More Creators + Taro's Success
Hey everyone đđ˝ Today weâll cover:
Introducing Lee McKeeman as a Taro creator
Successful onboarding as an engineer
How does Taro succeed?
New Taro creator: Lee McKeemanÂ
Lee McKeeman is the newest creator on Taro. On LinkedIn he describes himself: âStaff Software Engineer at Google * Good Person to Know * Autisticâ â heâs worked at several startups, along with a bunch of Big Tech cos (Amazon, Meta, and Google)Â
Weâve been blown away by the detail + care he puts into so many questions. Some examples:Â
âHow to run meetings effectively?â from a Senior Eng at Twitter: https://www.jointaro.com/question/CModSkZ4LWzw9bdaiakt/what-are-some-thoughts-on-maintaining-good-meeting-hygiene
âHow do I know what Iâm good at?â from an Entry-Level Eng at a Series D company: https://www.jointaro.com/question/hksE5OSxktWdbnQQFdaT/how-do-i-know-what-im-great-atÂ
âHow to balance between specialization and pigeonholing?â from a Senior Eng at Zendesk: https://www.jointaro.com/question/HL8uNNhwyPLBGv6RWaTX/how-to-balance-between-specialization-and-pigeonholingÂ
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, hereâs 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-domainÂ
The core parts of Alexâs and Rachelâs answer:
Get clarity of what's important moving forward and learn by solving a problem.Â
Build a âlearning agendaâ 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, âHow do we get more people like Lee to participate in Taro?â
When building a company, the expression âonly the paranoid surviveâ is so true. You have to anticipate problems and mitigate them to continue growing.
This manifests in 2 ways:
As weâve grown over the past few months, we need more high quality creators on Taro. If we donât solve this incentive problem, we wonât be able to help 100s of thousands of engineers.
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. Iâve 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, Iâd love to hear from you! What are ways we could make it compelling for you to share your wisdom on Taro?
p.s. if youâre interested in logistics around things like founder salaries, check out my most recent video.
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.Â
Taro is designed to show you what great looks like, and then help you get there. Weâd love to have you join us.
I rarely comment on Substack of all places, but I seriously recommend following Lee on LinkedIn if you aren't already: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lmckeeman/
Lee is one of the kindest people in tech with a massive amount of wisdom behind him, and it shows in the empathetic, thorough, and ultra high-quality advice he shares.