Team Selection Q&A and Videos

I'm thinking there are a few options:

1. Get a role on an AI project/team (internal transfer), learn AI specific engineering expertise on the job (not research)
2. Do part-time masters, land a role in AI research
3. Self-learn, land a role in AI research

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?

I got offers from Meta, several top hedge funds (Citadel, Millennium, etc.), Series E unicorn and a series C robotics startup and I want opinions on who to move forward with.

From a SWE’s perspective, Meta wins, but 10 years down the line, I don’t see myself as a SWE. I see myself doing (1) a startup, (2) going into VC or working in (3) product management or a more business-focused role. For the first 3-4 years of my career I want to get engineering training, position myself to do interesting and impactful work, networking with a talented team and building the skills that’ll set me up for the 3 career paths that I’ve discussed. I’ve listed companies in order of preference :

1. Series E Unicorn
   1. Company is customer-focused (engineers always talk to customers) and engineers wear many hats. These are skills for building startups.
   2. Getting startup experience is great for going into VC.
   3. I’m working on one of their core products, so there’s a lot of chances for growth. High performers become PMs in 2-3 years
   4. 30-40% ex-FAANG and lots of MIT, Berkeley and Stanford alum
2. Meta
   1. Meta trains you to become a great SWE, and you need to be a great builder for startups
   2. Meta doesn’t seem to prep me for the VC world, but the brand name alone will help get your feet in the door
   3. I have the optionality to climb the corporate ladder to do product management
3. Hedge funds
   1. Hedge funds don’t really train you to be a great SWE or a great VC, but the brand definitely helps
   2. I work really close to PnL for a division that is undergoing hypergrowth, so lots of interesting things to be done
   3. Can also break into management relatively quickly
4. Series C robotics startup
   1. I’m a SWE and the place that makes the money are the robotics engineers, so not really positioned to make a huge change

Unicorn > Meta/HF > robotics startup

I want to join the unicorn since it aligns well with what I want to do in the future, but the brand of Meta is really hard to pass on (only brands I have is MS from T5 CS and BS from T10 CS). On one hand I have a long career down the line, and this is one of many decisions I'll make, and if the unicorn doesn't work out, then it's not a big deal. On the other hand, I feel like if I don't choose prestige and the unicorn fails, I'd have a much harder time in life. It's like messing up an RPG build.

I’m curious what people’s thoughts are and what things I’m not considering?

Let me preface this by saying I have extreme impostor syndrome and I am optimizing for most chill company that's easier to survive in. I have offers from cockroach labs, and disney streaming. Both are senior level offers. At my last company (which i was let go from, I believe it was cause I took too long to resolve an outage in their eyes) i was basically doing mid level eng work so I'm not even sure I'm senior material tbh.

I have a little over 5 yoe. I've been laid off before and my perf has oscillated from good to bad etc (at times I've had personal things interfere with my work) so I'm very fearful of cutthroat/extremely high expectations environments.

From what I've seen, cockroach labs is very highly regarded in the industry, so in the case where I get laid off, it may be better to have a better brand name on my resume. They also do seem to have a good wlb. However, a lot of the people there are coming from other very reputable companies, and I'm very worried I won't be up to the par compared to these people, especially in this environment where performance is looked at more closely. They also did a large RIF last year which impacted low performers.

As far as disney, it may be easier to meet the expectations if the talent bar is lower, but they have done a fair amount of layoffs over the last few years, and the streaming unit has only recently gotten profitable. Seems the leadership is telling a story this will last, it's unclear how well the performance of the business will be long term. Cockroach labs seems to be very well positioned from a company performance POV.

I say all this because I don't really want to go through another job searching phase for a while, so I'm considering the strength of the business as well in addition to how capable I would be of surviving at the company.

Background:

I interned on my current team last summer and returned full-time at the beginning of this year. I've been performing well and have a great relationship with my co-workers, manager, and skip manager.

However, I'm not satisfied with the level of engineering in the org as a whole. Specifically, our service does not operate at a high scale and thus the engineering constraints are very relaxed. It feels like we can get away with making poor decisions and I often think that I am not learning good engineering principles by being here. It also feels like my peers are not that ambitious or passionate about engineering which makes me feel like I don't fit in at times. As a result, I'm looking to change teams even though I am only ~6.5 months into my career.

I recently did an internal loop with another team that does very interesting work with high-scale and low-latency services. The interviews went well and I was given the transfer offer. I think my mind is mostly made up on joining the new team, but just wanted to ping-pong my situation with the Taro community as a sanity check on whether I am making the right choice.

I'm aware that switching teams is essentially a "soft reset" on my promo timeline. I have a lot of substantial work artifacts from my current team such as: code reviews for important feature work and docs that contributed heavily to the service we just launched.

I'm okay with taking a hit to my promo timeline because in my mind, if I zoom out and view my career as a 30-40 year span, it won't really matter whether I got promoted from new grad engineer in 1.5 years or 2.5 years.

What does the Taro community think of my situation? Am I thinking about this in the right way? I tried to keep some details vague as to not speak too negatively on my current team in a public forum. But I'm happy to provide more details to the best of my ability!

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am a mid level engineer from a small startup and have recently secured a senior FAANG engineering position. Given this I am expecting to have some challenges when transitioning both from startup to FAANG and also from a mid level to a senior position.

Given the above my questions are:

• How can I ensure I find a good manager and team during team match to help me succeed? Particularly, what questions should I ask during team match to achieve this?
• Given the quite situational nature and the focus more so on making the transition easier rather than growing, I assume that my focus should be on finding a team with less pressure. Perhaps an internal team?

Would be good to get some thoughts on this.

Should I just accept the job offers I get offered rather than chasing the jobs offers which don't pay attention to me? I've kind of had this mindset that I should have a nice linkedin profile, and then just work on my craft and participating in the community. I'll apply to the big/medium sized tech companies I wished that I worked for, and if they accept me, great, and if they don't, well I have tons of stuff to do anyways and my current job is fine so it's whatever. Eventually my skills will be so sharp that the cool companies will reply to me, right?

Is this a reasonable approach? Or am I tricking myself here? Should I be more deliberate in my job hunting process even though I'm not really trying to run away from my job?

I'm a fullstack engineer, mostly focused on frontend. On my sparetime, I try to build web apps with the stack that I'm currently familiar with, hoping that they could attract some users. I try to learn about software patterns and tooling that the community recommend, and I try to learn more about cloud infrastructure so I can ship projects (including my own) more easily. Besides this, I participate in my tech community by doing some talks and attending meetups.

I don't dislike my current job, but I feel ready to take on a new challenge. At the same time, I don't know if most people who work in big tech follows a similar recipe that I'm trying to follow. I guess there's no magic formula. I tell friends and family that I'm trying to get into big tech, and I catch myself repeating myself about my plans every time I see them. I graduated university a couple of years ago, so I'm still somewhat new to the industry, but it still makes me question myself if what I'm doing is right, if it's completely wrong, or if I'm just being unpatient.

What should I do? Double down and try to improve my chances of getting replies from the current companies I apply to, or lower my expectations? Or is the answer just based on how much more effort I'm willing to put into it?

In taro there are tons of great resources for Job Switches, like:

• As Alex explained  Job Switching has some caveats
• As , it is a red flag for recruiters when you switch jobs within 12-14 months.

I understand the point, but what if I choose the wrong company? It's well-known that not all companies can offer the opportunities that we wanted initially. In this case, should I stay longer even if I know that I won't grow there due to factors such as the company structure or lack of opportunity?

I have a goal of reaching senior levels in my career, but to achieve this, I need to gain expertise in certain areas, like

• Strong domain knowledge to make an impact on the product side,
• connections and collaboration
• software craftsmanship.

Currently, my role does not offer me an opportunity to gain experience in the first two areas. As the product is well-regulated and the entire engineering team works on-site, it is difficult for me to connect and collaborate remotely.

On the other hand, this is making me lose my confidence and my ability to make an impact, even though I have gained hard skills and knowledge from my previous experiences in software craftsmanship part.

I am seeking advice on what to do next, should I even care about those red flags in my particular case if I switch the job?

If you receive an offer from a different team, how do you communicate to your manager that you plan on moving to a new team / opportunity at Microsoft. What if you don't have the best relationship with them?

At Microsoft, the current manager does not need to approve team switch, regardless of whether it's a software role or not.

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?

Hi Taro. When choosing a team, we also have to choose their specialization and tools. If the specialization is niche and the team uses exclusively internal tools I won't gain any transferable skills. I got laid off from AWS and I am realizing that I have little transferable skills. I used mostly internal tools. Believe it or not, many AWS teams do not use AWS extensively.

How can I choose a team or focus area for transferable skills? I was considering pivoting into Android and IOS development because I see many job openings for these.

As a team switcher, I'm worried that I could join a team that is rapidly expanding in headcount but isn’t having a clear business impact so the execs don’t care:

• As an engineer, would you get punished for this with worse performance reviews and slower career growth?
• How can you evaluate the business impact of a team?
• Is it just an educated guess or are there concrete things I can look at to judge this?

I currently work in a FAANG company, and I joined in the 3RD quarter of 2023. I am currently a SWE, but I did my masters in AI focusing on planning, reinforcement learning, and imitation learning. (I have 4 yoe relevant to my work and I have a 2 year Ms in AI. I'm currently an L5 engineer )

I need to communicate and reorient my career at my current company.

My manager has asked me initially if I am ok with the team and the product. They also communicated that since our product launch, the team will be in operational mode and hence, it would be good to network and build connections within the company so that I can eventually get into a green field initiative of my choice. Now I have these questions:

• How do I start the conversations for the same?
• What do I need to keep in mind and how do I figure out the details of teams and orgs that are doing what I am interested in?
• Anyone who has done this before, would you mind lending mentorship?

More details on the situation: Initially, I had a couple of conversations about joining at 1 level above, but I did not go through with, it because I knew I would have to do a safe transition and that 1 level above would make it too expensive for me to transition.

I am looking for a new role since layoffs last week and have applied for internal transfers for roles outside my skill set like Ruby on Rails work. Since I have no experience with the tech stack behind these roles, how to I put it in convincing words that:

• I can adapt to the new languages and frameworks to succeed in their role
• I compensate for this lack of technical knowledge with me already being similar with platform and tools used at this company

I recently joined Meta as a junior engineer and my hope is to be able to try out several domains (guessing realistically 2) to see where my interest lies. I’m not on an AI team currently, but given the rise of AI, I hope to be able to explore that area.

However, I understand that switching teams will disrupt my productivity and growth as a junior engineer. I’m wondering:

• When should I approach changing teams/domain? More specifically, is it better to change teams after being promoted to mid-level?
• How should I approach changing teams?

I am a senior software engineer at FAANG (not Meta), and have found myself in a difficult career dilemma.

I joined the company as a junior and made progress to senior in the same team (say A). The nature of the work was very unique. It was heavily focused on technical analysis of software as opposed to writing one yourself. A significant portion of it was cross functional collaboration across different orgs, probably the reason why I was able to get promoted fairly quickly. The coding part was maybe 30% (you were welcome to pursue more if you have the time). The culture overall was nice with good work life balance. Manager mostly supported things I wanted to pursue. Later, I switched teams (say B) and moved to the one with more focus on development of the software. I loved the technology, projects. However, the expectations were crazy high. I ended up getting a low performer rating, a year after I was promoted to senior in my previous team. The side effects were no bonus, refreshers, salary hike.

I have been working hard since then to manage the expectations. However, I have come to the conclusion that it is impossible to exceed them and thereby pursue a career growth and the next title without throwing your life at work. I can get “meets expectation” for foreseeable future. We are also thinking of expanding our family next year.

I discussed with my previous manager who is willing to take me back. The work there has a high visibility, impact for the next year. I could build strong soft skills - leadership, driving things through others, collaboration there; but, not so much as to actually writing software.

My options -

1. Stick through in my current team for few years because it lets me stay closer to software development and open up opportunities in the future for development roles. But that means financial stress, an impact on family goals. Added anxiety.
2. Go back to previous team. Get that job stability, pursue family goals; but, might get rusted on software development skills. Maybe if I find some ways to keep honing them (also software design skills) then maybe there is that.
3. Looking externally. This is my last resort; but, given the market conditions it does not look pretty. I also like my company in general and would hate to leave. Also not sure of the dynamics of going through pregnancy shortly after joining a new company.

What is the correct mindset I should have? How should I navigate this situation in short and long run.

I'm feeling very undervalued at my current position. I've been working on my service the longest and therefore was the one that onboarded most of my team. In 2023 my manager and tech lead have largely been too busy to help. For instance, I only have 1-1s one every 2-3 weeks.

The new members we got on our team were new to the company and one in particular has relatively poor communication skills, so I have had to spend a lot of time onboarding them.

Unfortunately, in my performance reviews the main emphasis is on the work that I am delivering and there is not much emphasis on the impact I've had through the rest of the team. But the couple of months I tried focusing more on my work, I noticed the culture on the team degrading.

The hardest part for me has been that I have found my manager very unhelpful in helping me with my career and other frustrations. There have been multiple times where instead of helping I've felt as if he's blamed me. I have expressed this to them, but they have not changed.

Now I'm in late stages of interviews with 3 companies. I estimate the pay increase would be between 10-25% if I receive an offer.

Our team also just changed significantly, we swapped a mid-level engineer with a senior-engineer and got a new manager. They will be reporting to my previous manager so that manager will still be around.

I'm optimistic that the new manager and teammate will upgrade my situation but given the more than a year of frustration without improvement I'm still leaning towards leaving. Though I am having second thoughts as well.

I'd love to get any advice on how to handle my situation. Thanks so much!

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

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

I'm currently employed as a Computer Engineer. I've been with the company for a while, 5 years now. I find myself in a strange position where I want to explore new opportunities but at the same time don't have enough confidence with the interviews. I study consistently but not sure if it's the most efficient way. Please share guidelines or past experience on what should I focus on. Thanks.

Good morning!

I work at a company of around 5000 employees and specifically on a team of 5. The culture and team are great but I feel bored half the time at work and don't see any true growth or progression happening. I work as the front end specialist on the team and feel a lot of the time my work has no impact as it only supports one customer.

My other question is in the current market landscape and given my work isn't even on the medium scale how do I go about transitioning to larger companies and having more impact? For context, my current job takes about 40% effort to complete my work and sprints ahead of schedule.

Thanks!

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 am planning to shift as most of my family would be situated there. But wanted to understand how it is from a growth perspective in terms of career ladder, compensation, and startup culture.

I understand that compensations are a bit lower than US. But how is it compared to places such as India wrt the cost of living there? I was exploring US as well but the long green card process is a bit challenging, especially since I have parents who are a bit older and thus want to be with them at a place where I can have them settle comfortably. Another con I feel is that very few companies sponsor direct H1B visa and don't want to invest two years in masters as well in US.

For background, I’m self-taught and got my first software dev role less than 2 years ago. I want a new job because this job isn't providing me with the skills needed to keep up with the industry/job market, but in part because I don't have those in demand skills I'm struggling to get interviews. At my current job, I was able to negotiate a large pay raise and because of that, for the first time in my life I’m not anxious about finances, so I'm naturally pretty cautious about taking a pay cut.

I code a lot outside of work, so I have skills/knowledge of areas outside of what I do at work, however, it seems most recruiters only value commercial experience with a given tech stack or field.

Is it a smart move to sort of ‘take a step back’ in order to get different commercial experience? Or should I just keep grinding and looking for Jr. roles with comparable salaries?