Companies may inflate title to retain you
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Companies may inflate the title to retain you
A lot of companies hand out senior titles to improve retention. Don't take it as a sign of true advancement. Let your title be something that is aligned with the quality and impact of your work.
Your inflated title may get you a fancy interview call, but when the interviewer asks for the impact, the quantifications, the challenges, and the complexities, you might not have an answer. Nothing beats the practical experience.
Building a strong foundation of technical skills and a track record of solving problems, improving business, and increasing revenue. Leave a lasting impact at work to ensure your value remains constant, regardless of title trends.
Don't misunderstand – titles have their place. They offer a framework for understanding roles and experience. Be true to yourself, evaluate your contributions, and ask for the title you deserve.
But for those who seek a fulfilling and impactful career in software engineering, the true measure lies in the outcome and impact you bring by the work you do. Build a career that's not just decorated with titles, but rich with accomplishments.
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📹 Video I posted this week
This week I posted Understanding Proxy, Forward Proxy, and Reverse Proxy
Proxy has to be the most common jargon thrown by senior engineers. But what exactly they are and where do they fit in?
This week, I published a video talking about proxies, where they fit into the system architecture, and the problems they solve. While exploring this, we understand the difference between the forward and the reverse proxy with practical examples and some interesting stories from my life.
🧠 Paper I read this week
This week I spent reading Kora: A Cloud-Native Event Streaming Platform For Kafka
This week I read a paper by Confluent covering their platform Kora which powers their Kafka cloud. The paper was awarded the Best Industry Paper at VLDB 2023 and it dives deep into the design decisions behind Kora. The paper touches upon three key aspects:
architecture, key design decisions, and trade-offs they took
how they abstracted out the complexities of managing Kafka clusters
how their design optimized resource utilization to save cost
how they baked in multi-tenancy in its design
You can download this and other papers I recommend from my papershelf.
What does a Process look like in Linux Kernel source code?
While preparing for my next video, I got curious about how the process is represented in the Linux Kernel source code, and this is what I found.
The process is represented as `task_struct` and I have attached a trimmed snippet of the struct definition. You could actually see the things we studied in the OS course in there like - process ID, a pointer to the stack, scheduling statistics, thread references, mutexes, etc.
One interesting attribute I found in the struct was `usage` and it interestingly had type `refcount_t`. Scrolling through the documentation I found that this is an important attribute that helps in scheduling decisions.
The `usage` attribute holds the number of tasks that depend on this one. The Linux Scheduler leverages `usage` to prioritize tasks with higher usage counts (more dependencies) to ensure the timely completion of operations that rely on them.
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📰 Interesting articles I read this week
I read a few engineering blogs almost every single day, and here are the three articles I would recommend you to read.
Thank you so much for reading this edition of the newsletter 🔮 If you found it interesting, you will also love my courses
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💯, taking counter with inflated title is a bad idea.
First counter in general is not the best, but even if you do, get the money not the title because it hard to justify in future interviews of why you got promoted.
Your audience may like my recent content: Why title matters: https://www.junaideffendi.com/p/why-job-titles-matter
Very true, especially in small companies where they feel you have a lot of domain knowledge. Have seen many promoted to lead this way even if they aren't necessarily leading the team.