The slack channel has 11k users, and messages have less than 10 reactions.
An Inspection of the user list shows a very suspicious list of names, with some names being repeated 200 times.
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
#52The slack channel has 11k users, and messages have less than 10 reactions. An Inspection of the user list shows a very suspicious list of names, with some names being repeated 200 times.
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).
Re: Launch HN: Taro (YC S22): Private career growth community for software engineers
#53Yes, 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"
Not without intervention on what the community considers strong.
See another book, “The Mom Test”. Usually self-advertised “strong communities” are focused on being supportive or inclusive over honest, aka trying to be too nice to plainly tell you your shortcomings that need work.
This is strongly related to why so many people are shocked, shocked, to get let go after a string of positive performance reviews. Most companies gave up on honest reviews long ago, all reviews are glowing, so even terrible performance gets “good reviews”. But managers still may have to let go the bottom 10 or 20 and they know who they are when their arms are twisted.
Great coaches tell world class athletes what they can work to correct, just as great teams do in great retros, so the whole team levels up together.
Re: Launch HN: Taro (YC S22): Private career growth community for software engineers
#54Interesting! 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…
As a side note: check out /r/ExperiencedDevs.
Re: Launch HN: Taro (YC S22): Private career growth community for software engineers
#55Junior 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…
How much of that is optimizing for appearance/behaviour (Either intentionally or unintentionally) and other people wrongly pattern-matching though?
When I joined a big tech company the hardest part of ramping up was learning how to operate in that environment. There are a lot of implicit behaviours a "good" engineer is supposed to that you mostly have to figure out by yourself. Some of them are genuinely useful, but I think a lot are basically a kind of filter: https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1555077502803947520.
From what I've seen, the main skill for promotion in my company isn't engineering a well designed system, it's being visible and finding/creating the right projects.
I completely believe that someone could figure out how to behave like a higher level engineer and even succeed in their team, then get put in a different environment and completely flounder because they were mostly just copying behaviours that worked in their current environment, not learning fundamentals.
I'm also curious, vaguely what archetype was this Staff engineer: https://staffeng.com/guides/staff-archetypes.
Re: Launch HN: Taro (YC S22): Private career growth community for software engineers
#56Interesting! 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 the…
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Re: Launch HN: Taro (YC S22): Private career growth community for software engineers
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
How much of that is optimizing for appearance/behaviour (Either intentionally or unintentionally) and other people wrongly pattern-matching though? When I joined a big tech company the hardest part of ramping up was learning how to operate in that environment. There are a lot of implicit behaviours a "good" engineer is supposed to that you mostly have to figure out by yourself. Some of them are genuinely useful, but…
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.
Re: Launch HN: Taro (YC S22): Private career growth community for software engineers
#58After looking through these comments and thinking through my own career to date in Big 3 automotive followed by AV work, I think I have to agree -- the lift to get from your Meta/Robinhood experience to information useful to the people in the other 80+% of the software industry, much less hardware/embedded/non-software-software companies is going to be enormous. I wish that there was a good solution for people who want to be Chief Engineer somewhere else, but it's about networking in your industry/company and not about lurking in leetcode forums.
Re: Launch HN: Taro (YC S22): Private career growth community for software engineers
#59First off congrats on the launch!
> 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.
At this point I've managed hundreds of software engineers and my assessment of the situation is in line with yours. So much so that I actually have a deck prepared for explaining this exact point to engineers.
What I've found is not that engineers need any one piece of advice. That would be different for different people (for the most part), it's that they need a framework to understand all the skills which are important to being an engineer and our industry has woefully underserved them when it comes to explaining things.
Re: Launch HN: Taro (YC S22): Private career growth community for software engineers
#60Interesting! 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…
It's funny you mention the blind since it's the name of an another approach in the same space, teamblind.com