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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

#31

Post by joatmon-snoo »

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 devolving into the blind leading the blind?

Case in point: your video on "why you should start your career at a big tech co" is very clearly driven by your own personal experiences. At one point you allude to optimizing for compensation, but you don't discuss fintech options (Jane Street, Citadel, etc.). Skimming through some of your comments on other threads, I also just don't see a lot of respect for the nuances of different folks' individual circumstances: understandable given that you two are a finite resource, but you also need to attract users who can give that advice, and I don't see a carrot there for me.

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

#32

Post by rpandey1234 »

endisneigh wrote: post #29

I don’t think this is a bad idea but promotions are often very circumstantial and cannot really be normalized across companies. 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…

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?

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

#33

Post by dang »

bee_rider wrote: post #2

I know nobody wants to do the "software engineers vs engineers" debate again, but even if we are going come down on the "programmers are software engineers" side of that debate, a site which exclusively serves software engineers shouldn't advertise itself as for engineers generally. I was excited to see what EE's would be chit-chatting about. :( As a suggestion -- it might make sense to put a link to your demo page r…

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.

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

#34

Post by rpandey1234 »

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…

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).

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

#35

Post by rpandey1234 »

wavesounds wrote: post #30

Maybe I'm being overly nostalgic but I miss the days when startups ruled and when it was all about building cool stuff. Nowadays tech feels so insanely corporate it's all about how to get a job at one of the biggest companies and how to play the corporate game to get more power and prestige.

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.

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

#36

Post by calvinmorrison »

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 enterprise environment using ITIL, doing lots of web development, and very little engineering.

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

#37

Post by Terretta »

Yes, and …

If you want career growth, consider these three simple* tricks:

1. Grok CircleCI’s engineering competency matrix, be honest with yourself, and work on your technical “level ups” across the board. These alone will generally not get you promoted without step 2.

https://circleci.com/blog/why-we-re-designed-our-engineering...

2. Buy the book “The Leadership Pipeline”, again be honest with yourself, and work on your management toolbelt progression. Level up within your company inside two years (an internal transfer can make this step easier).

https://smile.amazon.com/Leadership-Pipeline-Build-Powered-C...

3. After leveling up, and within the two years, accept a role for 20% to 40% higher comp at a new company, or the next leadership level up, or both. (Preferably both.)

Repeat.

- - - - - - - - -

Footnotes:

* Simple doesn’t mean without deliberate attention or work.

** Keep LinkedIn updated with every title or responsibility growth (new role same employer), as well adding to the key valuable outcome you delivered in that role’s bullets, so (a) it’s apparent to recruiters and employers that you are seen as promotable, (b) you are not updating it only when looking for a job.

*** The Leadership Pipeline book implies it’s for a company. On the contrary, use the framework to work on yourself.

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

#38

Post by bee_rider »

dang wrote: post #33
bee_rider wrote: post #2

I know nobody wants to do the "software engineers vs engineers" debate again, but even if we are going come down on the "programmers are software engineers" side of that debate, a site which exclusively serves software engineers shouldn't advertise itself as for engineers generally. I was excited to see what EE's would be chit-chatting about. :( As a suggestion -- it might make sense to put a link to your demo page r…

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.

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

#39

Post by rpandey1234 »

Terretta wrote: post #37

Yes, and … If you want career growth, consider these three simple* tricks: 1. Grok CircleCI’s engineering competency matrix, be honest with yourself, and work on your technical “level ups” across the board. These alone will generally not get you promoted without step 2. https://circleci.com/blog/why-we-re-designed-our-engineering... 2. Buy the book “The Leadership Pipeline”, again be honest with yourself, and work on…

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