Launch HN: Taro (YC S22): Private career growth community for software engineers

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.

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

I think there are 2 things here: 1. The paywall creates a positive "walled garden" effect - Very few people are going to spend $50+ just to come in and be a jerk. The paywall alone should do a lot of work making sure that folks who come in are positive and non-toxic.

2. Heavy moderation - Rahul and I actually built a free version of this software engineer community called Tech Career Growth (https://www.linkedin.com/company/techcareergrowth/), which was the inspiration for us taking the model freemium so we could quit our jobs to pursue this passion full-time after the community grew to 15,000+ members. Despite its size, we were able to moderate it very well with almost no instances of toxicity (more spam than anything) through a combination of empowering other community champions, having a clear code of conduct, and a 0 tolerance policy for the kind of abuse you see on Blind. Taro Premium will naturally be more limited in terms of user numbers as it's paywalled, so we're pretty confident we can scale a positive atmosphere for quite a while (10k+ members) as that's something we've already done with the much more open Tech Career Community.

Meta promotions for instance generally happen faster than Google. This is to say nothing about the actual quality of the person being promoted.

Other companies promote strictly with tenure. Unfortunately promotions are generally zero sum. As a hypothetical if everyone who is in the industry used this the main effect would ironically be making it harder for some poor sap who isn’t using this to be promoted as the bar is raised.

This is a good idea but I’d probably still prefer to find trusted people within my org and outside my org who’ve been promoted once or twice and are one, at most two levels from me and solicit their advice.