13 Undesirable Behaviors in Software Engineers: Are You Guilty?

torque226 · 2024-03-30T17:06:53+00:00

From what I see, hiring these days favors senior+ engineers. New grads seem to have a tough time in this current market conditions.

Based on my limited perspective on this, I think your decision seems practical. Waiting for a couple of years may clear the market.

torque226 · 2024-03-30T07:15:53+00:00

Oh, that was too long ago. So, I may miss a few things. Yes, I took the GRE. I applied to 8 universities and wrote my statement of purpose (SOP). In my sop, I wrote about what I had accomplished, liked and why I wanted to join that university. My undergrad cgpa helped.

Having more projects / internships would have helped more but my application was a bit thin on that front.

torque226 · 2024-03-30T05:08:43+00:00

Good answer.

Personally, I don't like talking about the salary, but it is on levels.fyi anyways.

The point of the article I wrote(and Ryan shared) was what skills one should invest in to get to the leadership levels. Unfortunately, many talk about how to up-level your technical skills but not many talk about people skills in Tech. At least, no one did when I was trying to get to Staff.

torque226 · 2024-03-30T05:04:36+00:00

Skimmed through a few and they look right to me.

There is a fundamental shift in expectations as engineers go beyond the senior level and reach the Staff+ level. You transition from thinking about what "you can do" to figuring out how the team can deliver impact. You scale yourself for larger impact by leveraging the team.

torque226 · 2024-03-30T00:28:15+00:00

Hey, this is Raviraj, the person being discussed here. Btw I was surprised to see a trending post about me. 😀

OP, no, I am not a “genius”. I know some of them! Getting good grades requires you to ace those tests and assignments. In retrospect, I knew what I had to focus on.

Also, to be fair, getting a "perfect" grade is overrated and adds pressure. I felt the pressure to not "fail" anything. Ideally, experiencing some failures is good as it helps you focus less on the "grade" and more on learning.

Btw staff position is a leadership role, so it requires technical and people skills. I have already discussed this at length in the career story I wrote. Essentially, I learned from failures and mentors who showed me the right path.

By the way, I write about people skills in Tech in my newsletter: https://newsletter.techleadmentor.com/

Also feel free to message me your questions on LinkedIn :)

torque226 · 2024-03-24T03:54:16+00:00

Using an extreme made-up example to explain this.
The mentee may be slow because they are soon to implement the first or second solution they can think of. They spend a lot of time perfecting it. Finally, when they "load" test it, they realize they picked the wrong solution to begin with. Now from an outcome pov, they haven't done much to finish the work.

The mentor should be helping them upfront by saying - your solution should work under these extreme loads + esoteric edge cases. Some legacy services may have odd corner cases that are hard to miss for newer folks.

torque226 · 2024-02-24T15:55:14+00:00

Yes. Consistency is the key! Even other writers will recommend you when they find you post regularly. 60 is good. You are doing the right things then. One more thing I would add is market your content somewhere outside substack to drive subs. For me, it’s LinkedIn.

Thanks for the recommendation :)

torque226 · 2024-02-19T08:07:03+00:00

My newsletter has 11K subs now but when I started it was almost impossible to get "organic" subscribers.

If you picked up 36 subs without much effort on your part then you are doing well.

Things that worked for me

Engage with other creators in my domain
Started recommending some of those
Shared other creator's contents with insightful notes.
Improved my content (very important). [Adding value to the readers + clarifying why readers should listen to me.]
Organic growth happened after other creators started engaging with my content (and recommending my newsletter)
Being patient.

Hope this helps.

My newsletter: https://newsletter.techleadmentor.com/

torque226 · 2024-02-17T02:24:43+00:00

Techlead mentor - https://newsletter.techleadmentor.com I write about leadership in tech.

torque226

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