance numbers that are not available in the dashboard so that they can communicate with clients or make business decisions. Sometimes this need is urgent, such as needing to write code to find the number of customers who made purchases in the past seven days that meet a certain condition within half a day to a day.

I have encountered a few problems:

1. The conditions are different each time, and the code is difficult to reuse. I am not sure if it is worth investing time to write unit tests. Is there any way to make sure my code is bug-free?
2. Sometimes the calculated numbers do not seem intuitive, and I am worried about providing wrong numbers, so I spend extra time checking them, but I am also told that it takes so long to calculate such a simple thing. Indeed sometimes the code itself is not difficult to write, but the main time is spent verifying the correctness of the results. How to communicate this?
3. Sometimes I ask my colleagues to help me check my code or results, but I am worried that my manager will think that I cannot complete my work independently and that I am not meeting the company's expectations of a mid-level engineer.

I am a deep learning research engineer at an early stage autonomous driving startup and I just got an offer for a senior deep learning engineer in the autonomous team at Qualcomm. I am confused about it as compensation is low compared to industry standards but overall a bit higher from my current salary. (The base is quite low, but RSU's make up for the rest). The work is same what I do, so that will be nice.

I can either keep looking for other opportunities while staying at the startup or take this. I am not too happy with the offer but it is the best I have right now. I will be shifting to San Diego from NY and will also take a major hit in my social life.

Any suggestion on how the culture at Qualcomm is and how their machine learning and AI teams are? I am really confused if it will be worth it.

I have worked primarily on the backend, but my company now has assigned me features concerning our Android app, which is built mainly on XML for layouts & Java.

How can I get started on this, be productive & contribute effectively?
Thanks.

I am looking for new opportunities and based on what I am seeing on Taro. My strategy so far has been.

1. Create and polish resume
2. Prep for DSA and System Design
3. Apply to jobs.

This is the end of week 2. 8 Applications, 2 Rejections and not heard back from the rest.

So far I have been applying through LinkedIn and Otta only. I have intentionally avoided and not reached out for personal references. My thinking has been, that I don't want to waste the guaranteed interview opportunity if I am not ready.

My target at the moment is that I should be able to complete 90% of the grind 75 leetcode questions and at least a few system design mocks.

My questions to the community:

1. What are other good job listing services?
2. Is my approach sound or should I change my strategy?

With every rejection, I try to remind myself what said. "We can only do what is in our control; that is to continue preparing."

I've been working at this company for almost 2 years now and we recently started doing kick-off calls for big features. Before this, management would come up with features in private meetings and assign engineers tickets. We expressed our frustration with this approach so management started doing "kick-off calls" recently but would only invite 1 engineer or 1 data scientist depending on who they think should lead the feature/project. This is a 10-person company, and it feels like I have no room to be creative/propose solutions etc. I brought this up during retro and 1:1s with my manager and the answer I always got was "we don't want it to be a democracy" or "too many people/questions would drag the meeting longer than it has to" etc

I can understand this reasoning if it's a big team/company, but we're a really small team and it feels to me like they're not interested in hearing about other engineers' input, ideas etc at all. This causes me to think engineers are just here to do grunt work/grind. Am I being too cynical?

I'm currently happily employed and I want to cultivate a strong network so that when I need a new job in the future, I am not struggling

I have watched the Taro course on referrals and cold emailing, but my issues is that I went to a small no-name state school and I don't know that many alumni. Also work at a 5-10 person YC backed startup so I don't interact with many people at my job

I understand networking is a long term game, but I feel stuck trying to build deeper relationships and especially trying to level up

I'd love something actionable on how I can add value to people and network that doesn't rely on my job/college

I'd also love to know how to leverage the fact that I work at a YC backed company to network with other YC backed startups?

Everyone wants to work at a YC backed company so I worry that the eng leads/founders get tons of spam email, so how can I stand out -- especially if they are a B2B company where I cant use their product and offer feedback or if they're more mature (series A/B) and I don't really have a lot of feedback

Hello! Are there any websites to assist with evaluating startup offers (e.g. salary and equity)? Pave and Carta are focused on providing benchmarks for the offer-givers, not the offer-receivers. seems interesting, but I'm not sure how much I can trust it?

Is it possible to just use Pave / Carta without paying for it?

Thanks!

I was watching the course on "" video from the coding course

As an MLE how narrow should my focus of a tech stack be? and what constitutes as a tech stack?

99% of my work is in Python, but at 1 job I did 90% of my work in PyTorch

At my current job I'm doing 40% sklearn/keras (it's a simpler version of PyTorch implementing same things, but is mostly used for ML stuff where models need low customization) + Pandas

Rest 60% of my job needed me to start working with Polars which is pandas but faster and is more heavy weight (similar to PySpark/Dask)

Is that too much branching? or Should I be narrowing my focus?

TL;DR it's ideal to hone in on 1 tech stack, but changing circumstances need me to use different frameworks depending on the problem. Is that bad?

I am at the final stage of a interview with the CTO of a startup.

All my interviews were scheduled via an automated system on their end and hence have no method to contact a recruiter or anyone from the said company. The interviews till now followed a “big tech” process with tech phone screens, system design, etc.

This final interview is for 30min and i am guessing its going to be behavioral and some “getting to know each other” type of thing.

What are some questions i can ask to show I'm interested in the company and the role. But, at the same time i want to understand their long term plan (think 6 months, 1 year and forward)?

A side question: Should i keep interviewing for public companies? Given I'm on a visa, but the tricky situation for me being that my current employer will be undergoing a layoff in the last week of April. If i do end up getting an offer from this startup should i still be looking out for jobs at more stable companies? (i do acknowledge that there isn't any such thing as “stability”)? Any pointers or guidance on this would really help me out in making a final decision 🙏

Note: they are willing to sponsor visa

I have 3+ years in the industry and have been privy to layoffs since 2023. I wish to understand how you view/process these layoffs and is the current situation unprecedented or just a sine wave occurrence in the industry.

Aside from LC questions, what do interviews for senior mobile roles (L5 equivalent), specifically iOS Engineering, look like at FAANG-like companies? If they are system design heavy, are there resources for mobile specific system design questions, since most of content out there is geared towards web system design?

How can I best prepare for these interviews?

Thanks!

I have around 15 years experience with background mainly in Java, Restful, Springboot etc. I was impacted by layoffs and I am on a H1B. Hence I have limited time before which I should choose a job. I do not have extensive time for preparing LeetCode in this short time span. I would like to know if there are mid-level companies (not startups, not big tech) that do non-leetcode style interviews. Like, a take home assignment, or some other demo kind of interviews.

I've been working as a software engineer for 9+ years. Even though graduated in CSE, I never put a great effort in learning DSA into deep. Nor did I found interest in solving problems in leetcode.

I mostly worked in startup jobs. The expectations are kind of clear here. Build apis and features and deploy.

I believe I know moderate amount of system design and build product from scratch using js tech.

Have hands on experience in Node, React and AWS. Lead ~4-5 members for a short time. Never had the opportunity to build product which needed a great scale. DB sharding, working in a system that had 100s of micrsoervices is something I have never experienced.

I'm making around $75k in UAE. How can I give myself a learning path which would lead me to a better paying job. Ideally ~120k+. Spending 2-3 hrs daily would be difficult because of personal commitment. Maybe 6-8hrs total in a week I can manage.

Thanks

My direct supervisor/ tech lead has a tendency to leave a lot of nitpick comments on my and my teammate's PRs during code reviews. I know the intention is positive, but in my view it's excessive and leads our team to spend too much time addressing stylistic or minor changes that don't materially improve the codebase. Since we're building for an early-stage startup I also believe it's a higher priority to ship code that works well enough so the business can get customer feedback, rather than focus on subjective stylistic things. It also increases the noise level in every PR and makes it hard to identify and focus on any comments about significant things.

I raised these concerns directly with my supervisor and also asked for clarification about which nitpicks are actually optional or if I can opt out of implementing any. My supervisor said I need to address/respond to every single nitpick comment, which means if I disagree or don't want to implement the nit, I would have to explain why every single time, which I think is not an efficient use of time. They also said we don't have to implement everything they suggest, and they welcome pushback, but I don't think they realize it feels a bit harder to do that when they leave so many nits and they are in a position of authority and are not my peer. I shared a suggestion that we make it ok for the PR owner to opt out of addressing a nitpick / leave it up to them to decide, and also try not to focus continually on stylistic things that can't be automated by linting etc. This was ignored though.

Does anyone have any advice on how to handle this situation? It's very frustrating and exhausting sometimes, and part of me has tended to cave in and just implement every bit unless I have a really strong opinion against it for the sake of avoiding spending time debating too much. I'd like to be wise about picking my battles.

I am curious if there are any strategies or techniques for better problem understanding. Personally, I struggle with comprehending problems, whether they are coding or business related. I often need to read through the problem multiple times to fully understand it, which may be due to my attention span. I sometimes feel stupid, but I am confident that there are techniques I can learn to improve my understanding of problems without belittling myself.

It's come to my attention that my company has about 10 percent android users. We hover around 98-99 crash free sessions according to Crashlytics. There are some features missing from the android app that our iOS counterpart does have so it could be that.

I was wondering if anyone has experienced this or had any tips to share.

I was an SDE-3 at Amazon until last year. Lack of exciting work and fear of layoff made me switch to a late stage startup as a Sr Software Engineer.

Now I am part of a very small team (3 engineers including me) and have been working on small scale projects which won't look great on my resume. I feel like I am stuck at my level and not sure how to move ahead. If I want to level up at my current company, I might have to spend a few years. My manager just got into her role and doesn't know what growth would be like for me. When I look at staff engineers in my company, I feel I am not at their level. I have thought about making a move again but I am immediately discouraged by the thought of wasting days and months in interview preparation after doing it just last year. Feeling really lost and looking for suggestions.

Sorry if the question is too open ended or vague

How do you people, as a Senior engineer, put things such as:

1. Team development and engineering excellence on your resume, or should I not mention them at all? I lead these activities daily at work, and my manager and team members appreciate it, but I have never thought to put those things on my resume before. I guess this should give me leverage in interviews for being considered for senior positions, but I am not sure.
2. Annual awards given? Again, should I even mention that?

Below are the elaborated points

On the team development part, I regularly mentor 2-3 engineers almost daily. Reviewing their design and code, unblock them. I introduced a document-first culture in our team as before; everything was a bit chaotic as it is a startup where everyone knew their modules but not others. No on-call process or SOPs. I led this initiative by creating 20+ documents myself related to high-level design, SOPs for engineers and others, etc.

On the engineering excellence part, I reviewed close to 150+ PRs last year, making unit tests mandatory, introducing db migration tools to the team, etc.

For the award, I got your point. Annual award: out of 18 SWE-3s in my company, three got it, including me. The reason was a bunch of high-impact projects + above points.