🪞 Reflections and Advice Across 2023

We're back with the best of the best over the past 6 months

Haven’t posted here in such a long time 😱 We’ve been so busy running Taro, and we’re still defining the highest ROI channels to help software engineers advance their career.

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.

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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