How to Grow Fast From an Intern to Senior Software Engineer

Thousands of new software engineers enter the industry every year with aspirations to make a mark, but many struggle to grow efficiently. Transitioning from an entry-level engineer to a senior software engineer is challenging and rewarding, requiring strategic effort, persistence, and the ability to learn from every experience. This article outlines a simple, effective strategy to accelerate your journey. This is not a shortcut; it is quite the opposite. This is a way to develop a solid base of earned knowledge for long-term growth with urgency and focus. 

Fast growth from intern to senior engineer requires a clear understanding of the expectations at each level, a focus on developing key skills, and a strategy that emphasizes both technical and interpersonal growth. This guide will help you navigate this journey effectively, laying out actionable advice and insights to fast-track your progress.

Who Is This For?

Before I go further,  let me be more specific about the strategy's applicability in this article. This article concerns growing as a software engineer from an intern/new grad (L3 at Google or E3 at Meta) to a senior software engineer (L5 at Google or E5  at Meta). 

While the personal growth part of this article is generally applicable, the career growth part applies only to companies where the engineering career ladder is heavily influenced by prominent Silicon Valley companies such as Google Meta. Executing this strategy requires a healthy ambition with a matching work ethic. 

Key Differences Between Junior and Senior Engineers

With that preamble, let's dive in. The first step is to understand what sets the two career levels apart. Once the difference is laid out, I will boil it down to a few dimensions of growth and demonstrate how the strategy covers all of them. While every organization defines these roles slightly differently, the expectations from these roles are roughly as follows: 

Entry-Level Software Engineer

• Works on small, well-defined tasks under close supervision.
• Relies heavily on existing frameworks, tools, and guidance from senior colleagues.
• Contributes individual pieces to a larger project, often with a limited understanding of the bigger picture.

Senior Software Engineer

• Independently solves open-ended problems that impact a business domain
• They are the domain experts. Owns large-scale projects or critical subsystems, taking responsibility for their design, development, and delivery.
• Designs complex systems, makes high-level architectural decisions, and anticipates long-term technical implications.
• Leads cross-functional efforts — partners across teams and functions to drive strategic initiatives that align with organizational goals.
• Maintains systems, leads incidents, and reduces toil. Participates in long-term planning. 
• Mentors junior engineers.

What Are the Areas of Growth?

You need to grow in the following areas to close the gap from an L3 to an L5. 

1. Independence

L5 are independent agents. They are responsible for figuring out what to do, how to do it, who to talk to, etc. Ultimately, they must be able to deliver results on medium-sized projects without handholding. An L5 must be agentic, i.e., they should be able to provide value for at least a quarter in their manager's absence. 

2. Functional Expertise

L5 can be independent only when they have the required expertise. This has three dimensions: 

1. L5 must have technical and functional competence in all things related to your team. 
2. L5 must understand the business context in which their team exists and why it matters to users. 
3. They must have organizational know-how and social capital that enables them to work on cross-team projects. 

3. Working With Others

Given that L5s manage projects with significant complexity and scope, they must develop this meta-skill. This one has many dimensions, such as writing, communication, planning, project management, etc. This only comes with deliberate practice.

4. Leadership

L5 leverages its expertise to make many small and big decisions. For more significant projects, you will need critical long-term thinking. You must uncover and present trade-offs and have strong opinions on what path the team should take. All of this is collectively covered under designing systems. This muscle, too, only comes with practice.

Strategy: Spiral of Success

“Take a simple idea, and take it seriously.”
– Charlie Munger

As you can see, there is much growing up to do. The overall strategy is simple: you need to maximize your learning rate. Learning in any complex domain happens only by doing, shipping, and learning from feedback. You need to do a lot of projects that are increasingly more complex. You need to optimize to be invited to do a lot of projects. For that, you need to increase the surface area of your opportunity. 

The best way to increase your opportunity surface area is to do the projects you get quickly and satisfactorily. Make doing things fast and well your brand. It is essential to go dapper in the significance of these two dimensions:

1. Fast: This is the key to turbocharging our learning process. The quicker you complete an assignment, the faster you get to do the next one. This enables you to do newer, different things sooner. And you keep accumulating a ton of delivered impact. 
2. Well: Doing a project well is key to earning your team’s trust. This is the best signal that you are ready for more significant responsibilities. It tells the team that you can carry your weight and more. This leads to increased scope and complexity in the next project. A project not well done is worse than a project not done. It erodes your brand; it delays critical and complex projects getting your way, robbing you of opportunities. 

Doing the first 2-3 assignments really fast and well leads to new and slightly bigger projects coming your way. You repeat the same process, forming a virtuous growth cycle, and before you know it, you will become a crucial team member. With every project done 

• You will learn new core skills, code something new, use new technology, see new interactions between technologies, and so on. You will become more independent and gain functional expertise. 
• You will gain more business context, which you will be able to connect to previous learning. Your holistic mental map of the whole area will start to become richer. This will make you more mature in a domain and improve your intuition, thus making you more independent. 
• You will earn the team's trust; you will make cross-team contacts. You keep accumulating social credentials. With time, you learn more about your adjacent teams, their systems, and how they join with your team. With more context, you become more creative, and you are able to generate more possible solutions to choose from. 

• Once you have sufficient context, more open-ended assignments will come your way. You want to reach this phase as soon as you can. These projects give you the opportunity to hone skills like writing, designing, project management, cross-team work, and overall leadership. 

Notice that this strategy does not discuss what to do on the projects. It’s all about how to do them. The “what” will keep changing as you take on bigger responsibilities. Initially, this will primarily involve coding and testing. But increasingly, there will be more investigation, communication, coordination, design, and so on. 

The key point is that your strategy should be the same, and you should do every assignment very fast and very well. This means doing well and making fast changes with changes in scope. Just like writing good code has a learning curve, doing good planning or writing well will have a learning curve. The only way to learn fast is to lean in, go through the discomfort, and do a lot of it. You have to really earn it. 

Execution

You can not apply this strategy blindly. You are providing a service. As you focus on learning and personal growth, ensure you deliver value to the organization and users. Ultimately, the delivered impact is the only thing that matters. While you're at it, treat everyone you interact with better than you wish to be treated. Be unreasonable in your hospitality. In the long run, this is in your self-interest because this leads to more opportunities coming your way. 

How to Do Things Fast?

First, consider how much it should take you upfront for each granular task. And then see how much time it actually takes. This is not about being right; it is about being deliberate. You will be mostly wrong in both directions, and that's okay. This is about figuring out how and why you are wrong and incrementally correcting for it. If you finish too fast, you will adjust your intuition. If you finish too slowly, you need to debug why. From that debugging, you will learn to do things faster. It's a win-win situation.

Projects can be done in a much shorter time than the time allocated to them, especially in cases where they don't need cross-team coordination. This is simply because people naturally procrastinate. To counter this, you should always set very aggressive timelines for yourself. You will meet such timelines more often than you think. An aggressive timeline helps attain focus, which is a force multiplier. You can do more in one 4-hour chunk than four 1-hour chunks. Find that sweet spot for you. 

Second, do not shy away from seeking help. Do not work in isolation. Sometimes, you spend a day on a thing that your teammate could have helped you within 15 minutes. Seek that help. Do your homework before seeking help. 

A well-framed help looks like this: I am trying to do X, I have attempted A, B, and C, and I am stuck. Can you help me figure out what I am missing? But seek the help. Because help means you will finish your assignment faster, and thus, you will be able to get the next assignment faster. Remember, your goal is to increase opportunity surface area. 

Finally, you must put in the hours — your growth compounds with time. Thus, the hours you put in the first few weeks, months, and years will keep giving benefits for many years to come. The intensity really matters here. With focus, a lot can be done in a day or a week. You could wrap your head around a new domain in a week. You could take a month, too, but then you lose out on some opportunities. Be relentless.

How to Do Things Well?

This boils down to two traits you can cultivate: curiosity and care. A healthy curiosity is essential to doing things well. It leads to more questions and a better understanding of the subject. Chasing every odd observation leads to the early identification of bugs and, thus, better quality output. With curiosity, you will not be confined to only your project. Still, you will learn from projects around you, too, which helps you spin up faster on the business domain and increases your opportunity surface area. 

Care is about the polish in your output. Early in your career, you still do not have a taste for what is considered “well done.” To counter that, you need to have a feedback and improvement loop. You will have teammates, users, or managers to work with for everything you work on. Show your work to them, seek feedback, identify improvement areas, and then make the improvements. Repeat this cycle many times, and fast. Naturally, you will develop a taste for what's well done, which is a requirement for a senior software engineer. 

What if Fast and Well Conflict?

Suppose you have to make a tradeoff between well and fast. Prioritize doing things well. It's okay to be a bit slow initially while finding your feet, but it's never okay to half-do things. 

Here, seeking feedback is crucial, as your own sense of what is well done is not yet fully developed. Seek feedback on what you are good at and what is not overkill. Seek clarity on requirements. Get your plans reviewed by teammates just to make sure. 

A Few More Things About Day-to-Day Practices

• Take all assignments, even if you don’t like them. Growing as a senior means caring about the business. If there is something that you don't like to do but needs to be done to have a business outcome, take it. Volunteer for the things no one wants to do. Because you do things so fast, unpleasant assignments will be short-lasting and earn you a lot of goodwill. 
• Some projects move slower than others despite your best efforts. But there will be downtimes. You will wait on other teams, data jobs will run long, builds will take time, code reviews will be delayed, and so on. To fully occupy yourself, try to have two or more assignments going in parallel, but ensure your primary assignments are always on track. 
• If you still have spare time, read the incoming tickets, bug reports, and design documents. Keep up with the Slack discourse. Be a sponge, absorbing all the context around you. Curiosity will help here. 
• Make a point of being excellent on on-call rotations, as they are an excellent learning opportunity to get involved in the whole team context. 

Tracking

As you execute this strategy, it is essential to ensure that you are on the right track and hitting the milestones along the way.

Phase 1: Foundations

• Complete small tasks. Build confidence by reliably delivering well-defined tasks.
• Understand team systems and tools. Gain familiarity with the team's codebase, tooling, and workflows.
• Build trust. As you deliver consistently, your team begins to rely on you for essential contributions.
• Grasp team dynamics. Develop an understanding of what everyone on the team is working on and how their work connects.
• Acquire operational knowledge. Achieve a working knowledge of the technologies and systems used by your team.

Phase 2: Gaining Independence

• Write small design documents. Begin drafting plans for features that take several weeks to implement.
• Handle feedback. Your code and designs require minimal feedback as you consistently land on effective solutions.
• Communicate more. Transition from primarily coding to more discussions, planning, and presenting your ideas.
• Tackle cross-team investigations. Collaborate with other teams to solve problems that extend beyond your immediate scope.
• Lead incident responses. Take charge of resolving incidents and develop a reputation for reliability under pressure.

Phase 3: Expanding Scope

• Own medium-sized projects. Successfully deliver projects lasting 2-3 months, taking responsibility for their end-to-end execution.
• Increase visibility. Participate in multiple discussions and contribute to projects spanning different teams.
• Propose solutions. Take on open-ended, high-level challenges and provide thoughtful, actionable solutions.
• Mentor peers. Offer guidance and support to less experienced colleagues, building your leadership skills.
• Contribute to design discussions. Meaningfully engage in conversations about system architecture and project strategies.

Phase 4: Strategic Impact

• Lead large-scale projects. Identify and own initiatives that have cross-team or company-wide implications.
• Develop frameworks and tools. Create solutions that improve productivity or simplify workflows for your team.
• Advocate for best practices. Promote coding standards, testing strategies, and effective development processes.
• Represent your team. Act as a spokesperson in cross-functional meetings, advocating for your team’s goals.
• Drive innovation. Bubble ideas for what the team should tackle next and align them with organizational priorities.

Tracking With Manager

You need to make sure that your management team sees that you are progressing on the career ladder defined by the organization. You need to keep a tight loop with your manager and explicitly sync with them regularly. You could do this monthly at the completion of each project or both. 

The best way to keep yourself and your manager accountable is to document every such check-in in a structured way rooted in the ladder. Here is a template that could be useful for such tracking

Parting Thoughts

Do not compare yourself with others. Focus on your rate of improvement. Your goal is to have the fastest possible growth for yourself, not to compare yourself to others. Everyone is different, with different starting points, in different teams, and with various projects. Thus, everyone’s growth will be different. Don't waste time agonizing over others.