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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?

I moved to the Bay Area to be within a denser network. However, everyone is working within their own silos, and it's hard to break them out so you can develop a deeper relationship with them.

Can you recommend some good platforms to network with other engineers in the Bay Area? I would like to meet other engineers at a similar level and working within a similar space.

I've already tried some basic things which I didn’t find much value from:

• Went to some public meetups from online sites like Meetup.com which claimed that there will be a lot of great engineers there. Once I went to these, the level of engineers didn’t match my expectations. The conversations were more generic and centered around TC.
• Get in touch with as many alumni from my college as possible.

I'm deciding between staying as an IC and becoming an EM, and I'm completely neutral right now.

When looking at the managerial role, it seems like you get more exposure around the product overall and you’re more involved within the product lifecycle end-to-end. When I look at Staff+ engineers on my team, they are more sound technically but don’t have as much impact on the product direction. As a senior engineer, I don’t understand the product much end-to-end, I'm mainly just working on features - It seems like becoming an EM is a way for me to get more of this scope.

When it comes to mentorship, I'm just mentoring some interns and no other full-time engineers. The mentoring is also more ad-hoc and unofficial - I help them out here and there, especially with onboarding.

Does specialization matter? I have a bunch of friends working in Big Tech, and some of them at my level started growing in 1 specific area. For example, one of them started going deep into machine learning. Do you need to make that decision when you’re a mid-level/senior engineer and what’s the criteria?

Adding on to this, I see a lot of noise in the market about various degrees and certifications to help you with specializations. Things like web3, ML, or other hot topics. This, combined with what I see my peers doing, makes me feel like this is a worthwhile or even the optimal thing to do.

As a counter-example, I have a friend who chose to specialize in ML and they’re job hopping a lot as they haven't been able to find good ML work at any of their recent companies.