rpandey1234's comments

yep! we'll do these for as long as we can

Deep software skills are critical for success. But we've found that many software engineers are surprised with how many other skills they need to build in order to advance in their career (and I'd argue these skills have always been important).

Thanks for sharing your perspective, no one has actually brought this up among the 100+ Taro Premium members we have.

I view our product as more than a Q&A database. Certainly getting questions answered is valuable part, and our goal is to make that interaction high-quality and easy (a coach can often be hundreds of dollars an hour). However, we also offer case studies from tech veterans and community features such as member matching.

We're focused on delivering as much career growth to members as possible. Working with this group of software engineers, the cost of upskilling pays for itself very, very quickly (we charge <0.1% of yearly comp for typical mid-level engineer in FAANG).

I wasn't aware of this subreddit, thanks.

I think for the highest levels (e.g. Chief Engineer as you mention), there's really no replacement to knowing the right people. You simply need a long enough relationship with someone that they trust you at that level.

However, for many other roles, there's still a ton of insights + best practices that can meaningfully help engineers achieve their career goal. Alex and I don't have all the answers, but as a community with ambitious people, there's a very good chance you can find what you need.

I'd love to check out this deck you made, is there a public version available? Or feel free to email it to me at [email protected].

Definitely agree that the advice that moves the needle depends on the engineer. That's why we like the community + Q&A angle to capture the nuances for each engineer.

I'd say they were somewhere between the Tech Lead and Solver archetype in the article you linked. BTW, we're big fans of staffeng, lots of good content there! One of the signs of promotion is that your behavior leads to having more impact (not just execution), so after a ramp-up period, I'd expect someone very senior to get back to that level of impact in a different team or even different domain.

You're right there is some element of pattern-matching that happens for a higher level engineer, but in my experience this has to be backed up with actually earning the trust of the broader team, and that requires strong fundamentals.

We have a separate Slack for Taro Premium, which is for paying members (a bit more than 100 people).

I think you're referring to the Tech Career Growth Slack which we've built over the past 1.5 years. Users there come from my YouTube channel (https://youtube.com/rpandey1234) or our LinkedIn sessions (https://www.linkedin.com/company/techcareergrowth).

We had a landing page a few months ago (back when it was still Tech Career Growth), but this web app at app.jointaro.com just came out in the last 1.5 weeks! Try it out and I'm always open to feedback -- my direct email is [email protected].

I'll share an anecdote here. I worked with an engineer at Meta who went from L3 (junior) to L6 (staff) in 2.5 years.

And he truly did operate at the staff level -- I know because eng levels at Meta are private. As he was climbing the ladder, people who worked with him assumed he was already a Staff Engineer, and were shocked when they realized he was 1 or 2 levels lower than that (this info would come out during perf review season).

Seniority is generally about how much people can trust you in the team, to identify blockers, provide feedback, or plan a roadmap. You can call it politics, but no one on the team would have denied that this engineer was hugely impactful. We're trying to capture these lessons + case studies in Taro.

good strategy :) And having a strong community really helps with "be honest with yourself"

I can see how it may appear that way. I view the non-coding skills within Taro to be less about power/prestige, and more about things that can genuinely help you become a better engineer.

One interesting trend is how Big Tech is becoming... bigger. This is certainly a new phenomenon in tech, to have a handful of companies (Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon) employing literally hundreds of thousands of engineers. Being able to succeed in these companies, along with many others with a similar culture), is increasingly important for software engineers today.

Appreciate the feedback! You're right that a lot of Taro is powered by our own experiences for now, which comes with any biases we have. For the video you mentioned in particular about starting in big tech, I believe that's only on my YouTube (not Taro), where I try to share stronger opinions to a larger audience.

For current Taro Premium members, a big part of the value prop is that we explicitly want to capture their nuances in Q&A, and provide relevant feedback for that situation.

To your point about attracting people to the community, the breakdown of our members is quite interesting. We have tons of engineers at top companies who have already "made it" -- from talking to dozens of them personally already, they have lots of insights which can meaningfully help others. Peer to peer learning can be very effective when people share their experiences openly and honestly.

Finally, we also have tech veterans join to share case studies and answer question. We want Taro to reflect a vibrant community with nuanced, smart discussions (growing beyond the 2 of us).

I agree there are certainly differences across companies with career growth, but there are also best practices that are generally applicable. As a concrete example, as a manager at Meta, I had a report who did a poor job of talking about his work in self-review. Giving him some structure made his impact much more obvious, and it was easier to get him the rating he deserved. The ability to explain your work is critical regardless of company.

I also think that having multiple companies in the community makes it more valuable -- Taro can give you a valuable perspective from people at your company, along with a smart external perspective.

Curious what kind of advice would you be looking for from trusted people within your company?

Great question! We are similar to Blind, but focused on career progression instead of gossip/TC.

Having a paywall inherently improves the quality of conversation, and the idea of "community" is also quite powerful to maintain a non-toxic environment.

We're designed for software engineers and we're specifically not designed for code monkeys :)

Yes! I think about it more in terms of the career challenge facing the engineer. These are often correlated with years of experience, but not always.

We categorize all content in Taro based on level, company, and topic, so it should be easy to find what's relevant for you.

Alex and I have created several case studies (video + text) from our careers, and we also bring in speakers (e.g. David Pan on the demo page) to talk about specific stories from their career.

As we get larger, we'll open up members to share case studies within Taro. We've found our existing members have really insightful stories that are quite applicable to others.

The target user persona currently is an engineer in a medium/large tech company -- that's where we've seen the most impact for members, since there's more structure and predictability at these companies.

There's still value for someone looking to improve their management skills, in terms of getting feedback from ICs and answering their questions, but you'd be in the minority of members for now.

These companies have talented engineers, and Alex and I learned a lot from working with them. Our goal is to share these insights and create a supportive community to collect best practices -- we think there are many SWEs who could benefit.

We charge software engineers directly for access to the product, which includes the Q&A database, case studies, and member matching services. Hope you'll take a look at our content and track record to judge if it's valuable for you!