Don't Let Imposter Syndrome Ruin Your Career

Hey everyone 👋🏽 Today we’ll cover:

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.

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