Hi all. I graduated college back in 2018 and for 75% of my career since then I have been doing Android development. I’ve recently come to terms that I do not want to consider pursuing it further, and would be much happier doing full-stack development or even primarily backend. I’m really struggling with attempting to make the switch as I have little to no system design experience. I’ve tried watching the videos and reading the documents about system design concepts, but even with practice it feels like I would be regurgitating information in interviews without having real world experience in these topics and I wouldn’t know how to answer follow up questions on any of them. I’m trying to switch internally at Amazon (as an L5/SDE II), and even then the informal loops typically end after the team asks for system design artifacts and I have nothing substantial to provide. Curious to hear from folks who have been in my shoes and how you got unstuck from a specific niche? Whether it be Android like myself, iOS or another specification. #engineering #software #swe #interview #career
You should try to apply for backend Java positions and then switch to the fullstack if your future team allows you to build frontend component of projects.
That’s a good point. I guess it’s better to start somewhere and I can always learn front end on the side and eventually make the transition. But right now having limited system designs experience is what is hindering me most. Seems like at L5 it’s expected, yet in mobile none of the projects that got me promoted to L5 required much system design concepts.
do you have some docs though for building out mobile components?
Dude trust me you want to work on android, I’ve done both. Apps are better. With full stack you normally are on call and it’s much more stressful. Having a release schedule (depending on what you are working on) is really nice.
Really? I can understand there being more on call load, but man being pigeon holed to Android OS and only all of that knowledge is not great either. I’m not passionate about it and find the concepts of the web much more interesting. Do you still think it’s not worth switching if I actually dislike Android development?
Android has its downsides too: constantly worry about memory issues, performance concerns, app versioning, specific android OS issues (or manufactures), debugging vague android internal stack traces, gradle issues, slow build times, etc
Funny. I’m in the exact opposite boat. Wanting to switch from full stack to Android. One option might be a smaller firm. For instance, the place I currently work is currently looking for an app developer but 90% of our work is actually backend work so our app developers end up doing a fair amount of api work as well.
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To be fair, Mobile development is absolutely miserable at Amazon and not indicative of normal mobile dev. Even so, plenty of people do jump to full stack or backend. A lot of my former coworkers (at Amazon) did exactly that and went fine for them
Thanks for your input. Did your former coworkers switch to these roles at amazon or externally?
I think every person I can think of switched internally first. Then since quite a few went to other companies as backend. Definitely easier to ramp up on new tech internally since you'd at least be familiar with Brazil and various other tooling