Startups Career Development Videos, Forum, and Q&A

I graduated University of Toronto computer science () with a decent GPA around a year ago. Following graduation, I applied to hundreds of jobs, networked aggressively, and skilled up as much as possible for around three months straight, every day, for the entire day. I landed a ridiculously small number of interviews, and I ended up landing a low-paying dev job with a stack I did not want in a tiny company with no employee benefits. Not exactly the tech bro dream 🥲.

Comparing with many of my peers who have similar backgrounds to me and who landed great jobs straight out of college, it's hard for me to know whether I'm falling victim to LinkedIn survivorship bias (i.e. I'm only seeing those who succeed) or if I am missing something here. Perhaps it's that I didn't do any internships during college, or that the market is bad right now, or that one simply needs referrals to get interviews. I am hoping to gain clarity on this.

My formal questions:

1. I am a graduate of one of the top computer science programs in North America, have a decent GPA, and have a portfolio of college projects. It's hard for me to assume my resume is that suboptimal that it undoes those facts. Why are companies not interested in interviewing me?
2. I have two years of experience total at two different companies, both of which are very small consultancies owned by friends of friends, which I suspect may be hurting my application. Is it better to apply for recent grad jobs or internships (which I'm applying for anyway) with no professional experience listed on my resume?
3. Something that I've seen emphasized on Taro is that it is much more attractive to specialize. For example, in the resume course, Alex recommends applying with a small number of technologies you are proficient in / have experience with. As a recent grad not getting interviews, I am (a) nervous I'll get thrown into a tech stack I don't care for, but thereafter only have a real chance at success interviewing for jobs with that stack, and (b) not actually proficient with any tech stack, so not sure I can craft a "specialized" resume. What are your thoughts on this, and what does a strong recent grad resume look like?

Thank you very much for taking the time to answer and for Taro's support in the job search!

TL;DR: is being deeply involved in the details and not a hands off managerial approach to starting companies popularized by brian chesky and paul graham

Nothing much here, just thoughts? Anyone here working in startups going "founder mode"?

Recently I had an oppurtunity with a strong startup (~10 people, innovative AI idea, but strong profits).

They paid all costs to fly me out so I can work with them for a few days to see if it's a match.

The problem was that when we met, the founders asked me what project I would like to implement in their system within these few days. I wasn't prepared to propose my own idea for how to extend their platform as I didn't know how they build things, and I wasn't sure if I can commit to completing a project in this short amount of times. I asked a few questions, and eventually the conversation landed on an idea I was excited about but I had no idea how to practically implement.

Moreover, their codebase was a mess (files with 10k+ lines, zero comments) and it was a weekend so I couldn't get much help from the engineers.

I've delivered a partial demo on the project, but ultimately wasn't able to ship the whole thing and did not receive an offer. I discussed with the CEO after and he mentioned that he liked my cultural fit, and he also thinks this project was too difficult, but he just doesn't see a good role where I fit currently.

I am trying to learn from this experience and what I could improve, and wanted to get any suggestions in this forum.

I started full-stack at start-ups and then became increasingly front-end as I often found myself on small dev teams that didn't want to worry about FE and I was happy to fill in. I am wondering if it makes most sense to rotate back to be a full-stack role or lean more into management or product?

I haven't met many devs on Front-end who have advanced very far in their career so specializing in Front-end is beginning to look like a dead-end to me.

So it's been 3 months at my startup.

The day I get there, I see that our product is way worse than advertised (ie. saying we had 20 core features when we actually had 2). That's okay I guess, the team was just selling their vision during the interview process.

After 1 month, one of the cofounders quits. The next day, another one of the cofounders quits. I'm panicking, but I realize I'm stuck here because it's my first job. (looks bad if I leave so early)

After another month, we get an impromptu Zoom invite. 1/3 of the engineers have been fired. Everyone is working 60+ hour weeks at this point to keep the same velocity. The firings were not due to lack of funding btw.

And just the other day, we had mid year reviews. The CEO says my engineering speed is slow. (he claims to be able to do in 1 day what I do in 1 week) However, he's never been a SWE before so not sure how he knows.

My gut tells me to leave, but where will I go? Hopefully I can strive for a FAANG company or somewhere that has a strong engineering culture, but I feel pretty trapped right now.

Reflection:

I think part of the issue may be that the CEO wants FAANG-level performance + ridiculous work hours while providing only 60-70% of the actual comp of these firms. Something about expectations and leveling seems to be amiss here

Personal Context:

I have no problems getting interviews (thankfully, even as a new grad) because I spent a few months contributing to open-source. Just debating if it's worth cracking out the LeetCode for a few companies

I've always had a fair share of projects, some of which are high priorities for the team and some of which are less so.

How do I show my impact on the team/org when I'm assigned projects that are low on priority?

Less-priority projects often receive less effort from Product, Design, and other functions. Things get delayed because of other higher-priority projects. Do you have any pointers on navigating such scenarios?

Hey All,

I have just completed interviewing at a seed-stage startup that is creating some stuff that I can really resonate with. The company is profitable, has huge growth metrics in the past 18 months, and tons of room to grow. I do have experience building the type of developer platform they are trying to build which is sort of specialized and I think the interviews went really well and according to the JD, after the onsite interviews the next step is an offer.

I received an email the next day asking me to schedule 15 minutes with the CEO and the Lead Engineer to discuss "next steps". I'm used to working at larger enterprises and tech companies, where I deal with recruiters and the interview processes are pretty straight forward and don't diverge much. I am hoping these next steps are to discuss a potential offer and to make sure I'm good to go with moving from a larger company to smaller company. I do have a few questions for the community though.

Assuming they discuss extending an offer:

1. Should I prepare to discuss comp? If so, is it unrealistic to expect a similar base comp to what I have now (~190k)? Basically all the senior engineers come from FAANG or mid-sized tech companies like me.
2. I'm not actively looking and am comfortable where I am at currently, albeit I am totally uninterested in my work and dread going in everyday, and really like what this company is building. Is there room to negotiate especially with no offers?
3. What are some good resources to gauge what sort of equity I should be looking for? I would be one of the first 7 FTE SWEs and a more senior one.

Also, are there any red-flags I should look out here?

When I joined my current company, it was a standard 40 hour/week company. Since the end of last year, we’ve been told that we’re all expected to work 55-60 hours/week to get our startup to a successful state (get funding, retain current customers, attract new ones). I’m feeling extremely miserable from the change because the schedule doesn’t allow me to do all the other things that are important to me outside of work, such as spending time with family, cooking and working out regularly, and dedicating time to my hobbies. I have subscribed to newsletters for years to keep up with how the javascript and react worlds are changing, but have stopped reading them. I feel like the work hours have made me less curious about keeping up with tech and growing, which is the thing that I used to like most about this career.

We’re asked to track and report our hours working on tickets, and any time we fall short of expectations it comes up in our weekly one on one with our manager. It’s making me want to leave, but the market is tough, I haven’t interviewed in years and never done DSA or system design questions, and it’s hard to start with the schedule I have, because again I’m already sacrificing time with my family for this job and don’t want to sacrifice more. It’s crazy how much the extra 15-20 hours per week is costing me emotionally.

How do I get out of a situation like this? I don’t have enough savings to fall back on, my wife doesn’t work, and my state doesn’t provide Medicaid even to households with no income.

I've recently been approached by a startup founder and asked to complete a take-home quiz, which I did. It looks like the founder is leaning towards offering me the Head of Technology position. However, I have a few concerns and questions.

1. How can I assess if the founder is someone good to work with?

   From my initial conversations, I've noticed a few things about the founder:

   • They come across as overly confident, almost to the point of being condescending. Is this a common trait among founders, or should it be a red flag?
   • They strongly believe the product will be successful. I think this is a positive trait for a founder, but I'd like to get your opinions.
   • They think all backend jobs will be obsolete in two years due to AI. While speculation is fine, I believe there should be a balance with reasonableness.
   • They talk more about the history of AWS, the life of Elon Musk, and famous quotes rather than focusing on their own product.
   • They tend to underestimate the complexity of engineering feats. For example, they think developing services like DynamoDB and S3 was easy for Amazon because of their large workforce, which I find undermines the actual engineering challenges.

2. How can I determine if the startup is likely to succeed?

   • What aspects should I be looking at?
   • What questions should I be asking the founder or team?

Any insights or advice would be greatly appreciated!

I'm a junior SWE at a small company which does not have a lot of standardized culture or process. A lot of inaccurate / non-standard terms get thrown around (for example, we call the entirety of one of our older apps the "backend" because of the way our repo is structured) and I've found that this has caused confusion in meetings, especially with new engineers being onboarded. Even though something like this usually only causes a 10-second confusion which is cleared up with follow-up questions, it feels like such an unnecessary inefficiency that could be easily resolved. Also, in general, I believe this can leak into situation where repercussions are worse like client-facing or investor-facing meetings, where for example a manager might call the old app the "backend" to a client, leaving them confused and thus unaligned on what's going on.

I typically wouldn't care about something of this scope as a junior, but it seems to me that the entire org would benefit from something like this, and that nobody else has addressed it nor will address it. So I've drafted a proposal for standardized terminology, with suggestions for specific terms to use and specific terms to deprecate in our company vernacular.

My question is whether it's appropriate to submit this proposal to my managers. It feels necessary but also not be my place / come across as aggressive. Of course it is hard to answer this question without knowing the specific company culture, but nonetheless, I would like to hear thoughts from seniors about how something like this would come across when coming from a junior.

I went through and kudos to her for doing a great job at articulating everything so well.

But I was wondering at the same time if there are any differences in leading a tech team at a startup (100 engineers company) vs a FAANG company?

Hey y'all!

I've been interviewing for a startup. I'm in the reference check step. This was supposed to be the last step before getting an offer, but they wanted to interview me again to (paraphrasing) dive deeper into topics they hadn't had the chance to ask before.

This feels odd to me; from previous experiences, the reference check is the final step before getting an offer. They also said this in my email after passing the "final interview": they needed to do a reference check before extending an offer.

Question:

• Do you consider this to be a red flag from them?
• Should I be worried?
• Would it be okay to ask upfront what's concerning and take it from there?
• Is this common? This is the first time this has happened to me (I've had 5+ jobs).

Thanks!

In, Alex answered that the key insight behind rapid career growth is good communication.

He points the reader to the "Effective Communication for Software Engineers" course and some other resources.

I feel like a ton of effective communication is , and so finding a good way to teach it outside of observing those who are already good at communication in the context a job is tricky. Specific case studies could be really helpful. I think Alex's course and the other linked resources were a really good introduction to effective communication, but if this is the key skill behind great performance I want to learn more! I've put most of the tips and tricks that Alex taught into practice at my current job and it's really improved my performance and my managers' trust in me already. A huge mindset shift for me was that it's better to risk over-communication than under-communication; it's better to be aligned but slightly annoyed by receiving a lot of messages than not aligned.

My question is: What is a good way to go about building my effective communication skills? Are there more really high-quality resources you recommend for building good communication skills?

Hey! I am joining a startup as a Staff Engineer. I understand, titles can be inflated at a start up. However, it is becoming increasingly difficult to get to staff at big tech, without a supportive team.

My eventual goal is to be a staff engineer at a FAANG, or a very high achieving Senior at a FAANG. I want to use this startup "Staff" as a way to really hone my skills, learn and grow. Purely focussing on my love for coding, software engineering and learning, and not motivated by money.

Keeping the above in mind, how can I ensure, I have staff level scope ( & not just a title) at this startup.

And any tips for successful onboarding at a startup helps, from your personal experience.! ( Yes, I went through Rahul's course already :) )

It is a series B start up, with 70 people.

I'm struggling with my engineering manager's low emotional intelligence. The product he has been building for two years is barely generating revenue, and the outlook for the next six months doesn't look promising either. Recently, he insisted we fix a small bug on a Saturday night, suggesting we'd have to give a party if we didn't do it immediately. After we fixed the issue and pushed a production release late at night, other developers praised the effort on Slack. However, instead of acknowledging our hard work, he responded with a :expressionless: emoji the next morning.

This behavior has been demotivating and has affected my own emotional well-being. I want to avoid reacting negatively and lowering my EQ to his level, but I'm finding it difficult to navigate this culture.

Additionally, the team leads receive high ratings because people appreciate the timely pay, despite the lack of substantial work. These leads earn significantly more than senior engineers, yet they lack skills and are easily influenced by those who are close to them and act as yes men.

Our product is plagued with a lot of technical debt and frequent changes. In two years, our team built a fintech product that was supposed to generate significant revenue. However, we only have one merchant and two lenders, and our 20,000 customers generated just 30K INR in revenue last month after 1.5 million INR in transactions. The cash burn for this product is incredibly high, running into crores. I don't see this changing within the next year due to fierce competition and the difficulty of acquiring customers with good credit scores.

Given this environment, I am concerned about the sustainability of our efforts and the future of the team. The founder might shut down the product within a year due to the lack of revenue, and I'm unsure what will happen to the leads and the team. I want to keep an attitude that is unfazed by negativity and develop a thick skin while focusing on high-level engineering efforts. How can I effectively navigate this situation and maintain my motivation and professional integrity?

Large tech companies used to provide a sense of stability and financial security, but with falling stock prices and layoffs everywhere I wonder if joining a hyper growth late-stage startup with a growing business and hefty pre-ipo RSUs is a better choice?

What will you recommend me at this stage of my career to go back from leading teams to writing code or being a tech lead / tech lead manager role? The industry has changed and senior/director level roles have vanished.

As a founder of an early-stage startup, what are the top things you look for in your first five engineering hires? Are you searching for people who can handle a bit of everything, or do you prefer specialists in key areas? How do you balance technical skills with ensuring they fit well with your company's culture and vision?

Besides their technical know-how, what personal qualities are most important to you in these early hires? Do you value problem-solving skills and creativity over past experience in similar roles or industries? How crucial are soft skills like communication and adaptability, given the fast-paced and ever-changing nature of startups? And finally, how do you make sure these first hires will not only meet immediate project needs but also grow with the company as it expands?

I've been talking with different founders about startups and exploring different getting started with Entrepreneurship And Tech Startups? I also watched several of the . and it got me thinking about when the right time might be to start my own venture. Since I have high tolerance for risk, Could you provide some insights into what are strategies of finding co-founders?

Moreover, what are your thoughts on working on side projects or trial work with potential co-founders before fully committing to a startup? How effective is this approach for building strong, collaborative teams and testing ideas?

Additionally, I remember Alex and Rahul did explore incubators and accelerators as part of this process from one of the Taro Videos. These programs often facilitate co-founder matchmaking and provide a supportive environment. I also got accepted to On-Deck Program for their next cohort for 1 intensive week and thinking about applying to YC in the future with future co-founders. How beneficial are these resources for someone in the early stages of startup planning?

How beneficial are these resources, and which ones would you recommend prioritizing in the early stages of startup planning?