Wow this is so awesome to hear! Meeting expectations at tech companies is actually super hard and great to be doing. Amazing work! I think the cool thing is also it's *almost* a blessing in disguise where it sounds like with the help of Taro you debugged many things about the way you were working so you can actually ride a rocket ship of excellent practices for how to be as a software engineer towards future promotions now.

Engineering Manager at Mistplay

Ryan Kuck

Complete meal could be defined as contains 

- grains, beans/legumes, or tofu
- 1 or more vegetables 

(should be able to hard code a list based on Wikipedia or something for all the options here)

60 minutes is still pretty intense - I think that complete meals that take &lt;20 min if not 10 would be more approachable. I’m seeing sides as well which would be good for a dinner party but not just a week night dinner or a lunch.

On the flip side I could also see this for 30-90 dinners and sides, but I’d want to filter for those separately - and as Rahul mentions it makes sense to go in one direction or the other, not all. And personally I’m not in the market for intense dinners as opposed to what Rahul is suggesting, I might actually try a few recipes if it was dead simple to get a healthy 15 min recipe in 3 minutes of scrolling.

Small UX comment is the ingredients are in a scroll view that I accidentally click on instead of the page itself which leads to a sub optimal scrolling experience on mobile.

This might be a whole different question Rahul and I know you love Taro and this domain is meaningful and relevant - but if you wanted to do your own start up earlier how do you feel it would have gone in other areas where you might not have needed the credentials? Like do you feel you could have started a successful personal finance company, health and wellness company, or home improvement business by following the principles of talking to users, building fast, and iterating?

I would tell my new grad self in December 2017, graduating a semester late with no job offers to prioritize mental and physical health, and relationships and hobbies. I would also have been even better served telling my self that going into college or high school but it’s never too late. Life is about much more than maximizing total comp - especially that of your first full time job. 

I felt like I had done a lot graduating from college and wondered why everything seemed so difficult given that I had been “successful” with graduating. The point is you’re just a beginner again then as a new grad employee and you have the challenge and opportunity to completely change the companies who interview you and you compensation over the next 5 years from there. 

I had no faang interviews after college, but many faang or faang adjacent companies have reached out since, because you CAN trust that if you take care of your self, build relationships, do good work, and get promoted then software engineering can be an amazing life changing career.

Glad if this helped! With all the context I have now I think another top level question thread to start could be: "Grad school experience - how to count this towards YoE when applying to jobs and talking to recruiters"

I personally am not sure, but I've heard of it indeed counting 1 to 1 in some cases. Probably it varies if you're focusing on more of a production or product SWE focused role or a more research focused exploratory R&D role.

The main point is that everyone phrases what they did in a very positive way on a resume, but the underlying facts should be obvious not a guessing game.

Being the first author on three papers is also super impressive, but I would argue it is almost more impressive if you did it part time as an undergrad. Otherwise they might be trying to understand if you were in a phd program for three years writing one paper a year and dropped out.

If your part time paid student researcher experiences are labeled with that phrase and start and end dates, and then you have another job that says Data Scientist start at some point I think that would be clear. If they  are labeled “ML Researcher” then that doesn’t seem great. Someone who is part time vs full time has a different amount of experience over the same amount of time. Personally I listed “Parallel Programming Lab Intern” on my resume for this kind of thing.

Note I’m not hiring on a domain where people often have research experience so can’t really comment there.

I just want to add that as a hiring manager I would probably toss a resume where I can’t tell how long the candidate has been at each experience or which ones are full time professional roles. However if it is clear that someone has 0.5 years professional experience but also clearly states their own app has 50k users, or they interned at FAANG, or they have some relevant but non traditional accomplishments then that would work too.

Based on your phrasing of it I would focus on achievements before graduation in the same sentence. Like maybe, “I graduated in 2022, and for context I launched my app in 2016 got X users by 2019, turned it into a business during college in 2020 and interned at Y two summers of 2020, 2021 accomplishing Z.”

Rahul just posted an answer about how to best use tutorials where you start by following the tutorial exactly but WITHOUT using any copy paste. Then the next time doing it over but not relying on the doc as much, ultimately by the fifth time doing it by memory and adding something new. (A link would be great if someone has that.)

There are 2 ways you might feel stagnant off the top of my head:

1. Endless reading without doing
2. Doing things that you already know how to do without having read about something new and more exciting

There are various ways to proactively stop this like setting a timer for an hour to go back and forth. Or mornings for reading and afternoons for doing. This feels a little artificial and may not line up with what you want. An alternative approach is this:

In the last 15 minutes you have for work for the day write in a journal about what you how it went. Reflect on how much you read and how much you did (maybe 2 columns?). List out your wins too, like you completed the tutorial from memory, or you read an article about a pattern you are excited to try next.

On the weekend you can spend sometime reviewing your week to collect the biggest wins and retrospect on if you felt balanced in learning and doing or if you got stuck in rabbit holes.

This behavior itself will also be super valuable when starting your new job - the exact same journal will be full of work based wins to keep yourself on track, to share in bi-weekly 1:1s with your manager, and the big wins will be there for you to rock your first performance review.

You got this!

A few more options for ideas, of course pick what genuinely is important to you:

- Working with a great set of collaborative coworkers
- Having an inspiring manager and or leadership team
- Growth opportunities 
- Meaningful impact in the world, relevant domain to something important to you
- Massive scale and impact, or opportunity for helping the company get there

I’m going to jot down a few thoughts here that might be off base or might answer your question. 

As a hiring manager seeing that someone was in a technical sales or integration role at Google or Amazon would still be impressive. That isn’t going to land the job, but would be a nice bullet point on a resume and could lead to some more phone calls. 

For both questions though what is the opportunity cost? What is the other option we are comparing with? Also what are your career goals? Being a SWE at a mid tier company might be more relevant than a sales engineer at google. But what if you’re applying for another sales engineer role and you love that work? 

The thought I have about how faang affects your career is that undoubtedly you will get more phone calls if you’re there a couple years, and even more so if you land a promotion. But there was a study about ivy league colleges that might be relevant as well. The students who went to Harvard, or something, and the students who went to small unknown schools but got in to Harvard have about the same income later. That makes quite a bit of sense but also: the students who just thought they might get into Harvard and applied but were rejected also did about the same.

So my point is that yes great engineers go to faang and they also do other stuff. You will certainly accelerate some aspects of your journey by going to faang. But also careers are very long and there are many metrics of success.

If you do hire other people to work on your app that sounds pretty serious. If you really plan to scale a business on the side and quit your job then I agree that’s not ideal LinkedIn material yet.

In general though, having a side project is very common and helps engineers with having a product mindset. It’s a given that you are not taking company time or money to work on this, and the fact that you are also doing impactful work after hours is not only OK but potentially a highlight and reason for continued growth and success.

Personally I had a fear when launching an app of “oh no what will happen when I get a bunch of users”. Not to worry though, that hasn’t been an issue for me at least. (Also Alex has a ton of users and I believe chatted with his manager about it as is required at Meta, and had no problems.)

To answer your questions specifically this would be my thought about nit picks that are repeated from one person and feel aggressive:

- From people lower than you: politely fix a couple and ignore most of it, steering them back to what’s important about your work and a guide on how you are following best practices 
- From peers: if it feels aggressive try to repair the relationship. Don’t push back on the nits specifically but focus on connecting with them as a person and understand where they are coming from. Maybe it would be possible to have coffee and get to know them?
- From people above: if it’s repeated for a long time and a manager isn’t helping I’d find a new team sooner rather than later

This is really a stressful scenario to be in. If it happens over and over again from the same person to you but not as much others then I do think you are reading it correctly: this is a power struggle and this is aggressive behavior.

I wouldn’t recommend learning too many soft skills from this person. In general it’s good to have a mindset that we win and fail as a team, and success is not a zero sum game. If that isn’t the case on your team and everyone is hyper competitive with subtle passive aggressive behavior, then it might be a team that you want to move away from. 

If it’s just this one person, I would collect some examples of how trivial the problems are and share it with your manager that this is a blocker for you. 

If it’s the first time a new person is nit picking your style or you are new to the team, my personal realization is that arguing will take way longer then even some slightly time consuming changes on my part. In general, assuming friendly colleagues, the goal is relationship building in the long run not what happens for this specific pull request or feature.

Other things I’ve tried that have helped to varying degrees are:
- Setting up a linter to take care of the easy stuff and avoid arguments
- Ask for the teams guidelines for style: both code wise and system design docs. If they don’t have one, keep track of everything they’re telling you and make a guide.
- If it doesn’t matter that much but doesn’t hurt anything, you can adapt to the new style and match it going forward to not keep repeatedly bringing up the same point

Managing up is assuming that your manager is super busy and as a result then telling them exactly what you need them to do.

Examples:

- We talked about my promotion 6 months ago, I delivered my results, can we collaborate on my promotion packet now?
- I'm look for growth opportunities and have landed my last few features early and they were very successful. Can I lead the next project coming up about X?
- I've been stressed when receiving feedback from you. I prefer feedback written when it is negative feedback so I can process it at my own speed first, and then discuss in person as a follow up. Can you do that for me?

The opposite of "managing up" would be assuming that since they know the precursor for each of the above questions, then they should already know what you need from them.

Have you had any luck talking with your manager about this? They should be able to help here!

Would you mind elaborating a bit on these questions here? Are you looking for a framework to determine the priority of work? Or a method of working on top priority tasks? 

What have you tried and what has worked well in the teams you’ve been apart of in the past? What problem are you trying to fix here - what isn’t working for you right now?

In order to align on goals is super important to ask a lot of questions and listen at length. When ramping up in a new area I also think listening helps a lot. There can be an instinct to make an immediate impact, but it’s important to observe and understand what is already working and what has already been thought about.

In order for something to be a story it needs three parts: a beginning, a middle, and an end.

So that’s where explaining why we are talking about this is foundational to the story as the beginning. And then it’s good to know what’s been done or what we’re doing now as the middle. And then you can share your vision for the future as the end.

I would try to focus on the “why”. Why does this feature help the users? What team goals is this relevant to? What is the size of the problem? How does this ladder up to the organizational goals? What is or was the hypothesis, the experiment, and the result. And then from all of that where are we going next?

I’m certainly not in a position to comment on Meta specifically, or at your level there. However these are some simple ideas:

- Where do you want to be in 3 years? 6 months? 20 years?
- What genuinely interests you that you can talk endlessly about and have thought a lot about? You need to show off what your strengths are.
- Listening goes a long way in building connections with anyone. Get to know them by listening more than you talk. Ask great questions to dive into their experiences and interests. See where you can help add value to there mission and make them look good.

My thought is that as a senior engineer, if some critical job is not being done on the team then that is my job. There’s also very little chance of getting a “no” from proactively booking a retrospective and leading a discussion about how things are going.

Meanwhile whether or not there is an official manager it is great to have regular peer 1:1s to help unblock each other and help the team stay on track for delivering.

And if you have capacity and interest and you lead the team under the radar for a few months in many ways, then that is a great time to propose being the official manager.

I recommend this event for digging into this topic more. Whether or not you have the authority, you don't want to rely on that to get people to do stuff. Instead the answer lies in building trust and genuine relationships focused on helping the other person with THEIR goals aligned with their values.

[How to Influence your Team without Authority: Presentation + Discussion Time](https://www.jointaro.com/event/how-to-influence-your-team-without-authority-presentation-discussion-time/)

+1 to this question.

What should you do when leadership says “this is wartime”?

My experience was quite similar in the sense that I had several internships where I asked tons of questions and received no return offers. Personally I had little if any positive impact for the team. I assumed that since I had done well in school I would be high performing at a tech company. The reality was that I needed to learn a lot from scratch:

- How does shipping a product work? How do tech companies make money?
- How is code built at scale on the client and server side?
- Who are these non engineers I’m collaborating with?
- How do I learn on the job while delivering value?
- How do I work with my mentor and manager and collaborate with other engineers in general at a business?
- What is a perfomance review and how will I be evaluated?
- How do I have effective 1:1s?

Tldr: answering these questions for ANY company you pick is the key, by finding as SUPPORTIVE of a team as possible in your next role, while in return for their support you work as hard as possible to level up on your side. Because this is hard. But you can do it. And in general you have a huge leg up: you can learn a lot of info about all of this stuff on Taro!

Here was my experience:

My formula for getting out of this was to first build self confidence with side projects. I proved to myself that I could imagine something useful and solve it to some degree with just myself, my laptop, and the internet. I still asked a couple questions on stack overflow, and if chat gpt had been around and Taro I would have used that on that a lot.

Step two was finding a job with the #1 important parameter being excellent friendly senior engineers on the team open to mentoring me. (With an interesting product and tech stack distant 2nd and 3rd factors)

Step three was working nights and weekends for two years at that company so that I could survive and become great at the craft. I started on a Thursday, and took as many notes as possible immediately for two days. Then I treated myself to a Saturday brunch and followed that by sitting in a coffee shop trying to figure out the code base, what my first task involved, and how to get everything running. I had failed before but was not going to fail this time.

In the office I worked long days doing my best to collaborate asking good questions, and then at night kept going to keep figuring it out. After the 3 month open window on asking endless questions closed, I kept a journal of 3 columns: 

1. First column was “I am stuck”
2. Second was “I worked for 2 hours on it and had to ask for help”
3. Third was “I worked for 2 hours on it and figured it out”

For context it took me 6 weeks to ship my first feature which was complicated but this was too slow. And after 3 months people liked my work but I was also too dependent. So at the 3 month mark I had that sheet going and shared the results in 1:1s to show my boss I was having less blockers overall and solving more and more blockers every week and month independently. At the same time my goal was to learn as much as possible quickly to be able to ship my next feature. For the first year at the company this was basically doing something new every sprint across our full stack android and node js app. But I tried to be relentless about tracking improvements like landing more PRs and shipping more results. Very painful but I landed a promotion after 1.5 years and kept going pushing and then became a senior / team lead a year after that.

You got this!

Hmmm. I’m not 100% sure what to think, but using your resources is good right? And it kind of sounds like everyone likes the work you are shipping! The big red flag for me to watch for would be if you were saying “well it works” but were getting rejected in code review because it doesn’t fit the codebase or is nonsense. 

If you feel guilty you are not spending enough time, what about offering to get even more work done? Or if you are guilty about feeling like you aren’t learning then ask for more complex work that pushes you a bit more? I think you should keep using it to do well, but you can move deeper: ask it “why” things work. Like, “what are the general software engineering principles demonstrated by this code?” Or also look at system design with it, “When I add this code to my codebase, how can I follow SOLID principles?” (Or whatever you’re learning about from other sources and your team values). 

You could also push it to write great tests, make your code very readable, modular, and generally extendable and maintainable. If you balance that info with books, articles, documentation, and Taro content then maybe it’s actually a great way to get a lot done AND learn?

I recommend these Taro resources for this question:

- ["How can I get really good at Android?"](https://www.jointaro.com/question/r18MMuiBoRR0ugpxJ7bC/how-can-i-get-really-good-at-android/)
- ["What are some good resources for learning mobile system design?"](https://www.jointaro.com/question/NyLoSTCyju0rfywZUPvs/what-are-some-good-resources-for-learning-mobile-system-design/)
- ["How to prepare for Senior Android Interviews"](https://www.jointaro.com/question/LrS2IELrVoZeWdygua4u/how-to-prepare-for-androidmobile-senior-software-interviews/)

To highlight the #1 reason you might not want to be a manager: **you are essentially starting over from 0, learning from being a junior in many areas**:

You have to learn how to resolve conflict on your team, with other teams, and influence and motivate people who each are motivated by different things. Additionally questions like what should we prioritize now, how should we do things both physically and mentally are up to you. Expect they also are not up to you 100%, so there is a fun game where directors and executives are changing their mind on what to do above you, and you need to be a giant shock absorber to provide a reasonably constant experience for the team. At first all of these ideals will go terribly backwards and you’ll have to repair the damage and figure out how to improve asap.

If you have been building a lot of people and relationship skills you may be doing a lot of this already. But it is different to lead with out authority when you aren't accountable vs you are. When you are a manager/director etc your title is a shield not a sword: you still shouldn't shout orders at people, but rather inspire the team to move in a unified direction, and then when things go wrong jump in to take responsibility for the issue and correct it at a system level.

And the point is no one really is there to make sure you succeed at your completely new role. As a junior engineer you have a mentor to endlessly answer your questions and hopefully a supportive manager, and your whole team will be full of folks ready to help. Here *ideally* yes you can find mentors as well, but your manager 100% will not have time to talk through everything you need to learn on the people/relationship/influence side: in my experience you have to figure it out without lots of direct support by learning on the fly, failing, and going again.

I would focus on the value you are creating for the team, for example:

- Work shipped, or in progress about to ship
- How you've helped make the onboarding process better as you've onboarded
- A story about a senior engineer who you're helping or a junior you've helped

Also be prepared to see what is on his mind. Depending on if this is a regular cadence meeting or a one off, there may be a change that he is communicating to you. You should ideally be ready to "show off" but, there might end up not be a lot of time to go over what you've prepared.

More ideas for low key ways of adding value that you can talk about:

- Generally talking about relationships you're building with anyone on your team or cross-role or cross-team
- Giving real feedback about your thoughts on the mission of the team or the tech you're using, and some forward looking thoughts about how you're excited for it even if you haven't had time to make a huge splash yet
- Product/infra suggestions where you want to pitch some ideas for opportunity currently missed

Whatever you decide to talk about make sure it resonates with you genuinely and then focus on listening to the feedback about what you're saying and having the conversation unfold from there.

I know this wasn’t the point of the question, but even if you are 60 careers can still be long. My dad retired last year from being a senior IC at Intel at 86. So I think the goal is to really find something you love doing and keep doing it for fun! He actually still talks to his team every week about their projects… but that’s so much better then puttering around the house with no purpose!

My two cents: a major hit to your social life for an ambiguously better offer does not sound worth it.

As a new EM I want to chime in that it is also essentially starting over from 0, learning from being a junior in many areas:

You have to learn how to resolve conflict on your team, with other teams, and influence and motivate people who each are motivated by different things. Additionally questions like what should we prioritize now, how should we do things both physically and mentally are up to you. Expect they also are not up to you 100%, so there is a fun game where directors and executives are changing their mind on what to do above you, and you need to be a giant shock absorber to provide a reasonably constant experience for the team. At first that all of these ideals will go terribly backwards and you’ll have to repair the damage and figure out how to improve asap.