Episode 447: Overleveled at FAANG and accidental draft feedback

Soft Skills Engineering

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. I am a mid level engineer overleveled as a senior engineer in a FAANG company. I got super lucky landing this high paying remote job, but dang… I did underestimate the expectations for my senior level. I had no FAANG experience before, just working at startups, flat hierarchies, just doing the heavy lifting coding.

   Now it is all about impact and multiplying impact across the team. I am told I should do less IC work and more leading of projects and owning initiatives.

   Can you give me some general advice on what actions I can take to get from the mid-level to senior-level? I am not really sure, what taking ownership really means in practice… These just seem like empty phrases to me without a meaning…

2. I have had a bit of time, while running a 40 minute build, so I looked into open pull requests. One PR caught my eye and I started to read through it and left a comment with a suggestion for a small change. All in all sounds good probably, but the caveat to this is, that the PR was marked as Draft.

   I was thinking that it would be useful for the author of the PR to already get some suggestions during development, but the response got me thinking. The author passive aggressively mentioned that the PR is in Draft and that there is more work to do.

   Am I the jerk for commenting on a draft PR? Second question, what other things should I pay attention to in code reviews to not be a jerk?