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

Career growth depends on having a good manager and support group, but finding someone who advocates for you is challenging. Especially in a post-pandemic world, where many of our working hours are spent in isolation, we’ve lost many of the hallway conversations + quick insights that are critical to success in large organizations.

Alex and I have spent our careers at companies like Meta, Pinterest, Robinhood, and Course Hero, eventually landing Staff+ IC and management positions. Despite spending more than a decade in tech, we still stumbled our way through our career: choosing a team, understanding how perf review actually works, and finding a career path. We’ve had our share of good and bad managers, and we’ve also personally mentored dozens of engineers. (Interesting stat: the average engineer at Meta gets a new manager every 1.2 years!) During the pandemic, we started giving free talks about SWE career growth, explaining what we wish we knew earlier. These livestreams routinely got 500+ concurrent viewers, and our community ballooned to 40K software engineers who were looking to understand promotion and influence as an engineer.

We spent weeks talking to 100s of engineers and discovered that their career bottleneck was not coding ability, but all the other _stuff_ that is essential for software engineering. For example, as a mid-level backend engineer, how does my path to senior get impacted if I switch to Android dev? A product manager added a last minute requirement on my project which may cause the deadline to slip – how do I handle the fallout? Engineers often neglect these topics (project selection, effective communication, perf review) which leads to career stagnation and frustration.

For many engineers, the current resources available online are overwhelmingly irrelevant: they’re about learning a new web framework, or Leetcoding to switch jobs. If you’re at an established, fast-moving tech company, these resources won’t help with career advancement. Instead, the highest leverage activity is to learn from peers + veterans in similar companies.

Taro is the product that emerged from our community: a Q&A database from real engineers, where content is tagged by company + level. We also adopted the "case study" model where an engineer or manager discusses a specific story of how they ramped up or landed a promotion-worthy project. This kind of info is difficult to come by unless you know the right people within the company. Taro allows you to get personalized help for your situation, while also learning from the questions + answers of others.

We make money by charging software engineers directly for full access to the Q&A database, plus the ability to ask their own questions. We currently have 100+ Taro Premium members from companies like Meta, Google, TikTok, and Amazon, along with thousands of free users. We designed Taro for full time engineers at fast-moving tech companies – it’s not a good fit for freelancers or students who are still exploring software engineering.

Checkout a quick demo of Taro: https://youtu.be/nMgUciFPJMs

Feel free to browse through https://app.jointaro.com. We’d love to know what resources you’ve used for career growth. Thanks for your feedback!

Thanks for the suggestion on surfacing the demo page more prominently, we definitely want to do better with embedding the actual content in the landing page.

There are definitely more toxic ways to get promoted, "gamifying" the process like you said. The prime example is playing infamous corporate politics, providing the perception of doing great work without actually doing it. I hate those kinds of games (I saw it ruin various orgs I've been on across my ~8 years working in Silicon Valley), and because of that, Taro isn't a product to teach software engineers how to play politics and other tricks.

On the flip side, we really do believe that promotion, especially in the more innovative, modern tech companies, has many components stemming from actual growth. While Meta was far from perfect, I largely felt like promotion pushed me to develop skills that genuinely made me a better software engineer and person to work with. I learned to empathize with other parties, especially those who weren't in engineering, and factor in their perspectives when building alignment on projects. I learned to think proactively, clamping down risks early instead of letting them blow up the project and team later on down the road. I learned to work through others, mentoring more junior engineers, and taking on responsibility for their well-being. The even cooler thing is that I found myself applying those skills outside of work as well: I became a better listener and got better at hectic life activities like vacation planning.

Taro is a product meant to teach those kinds of aforementioned, more "wholesome" skills, and Rahul and I have historically found it hard to find guidance to learn those skills. I didn't start seriously building those deeper behaviors until I rolled some incredible managers ~5 years into my career. We believe that this kind of learning should be far more accessible, and by doing so, we can help empower a workforce that's far more productive and positive.

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!