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

Direction: Strategy formulation and road mapping are key, along with influencing and collaborating with other teams. How I could promote proactive inclusion of ideas on other teams’ roadmaps and engaging with leadership to drive product decisions. It’s also important to consult with managers to identify tasks that create the most impact, whether they are big or small. Engaging in strategic and road mapping discussions can be highly beneficial.

Hi Taro community,

I have gone through the in-depth explainers on Side projects and totally understand the importance of having good side projects on your resume. However, I have been working in the cloud-infra space in my recent company (Tech stack is heavily based on Python, SQL, JS and ElasticSearch) and was wondering how I could explain impact of any side projects in this space (like for apps we have downloads, for websites we have how many times visited, no. of signups, etc.), what kind of side projects could I target in the cloud infra space that can have some quantifiable impact as well?

Hi All,

Provided one is working full time it might not be possible to market your product or side projects on professional networking sites like LinkedIn mainly because it may ring a bell and other obvious reasons.

I think other social platforms like Reddit and Twitter can work and are relatively safer in terms of getting noticed my your manager or company folks.

One option I can think of is to ask your friends or hire a marketing person to do this for you but it will cost me.

Curious to know the opinion from others. Thanks,

How to seek manager or TL’s support on project unblocking or career growth?

What topics I should talk in 1:1s with my manager/TL?

How to build the connections with leaderships?

How to build your reputation in new area?

How to use better story telling?

How to better align on the organizational goals?

How to define the priority and work on your projects?

How to setup clear expectations for yourself and your team?

How to identify my gap to next level?

How to narrow my gap to next level?

The Hack language is indeed associated with PHP but it's not exactly a new version of PHP. Instead, Hack is a programming language developed by Meta (formerly Facebook) that operates within the same ecosystem as PHP and is designed to interoperate with PHP code. Hack extends PHP by adding additional features such as static typing, type inference, generics, nullable types, and async programming, among others.

Hack aims to maintain the fast development cycle of PHP while offering the added reliability of static typing, enhancing both performance and safety. It was developed to address some of the shortcomings and challenges of working with large PHP codebases, especially in a fast-paced development environment. Hack and PHP codes can coexist, allowing developers to gradually migrate PHP codebases to Hack, providing a smooth transition pathway without requiring a full rewrite. Meta originally developed Hack to run on the HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM), which is used to execute both Hack and PHP code, significantly improving execution times compared to the standard PHP interpreter.

Meta recruiters request references of people you have worked with before who are current employees of Meta before submitting feedback file to review committee.

My question is what & how much impact does providing these references have on your application, candidacy and the ultimate outcome of the interview process.

Does it hurt your chances to not be able to provide these one or more of these references?

I am a seasoned Mobile engineer(Staff+) and have been looking for a new job since this January.

After failing at several job interviews with big tech companies like Meta, Square, Airbnb, Uber, etc I finally received offers from Okx, Doordash and Reddit.

To be honest, I feel like the biggest gap was DS&A. Over time, I improved a lot in this area and through the help of mentors and referrals, I was able to land the above offers. I'm very grateful for Taro (especially Rahul) for his constant words of encouragement and his guidance when I needed his help.

To everyone out there, I know the market may seem crazy but if you weather the storm, you will find success. If I can do it, you can too! Good luck!

Background:

Our team inherited a set of products which are full of spaghetti code and bad design. We are currently building a high visibility and high impact project based on the backend of this system.

Although the main project UI goes on-track, some critical backend design flaws will hinder product performance and reliability within a couple of months - maybe close to or right after official product launch, which will turn our whole effort into a joke since we have executives' eyes on it.

My progress this year so far: (besides my roadmap item commitment)

• 1. Identified a system hotspot, finished analysis & design, and convinced our EM to rewrite this module (currently 95% finished by a junior engineer.)
• 2. Rewrote 1 foundation module to eliminate legacy design flaw (ended up with less code, less complexity, same performance, more system reliability.)
• 3. Design and rewrite another foundation backend module to address legacy design flaw & unblock development of the next milestone
• 4. Leading on technical design and discussion of a re-architecture for the overall backend end to end flow. (simplify design, improve performance)

NOTE:
- I tried to delegate 2 & 3, but no other engineers can do them after a few try since it's too tightly coupled with the rest of the system.
- our team lead is championing for all these work, which is how we are able to make room for them

Benefit of these work:

• accelerate other engineers' work in the system
• cut clean with the legacy system design flaw, improve product reliability and performance
• ensure our team's win on the high visibility project that built on top of this backend
• easier oncall for the short run or long run

My questions:

• In terms of performance review, my manager thinks this is better engineering work, while I think is closely tied to the success of our main project. What kind of evidence do I need to convince him? (My EM is not very technical)
• From his tone, I sense he thinks better engineering work in considered "lower priority contribution". Is this true? How do I communicate the importance of code/design quality with him?
• I'm trying to reach the staff level promo, does this initiative demonstrate any trait for the next level? (I'm not doing it for promo, but my EM's neglect on this makes me pretty frustrated because refactoring and rewrite is such tedious and painful work... I want to make it count)

Thank you!

I know Alex has talked about his experience mentoring 10-20 folks at once and handing out work to people as he went. Videos have talked about "decentralized power" where you figure out how to do something really well and then hand it off to someone else so they grow AND you grow by managing it.

I'd love to hear more folks' experience about how this has gone! I imagine there are some stories where this has been an easier process than others. For instance how have you handled a scenario where you hand someone something and then they dropped the ball because they were too busy? Or what about a scenario where you had a clear vision but early on during handoffs you didn't have a system in place to communicate all the details that you knew but they didn't - how did you fix this?

I'll also share my two cents on this one - hope to discuss more in the comments!

I have been generalist my whole career, I have moved from front end web development --> platform as a service web development --> microservices cloud development and now as a ML engineer, all on different tech stacks. I am pretty late in career now, 12-15 years in. What do you recommend, in terms of going forward, do I have a chance with trying to be a staff, or should I switch to PM/EM role? I would eventually want to be a good EM.

From what I have heard so far, Staff is: The person needs to be technically very sound, guide the folks, find projects, carve solutions, and lead without authority.

Engineering managers on other hand: Would work these folks to approve/disapprove these projects, get resources, manage the people (promotions, growth of team - product as well as people).

From this I derive that managerial role is subset of staff + people management. But I am sure I am missing something, what am I missing? Why do people choose to be staff over manager, expect for passion to stay IC (not manage people)? Also, is there a pay difference?

After 10 years as a full stack SWE and eng manager, I pivoted into AI while working at Shopify, and was recently laid off as Head of AI at a collapsing pharma startup. Title is nice, but I only really have two years experience in ML. While it is high quality experience (training and shipping models and LLM apps at web scale)-- I'm feeling a bit scared. I don't have a ton of savings and two kids so I need something soon.

I'm deeply passionate about language models, for the first time in my career working with a particular technology has felt like a real calling-- staying up nights and weekends just to learn and build. My first research paper ever was published at NeurIPS last year.

However, I'm feeling fairly unconvincing as an ML engineer after the layoff. Probably the perfect role would be something in between web and ML. So now we're at the question:

Given that I'm pretty desperate to land anything (3 mos runway before pulling out of investments, wife really against this) I'm wondering how to approach my search:

1. Go all out for AI Engineer Roles (passion forward)
2. Go for senior / staff web dev roles (safer, maybe, given 10+ yrs exp)
3. Go for 1 or 2 plus eng manager roles
4. Go for all of it at once

Some confounders:

I have referrals at Google and Microsoft, but don't want to burn them on ML roles if I'm obviously unqualified having only 2 years ML. I know I can absolutely add value wherever I land, but these feel like precious gold to me, and I don't want to get tossed out of the running for playing it silly. I can likely get some at Meta as well, but again, I don't want to play myself going for stuff that's just inappropriate. This has never been an issue in the past, I've been able to land stretch roles or at least get the interview but stakes are different now and my confidence is lower.

I am a good eng manager, and would do it again, but I have a feeling it's an altogether different search. Is there a way to increase the surface area of possible roles by applying to manager jobs too-- without splitting my energy?

Anyway, its helpful just to think out loud, would appreciate any advice here. Current plan is to create 3 resumes, start blasting applications and networking to get the interview funnel spun up before the leetcode grind.

Thanks.

Which choice is better for long term career growth in FAANG, especially senior to staff?

1. A team of extremely talented engineers (where showing an impact would be very hard)
2. A team of decent talent (but hardworking) where it might be easy to stand out

I know the way I’ve framed the question makes it more like option 2 is better; but, I would love for hear your thoughts.

I am not sure if we have a option of 1:1 mentoring.

I recently started a side project that could have an org level impact soon within this year. The feedback for the prototype is pretty good and I got a green-light to put more bandwidth in it.

I used to think once I get the good work done, promotion should come naturally. But both my manager and skip manager are telling me to leave proper documentation and communication as evidence for promotion - docs like PRD, roadmap planning, status update etc.

I usually do communications pretty well, so their feedback make me wonder if I missing something for a staff level promotion.

• What kind of evidence is being valued in a staff promo packet? Any differences between senior and staff promo packet?
• What do I need to highlight and keep track of if I'm creating scope outside of daily work?
• What kind of data I should keep track of to quantify the impact? How do you usually learn about finding the matrix to track?

Thanks!

As you climb up the career ladder (senior -> staff), this soft skill becomes more and more important. What are some ways I can keep honing it? Are there any professional courses I can consider?

I would learn to be effective and efficient at it, specially in scenarios such as public speaking, team meetings, project status, emails etc.

Also, English is not my first language.

So, in the past, whenever a job switch happened, it was comparatively easier to align all the interviews and get the offer timing synced up to some extent. But with team matches now, with the big companies, how do you manage the timeline for offers, and also, how long should one wait on any of the offers, given there is no assurance of a team match?

I am wondering if there is a strategy that can be applied in this scenario. Also, if one accepts an offer at company A, and there is a team match with company B, at what time is it okay to let go of company A (accepted offer, joined the company but less than a month, joined a company less than a year). This is assuming that the candidate is joining in a senior role and both companies A & B are big Tech firms.

I would like to get some ideas for team match interviews with EMs. Most times, the team match interviews are the last ones after the entire loop with the company has finished. These interviews are very unstructured and very EM specific. Since there is no structure and most times, the team details are not known upfront (except team names), I was wondering how I navigate these and make sure I can show my full potential and upsell for this interview.

I've been a Data Engineer for most of my career and my observation is that scope as a Data Engineer can plateau and therefore I see a lot more L4/5 DE's than L6+. I think it is because you don't impact the bottom line directly and regularly.

At FAANG's I've worked at so far, finding new scope can be difficult even when you are working with stakeholders: it is "easier" to scope/build a product (i.e. SWE work) and show metrics of success to add value vs building a data pipeline which may be limited to them having a reporting need for example which often isn't the case especially in a more established firm.

I moved into a partner facing DE role to help more with scope/stakeholder exposure. The highest impact project I worked on so far is influencing an internal team to change the way we measure a particular metric. This involved mostly stakeholder management and nothing more complex than SQL queries from a technical standpoint. While it was fulfilling, this is also something I 'stumbled' upon and is rare due to challenges like partner scope/vision is limited/slow (their leadership can change and therefore you projects/ideas can), technical challenges of automating things because of larger concerns (e.g. privacy, lack of infra on their side which you have no control over) and so on (you generally have even less control than an internal DE).

In my current role, I am generally able to derive projects, but (in my opinion) they are limited in scope/value: i.e. build a pipeline, deliver an analysis. Therefore, even though the projects 'ticks the boxes' for an L5, it is not really driving a 'transformation' as an L6+ would. I also directly asked my manager what are some of the hardest problems we have, and have been told we have a lot, yet, I'm not hearing or seeing them.

Given the situation, would you:

1. Move to a SWE role internally at FAANG for a more established path 'up' (not sure this resolves the scope problem especially at FAANG as I think SWE-DE's can almost be even harder to get to L6+ on because they generally lack stakeholder visibility and focus on more top down work?).
2. Seek roles outside of FAANG where the scope of the work is already scoped to L6+ e.g. Airbnb so the 'heavy lifting' has been done in terms of scope.
3. Refine your scoping strategy within you own team, and if so, how?

Note: my motivation is to thrive at work, this isn't for a promo, just incase the post comes across as promo-focused. :)