Session #9 - How To Become A Data Guru As An Engineer (w/ Senior Director of DS Mo Shahangian)

Mo has had a successful career at the intersection of data science and engineering at companies like Pinterest, Meta, and Epic Games.

Mo talked about the biggest data mistakes and how the job changes as you navigate seniority levels. He also shared his contrarian approach to promotion that has worked so well in his career. 

## Data knowledge for engineers:
- Data science is an overloaded term. The high-level goal for anyone working with data is to surface insights that will inform decisions. 
- Being insightful isn’t enough -- you need to surface **actionable** and **causal** relationships.

Everyone needs a reminder correlation != causation. Have some tools to remind yourself.
- Which way does the causal arrow go?
- Remember [Goodhart’s Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law)

## Career growth
- At the most senior levels, leaders are business owners/product leaders, not functional leaders.
- At more junior levels, it’s the opposite, there needs to be order and a separation of responsibility. The best people learn how to work, not only within their lane, but across.

Career success comes from being deliberate:
- A career is a series of decisions
- These decisions come with tradeoffs
- Those best at navigating tradeoffs emerge as leaders
- "Deliberate" means that you are both intentional and calculated

Mo started out building data systems at UCLA, joined Pinterest during hypergrowth, and eventually became a Senior Director of Data Science at Meta, and recently joined Epic Games at the leadership level. Connect with Mo: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mohammad-shahangian-b040188/

[Connect with Mo](https://www.linkedin.com/in/mohammad-shahangian-b040188/)

More resources: 
- Another Taro Premium Session about [junior --> senior eng promos at Meta](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/EX9563YnxcJb62cCmetg/session-5-mentoring-junior-swes-e3-to-senior-e5-in-just-25-years-at-meta/)
- [Why chasing promo could hurt you](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/qj2kX94TfFPgBLlQZBtb/why-chasing-promotion-could-hurt-you/)

Senior Software Engineer [L5] at Pinterest

Suboptimal work efficiency resulted in me putting so much time at work, leading to 
poor WLB @Meta. I don't want to repeat it @ Pinterest. How can I improve my efficiency?

[INTERNAL] Ask an internal question [INTERNAL] Ask an internal question [INTERNAL] Ask an internal question [INTERNAL] Ask an internal question [INTERNAL] Ask an internal question [INTERNAL] Ask an internal question [INTERNAL] Ask an internal question [INTERNAL] Ask an internal question

[INTERNAL] Create another internal question [INTERNAL] Create another internal question [INTERNAL] Create another internal question[INTERNAL] Create another internal question [INTERNAL] Create another internal question [INTERNAL] Create another internal question [INTERNAL] Create another internal question [INTERNAL] Create another internal question [INTERNAL] Create another internal question [INTERNAL] Create another internal question

[INTERNAL] Create another internal question [INTERNAL] Create another internal question [INTERNAL] Create another internal question

test me test me test me test me test me test me test me

I joined Pinterest few months ago, and I was under the impression that I will be driving a large, high-impact project. I was hired with this project in mind, but due to external factors, this project has been deprioritized and removed from the roadmap.

This puts me in a vulnerable position as now I don't have major scope to work on. Here are my thoughts on how to remedy the situation:
- Find new scope - I am doing this now, but this is tough as I'm pretty new. Unsure how I can find this on such short notice.
- Change teams
- Wait for the manager / lead to figure out a new large scope project for me
- Work closely with my manager, so they can find a new project for me

My main project got cancelled - How can I find new scope for me to work on?

I’m currently a relatively new senior engineer at Pinterest trying to get to staff engineer. The area where I need the most help is the direction axis of the next level. How can I meaningfully shape the vision for a decent project?

How can I get better on the direction axis to get to staff engineer?

Pinterest is an image sharing service designed to enable saving and discovery of information in the form of pinboards. Pinterest has over 430 million monthly active users and is headquartered in San Francisco, CA.

Pinterest

Senior Software Engineer [L5]

Two broad approaches here: 
1. Create/invent a new project where you will inherently determine the direction, since you have the most context. 
2. Shape the (engineering) direction on an existing project. This requires taking the time to build relationships, deliver high quality work, and use the resulting trust to shape the engineering.

By definition, direction requires that people understand and agree with your approach. That means you need to talk to people. Writing emails and writing code is not enough.

Meta, Pinterest, Kosei

Rahul Pandey

Funnily enough, I actually think how the question is framed shows a bit of the gap between L5 and L6. When you're a true staff engineer, you need to care about the entire team's charter, not just individual projects. When an L6 suffers, the entire team suffers. This means that you have to care about a collection of projects (often by working through L5s), not just one.

To make things clearer, I'll dive a little into my experience working on Instagram Ads. Different teams (M1 scope with an L6 engineer) would own different parts of the ad (Oversimplification: 1 team owned the media, 1 team owned the CTA button, etc), and each team had core metrics to increase the effectiveness of their portion by X% leading to Y% more revenue.

There's often times no single project that will single-handedly get a team to its half-long or year-long goal, especially at a bigger company like Pinterest and definitely not in a mature org like Instagram Ads. The L6 engineers in this org would figure out the **collection of projects** the team should work on to try and hit that core goal, often times with a common theme behind them (i.e. "Why are we taking these 5 bets instead of these other 5 bets?"). They would oversee the execution of all the projects at a high-level and maybe get into the weeds and be the core POC on the biggest one.

This more holistic thinking at the team scale vs. the individual project scale is key to becoming a staff engineer. In terms of how to unlock this vision, I recommend working backwards from the team's OKRs/KPIs and building a deep understanding of your team's product space by talking with your PM/designer. Another thing to do is to figure out how you can influence other L5s and lead them.

Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero, PayPal

Alex Chiou

Senior engineers have proven themselves to be extremely capable at shipping high-quality, complex software efficiently. This collection breaks down how they operate and how you can get to this level too.

The clearest way a company can acknowledge your growth. At the end of the day, you can't solely interview your way to a principal engineer; promotion is the true foundation of your pay and career.

How can I get better on the direction axis to get to staff engineer?

Pinterest

Discussion

Pinterest