Tech Career Events for Software Engineers
This session is for wantrepreneurs (someone who wants to leave their full-time job and do a company) and early entrepreneurs. All attendees should be prepared to either pitch an idea or provide thoughtful feedback on other ideas.
In the last two decades, more money and attention have gone to early-stage startups. It's easier and cheaper than ever to start a startup, especially if you're an engineer!
Sample discussions:
- Get feedback on the clarity of your idea, along with the opportunity size. Do you want a VC-scale outcome, or a "lifestyle business"?
- Should you get pre-seed funding (generally $100K - $500K) from an accelerator?
- How and when should you launch your product?
Also happy to share honest thoughts and feedback on well-known accelerators: Y Combinator, PearX, TechStars
What you get:
- Hear ideas from other ambitious engineers to make your own idea/pitch better.
- Taro (this platform!) is a YC-funded startup from S22. Rahul can share thoughts about how Taro got in and what he learned.
- Rahul has personally reviewed and recommended 10+ companies that have gotten funding and launched their product.
Resources to take a look at:
- How To Approach "Doing Your Own Thing" -- Startup Discussion And Feedback
- [Taro Top 10] Entrepreneurship And Tech Startups
- Alex answering "How did you decide to quit your job and make a startup?"
- How To Prepare To Leave Big Tech For A Startup
- Taro at YC's Demo Day (Summer 2022)
This session will not be recorded. Group Office Hours are a communal way to get the personalized career advice you need.
Unlock all events and courses with Taro Premium. Join at a discount with Yogi's link: https://www.jointaro.com/r/yogi-sharma/
In 2017, amidst the bustling innovation and relentless pace of Facebook, I encountered a pivotal moment in my career. The sting of receiving not one, not two, but three job rejections in as many weeks (and first round rejections at that) set the stage for a profound professional transformation. This period, marked by deep introspection and resilience, was not just about coping with disappointment; it became a launchpad for unprecedented growth and success.
But all the came after an initial period of dejection.
The journey from those initial rejections to eventually landing six coveted job offers, with negotiations exceeding $100k, is a testament to the power of strategic habit shifts and mindset realignment. The experience, while daunting, unfolded the essential principles of leveraging one’s time and energy efficiently, ensuring readiness for job transitions without compromising current job performance.
In this talk, I aim to demystify the path from setback to success. I will unveil the practical strategies and mental adjustments that not only helped me navigate the turbulent waters of job searching but also equipped me with the tools to excel beyond expectation, which I have used in my work with over 400 professionals in my coaching practice. This narrative is more than a personal victory; it's a blueprint for anyone facing the disheartenment of rejection, providing actionable insights to transform challenges into opportunities for substantial growth and achievement.
Join me as I dissect the critical principles, mindset shifts, and habit changes that can empower us all to turn job search woes into wins, illustrating that with the right approach, navigating the job market can be a journey of triumph even though tribulation are inevitable at times.
Negotiation content on Taro:
Yogi's next event about going from the PIP danger zone to a top performer: https://www.jointaro.com/event/behind-the-scene-from-meets-most-greatly-exceeds-in-3-months-at-facebook/
Are you a founder or thinking of starting your own company? Or are you an engineer looking for a job? If you're either of these, then you're in luck! The prestigious Stanford-affiliated startup community StartX is hosting a mixer where Silicon Valley's best founders and engineers can meet up and chat!
For more details (including where to get tickets), check #g-sf-bayarea-meetup in the Taro Premium Slack.
Here's some career advice to help you make the most of this networking event:
In this talk, we delve into Self-Discover, an innovative framework revolutionizing Large Language Models (LLMs) by enabling them to autonomously discern task-specific reasoning structures, thereby empowering them to tackle complex problems without explicit prompting. At the heart of Self-Discover lies a self-discovery process, wherein LLMs independently select and amalgamate various atomic reasoning modules, such as critical thinking and step-by-step reasoning, into explicit structures to guide their decoding process. The broad applicability of these self-discovered structures across diverse model families—from PaLM2-L to GPT-4 and from GPT-4 to Llama2—underscores the framework's versatility and adaptability, suggesting seamless integration with an even wider range of advanced AI models. This holds promise for a unified approach to autonomous reasoning in artificial intelligence.
Whether you're an AI researcher, engineer, or simply curious about this achievement in AI research, join us as we explore the intricacies of Self-Discover and its potential implications for prompt engineering and advancing the capabilities of Large Language Models in complex reasoning tasks.
Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.03620.pdf
In this session, we delve into the intricacies of Amazon Aurora, a high throughput, cloud-native relational database designed to meet the demanding scalability and performance requirements of modern applications without compromising on the simplicity of access via SQL. The paper presents a thorough examination of the design considerations that underpin Aurora's architecture, understanding how it achieves unparalleled levels of efficiency and reliability within the cloud. We will explore key concepts such as Aurora's distributed and decentralized approach, fault tolerance mechanisms, and the optimization of data storage and retrieval processes.
Topic: Chapter 4 - Encoding And Evolution
In this #taro-bookclub discussion, we'll be talking about Chapter 4 of "Designing Data-Intensive Applications" by Martin Kleppmann.
Here's the agenda:
- Let’s get to know each other with some quick introductions.
- We’ll break down and discuss the key concepts from Chapter 4.
- There will also be time for any questions and answers you might have.
Please send your questions ahead of time to Lax Meiyappan in the Taro Premium Slack, so that they can be included in the discussion.
Get ready for another engaging and informative session!
Come on down to Chelsea Market to get some Boba Tea and network with other talented professionals in NYC.
For details, check out #g-nyc-meetup in the Taro Premium Slack.
If you have any questions or run into any logistical issues, reach out to Ammar Chishti.
As Stable Diffusion 3, the new text-to-image diffusion model from Stability AI is released, we look at the original latent diffusion model (LDM) paper that got the ball rolling. We cover how diffusion models produce stunningly photorealistic images from any textual prompt, and delve into the core concepts that power them.
We will cover:
- Variational Auto-Encoders (Background)
- Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPM paper)
- Latent Diffusion Models (LDM paper)
Note: This session will be followed by another session on Diffusion Transformers, the basis of Stable Diffusion 3. It will build upon what we learn in this session and the previous one on Vision Transformers.
How to join:
Join via Teams link.
- Meeting ID: 310 267 993 213
- Passcode: z773PU
Your host:
Hemang Chawla is an applied scientist in computer vision focusing on anti-counterfeiting at Scantrust. He has previous worked in the domains of robotics and mapping for ADAS, and has published several papers at top conferences such as ICRA, IROS, and WACV.
This event is free for all. For premium access to Taro, you may use this referral link for a 20% discount.
Topic: Chapter 5 - Replication
In this #taro-bookclub discussion, we'll be talking about Chapter 5 of "Designing Data-Intensive Applications" by Martin Kleppmann.
Here's the agenda:
- Let’s get to know each other with some quick introductions.
- We’ll break down and discuss the key concepts from Chapter 5.
- There will also be time for any questions and answers you might have.
Please send your questions ahead of time to Rohit Katyal in the Taro Premium Slack, so that they can be included in the discussion.
Get ready for another engaging and informative session!
Note: The date of this even is subject to change. It will be finalized after the Paper Reading event on Diffusion Models.
With Stable Diffusion 3 being released recently, we look at the underlying papers that make it possible.
We will cover:
- Recap of Vision Transformers and Diffusion Models
- Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers (ICCV 2023 paper)
- Flow Matching for Generative Modeling (ICLR 2023 paper)
Your host:
Hemang Chawla is an applied scientist in computer vision focusing on anti-counterfeiting at Scantrust. He has previous worked in the domains of robotics and mapping for ADAS, and has published several papers at top conferences such as ICRA, IROS, and WACV.
This event is free for all. For premium access to Taro, you may use this referral link for a 20% discount.
Among virtually all tech companies, Amazon is the most notorious for having the hardest senior promotion, going from L5 (SDE 2) to L6 (SDE 3). It's so bad that around 65% of Amazon's engineering base are stuck at L5, and many engineers burn out and leave the company because of this.
This wasn't the case for Bala Ram. In this special session, he'll be breaking down how he navigated the arduous journey from Amazon L5 to L6 to officially become a Big Tech Senior Software Engineer. He'll go through the mindset shifts he had to make alongside how he was able to find senior scope.
After his presentation, he'll open the floor to some of your questions as well!
Tarodactyls of Toronto unite!
Meet other ambitious engineers in the Toronto area. Taro will cover your drinks and snacks up to $10 USD per person.
For more details and any help finding the event, contact Jay Son on the Taro Premium Slack and keep an eye on #g-toronto-meetup!
Unlock all events and courses with Taro Premium. Join at a discount with Yogi's link: https://www.jointaro.com/r/yogi-sharma/
Imagine pouring your heart and soul into your work, only to be met with criticism instead of commendation. This scenario is all too familiar for many engineers who, despite their hard work, find themselves at odds with their manager's expectations due to a misalignment with business priorities. My own journey at Facebook serves as a testament to this common predicament. Tasked with two major projects, I found myself at a critical juncture halfway through, being told my efforts were not meeting expectations.
I was not always doing exceptional at Facebook, but this time I knew that I was not below the "meets expectation" mark. I had been there before, but this time was not it.
Learn more about ratings at Facebook (aka Meta): https://www.jointaro.com/topic/meta/performance-review/
Despite knowing that, the assessment of the manager was a bitter pill to swallow, leaving me furious and speechless. However, it also marked the beginning of a transformative journey. I ventured into realms that many engineers shy away from, embracing principles that I previously overlooked. This shift in behavior and perception propelled me from being perceived as merely meeting most expectations to greatly exceeding them, achieving a rating leap that not only vindicated my efforts but also significantly enhanced my bonus.
In this seminar, I aim to share the insights and strategies that catalyzed my dramatic turnaround. I will delve into how a recalibration of focus and an embrace of broader impact can elevate your work from good to exceptional. Additionally, I will touch on the crucial balance between maintaining stellar job performance and navigating a job search. This balance is critical for ensuring you are not cornered should your job search extend longer than anticipated. Join me as I unravel the nuances of achieving long-term career satisfaction through sustained excellence and strategic job search efforts.
How to master performance reviews: https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/b0B8uqIAUnBLE10jJHJG/masterclass-how-to-navigate-your-performance-review-in-tech/
Join us for a discussion about wealth creation and preservation for engineers. We'll also talk about financial independence / retire early (FIRE), a dream for many tech workers. Most engineers earn a high income relatively early in their career -- $200K+ total compensation per year is not uncommon for software engineers working in North America.
Some things we can talk about in this session (April 22):
- Monetizable AI projects.
- Revenue-generating projects, e.g. writing a book, starting a podcast, teaching a course.
- Rahul to share an update on his YouTube income
As a reminder, this session will not be recorded. Group Office Hours are a private, communal way to get the personalized career advice you need.
Resources:
As the first terminal level in your career, senior engineers independently solve problems and deliver business value. Many engineers are stuck for years as senior engineers.
This is part of the cohort-based course "Senior to Staff - Land Your Promotion As An Engineer". This session is to check in on your progress to becoming a Staff Engineer. There's no agenda or presentation planned -- come with your questions and discussions.
Sample topics:
- How to know where you stand on the path to promotion.
- How to get (or create) scope on a team with many talented engineers.
- How managers and directors perceive very senior IC roles.
Taro resources:
Abstract:
Explore the Mamba paper's groundbreaking approach to sequence modeling efficiency in this event. Uncover how Mamba addresses computational inefficiencies in transformers, especially for long sequences.
Overview:
Discover the motivation behind Mamba, highlighting its improvements over subquadratic-time architectures struggling with language tasks. Learn about Mamba's content-based reasoning and enhancements for superior performance.
Key Features:
1. Selective Structured State Space Models (SSMs): Mamba introduces adaptive SSM parameters for content-based reasoning, allowing selective information handling for discrete modalities.
2. Hardware-Aware Parallel Algorithm: Despite forgoing efficient convolutions, Mamba's hardware-aware parallel algorithm maintains fast inference and linear scaling in sequence length.
3. Architecture Overview: Dive into Mamba's streamlined architecture without attention or MLP blocks, achieving efficiency without sacrificing effectiveness.
4. Performance Metrics: Witness Mamba's 5× higher throughput than Transformers, with linear scaling, showcasing its real-world improvements in language, audio, and genomics tasks.
5. Comparison with Transformers: See Mamba outperforms Transformers of the same size and match larger Transformers, especially in language modeling.
Join us in unraveling the secrets of Mamba, poised to redefine sequence modeling standards. Anticipate a paradigm shift in efficiency and performance in deep learning.
paper link: [https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.00752]
This session is for wantrepreneurs (someone who wants to leave their full-time job and do a company) and early entrepreneurs. All attendees should be prepared to either pitch an idea or provide thoughtful feedback on other ideas.
In the last two decades, more money and attention have gone to early-stage startups. It's easier and cheaper than ever to start a startup, especially if you're an engineer!
Sample discussions:
- Get feedback on the clarity of your idea, along with the opportunity size. Do you want a VC-scale outcome, or a "lifestyle business"?
- Should you get pre-seed funding (generally $100K - $500K) from an accelerator?
- How and when should you launch your product?
Also happy to share honest thoughts and feedback on well-known accelerators: Y Combinator, PearX, TechStars
What you get:
- Hear ideas from other ambitious engineers to make your own idea/pitch better.
- Taro (this platform!) is a YC-funded startup from S22. Rahul can share thoughts about how Taro got in and what he learned.
- Rahul has personally reviewed and recommended 10+ companies that have gotten funding and launched their product.
Resources to take a look at:
- How To Approach "Doing Your Own Thing" -- Startup Discussion And Feedback
- [Taro Top 10] Entrepreneurship And Tech Startups
- Alex answering "How did you decide to quit your job and make a startup?"
- How To Prepare To Leave Big Tech For A Startup
- Taro at YC's Demo Day (Summer 2022)
This session will not be recorded. Group Office Hours are a communal way to get the personalized career advice you need.