Folks I need your honest advice here. I accepted a Google offer as a new grad (early career/ L3) and am given the opportunity to be apart of a Firebase team where I build what looks to be ETL pipelines. Except the work seems laughably easy. The manager said that there's templates for everything and that 90% of my job will be to write SQL queries and build dashboards. I did this once before and it was a little boring to me. My main issue is that I'm afraid that writing SQL queries all day will set me up poorly for the rest of my career. I'm just starting and would like to learn other useful things like distributed systems, design principles etc. I already know SQL and I'm not sure that becoming an SQL master will necessarily help me in the future. Now this Firebase team has insanely good team culture and wlb. My other option is to go to another team with proper challenging projects, but they likely have worse wlb and dont know anything about team culture. My role for this other team would be fullstack My question is: are my worries about dashboarding valid or am I just tripping?, and is it wise to give up a bit of wlb to work on projects that I will learn more from? TC: 190k CAD #tech #google #googlecloud #gcp #advice #swe #data #softwareadvice
You’re young, the compounding effect from learning a lot early will likely help you develop Your career faster and further.
Seems too early to be worried. Do it for some time until you learn about other teams and opportunities while you learn whatever you learn there. Don’t make rush decisions and enjoy the good things from the team in the meanwhile. Also, see if you can come up with new ways of doing things in this team, that will be challenging enough to keep you entertained and force you to learn new things as well. Just my 0,02
I was in an exactly similar situation, was hired for a Frontend dev role, reorg resulted in me working on builduing looker dashboards and BIE stuff, had great wlbbut no growth or learning opportunities, decided to interview and jumping ship next month.
Wait why is there such a stigma against writing SQL queries and building dashboards? Yes I understand BIEs are paid less than Software Engineers but if you want relatively easier work and a little less money is there anything else wrong with it? I’m sure demand for those jobs will also remain high for a while
No stigma from me personally, but I'm hired as a Software Engineer and that's what I would like to do. Tbh I always thought people who made dashboards were software engineers anyways
Oh ok I see so you were originally at Amazon and then joined Google right?
Why do you worry about wlb at the moment? Do you have extra responsibilities? Can you find out more about those other teams?
Tbh I kind of just want to have a chill job where I can clock out and not think about my with outside of work hours. About the other teams, they are very new (<1 years old) and they have lots of new projects that I can get in on at the design stage. I just fear that the wlb will be bad since one of the teams seems to have a lot of ex amazon, and it's a cloud team. But that's all speculation I don't know for sure. It seems to me that I should go for one of the other teams since doing SQL all day will cause me to stagnate right at the start of my career. And I already know that I don't want to dashboard for the rest of my career
You’ll be wasting time as an engineer writing SQL, that too in a place that pioneered distributed systems. But you also have the option to chill for a while, prep and switch to another systems heavy team later on if you maintain your interest. Full stack is a bit more technical than sql crunching but definitely not at the depth of systems. I’ll say if you want to gain deep and broad expertise in the long run systems is the way to go. Full stack is a more balanced developer role where things will get more collaborative with business/PMs
Hey OP how hard was the interview loop? Thanks
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So basically it’s a Business Intelligence or Data Engineer role. Not really full stack role.
I meant the other team's role is fullstack. The firebase one you're correct, its one of those two
Oh ok. Then go for the full stack, because that what seems to be what you really want to do.