[Taro Classic] Choose The Best Company And Team As An Engineer
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As an engineer, your skills are incredibly important, but at the end of the day, they are meaningless if you can't find the right team and overall environment in which to put them to use. This is why being able to choose a proper company and team for every stage of your career is one of the highest (if not the highest) leverage things you can do in your career.
Now here's the big problem - The vast majority of tech companies and teams are terrible. Even at top companies like FAANG, there are tons of teams that are awful for your growth. This course is here to help you slice through all the noise and identify truly stellar teams where you can thrive. After going through it, you will:
- 🧭 Know the main framework you should follow to make the best career decisions
- ❌ Learn both what is commonly overrated and commonly underrated by engineers when it comes to career priorities
- 💡 Understand the pros and cons of working for Big Tech
- 🚀 Get insight into what unique career benefits startups can offer, especially those that are inaccessible at Big Tech
- 🔍 Have concrete tactics to get information on what a team is actually like
Alex Chiou and Rahul Pandey have worked at every company type you can possible think of from the seed stage startup (including one that gets acquired) to the massive FAANG company to the pre-IPO unicorn and more. From this experience, they've developed a deep understanding of how every team and company type can bolster your engineering career.
Alex Chiou: Across his 10+ years in Silicon Valley, Alex has worked for 5 companies covering every stage. He started off his career at PayPal, a large, older tech company. After that he learned what a scale-up was like at Course, joining at ~50 employees and leaving at ~250. From there, he did the classic FAANG stint with Facebook and then went smaller again, joining pre-IPO Robinhood. Finally, he's in the seed-stage startup life with Taro.
Rahul Pandey: Rahul is one of relatively few engineers who has gone through an acquisition, joining a new startup Kosei after he graduated from Stanford which got acquired by Pinterest. From there, he went to Meta (where he was also an engineering manager) and is most recently doing the seed stage startup grind with his cofounder Alex on Taro (Y Combinator Summer 2022).
