In this post, I’ll share some reflections and top content from the past few months.

Reflections

My YouTube channel has struggled in 2023. This is directly tied to Taro since most people discover us through YouTube or LinkedIn. Here’s the cumulative subscriber count for the past 1.5 years:

This clearly shows how my channel has basically plateaued for the last 6 months. I’m making videos consistently, but the views (and therefore, subscribers) are not growing. It’s disheartening because I’m putting in the same amount of effort, but the videos are not getting picked up by the algorithm to the same degree that the 2022 bangers were (e.g. [1], [2]).

My channel is still very much alive, though! There is a core contingent of users who watch every video, and I’m making a promising video that breaks down my $800K TC at Meta. Everyone loves salary discussions, especially large numbers at a FAANG company, so I’m hoping to deliver on the curiosity while also being genuinely useful. (This is your subtle cue to subscribe if you haven’t already…)

Despite the YouTube troubles, life at Taro is going quite well. Active users on the platform are growing nicely, and I love talking to software engineers about their careers almost every day 😇 Two things worth calling out:

• We’ve invested heavily in events, which has worked really well. People love hearing directly from credible eng leaders who share tactical advice. Here are some upcoming events:

  • Jul 13: Autism Allyship and Identity in Tech by Lee McKeeman and Jaswir Raghoe

  • Jul 29: Join us for the first Taro Bay Area meetup (in-person!)

  • Aug 7: Growing to Meta Tech Lead and then Entrepreneurship - by Jocelin Ho

  • On the docket: book clubs, promotion case studies, and office hours.

• We’re seeing a lot more activity on the Q&A platform. Alex and I love replying to many of the thoughtful questions here, but it’s been incredible to see tons of quality replies from Taro Experts.

Top content

Alex shares the story of how the Instagram mobile apps reached a staggering userbase with limited test coverage. The Taro discussion is about how to handle testing pressures when there’s no one available to help.

I like to think we integrated AI in a tasteful way on Taro: a chatbot trained on Taro content, with links directly to the content which generated the answer. Try it at joinTaro.com today.

Intern season is upon us! Tens of thousands of people used our software internship survival guide.

Yes, Senior Staff Engineers make a lot! Getting to that level means that you’ve earned the trust of the leadership team to get stuff done, despite last-minute bugs, XFN thrash, or unclear product requirements. A mid-level Meta engineer asks about this on Taro here.

This was a very different email: some personal reflections along with a content roundup. Did you love it or hate it? (just reply!)

Best,

Rahul and Alex

Discover Taro Premium

Yes, I’m very excited that the domain was available 😊 We’re hard at work to make this jam-packed with value for software engineers:

• We’ll cover the basics: when performance review happens, rating breakdowns at each level, and the promotion process

• We’ll also share insights for each company, with advice from engineers at various levels

We’ve talked to hundreds of engineers at target companies already, so I’m really excited to bring this to life.

If you have thoughts on what you’d like to see, or if you want to contribute from your company’s perspective, please reach out.

Get early access to promotions.fyi

I’ve gotten a ton of questions about the tech stack for Taro. I’ll probably make a video about this on YouTube, but here’s the gist of it.

First, the guiding principle for Taro is that we care more about users than technology. We’re happy to use boring tech since our priority is to deliver value as quickly as possible.

• Web app: TypeScript, Next.js, Tailwind (deployed with Vercel)

• Android app: Kotlin + XML layouts

• iOS app: Swift UI

• We use Firestore for the database and Firebase Storage for images and videos

• We heavily use Firebase triggers for things like notifications and data synchronization across the NoSQL data store. Our backend is written in TypeScript.

• We have a bunch of internal dashboards: tracking referrals, managing events, and sending out notifications. We initially built these from scratch, but we recently discovered the magic of low-code tools (in particular, Retool)

• Stripe runs our financial infrastructure (payment and billing)

• We use Posthog extensively for analytics

• We use loops.so for sending both transactional and marketing emails

One thing worth calling out: we don’t worry much about compute efficiency. We have 25K active users on Taro. Hopefully that number will double or triple soon, but even then, we are a far cry from social media scale (the typical size for an experiment at Facebook was a few million users). Because we’re small, we focus on developer time instead of machine time.

For example, a new response in Taro’s forum will spawn multiple additional document updates in a fairly inefficient way. We could improve this, but we don’t need to. Taro will succeed based on how much we help engineers in their career; at this stage, it would be foolish to optimize our Google Cloud bill.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard of, and perhaps tried, the generative AI chatbots from OpenAI (Chat GPT) and Google (Bard AI). Unlike web3, the hype here is justified:

Hope to see you at one of our upcoming events soon!

Rahul & Alex

joinTaro.com

Highlighted discussion in Taro: 

• “How do your teams handle scope creep?” with responses from an SDE3 at Amazon and an Eng Manager at Mistplay

• Use Code Review Feedback For Hypergrowth - Meta Prodigy Engineer Story

• “How to hold people accountable for Action Items from meetings?” from a Senior Software Engineer [E5] at DoorDash

• The full masterclass “How To Build Deep Relationships Quickly In Tech” from Dec 17 is now available

This is your last chance to use your learning budget for 2022. If you’re still have budget, and you’re looking for a place with the highest credibility engineers engaged in real discussions, consider joining Taro Premium.

Latest video

How important is location (Silicon Valley) to your career as a software engineer? 

Upcoming events

• Jan 11: Group Office Hours #7 by Alex Chiou

• Jan 12: "How To Become A Data Guru As An Engineer - The Executive Perspective" by Mo Shahangian

• Jan 14: "How To Navigate Tech Industry Layoffs" by Alex and Rahul

Around the web

The Southwest Airlines meltdown is due to an unmaintainable scheduling system which is 20+ years old. The cost of poor technology here is far, far more expensive than the cost incurred by the poor weather conditions in the US in the past week.

Build, then learn. Not the other way around. 

 Rahul & Alex

https://jointaro.com/membership

Thanks to everyone who replied to our last email about contributing to the Taro blog! Taro gives you the insider perspective on career growth from credible engineers, and the blog is a great way to highlight many perspectives.

Our first guest post is now live from Michael Lin, 3 Ways To Create Luck in Your Career (as an Engineer). Would love your feedback, and you can follow Michael on LinkedIn here.

Latest Taro Content

We published highlights from our session about writing better code faster as a software engineer, available now in Taro. Here’s how the time spent after writing code differs between a n00b and pro engineer:

Watch Taro videos

Around the web

My reflections on eng culture after visiting Spain for the first time:

Computer Science is, by far, the most popular major now at colleges like Stanford. This was not the case 10 years ago. I saw the shift from BA degrees to BS degrees while I was a student in the early 2010s:

Rahul & Alex

https://jointaro.com/membership

Quick hits from Taro:

• Asking questions is NOT a sign of weakness: https://link.jointaro.com/pj34UDSNucpgryzr5

• Don’t spend too much time just reading code: https://link.jointaro.com/RnVXsjn88phzrYGY7

• From a senior eng at DoorDash: “How to talk about unexpected problems in performance reviews?”

BTW, Taro now has a blog at joinTaro.com/blog! We’re looking for guest contributors. You’d be a good fit if: 

• You work as a software engineer or manager (probably Senior+)

• You care about helping other engineers

• You have an insight or contrarian perspective on something non-coding related

We’ll take care of distributing your post and tagging you. If you’re interested, reply to this email!

Latest video

It's Hard Performing At FAANG - How Software Engineers Struggle At Big Tech

Many engineers, despite being extremely smart, still do very poorly in Big Tech companies. Avoid these traps as you grow your career.

Around the web

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s new generative AI chatbot, was released 3 days ago. It immediately went viral due to both the creativity and quality of the produced text. 

The fact that even people immersed in the field of AI are amazed is a sign of how important this technology will be, and software engineers will be deeply impacted.

Some interesting takes: 

Happy December!

Rahul & Alex

https://jointaro.com/membership 

When it comes to writing lots of impactful code, the U.S. Navy SEALs say it best: “Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast”. (Perhaps one of the few similarities between software engineers and the SEALs 🙈)

A good demonstration of this concept applied to coding is one diff, one thesis.

Be Amazing Anywhere As A Software Engineer

My latest video is about successful onboarding. Here are some frameworks and tactics when you join a new team or company.

BTW, we just launched the Taro blog: joinTaro.com/blog. I’d love for you to tell me what stories or data you’d like to see.

So excited for Thanksgiving!

Rahul & Alex

• “Aftermath of layoffs?” asked by the Taro community

• The full recording is out for How To Succeed At A New Team Or Company As A Software Engineer.

• “How do I balance addressing fires and working on p0's?” from a Mid-Level Software Engineer at Meta

Audio Event on Wednesday

Alex and I are trying our first LinkedIn Audio event on Wednesday at 6pm PT! We’ll be talking about How To Get Stuff Done In Tech. 

This is the “how do I stop scrolling Instagram and actually get work done?” session. Since we can’t present slides, this will be more informal and conversational if you want to join us on the stage.

Find the details here – you’ll be able to enter the live event through LinkedIn at start time.

Learn about Taro membership

Latest video

The past few months have obviously been tough for many of us in the tech industry. I talk about the current and future state of layoffs in my latest video.

We’ve made all the discussions + resources about layoffs free in Taro: https://www.jointaro.com/tag/w7kqFY2Fe8BVTts5uqEt

Rahul & Alex

https://jointaro.com/membership

• Alex just published an in-depth System Design Series. This is an amazing way to understand how system design/architecture review is done in “real life” at an established company.

• “How to overcome imposter syndrome with amazing teammates?” from a Senior Engineer at Netflix

• “If becoming senior involves finding your own scope, how does this work alongside a product manager?” from an engineer at Booking.com 

Questions from real engineers in Taro

Taro Premium session

This Saturday: hear from employee #10 at a company which is now a $10B unicorn (Klaviyo).

Seed Zeng, now a Staff Engineer at DoorDash, will talk about why you should (and should not) join a startup, along with career growth insights he's picked up over the years.

RSVP here: https://www.linkedin.com/events/hyperchargingyoursoftwarecareer6992163609573294080/ 

Latest video

I came into Meta expecting a pristine codebase and flawless development environment. I couldn’t have been more wrong 😣 It took me months to figure out how to become productive again.

 I cover this in my latest video. If you're coming into Big Tech from a startup, some parts of your job as a software engineer become harder. I talk about four dimensions of development that are more painful in FAANG compared to smaller companies. 

(yes, I do have a “thumbnail guy” now 😂 I’d love your candid feedback on this style)

Happy November!

Rahul & Alex

https://jointaro.com/membership

1. Building influence across orgs as a Software Engineer

2. Engineers and the stock market

3. For engineers on a new team: our next live event Saturday, October 29

Building influence as a Software Engineer

We got great feedback from the session last week by Cat Chen (Staff+ engineer at Robinhood, Facebook, Baidu). It’s available now in Taro (our next premium session is with a Staff Eng at DoorDash).

Cat led the effort within Facebook to launch Android apps on 10+ non-Google app stores to expand distribution. This turns out to be less of an engineering challenge and more of a policy/legal challenge, but Cat built enough relationships across the org to get the job done. 

Takeaways: 

• When a team or individual pushes back, understand the “why” behind their answer. 

• Re-emphasize your objective, and be candid about your desire for feedback. (“I’m a noob, and I’d love your perspective”)

• At very senior levels, you don’t need to write code to have impact. 

Engineers And The Market

My recent post went viral on LinkedIn.

In 2017, I received 2 senior engineering offers: Snapchat and Facebook. I chose Facebook, but that didn’t stop me from checking each company’s stock price every day. Who else does this? 🙋🏽

Over the next 5 years, the stock for each company swung wildly, and so did my emotions. At one point, in 2018, Snapchat sunk to an all-time low. In late 2020, Snapchat stock hit its all time high, more than 13x from trough to peak. 

I could have been a millionaire multiple times over. Facebook went through similar swings, but at different times. Now, both companies are doing poorly, far below the 2017 levels when I would have joined.

Underlying our compulsion to check stocks everyday is the question “what if? What if I picked the wrong company, or what if I need to sell because the stock went up? 

Here’s the reality: you can’t undo decisions, and you can’t do much to change the stock price of your current company. 

Why would you pin your happiness on something you can’t control? If you focus on becoming more valuable to your company, that will have the biggest impact on your overall career + finances over the long term.

The Refactoring Newsletter

I want to take a moment to recommend a newsletter by a friend of Taro, Luca Rossi.

The Refactoring newsletter helps you become a better tech leader by sharing weekly, practical advice about your work. It’s read by 20K+ subscribers every week.

Our readers get a special 33% discount for the paid plan, valid until Monday (Oct 31st — Happy Halloween!). Here is what paid subscribers receive:

• A new original essay every week ✍🏽

• Access to a curated library of essays and resources (250+) 📚

• Access to exclusive discounts worth $50K+ on selected engineering tools 🎁

Be a part of Refactoring

Learn more about Refactoring here!

Next live event

Our next live session is about succeeding as the new software engineer in a team or company, happening October 29 at 10am PT. This is huge topic, relevant for all engineers:

• Engineers frequently switch teams or companies, which means effective onboarding is critical to their success. 

• Even if you’re not onboarding, you’ll work with people who are new (and therefore onboarding). This session will help you understand what these people need to succeed.

Hope to see many of you there!

Rahul & Alex

https://jointaro.com/membership

1. Taro is live on Product Hunt!

2. 3 Traits Of The Fastest Growing Software Engineers

3. Our next event from Cat Chen (Staff Engineer) this Saturday

Product Hunt Launch

After weeks of preparation, we just launched on Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/taro-tech-career-mentorship. If you’ve gotten any value from Taro, we’d love for you to take 30 seconds to upvote and leave a comment!

We’re designing the career growth platform that we wish we had as we started our software engineering careers. Your feedback is so valuable – thanks to many of you who replied to last week’s email about creator incentives!

I think there’s a “proper” way to solicit feedback on Product Hunt (something about having prior activity?), but honestly we’d just love your support, however it comes 🥰

Let’s make more people aware of Taro!

3 Traits Of The Fastest Growing Software Engineers

My most recent YouTube video is about the patterns of the fastest growing software engineers I’ve ever worked with.

1️⃣ They act as feedback sponges.

These engineers seek out feedback, act on it quickly, and close the loop with the person who gave the feedback. Instead of just asking “how am I doing?”, they ask deeper questions to get more thoughtful answers.

2️⃣ They have an amazing ability to manage time and focus.

When these engineers start the day, they act with urgency to get things done. They don’t spend hours checking email, or waiting for code to compile.They follow one of 3 patterns to ensure meetings are actually valuable.

3️⃣ They have very clear communication, written + verbal.

The byproduct of clear, consistent communication is that you build strong relationships and trust. That trust leads to likability, which leads to faster career growth.

More details in the video!

Live Event with Cat Chen on October 22

Cat Chen is a very senior engineer who has worked at top companies like Robinhood, Meta, and Baidu. His level of fame reached a point within Facebook where he actually had a “Cat Chen fan club” 🙀

Cat had an astonishing ability within the company to share perspectives and stories which resonated with 1000s of employees. He’ll talk about building influence, working with cross-functional partners, and navigating multiple organizations. Details are in the LinkedIn event.

This live event with Cat is for Taro Premium members. Going forward, we’ll have events with talented engineers + managers every few weeks.. 

Get the details by joining us.

When you work with enough technologies + frameworks, you don’t get scared as easily :)

Rahul & Alex

https://jointaro.com/membership

1. Introducing Lee McKeeman as a Taro creator

2. Successful onboarding as an engineer

3. How does Taro succeed?

New Taro creator: Lee McKeeman 

Lee McKeeman is the newest creator on Taro. On LinkedIn he describes himself: “Staff Software Engineer at Google * Good Person to Know * Autistic” – he’s worked at several startups, along with a bunch of Big Tech cos (Amazon, Meta, and Google) 

We’ve been blown away by the detail + care he puts into so many questions. Some examples: 

• “How to run meetings effectively?” from a Senior Eng at Twitter: https://www.jointaro.com/question/CModSkZ4LWzw9bdaiakt/what-are-some-thoughts-on-maintaining-good-meeting-hygiene

• “How do I know what I’m good at?” from an Entry-Level Eng at a Series D company: https://www.jointaro.com/question/hksE5OSxktWdbnQQFdaT/how-do-i-know-what-im-great-at 

• “How to balance between specialization and pigeonholing?” from a Senior Eng at Zendesk: https://www.jointaro.com/question/HL8uNNhwyPLBGv6RWaTX/how-to-balance-between-specialization-and-pigeonholing 

With Taro, you can ask a question and get a high quality response from someone like Lee, Alex, Rachel, or other Taro Premium members here: https://www.jointaro.com/questions/create.

Successful onboarding as an engineer

We have a Taro Premium session coming up next week, but our next free live session is on Saturday, October 29 at 10am PT about onboarding. Find the details on the LinkedIn event.

As a primer to that event, here’s a great question about onboarding from a Senior SWE at Grab: https://www.jointaro.com/question/RiYijujiMNSZ9YhBo1Jd/what-is-the-most-effective-way-to-onboard-yourself-to-a-new-teams-domain 

The core parts of Alex’s and Rachel’s answer:

• Get clarity of what's important moving forward and learn by solving a problem. 

• Build a “learning agenda” and carve out time for deliberate learning

• Have clarity with your manager about the expectations for your onboarding (there should be a written artifact)

How Does Taro Succeed?

Lee is a prime example of what makes Taro work: we offer the highest quality discussions of software engineering career growth on the Internet. The question becomes, “How do we get more people like Lee to participate in Taro?”

When building a company, the expression “only the paranoid survive” is so true. You have to anticipate problems and mitigate them to continue growing.

This manifests in 2 ways:

1. As we’ve grown over the past few months, we need more high quality creators on Taro. If we don’t solve this incentive problem, we won’t be able to help 100s of thousands of engineers.

2. We need sustainable growth channels. Today, a bad week on my YouTube channel translates to a bad week on Taro, which is an uncomfortable place to be. I’ve seen channels with 100K+ subscribers that are effectively dead because they got off the content treadmill. Attracting other creators and doing better with things like SEO will help diversify where traffic is coming from.

If you have ideas here, I’d love to hear from you! What are ways we could make it compelling for you to share your wisdom on Taro?

p.s. if you’re interested in logistics around things like founder salaries, check out my most recent video.

Share Tech Career Growth - Alex + Rahul

The image below perfectly captures the need for Taro. Just like any other profession, the gap between a competent programmer and a great software engineer is enormous. 

Taro is designed to show you what great looks like, and then help you get there. We’d love to have you join us.

Rahul & Alex

https://jointaro.com/membership

1. Introducing group office hours for Taro Premium members

2. Dealing with imposter syndrome

3. Recapping the team selection event

Group Office Hours

We’re trying a new experiment for Taro Premium members. Rather than a formal event with an agenda and slides, Alex held a session of “group office hours” where members drop in and talk about a problem or scenario at work. Others on the call can listen and jump in, which leads to live feedback + serendipitous encounters.

The next group OH will be Friday, October 14 (I plan to join as well!). Here’s the LinkedIn event – we’ll post details in the Premium member Slack.

We also have an upcoming live discussion with Cat Chen in ~2 weeks. He’s been a very senior engineer at companies like Facebook, Robinhood, and Chime. He’ll talk about his wildly successful approach to build influence within the company. LinkedIn event.

Download the Taro mobile app

Imposter syndrome

My latest video is “The Unseen Plague Among Software Engineers: Imposter Syndrome.” I’ve personally felt like a fraud at several points in my career, and you will too. Here are 4 effective ways to ensure you’re not paralyzed by imposter syndrome: 

1️⃣ Give yourself permission to fail

2️⃣ Seek out supporters + feedback

3️⃣ Find community

4️⃣ Take action toward your goal

Full details in the video: 

Choosing A Great Company & Team As A Software Engineer

Thanks to the 300 of you who joined us live last Saturday! Here’s a recap of what we discussed:

Identify your priorities

• Figure out what’s important to you and what’s not. Create a stack-ranked list and work backwards from the top 2-3 to figure out the best opportunities for you

• Factors to consider: compensation, work-life balance, company prestige, supportiveness of team, growth opportunities, stability, maximum outcome (risk), remote work, product space, technical space, level/title, benefits, location

Supportiveness and overall quality of the team are often underrated

• It’s really hard to grow and have a healthy work life without this.

• If you like your manager/teammates and you feel like you’re regularly learning/being challenged by them, deeply cherish that. People underestimate how hard it is to find an environment like this. Even in a prestigious company like Big Tech, this is difficult to find.

Big Tech vs. Startups

• This is largely a question about risk tolerance - Startups can have insane monetary/promotion outcomes, but they also might collapse the next year.

• In a vacuum: Start off at a Big Tech company to build a good foundation and then switch into smaller companies to have more scope/ownership

Learning the quality of a team

• Talk to engineers/ICs if you can - The manager will inherently be biased towards their own team as they are often goaled on hiring

• Make sure that the team has a healthy oncall process and fast code review iteration

The full session recording is now available on Taro for Premium members. Other reasons to become a Taro member (https://jointaro.com/membership): 

• Figure out the proper next company for you given your stage in career

• Evaluate and compare offers

• Negotiation

Quick Hits

• Highlighted free content: “How many YoE are required to be a senior SWE?” https://app.jointaro.com/question/D9RjNUq6zRVNi6AMfYn4 

• Highlighted premium content: “Best onboarding tips when multiple people are onboarding?” From a junior engineer at Amazon: https://app.jointaro.com/question/TxjJsmn9URWYjppKLfpC 

• Meme of the week: 

Happy October!

Rahul & Alex

https://jointaro.com/membership 

1. Introducing Rachel, Lee, and Seed on Taro

2. How to choose which company to join

3. Details for our live session tomorrow about team selection

Introducing Rachel, Lee, and Seed on Taro

Alex and I went to the Airbnb HQ in San Francisco to chat with Rachel Zhao on a variety of topics: the top mistakes engineers make, the importance of using English in the workplace, and how to think about staff engineer promos. Find those videos here:  

Learn from Rachel on Taro

We’ve also onboarded two fantastic creators in Lee McKeeman (staff eng on Google + LinkedIn famous) and Seed Zeng (staff eng at DoorDash, ex-Meta). Check out some of their responses in Taro: 

• (Lee) “How do you network effectively within a company?”: https://link.jointaro.com/uBCEUcqvhZt3iHBm8 

• (Seed) “How do I turn SWE roles descriptions into concrete actions in a startup?” https://link.jointaro.com/gMLPFjBFmKPGMwnb6 

If you ask a question in Taro, you’ll get a significantly better answer compared to anywhere else on the internet :)

Choosing a company as a software engineer

Here are 2 ways you should NOT evaluate a job opportunity, especially if you're looking at Big Tech:

❌ Don't focus on how much you liked (or did not like) the people in the interview process.

The recruiter/interviewer is NOT representative of your life at the company. Instead, focus on trends of the people joining the company, rather than individual data points.

❌ Don't spend time looking at the financials of the company

Humans have a really hard time with exponential growth. If you're joining a disruptive company, or even a big tech co growing 30% y/y, it's hard / impossible to predict how the company will change in the coming years.

My most recent YouTube video covers (IMO) a better way to evaluate which company to join:

Choosing a team as a software engineer

Once you’ve committed to a company, the next step is to pick your team. Within big tech, the team you pick can impact your career + growth more than the company.

Tomorrow we have our next Tech Career Growth live session “Choosing A Great Company & Team As A Software Engineer”. 

Mark yourself attending and grab the Zoom link on the LinkedIn event. In the meantime, we have existing resources + Q&A in Taro:

Free

• “How do I know when it’s time to leave a team/company?” - https://link.jointaro.com/4QnYTeAwNrugmmkF9

• “What’s the difference between Big Tech and startups in terms of learning and growth?” - https://link.jointaro.com/tWzx3ggRXLBshexv9

• Why You Should Start Your Career At A Big Tech Company - https://link.jointaro.com/9k3HkgfJsTp1Nd2w5

• Questions You Can Ask To Evaluate An Engineering Manager - https://link.jointaro.com/ByjnL1VbaePfXSUp8

• “How do I factor in oncall into my team selection?” - https://link.jointaro.com/rBGgdKSwY4pSkXus9

• “What’s the best way to think about a team switch?” (lots of Meta-specific advice) - https://link.jointaro.com/iQbmorDuqxm4DRuWA 

Premium

• Full 1.5 hour session on finding a great engineering manager who will support you: https://link.jointaro.com/r6A67w77hYobJge79

• “How can you tell if a large public company is going in the right direction?” - https://link.jointaro.com/qqwNf65YZJsiU5JY9

• “What does it mean to not have enough scope to be promoted?” - https://link.jointaro.com/NEqz7SCR63g4kN2eA

• “What should I look for in a new team in terms of growth?” - https://link.jointaro.com/vd3HM4Zaju8Zeun57

• “Things to keep in mind while switching teams and targeting promotion to Senior Level?” - https://link.jointaro.com/cuMEJS4GusQ1PmTQ6

Hope to see you tomorrow!

Rahul & Alex

https://jointaro.com/membership 

1. Company breakdown of members

2. Three ways to build your own scope

3. Highlighted Taro content

Taro is a premium membership for ambitious software engineers, focused on career growth. Taro gives you the inside scoop on onboarding, promotion, and compensation, both from your peers and tech leaders. 

We’ve been really happy with the growth of Taro. We now have 250 Taro Premium members, with the most represented companies being Meta (35), Amazon (25), and Google (20). There are also at least 2 engineers each at companies like Pinterest, DoorDash, Stripe, and Uber.

As we get more users, we also get more questions + answers in our database, which makes the data even more valuable for new members. Join Taro Premium here: https://app.jointaro.com/membership. If your company offers a learning budget, you can use our template to request reimbursement.

Build your own scope

In my most recent video, I talk about 3 ways to combat the common frustration from engineers around not having enough scope:

1. Carve out time unencumbered by the process and noise of working on a team.

2. Be aware of what’s happening in the ecosystem. Change results in innovation.

3. Bias toward action. You don’t need to ask for permission to create a pull request.

More details in the video:

Highlighted content

Cat Chen and Girish Patangay were two very senior, very prominent members from the early days of Facebook. They replied to a junior engineer at Meta about how to think about a team switch: ​​https://link.jointaro.com/ukJS65ZSh13RvQV49. Our next live session is actually on this topic on October 1: how to find a good team as a software engineer. 

Selected Taro content:

• A mid-level eng at Amazon is curious what questions to ask their future manager: https://link.jointaro.com/7v3qQcaFSxsZfzzv7 

• Our 1 minute Demo Day presentation for Y Combinator (premium): https://link.jointaro.com/ypJ5G7JgdSwTYEbN8 

• “Why is Taro called Taro?” https://link.jointaro.com/7wiTZ7QCpPUF3EcQA 

Have a great week!

Rahul & Alex

https://jointaro.com/membership

Today we’ll cover: 

1. How to create a compelling interview experience (as a candidate and interviewer)

2. Three reflections on Taro members so far

3. Meme of the week

A Compelling Interview Experience

If you’ve been an engineer in the same company for a while, you’ve probably conducted interviews. How much did you think about your role? (If you’ve only ever been interviewing, understanding the mindset of the interviewer is very valuable.) 

Here were our main insights: 

1. The tension of being a great interviewer: you need to get signal while maximizing candidate experience. Can the candidate enjoy the experience even if they failed?

2. The way you get signal from the candidate is by assessing their response to questions where you can calibrate performance against others. This means that you need to be very careful giving hints. Remember, interviews are supposed to be challenging (but that doesn’t mean they have to be uncomfortable).

3. Never ever end an interview early due to poor candidate performance, especially an onsite round. Turn the interview into a fun pair programming exercise where you build cool stuff and help them become a better engineer.

4. If you're the candidate, communicate as much as possible and don't fish for hints. This gives the interviewer more opportunities to help you out. Doing the opposite can doom your chances.

Catch the full session from the live session on Saturday here. This is for Premium members, but we’ll have the session cutouts in the Taro app within 2 weeks.

Why Do People Join Taro Premium?

We now have more than 200 Taro Premium members and it’s been great talking to so many ambitious engineers around the world (82% in the US/Canada, 8% in Europe, 6% in India, and a handful in 3 other continents!). Alex and I think a lot about the “trigger point” – what makes someone actually decide to purchase a membership? We’ve identified 3 common patterns: 

1. Engineers who have several offers in hand and want feedback on the pros/cons of each company, and advice on negotiating. These are pivotal moments in anyone’s career. 

2. Engineers who just joined a new company and want support/feedback on the onboarding process.

3. Engineers who have been within a company for a while and want to meaningfully prepare for a promotion.

We’re finding many interesting patterns as we understand the motivations and concerns of engineers at high-leverage moments in their career. Our goal is to be genuinely useful, and we’ll share our findings over time with the broader community.

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Meme of the week

So many good ways to caption this :)

Finally, we’ll leave you with an interesting question from a Forward Deployed SWE at Palantir about average vs great engineers: https://app.jointaro.com/question/nMxx2EMVIlJbl1oK4SGu 

Rahul & Alex

https://jointaro.com/membership 

1. Insights to level up your communication as an engineer

2. Two upcoming events this week

Estimated reading time: 4.1 minutes 🔖

The Comms Plan

In my 4.5 years at Meta, I was consistently recognized for my ability to collaborate and build consensus. This skill becomes especially important as a Senior/Staff individual contributor, where your impact is defined by your ability to have influence without authority. Clear, consistent communication is the bedrock of influence.

In the last Taro Premium Session, I talked about 3 pillars of effective communication:

1. Start with the audience. Understand how much context your audience has, and connect the dots for them. Bad news should never be a surprise. Everything you say/write should be as short as possible. 

2. Choose the right medium. Is your goal to build relationships, or to efficiently communicate info? Synchronous (verbal) is better for the former, asynchronous (written) is better for the former. Spend time evaluating the different means of communication available to you: standups, team meetings, email updates, cross-org communication. (See image below)

3. Be consistent. You should have a regular drumbeat of posts for your work. If you feel like nothing happened, you should explain why nothing happened. For long-running processes like brainstorms or architecture reviews, you should consistently message the timeline and milestones.

You can find the full recording of this session, along with examples, for Taro Premium members here.

Share Tech Career Growth - Alex + Rahul

Two upcoming sessions 

• Friday Aug 26: Alex will do a deep dive on effective mentorship (Taro Premium)

• Saturday Aug 27: How To Be An Amazing Interviewer

Finally, here are some great recent Q&A on Taro: 

• Entry-Level Engineer [SDE 1] at Amazon asks “How many years of experience should I rack up at Amazon / in Big Tech before moving to a startup?”

• Mid-Level Engineer [E4] at Meta asks “How can I pick up other tech stacks more quickly at Meta?”

• Entry-Level Engineer [L3] at Google asks “Started my 1st FTE SWE job and been on my team for just a few weeks - What should I do?” (Taro Premium)

See you soon!

Rahul & Alex

https://jointaro.com/membership

1. The main insights for software engineers about performance review.

2. Taro now has a (bare-bones) web app! app.jointaro.com

Estimated reading time: 3.3 minutes 🔖

Improve Your Performance Reviews

Thanks to the ~500 of you who joined us to discuss how to navigate your performance review. The biggest mistake we’ve seen among software engineers in performance review is assuming that others understand their work. 

To avoid this issue, discuss each of your projects in 3 parts: 

1. What is the project?

2. Why is the project interesting and/or challenging? (explain the context)

3. What role did you have in the project’s impact?

If you make it simple + easy for someone to understand your impact, you’re already doing better than the majority of engineers. Here are the other takeaways from the session: 

• Understand the perf review process. Who decides promotion, and what role does your manager or TL play?

• Work with your manager at the beginning of every cycle to create a clear and living expectations document. This should be written down. 

• Be deliberate about the peers you want leaving feedback on your performance review. Assemble that cast at the beginning of the cycle and build deep 1:1 relationships.

You can find the session recording available in the Taro app. An unfortunate part of every perf system is the PIP. I just made a video about what you should know about PIPs here:

Taro now has a webapp!

Intuitively, an upskilling product for a knowledge worker will be used primarily on a laptop. So it’s surprising that we haven’t had a web app for Taro until now. We hope the app makes it significantly easier for you to discover + apply the content. 

Yes, we are planning to get some design help :P We’d love your feedback! 

From the 100+ Taro Premium members, we’ve gotten great feedback around the Q&A database, where you can find questions according to company + level. You also get access to an ever-growing set of case studies (I recently did one about my promo to E6 at Meta and receiving Additional Equity). You can also ask your own questions as a Premium member. 

Our next live session on Aug 27 is about how to be an amazing interviewer (LinkedIn event). We’ll talk about the job + mentality of an engineering interviewer, which is valuable as both an interviewer and candidate. See you there!

Best,

Rahul & Alex

https://jointaro.com/membership

1. Taro Premium is now generally available: https://jointaro.com/membership.

2. We’re taking part in Y Combinator, the preeminent startup accelerator.

The Taro Experience

After coaching software engineers for years and building a community of 10s of thousands of engineers through email, YouTube, and LinkedIn, Alex and I decided to leave our full-time jobs in January to see if we could make a living doing what we love.

Taro is designed to help SWEs get onboarded and promoted faster. Our thesis: there’s a severe lack of guidance on the non-coding parts of the software engineering job, which is what ambitious software engineers need to navigate their career.

If you don’t have a good manager or mentor at your job, you’re at a huge disadvantage in your career. Our goal with Taro is to provide high quality, contextual wisdom from tech veterans – we’re a coach that scales to all engineers, independent of company or level.

With Taro Premium, we package up the best career insights through personalized Q&A, bi-weekly sessions, and a community of peers. We feel confident that the cost pays for itself (many times over) if you fit in our target demographic of full time software engineers. 

• Premium is a great fit if you’re in North America and working at a fast-moving tech company. This is where we have the highest density of premium members already, and we’ve proven the effectiveness of our frameworks and tactics.

• Premium is not a good fit if you’re a freelancer, part-time contractor, or if you’re learning how to code. Our members are full-time engineers operating within a team.

Thank you to the 60+ of you who have joined Taro Premium already (from companies like Meta, Google, Microsoft, and TikTok) — it’s been amazing so far 🙏🏽

The YC Experience

We’re currently taking part of the current summer batch of YC (S22), which has >200 companies. Two observations:

The $500K finally hit our company bank account. We just agreed on how much to pay ourselves, which is nice after having no salary for 6+ months 💰 If you’re interested in things like salary + equity in a startup, we’re happy to share more details.

The signaling from being a YC company is huge. Tons of people have reached out looking to invest, partner with us, or work at Taro. This has tremendous value, and it doesn’t even consider the network within YC. Getting into YC is like getting into a prestigious college: people assume you have it all figured out, even if you don’t 😅

Alex and I talk about where we are in this 4 minute video:

We’re always open to feedback — just reply! We want to create the “Amazon Prime” of software engineering – the membership will have immediate and sticky value.

Best,

Rahul & Alex

joinTaro.com

ps. Thanks to the ~500 of you who joined us for “how to navigate your performance review” live session. You can find the full recording as part of Taro Premium.

Today we’ll cover:

1. The impacts of a poor outlook for tech.

2. Our next live session about performance review.

3. Our dedicated course for SWE interns to succeed.

Estimated reading time: 3.1 minutes 🔖

This is the first time most of us are experiencing a sharp pullback in the tech industry (the last one being the Great Financial Crisis in 2008). Historically, recessions have lasted between 6 and 18 months, which means we’re just getting started...

In a recession, employees will extend their tenure at companies. Since fewer companies are hiring, bidding wars are less common, which reduces the incentive for job hopping – that sweet TC bump is now much harder to come by. From talking to dozens of engineers, we’ve observed that success in the current job has become dramatically more important in this environment.

Central to success in your job is understanding your company’s performance review system. Lucky for you, we’re holding a free live session about exactly this topic on Saturday, July 23. For better or worse, perf reviews are a big part of every engineer’s life, so it’s worth understanding how to get some benefit from them. 

Join 3.8K people to learn the hacks and optimizations Alex and I have applied in our careers. The session is happening at 10am California on Saturday: details in the LinkedIn event.

SWE Intern Success

We now have dozens of engineers in Taro Premium, and we’re making the membership more valuable every week.

As part of this effort, we launched our first course! We distilled years of experience managing interns into a 1 hour, 8-part video course to help SWE interns succeed. We specifically talk about the Meta internship program, but anyone interning as a software engineer at a large tech co will get immense value.

Get access to the course (and more) by joining Taro: https://joinTaro.com/membership. Managers have also found the course directly applicable in their dealings with interns. 

You can get a taste of the course from my most recent YouTube video:

• An open secret about internship programs: companies don’t expect interns to create business impact, but the best interns are still hugely valuable.

• Good questions have inherent value for you *and* the team: you're showing others what's confusing for someone new to the team.

Hope to see you in the members-only Slack!

Rahul & Alex

joinTaro.com

1. Why Philip Su, a former eng director at Facebook, bought coffee for the whole company.

2. How to evaluate if you’re a good fit with the most important part of a job: the people. 

3. Starting an experiment with Taro Premium.

Estimated reading time: 3.4 minutes 🔖

First, I wanted to let you know about Quastor. 

The best way to learn how companies build products is to read a lot of technical blogs.

Almost every big tech company out there maintains an engineering blog where senior developers talk about their architecture, lessons learned and mistakes made.

Quastor is a free newsletter that finds the best big tech engineering blog posts out there and sends you a summary of the main takeaways along with resources to learn more.

Tens of thousands of developers read Quastor and use the insights to level up in their career. I personally look forward to reading the Quastor newsletter each week!

Subscribe to Quastor

Philip Su’s Badge Post

On Valentine’s Day 2018, I came into the Facebook office and happily discovered that someone bought coffee for me. The oat milk latte at the Philz on campus would normally set me back $5, but on this day I walked into the campus coffee shop and got a free drink.

BUT it wasn’t just me who received the random act of kindness. The entire company, tens of thousands of people, received free coffee 🤯

The benefactor? After 8 years, Philip Su was leaving Facebook and decided to go out with a (caffeinated) bang. As an eng director, he started two major engineering offices, in Seattle and London. This goodbye post – “badge post” in Facebook parlance – was his way of thanking the company for the hyper-growth experience. Philip and I chatted about this for a YouTube video, but he packed so much wisdom into our conversation that we put the overflow in the Taro mobile app. Direct link if you’re on mobile: https://jointaro.page.link/jLbzqhR8HcCBB2cJ7

Aside from being a fun story, why am I sharing this? I believe the internal company community  + discussions are underappreciated when evaluating career decisions. Everyone looks at compensation, job title, and tech stack, but we rarely ask questions about team culture and group dynamics.

Evaluating the community + communication for employees

People who work at a given company are inherently self-selecting into that culture, so make sure the culture resonates with you before you commit to spending 40+ hours/week with them. Some ways to get at this:

1. Talk to senior individual contributors (ICs) who have been at the company for 9+ months. ICs will have a better pulse on culture compared to managers, and they can talk about how it has evolved. What’s an example of a tradeoff they made?

2. Which values does the company reject? A strong culture is not only about holding strong values, but also knowing which values are being rejected. “Move fast and break things” famously prioritized iteration speed over quality.

3. How much do coworkers share about their work + non-work priorities? Is everyone on the team aware of the risks on an adjacent project? Or of someone’s home-buying saga? There’s no right answer, but contrast the answer across companies.

Most companies will have various tools to facilitate workplace communication and cohesion. Are you going to be happy with the tools available to you? At Meta, I really appreciated the internal groups based on job profile, interests, or commonalities. A few of my favorites:

• e-nonmanagers: only IC engineers were allowed (no managers!), which created a safe space to discuss things like team switches and perf questions.

• Rahul @ Facebook: I started this group as a way to facilitate easy hangouts + communication with all 120+ employees named Rahul. We held annual meetups.

• FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early): for financially-minded employees, this group was vastly more useful than any of the public blogs about financial independence since it was high-trust and high-context.

I also appreciated having colleagues like Philip who shared their experiences openly, and occasionally even bought the entire company coffee :) 

Our experiment in charging for something

We started the Tech Career Growth community 1.5 years ago, and if LinkedIn stats are to be believed, 17.2K people want to hear from us (whether they’re coming for memes [1] or the advice, I’m not sure).

So far, everything has been completely free, which has been amazing. We’ll always have substantial free content, but Alex and I also quit our jobs 6 months ago. To figure out the plan for sustainably helping software engineers, we’re opening up 100 slots for something we’re calling “Taro Premium”: joinTaro.com/membership. Joining this inaugural edition gives you 1:1 time with us, along with premium features in the app. Consider joining :)

[1] Alex is the master of meme:

Rahul & Alex

joinTaro.com

p.s. At Facebook, coffee from the self-serve machines is free, but not if you want a barista to make it for you from shops like Philz and Saint Frank. Full disclosure: I rarely drank coffee, and when I did, I almost always opted for the free version 😋