I worked in one of FAANG, I am right now a level 7 engineer, the title is Senior Staff Software Engineer. In this post, I want to talk about climbing career ladder. Why do you want to climb the ladder? I don’t know about other people, my own motivations: You get paid better You can see a bigger…

Tech lead emerges by itself, it is never appointed. I have been wearing the Tech Lead hat for quite a few years now. There are a few different types of Tech Lead. I worked with 2 types closely. One type is called Uber Tech Lead, the other type is called…

Following my previous post https://medium.com/@hlxmtv/reading-code-a-must-have-skill-4125a0804f50 I recently was assigned to a new project. The team’s execution was not good, and the project was delayed. My job is to fix the execution. My approaches are always 1/ understand the problem structure and find POCs for each sub-area; 2/ be detail oriented…

There are plenty of materials teaching programming languages, debugging, libraries/frameworks, design pattern, etc. But I didn’t read anything that teaches people how to read code. Reading code is a really important skill that every software engineer must master. Working in the industry for almost a decade, I realize that 1)…

I am arguing that we are entering a mediocre age here https://medium.com/@hlxmtv/software-engineering-are-we-entering-a-mediocre-age-1246ed8f8e1d But as an individual, we should still aim for being a great software engineer. Everyone should be motivated to be the greatest in his/her industry. A motivated society makes itself better and thus benefits its people in turn…

As discussed before (https://medium.com/@hlxmtv/why-do-we-see-disparity-2cd5506528c5), a lot of us are worried about the bigger and bigger disparity. Some politicians proposed a solution to redistribute resource (wealth) by government via high tax and welfare program. The motivation is really good. My understanding of the rationale works as follows: the advancement of technology…

Follow up from the previous article: https://medium.com/@hlxmtv/why-do-we-see-disparity-2cd5506528c5 Money (or capital) is the main force that drives the advancement of technology, and the motivation is to generate more money (or capital). Capital is always looking for exponential growth, and its power is so big that the business owner, big or small…

Linux is mainly created by one man, C is mainly invented by one man, etc. Software industry is good at creating hero, some true legend. It is always excited to hear stories that a few talents work together and create a piece of software that empowers millions of users or…

The United States is divided. People blame social media, blame Trump, blame China, etc. I think they are not the root causes. We are entering a new era — the advancement of technology accelerates the disparity between the rich and the poor, yet we don’t have an efficient way to…