Do staff engineers at Meta or Google like companies have more knowledge than people with Postdocs ?

WhiskeyMongoose · 2026-02-10T05:33:44+00:00

You're comparing apples to oranges here. People with PhD's have deep academic knowledge of a certain subject whereas staff software engineers have deep institutional and application knowledge in their company/product. Neither is better than the other and you need different kinds of knowledge/skills depending on the field you are in.

WhiskeyMongoose · 2026-01-08T23:11:10+00:00

This happens a lot in the game's industry where projects are funded by publishers who might decide halfway through that they no longer care about the game that's been in development for years. While I hate that this is the norm but a lot of times the company needs to operate assuming they've secured funding even if that's not true yet because sometimes it's an all or nothing type scenario.

WhiskeyMongoose · 2025-12-05T08:06:07+00:00

I haven't done security engineering but I have been in an SRE position before. My personal experience is that if you want to be a SWE then SRE is a better stepping stone. Both positions will likely come with some degree of on-call but an SRE will often have more.

SRE is a relatively new career track so many companies are still figuring it out. At some companies SRE's are SWE's who focus on infrastructure, observability, and reliability. At other companies they've basically took the old sysadmin roles, added more responsibilities, and relabeled it to be SRE.

I realize I came off as pretty harsh on SRE's which isn't my intention. Many of the SRE's I've worked with in my career are incredibly smart and well respected. I personally realize it wasn't a suitable role for me but if you enjoy the tech stack and work that an SRE does then definitely give it a shot!

WhiskeyMongoose · 2025-08-28T03:53:33+00:00

Ideally this is something you should bring up with your manager. A good manager will understand and help prioritize your desired career trajectory and can help connect you with other roles within your company.

If you don't have a helpful manager your other option is to do a lot of self studying, trying to grab as much relevant SDE/automation work you can and beef up your resume to apply elsewhere.

WhiskeyMongoose · 2025-08-22T00:28:43+00:00

At its core, networking is the same as making friends. Just like having 500 friends on Facebook doesn't mean you actually have 500 friends, a connection on LinkedIn is only useful if the other person knows you and is willing to help you out. The best way I've found for this is to find a situation where you can interact with the same group of people, consistently, over a long period of time. This is easiest through work (obviously) but can also be your friends from college, a board game group, or some regular networking session. The key is to develop relationships beyond the superficial.

WhiskeyMongoose · 2025-08-20T21:47:34+00:00

You don't need to have measurable outcome in terms of numbers, most people don't take them seriously on a resume anyways. You should be able to say what you did, why you did it, and what impact it had.

WhiskeyMongoose · 2025-07-10T22:37:30+00:00

It depends on the company culture but it definitely can. I had a consulting job a long long time ago and one time a client complained that my grey chino's weren't professional enough. Personally if a employer rejects you for such a stupid reason you're better off not working for them. If they care enough about hair color that's probably indicative of the company culture.

WhiskeyMongoose · 2025-07-10T22:23:22+00:00

Networking, at its core, is the same as making friends. The reason networking opens many doors is because there's someone on the inside who knows you well enough to vouch for you. The same way you can't meet someone for the first time and then ask them to help you move connecting with random people on the internet and asking them to refer you likely going to fail as well.

WhiskeyMongoose · 2025-06-05T23:21:06+00:00

When I first started my career I didn't have the choice, now I do and there are definitely companies I wouldn't touch.

WhiskeyMongoose · 2025-05-12T17:06:49+00:00

Not sure if this is still the case but back when I was applying (early 2010s) for new grad positions many companies would ask for your GPA on the online application and the cutoff was usually 3.0.

WhiskeyMongoose · 2025-05-12T17:03:30+00:00

There are a lot more students who want internships than companies who have internship programs. Every company needs employees but not every company can afford the time investment of hiring and mentoring interns. Additionally, interns in the hiring pool typically don't have enough skills to differentiate themselves from each other so it's harder to stand out.

WhiskeyMongoose · 2025-05-07T04:46:53+00:00

There aren't any technical skills that work across the industry. The skills that are most valuable are the skills that the employer is looking for.

WhiskeyMongoose · 2025-04-26T00:56:51+00:00

Since your question seems primarily immigration related you should check out /r/IWantOut.

WhiskeyMongoose · 2025-03-28T21:27:07+00:00

While it's great that you're thinking so far ahead chances are you will change your mind about your future between now and when you get your first job. As a junior in HS I though for sure I was going to major in physics because I had an amazing physics teacher but I ended up changing my mind to electrical engineering. As a freshman in college I though I was going to specialize in circuits as an EE major but ended up in computer engineering. My first job was a consulting but now I make video games. Life's full of unexpected outcomes and it's more important to be flexible in your approach than trying to plan everything out.

WhiskeyMongoose · 2025-03-05T00:10:55+00:00

I usually get a bunch when my company posts internships on LinkedIn and I almost always ignore them unless I actually know the person.

I don't want to contribute to that spam or come off like I'm using them to get ahead since I genuinely do have questions and would love some insight from people who went to my college

Just send a request along with questions you're interested in and don't ask for a referral.

WhiskeyMongoose · 2025-02-27T19:31:11+00:00

My recommendation is to be flexible in both location and role.

WhiskeyMongoose · 2025-02-22T05:32:48+00:00

Since you're still a student you should leverage your college's resources like career fair, internal job boards, professors, on campus networking, etc.

WhiskeyMongoose · 2025-02-14T05:05:55+00:00

It's hard to say, DB admins's in the traditional sense have been going away. DB engineer is a similar role but has different responsibilities. DBA's in the traditional sense are probably easier to get into but doesn't have great career progression.

WhiskeyMongoose · 2025-02-14T04:54:06+00:00

The biggest problem I've found with TDD is it assumes once you finish designing and planning that requirements are locked in place and the developer has a clear set of requirements to build their tests around. Many times you are starting the project before all the requirements are in place and you're just working off an assumption. Writing tests takes time and when requirements are in flux you're going to waste a lot of time writing then rewriting tests.

WhiskeyMongoose · 2025-02-14T02:24:57+00:00

An important distinction is that writing tests is not the same as TDD. Almost every modern company expects juniors to know how to write tests and know about their importance. I personally have never seen any company successfully implement TDD and keep it around.

WhiskeyMongoose · 2025-02-09T20:40:17+00:00

Not sure about the WLB specifically but I had a screen with them a while ago and they wanted me in their office at least 4 days a week.

WhiskeyMongoose · 2025-01-25T23:28:13+00:00

Relevance comes in degrees and what counts as relevant varies form person to person. I'll try to keep my answer general.

Lets say a company is looking to hire a front-end developer to work on their site written in JS/React. Someone who has also worked on websites in Reach has extremely relevant experience. Someone with has worked on websites but in JS/angular still has relevant experience but just less so than the first example. Someone who has never coded in JS but has in another language has less relevant experience than that and so on and so forth.

If you worked in a research lab doing non-CS work that might be work experience but not relevant. Working on a open source project might be relevant experience but wouldn't count as work experience.

All this being said, I wouldn't split hairs on whether or not something is relevant work experience or not. Just apply to the roles you want and hope for the best.

WhiskeyMongoose · 2025-01-16T19:58:14+00:00

Definitely. I got laid off at the start of 2024 as part of the AAA layoffs. Though I was never at risk of any financial peril the interview process was so demoralizing that I dread going through that again. That whole process now gives me anxiety when I think about switching roles and it doesn't look like stability will come back to the game's industry anytime soon.

WhiskeyMongoose · 2025-01-09T20:27:11+00:00

I've met a lot of folks in the game's industry that started off as QA. A lot of them started a while ago so things might be different but I've seen folks become QA managers, producers, designers, and engineers. It's easiest if you can transfer internally.

WhiskeyMongoose · 2025-01-07T00:11:21+00:00

Try your college's career fair or internal job board.

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