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

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

#41

Post by abirch »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #36
joatmon-snoo wrote: post #31

Interesting! This reminds me of /r/cscareerquestions: both the good and the bad. Good: you're trying to create a space where a lot of people have similar professional goals and can riff off each other. Better: the two of you have a lot of content backed by your own, verifiable, professional experiences. Bad: why would someone qualified to give advice want to join the community? What prevents your forums from devolvin…

Bad: why would someone qualified to give advice want to join the community? What prevents your forums from devolving into the blind leading the blind? Yes, that's my experience with cscareerquestions, lots of questions about the big 4, doing leetcode to get into google, facebook, etc. A lot less about where most programmers are probably employed, small to medium businesses doing boring ETL, large companies in a enter…

The difficult thing is seeing the forest from the trees. It's great that some advice worked for a particular person in a particular situation. It's impossible to have principal component analysis of what really worked.

It's even more depressing to see what a large role that randomness plays in lives and careers. E.g., if Yahoo had bought out Larry & Sergey for a million, would their advice be worth more than now? If Steve Jobs never returned to Apple?

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

#42

Post by ceeplusplus »

f6v wrote: post #40

Junior to senior in 2.5 years? I mean, you could do it, by playing politics. But are you really a senior engineer?

The thing that a lot of people don't understand about SWE (and a lot of other 10x professions) is that years of experience has a very weak correlation with skill. A top tier junior engineer could easily become better than a 15 yoe senior engineer who's not so top tier.

If you work at a Fortune 500 and then jump to a FAANG, this difference is very obvious.

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

#43

Post by simon--poole »

alexc61 wrote: post #9
jeffwiederkehr wrote: post #6

Excited to see Taro on the front page of HN. I’m just finishing up my first internship at a Big Tech Co and the advice and discussions I’ve seen from Rahul/Alex were extremely valuable in helping me perform well. I feel somewhat connected to the product in a weird way in that I went through the non profit Codepaths interview prep summer course which is where I heard about Rahul and seems to solve a somewhat similar p…

Thanks so much for the great feedback and consuming our content! The Taro app definitely has a long way to go, and we're also investing a lot into the web app right now as we know that a lot of folks prefer to consume professional content on their desktop. Taro is very early, and we know that a lot of product right now sucks. If you or anyone else here has any feedback, we're all ears at team@jointaro.com!

> The Taro app definitely has a long way to go, and we're also investing a lot into the web app right now as we know that a lot of folks prefer to consume professional content on their desktop.

I definitely find this discrepancy interesting, since I found the app to work much better than the web application! Although this was mostly a couple months ago, so I'll have to take a closer look at the web app these days.

That being said, I found the content super useful - although I found the ordering presenting in the free iOS app to be rather confusing, as I ended up jumping around a lot.

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

#44

Post by simon--poole »

f6v wrote: post #40

Junior to senior in 2.5 years? I mean, you could do it, by playing politics. But are you really a senior engineer?

Depends how you measure senior engineer.

Most sensible companies measure by impact - and Taro focuses on how to explain and justify that.

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

#45

Post by dang »

bee_rider wrote: post #38
dang wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We could change the title to say "Software engineer" but then we'd have to drop the word "Private" and people would probably start complaining that they didn't expect it to be a closed community.

It isn't a huge deal really. But I think Launch HN: Taro (YC S22): Private software engineer career growth community or Launch HN: Taro (YC S22): Private career growth community for software engineers would fit, I think. IMO the latter is more clear anyway.

Ok let's go with the latter. I was going to say "80 chars on the nose" but I had to mess with the punctuation—or rather, you did (with the double colon).

Thanks!

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

#46

Post by rpandey1234 »

f6v wrote: post #40

Junior to senior in 2.5 years? I mean, you could do it, by playing politics. But are you really a senior engineer?

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.

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

#47

Post by f6v »

ceeplusplus wrote: post #42
f6v wrote: post #40

Junior to senior in 2.5 years? I mean, you could do it, by playing politics. But are you really a senior engineer?

The thing that a lot of people don't understand about SWE (and a lot of other 10x professions) is that years of experience has a very weak correlation with skill. A top tier junior engineer could easily become better than a 15 yoe senior engineer who's not so top tier. If you work at a Fortune 500 and then jump to a FAANG, this difference is very obvious.

What’s even a “10x profession”?

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

#48

Post by rpandey1234 »

simon--poole wrote: post #43
alexc61 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks so much for the great feedback and consuming our content! The Taro app definitely has a long way to go, and we're also investing a lot into the web app right now as we know that a lot of folks prefer to consume professional content on their desktop. Taro is very early, and we know that a lot of product right now sucks. If you or anyone else here has any feedback, we're all ears at team@jointaro.com!

> The Taro app definitely has a long way to go, and we're also investing a lot into the web app right now as we know that a lot of folks prefer to consume professional content on their desktop. I definitely find this discrepancy interesting, since I found the app to work much better than the web application! Although this was mostly a couple months ago, so I'll have to take a closer look at the web app these days. Th…

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 rahul@jointaro.com.

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

#49

Post by f6v »

rpandey1234 wrote: post #46
f6v wrote: post #40

Junior to senior in 2.5 years? I mean, you could do it, by playing politics. But are you really a senior engineer?

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…

I mean, there’re brilliant individuals in any profession. I don’t see how that turns into a generalization. Most of engineers I’ve seen had to spend many years to become senior. Selling fast growth is denying the reality for most people.

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

#50

Post by ceeplusplus »

f6v wrote: post #47
ceeplusplus wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing that a lot of people don't understand about SWE (and a lot of other 10x professions) is that years of experience has a very weak correlation with skill. A top tier junior engineer could easily become better than a 15 yoe senior engineer who's not so top tier. If you work at a Fortune 500 and then jump to a FAANG, this difference is very obvious.

What’s even a “10x profession”?

Jobs where the difference in output between the best and worst is 10x. Generally creative professions like movie director, writer/journalist, lawyer, etc. SWE tends to fall into this category because the difficulty of writing good code is in some respects like writing good prose: the space of "solutions" is vast and there are few well defined rules by which a "good" solution can be constructed. Not only that, but writing it quickly while maintaining quality is difficult as well.

See for example this blog by Joel Spolsky [1].

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/07/25/hitting-the-high-n...

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