Tech Lead Q&A and Videos

What is the role of Staff Engineer at a early stage startup where infrastructure is on an average setup? In terms mobile application it is standard app with migration scope to react native but there are no takers for migration at all (only product release need) Here how can staff engineer play a role and how to deliver product and engineering goals with awareness to large eng teams?

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

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?

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.

As an E5, I'm switching to more of a tech lead role, and one of the engineers I'm leading has had consistently poor code quality despite being at Meta for a few years now. I've asked my manager for feedback about this, and they say that we should come up with a plan to improve the situation. I've already invested time in this, and I'm not seeing results. How can I get the code quality feedback to fully land and improve this engineer's code?

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?

Hey folks, I don't know how to contribute to our team's monthly planning. How should I come up with ideas for things that the team should work on and contribute to our team's road-mapping meaningfully?

I'm an E5 iOS engineer reporting to an M2 at a Big Tech company. I am the mobile lead for a complex mobile-heavy project spanning 2 other teams. This is a high visibility project that's on the VP Eng's & VP Product's radar. This project had 4 E6s: E6 iOS engineer on partner team #1 delivered an onboarding guide with 70+ compilation errors and took a month to fix all the bugs blocking our integration. He did not test his code at all before delivering it to us. E6 iOS engineer on partner team #2 delivered a component that did not tokenize SSNs properly, resulting in raw SSNs -- this would have caused an s0 incident, but my team fortunately caught it before it went to production. He also did not test his code at all before delivering it to us. My team's E6 BE engineer spent a month fixing it for that team, resulting in delays to our project's BE. My team's E6 BE engineer had a falling out with my M2, so he switched teams, leaving us in a bind since our only other BE engineer (E5) on this project had resigned at the end of last year. We got a replacement E6 BE engineer, but he is very slow, requires a lot of handholding, and most of his PRs have serious bugs -- I feel he's performing like an E4. A junior iOS engineer joined our team at the same time as he did but delivered more complex features in the same amount of time. I switched to BE to de-risk the project after I took care of all the iOS fires. I've already fixed more BE bugs than the replacement E6 BE engineer. Of the 4 E6s, I feel the one who switched teams was the strongest, but my M2 said that E6 did not exhibit ideal E6 behavior because we're over a month late due to BE delays and we keep discovering more and more BE bugs. The E6 also changed the design 3x when fixing the SSN issue. The M2 told me not to use that E6 as a role model, but the other E6s are even worse!

I just got promoted to senior engineer level (E5) at Google and I just switched into an infra team 2 months ago. In order to succeed as a senior engineer, I know I need to mentor and influence other engineers, specifically helping newer and more junior folks on the team. How can I do that quickly, acknowledging that I’m not their direct manager?

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.

What I've learned over the years is that the most important thing to do when I realize a project is late is to: Come up with a revised estimate of the task Notify all relevant parties with #1 (E.M., PM, x-function partners, etc.) 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?

My technical lead is excellent but not the best communicator, and by that I mean I don't understand what they are saying 50% of the time. I intend this in the most respectful way when I say that I don't understand the punctuation behind their comments and chats. I ask them about X and before I've even finished they shoot out with a response on Y. I don't think they have ever been able to explain anything clearly to me. It's getting to the point where my manager sees me as incompetent (I think) even though it's clearly a lack on their part. I'm an L3 and they are a critical L5 so the team will never stand up for me but given this economy, I'm starting to get a bit concerned about my career. The difference between their language and others on adjacent teams is like night and day and I'm not sure how to bring this up with my manager without sounding prejudiced. What should I do to help myself and navigate this situation?

I joined my current company a bit more than a year ago as an L4. Within 4 months, I'd launched a high stakes project, and after some churn in the team leadership, I was put into the role of being a tech lead to my remaining team of L3s. As a pseudo TL, I did well in the mentorship and technical guidance responsibilities, but my code output dropped drastically (due to my projects being in the design phase which were being done by my juniors with me providing high level guidance). In the last three months, I suffered some mental health issues. My work productivity dropped significantly during that time. I've been very open with my manager about my mental state throughout this process, and they've been very supportive of the things I need to do to recover. Around this time my team also hired an L5, who is now officially the TL. Due to my drop in performance in the latter half of the year, I'm afraid my manager won't trust me with important projects. I wonder if I need to again prove my credentials to keep me on track for L5. I feel very low about my software development abilities. This has made me demotivated and disinterested in my work. I took a couple weeks off, yet I don't feel like going back to work. I'm not considering changing teams due to immigration issues. I also don't want to leave a team on a low. Any tips on turning around my motivation, and trajectory on the team? What can I change in my mindset and working style to overcome my struggles?

I was lucky to join a very competent and lovely platform team when I joined my current company. I have been working in the same team for 18 months but due to re-orgs people have moved out and we are currently 3 people and we were 9 people when we started out. We have been doing mostly maintenance work for the past 3 months after re-orgs and recently we were given a choice to work on two projects. There is one project, lets call it Project Hero which my skip level manager wants me to join. I would be the main PIC for this project and it will involve a lot of integration work and system design. This project is with new team mates and a new manager with whom I have not worked but they don't have the best reputation. However, going by FAANG level, they should be good enough to get the job done. Only downside is work-life balance might be skewed if I join here. However, if the project is a success, it sets me up for Senior level promotion. There is another project, lets call it Project Nero. This will be with my existing team but from a company perspective, it's not a very important project. But I will be working with my existing team mates who are both capable of delivering a solid project and a joy to work with. However, my work here will be overshadowed by other Senior engineers on the project. Which project should I join? I personally want to do Project Hero but not with the people present there. Also it will be challenging. Project Nero will be challenging also but more up my comfort zone. Given the current economic climate, I feel being in more important teams will help keep my job.

A teammate of mine has sometimes delayed tasks and informed about them at the last minute leading to us missing the delivery deadlines. As the tech lead, I've shared this feedback along with explaining the impact and suggestions to tackle the issue. I've encountered this situation a few times even after sharing this feedback. What other steps can I take to help the teammate and minimise the overall impact on our delivery?

I work as a mid-level software engineer. We have team channels where people can reach us on. But for some reason people always message me in a private message or they visit my office for team related tasks or product owner tasks. I keep telling them to ask the person in charge or communicate through our team channel, but they don't. I don't want to be rude to them, yet I find my frustration growing. Sometimes I feel like they can't bother to formalise their requests, so they go to me to quickly mention whatever is bothering them, so they later can refer to our "discussion" if the issue is brought up again. What should I do?

Hi! I'm an L5 in a big tech company, tasked with leading a big org-level project that span multiple engineering teams, with lots of cross functional collaboration w/ UX and PM as well. I'm new to my own team and I'm not the subject matter expert in the area of our work, which is around 8-ish people with about 2 other L5s. In order for me to successfully manage this project for our team, I am already involved in a lot of meetings and I have yet to set up recurring 1:1s. I believe I should set up some more of these 1:1s, but I can't imagine I would be setting one up w/ everyone I come across. Which 1-on-1s / relationship should I prioritize, how frequently should they happen, and how do I ensure these meetings are good use of both my time and the other person's time?

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?

I'm an E5 iOS at a Big Tech company reporting to an M2. I'm leading the mobile side for a multi-quarter product project that leverages work from 2 platform teams. Most of the complexity of this project will be on the mobile side. My backend lead is an E6 full-stack web engineer reporting to an M1 who reports to my M2. The M1 is on parental leave until late Dec / early Jan. This E6 has been an amazing partner and teammate. The 2 platform teams have missed a lot of their timelines. One dependency is about a month behind schedule. They often give us deliverables that are dev-complete and not tested (e.g., compilation errors, etc.). We have sync meetings 2x/week, but 1 platform team has never attended any of these meetings. The other platform team doesn't always send the same engineers to the meeting and doesn't always know the status of their own deliverables. That platform team's EM got terminated for performance reasons before this project started, so their M2 and a TPM have been tag-teaming to fill in the gap. That means sometimes their M2 attends the sync meetings, sometimes the TPM attends, sometimes both attend, and sometimes neither attends. The TPM sends a weather report on that team's deliverables every other week, but hasn't sent one in the past month. In his last email, he listed my E6 and me as the DRIs for their team's deliverables. When I confronted him about it, he said it was a mistake and he'll fix it in future emails. How do I bring visibility into these delays to external stakeholders? I created a shared Google Doc to track all the dependencies, including when our team needs the deliverables, the other team's ETAs, and any notes. However, it's been challenging getting ETAs from the other teams. When I tagged them in the Google doc asking for ETAs, they just ignore me. My manager gave me feedback to "influence engineers to hold up their timeline than push for hard commitments". Do you have any concrete advice here? I'm not sure how to do this. After I escalated the 1st platform team's unresponsiveness to their Director (3 levels up), the E6 iOS DRI became very responsive. Escalating to that E6's skip level had not been effective. Should I just keep escalating everything or is there a better approach?

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.

I have read several articles on becoming a Staff Security Engineer or Principal Security Engineer, and I understand that career growth is not just about personal aspirations but also about aligning with the organization's needs. In my current situation, my goal is to increase my visibility within the organization. I believe I've spent enough time working internally, but a significant part of my visibility in the security community is still pending. My ultimate goal is to enhance visibility, establish a brand as a security engineer, exert influence, engage in cross-collaboration projects, and grow my presence in the community. To boost visibility, I realize I need to engage with the community by writing blogs, creating tools, giving talks, and attending conferences. I've observed exceptional performance by certain engineers and have often wondered how they can think outside the box, achieve skip-level promotions, and grow exponentially within the company. Do they have mentors? How can one find a mentor, and how do you determine if you need a mentor? How can I start this journey and find the motivation to do so? Additionally, how can I maintain consistent motivation, as motivation may fluctuate? For instance, after two weeks of hard work, there might be a dull and weak period, and then you need a kickstart to regain the curiosity you had the week before. I do find curiosity in my current role and the nature of work as an Application Security Engineer, but sometimes I also think, should I explore a bit of change towards offensive security or red teaming? Furthermore, my personal passion and motivation always lead me towards delving into technical aspects. How can I align more with the business needs of the organization and develop my business acumen skills? How can I develop multiple skills to operationalize application security engineering in a team? In my current location, there are limited job openings for security engineering positions, making it challenging to switch roles. What are other possible options for me in this situation? In summary: Is there a roadmap to grow as a security engineer within the organization, gain influence, create a personal brand, and secure promotions? How can I enhance my visibility in the security community and maintain consistent motivation? If I find myself stuck in my current role, because of limited openings in my current location, what alternative things can I explore? Given that many interviews for security engineer positions now include coding rounds, is there a structured pathway for enhancing coding skills specifically tailored for security engineers? How can I maintain consistent motivation, as motivation may fluctuate? How can one find a mentor, and how do you determine if you need a mentor? How can I develop multiple skills to operationalise application security engineering in a team? What does even operational excellence mean? Any insight will be highly appreciated.

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?

I am an L5 TL, of a team of less than 10 people. My manager very recently asked me whether I am interested in becoming an EM (managing most if not all of the people on my team). I like coding and technical contributions, but I believe I like helping people succeed more, including having crucial conversations where things aren't going well. Those things don't come naturally to me, BUT I get great satisfaction out of those tricky situations. I would also like the opportunity to build a team of amazing individuals who come together around a central goal. Based on this I am leaning yes. However, I know the EM path isn't all roses. What are the top 3 questions I ought to consider, before I decide whether I want to do this?