Gaining seniority

We see much more job applicant competition for junior roles (0-1 years of experience) as compared to more senior roles (2+ years of experience). Here we list some basic things we recommend to focus on in order to better qualify for more senior roles in a large successful tech company:

• Focus on a small number of modern technologies to master

  • Deprioritize technologies like C# and PHP

• Keep learning the basics of other new technologies to understand your architectural options

• Switch to teams with stronger developers, better work culture, and processes

• Take more responsibilities in more impactful projects

• Gain experience designing systems

• Measure your impact on users (e.g. latency, usage) and the company (e.g. cost savings)

• Challenge yourself by trying to improve your impact by 10x

If you want to get a job in a large tech company and are flexible to choose among backend, frontend, full-stack, mobile, then we recommend focusing on backend software engineering.

If you are planning to apply for backend software engineering roles then we highly recommend gaining experience with distributed computing. These skills are rare in emerging markets and are in high demand at top tech companies.