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Rockstar Software Engineer Story: SW2 -> Principal In Just 4 Years

  • An engineer joined Mixpanel as a level 2 Software Engineer, and received 4 promotions in 4 years to become a Principal Tech Lead Manager (TLM).
  • Key to his success was the ability to make rapid progress on one of the company's top priorities: reduce infrastructure spend.
  • He had a hypothesis that the majority of the cost incurred came from a few customers where the economics were backward for Mixpanel.
  • Rather than solving a gnarly technical problem, the engineer worked with these customers to change their use of compute resources, resulting in massive savings for the company.

For more resources about becoming a rockstar engineer:

Nail Your Promotion As A Software Engineer

Nail Your Promotion As A Software Engineer

(12)
8.7k learners
4 hours, 9 minutes
Switching jobs is great, but it can only get you so far. The true foundation of any ultra-successful tech career is promotion. When you look at software engineers at the pinnacle of career achievement like the FAANG Principal Engineer [L8] making $1,000,000+, you'll notice that the overwhelmingly majority of them have very long stints at a particular company with several promotions. Despite this, promotion gets a bad reputation as it's sorely misunderstood, both by individual engineers and entire tech companies. This leads to many engineers getting stuck at certain levels, giving up, and just hopping companies to escape the pain. This course is here to demystify promotion and teach you how you can plant roots and actually climb up the tech career ladder. By the end of the course, you will understand: πŸ’‘ How promotion actually works, particularly at top companies like FAANG 🧠 The framework to understand the senior engineering career ladder πŸ“ƒ How to define a clear plan to get to the next level βœ… What it takes to get maximum credit for every project πŸš€ What it means to master your performance review and produce the best promo packet Now here's the beautiful thing about pushing for promotion and following the advice of this course: It will make you a much better software engineer. The skills you build up to make a serious promotion case are genuinely useful for your long-term development. This is in contrast to interviewing where you're largely trying to fake mastery. At Taro, we're all about a growth first mentality, which is why we're so excited to share this course with you.