Level Up Your Code Quality As A Software Engineer [Part 5] - Fake "Clean Code" Shortcuts

A lot of software engineers want shortcuts: They want to find the optimal tech stack, programming language, and framework to slot into their code so it's automatically the best and they have conquered code quality. Unfortunately, that's just not how code quality works. This lesson will teach you:

- Why having truly good code quality is so, so hard and more about building up fundamental technical skills
- How to have a proper senior engineer mentality around "clean code" and how to extend a codebase
- Common fake "clean code" shortcuts that engineers desperately want to believe but ultimately aren't true (often stemming from obsession with FAANG and Big Tech)

How The Top 1% Of Engineers Are Judged

As a former VP of Engineering at Amazon, Ethan has the unique ability to share how the senior-most engineers were evaluated within Big Tech. These are the top few percent of engineers in the company (Staff Engineers, Principal Engineers, Distinguished Engineers, etc), and the expectations are incredibly high.

**Key insights:**

- **At very senior levels, technical excellence is table stakes.** The top-performing engineers use their technical expertise to help the business. 
- **The dynamic with company leadership is important**: these engineers must be proactive in helping the business, and not simply the "guru on the hill" who provides answers when asked.
- **There are different modalities to get to a very senior level**, e.g. CTO model, technical expert, product engineer, and others. It's ok if you don't want daily meetings with company leadership, but you must be working on a valuable enough problem that can merit an engineer of that seniority.
- **Finding a good manager is critical for both ICs and managers**. Two ways to evaluate this are (1) find a leader who has grown many people and (2) find a leader who is advancing rapidly in their career.

[**Ethan Evans**](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ethanevansvp/) is a retired Amazon VP who now teaches managers how to break into executive levels. He was at Amazon for 15 years, and he became a VP in 2013 until he left in 2020. Ethan shares valuable insights for anyone interested in management or career development.

**Helpful links:**

- [**\[Masterclass\] How To Work Better With Your Engineering Manager**](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/2PbJb2fuqF3iMHy57eEg/masterclass-how-to-work-better-with-your-engineering-manager/)
- Rahul's Senior to Staff course: <https://maven.com/taro/senior-to-staff>
- More from Ethan: <https://www.jointaro.com/topic/ethan-evans/>
- [Rahul's $800K TC journey](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inydj1VZ0y0)

Overcome Career Stagnation (5 Common Scenarios)

**This session dives into the steps you can take to get unstuck and get back to growing your career in a meaningful way.**

Overcoming career stagnation is a complex problem and a primary reason behind job dissatisfaction and burnout.

We often hear stories of people leaving their jobs due to a toxic environment or lack of compensation. However, it’s often due to a lack of meaningful growth, especially amongst ambitious, top performers.

There’s more in our control than we think. Sometimes, we just need to know what options we have at our disposal.

For a deeper dive into this topic, [Casey](https://www.linkedin.com/in/caseydai/) is teaching a course starting mid-January: [**Operate Like An Engineering Leader**](https://www.jointaro.com/event/operate-like-an-engineering-leader-cohort-based-course/)

Inside TaroGPT - Building A Career Coach Chatbot For Engineers

TaroGPT is an AI chatbot designed specifically to help engineers, trained on the 1000s of hours of expert career advice on the Taro platform, crafted by tech leaders at companies like Google, Meta, Amazon, hyper-growth startups, and more. In this session, we go through the system design and product philosophy behind the product.

TaroGPT is a collaboration between 2 companies (and 2 Alexs):

- **Taro (obviously)** - We only built the frontend, and Alex Chiou was responsible for the Android and iOS implementations.
- [**Sentiyen**](https://sentiyen.com/) - This is [Alex Perelman's](https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexperelman/) company, and they built the backend that does all the cool machine learning and AI logic.

To learn more about front-end (Android, iOS, web) system design, check out Alex's master series here: [System Design Masterclass: Taro Playlists](https://www.jointaro.com/playlist/dChIyTQcu2Ct5VC70lki/)

If you don't have TaroGPT yet, you can download it here:

- **Android** - <https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.randomappsinc.techcareergrowth>
- **iOS** - <https://apps.apple.com/us/app/taro-ai-gpt-career-coach-chat/id1605094641>

Lastly, here's the link to the presentation slides:

- [Alex (Taro) - Mobile System Design](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1JKp3xnkdfBNUiCfpDTlpjzzbsSlRrXtZFDMeigxP454/edit?usp=sharing)
- [Alex (Sentiyen) - Backend/ML/AI System Design](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xRsyMi0baRBxVEj7lTVvd6SfUo3gRM9c/view?usp=sharing)

Why All Great Engineers Are Great Debuggers

A lot of engineers will run away from bugs to solely focus on feature work instead. This is a huge career mistake as it deprives you of one of the core sources of engineering growth.

This video is a clip from our debugging masterclass. You can watch it here: [[Masterclass] How To Become A Debugging Master And Fix Issues Faster](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/ioR6WzamAIUTpySLAr7o/masterclass-how-to-become-a-debugging-master-and-fix-issues-faster/)

Related resources:
- ["How can I become more independent and better at unblocking myself with tricky technical issues?"](https://www.jointaro.com/question/QhqQQGrDgFjZbqohpKe0/how-can-i-become-more-independent-and-better-at-unblocking-myself-with-tricky-technical-issues/)
- ["What is the effective way to understand new repository in order to make the required changes in that repo?"](https://www.jointaro.com/question/KoxB3UU2zWC9pdYU6Rx0/what-is-the-effective-way-to-understand-new-repository-in-order-to-make-the-required-changes-in-that-repo/)
- [[Taro Top 10] Junior Engineer To Mid-Level Engineer (L3 To L4)](https://www.jointaro.com/playlist/iBKHYpkjd0BRWWLKQG2j/)

Software Engineering Vs School -- What's the Difference?

A core confusion for many new Computer Science graduates who land a role as an engineer is that **their job is only partially about coding**. Edsger Dijkstra once said:

> Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.

A software engineer is much more than a computer programmer. You're a point of contact for your team, and you better get used to working with tons of other... humans.

And humans are often harder than computers to deal with :)

1️⃣ Learn to push back on requests or features
2️⃣ Communicate the value of your work
3️⃣ Understand how career growth works at your company

This video covers the main areas in which being a software engineer diverges from being a computer science student. The earlier in your career that you are able to fully recognize and account for these differences, the sooner you can go from a simple low-level engineer “who just writes code” to a more senior actor that is able to push the direction of both your team and other teams in your organization.

- Read the [blog post version](https://www.jointaro.com/blog/school-vs-swe-a-lot-of-nos/) of this
- Follow Jordan on YouTube: [https://www.youtube.com/@jordanhasnolife5163](https://www.youtube.com/@jordanhasnolife5163)

Related resources: 
- [Working with your manager for promotion](https://www.jointaro.com/question/iH4HPSNkRpGGCGSlNhNm/resurfacing-a-discussion-about-a-promotion-with-my-manager/)
- [Masterclass on choosing a good team and company](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/0WEmTNZOMIh8xAdfO3JH/masterclass-how-to-choose-a-good-company-and-team-as-a-software-engineer/)
- [Masterclass about learning quickly in tech](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/u9ldIvrTvV1wfWExccDR/masterclass-how-to-learn-quickly-in-tech/)

[Case Study] Building XFN Alignment Across Multiple Orgs (w/ Staff Engineer Cat Chen)

[Cat Chen](https://catchen.me/) talked about his success building alignment across multiple orgs. 

Cat was working at Facebook as a Staff Engineer on the growth team. His charter to get the Android apps on app stores beyond the Play Store. (There were 10+ non-Google stores where Android apps get downloaded with some level of traffic.

Getting an app listed on a 3rd-party platform is simple – sign up as a developer on that platform; upload the Android app for review; wait for approval and launch it. Just as simple as publishing to Google Play.

**BUT it's not that simple at a company like Facebook.** Facebook lawyers wouldn’t allow Cat to accept the Terms of Service on behalf of Facebook the company. Cat didn’t have the privilege to bind Facebook into this contract and even if he did, the lawyers would certainly advise against that.

Instead of simply handing this problem to another person or org, Cat met with a director-level lawyer. Given he was on a different time zone, and in a different job function altogether, this took some legwork. The director explained the risk profile (Facebook could have unlimited downside by blindly accepting an agreement). Eventually Cat discovered a workable solution by using a contracting company to sign the legal agreement, which limits the damages that Facebook may face.

Impact of this work: 
- Successful launch of the existing Android apps
- Ability to launch other apps in the future
- Deep and positive relationship with the legal team, and Cat owned that relationship (which made him indispensable)
- **Almost zero lines of code written!**

[Connect with Cat](https://www.linkedin.com/in/catchen/)

For more resources on how to communicate, build alignment, and operate as a Staff Engineer:
- ["How do I sell the vision behind a large, org-level project?"](https://link.jointaro.com/NGCrB2ifkkpDaDe69)
- ["What's the Difference Between A Senior And Staff Engineer?"](https://link.jointaro.com/BEM2RAjPFe8Pv7826)
- [Guide to Effective Communication](https://link.jointaro.com/mP3WEd4zt5ecnupX6)

How To Handle Hints In A Software Engineer Interview Without Failing

The best software engineer interview performances feel like a collaborative experience between the interview candidate and the interviewer. If an interview is going well, you will be supporting them as the interviewer and maybe giving hints. However, both sides need to be careful about how this happens.

Here are the core points from the video:
- Giving hints is tricky. There are some situations where it's good and some where it's bad.
- In general, you should lean towards giving less hints as an interviewer to maximize the signal you get.
- *Don't give hints when the candidate is desperately fishing, and they have no idea how to solve the problem.*
  - **Fishing example**: "Can we use a binary tree for this?" (they didn't explain their thought process at all prior to asking)
- Fishing questions like the one above are tricky as you can't answer them normally:
  - **If you say "Yes":** You reveal the core pattern behind the problem, solving way too much of the problem for the candidate. At this point, they have failed the question.
  - **If you say "No":** The candidate is one step closer to the core solution via process of elimination. This sets them up to keep fishing until you say "Yes".
- When the candidate is fishing, say something like, *"How do you feel about it? If it makes sense, we can try building it out."* Flip the question back to them and push them to think through it more.
- Give hints to bridge small gaps. If the candidate is 90%+ of the way there, just give them the hint so everyone can move on.
  - A common scenario here is that the candidate has almost all of the solution working minus some trivial 1-liner. You are losing signal by having them struggle on this trivial piece and not working on other, larger problems. In this case, just give them the 1-liner.

Related resources:
- [[Taro Top 10] Effective Interview Prep](https://www.jointaro.com/playlist/HLBYxJI7D1j8STolrwum/)
- [[Masterclass] How To Ace Your Big Tech Interview - Data Structures And Algorithms](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/V4sTACzfOh22nMVcUV3w/masterclass-how-to-ace-your-big-tech-interview-data-structures-and-algorithms/)
- [[Masterclass] How To Ace Your Big Tech Interview - System Design](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/J3I9fTW9ulr6T9KjxpqY/masterclass-how-to-ace-your-big-tech-interview-system-design/)
- [How Alex Got Into Meta With 0 Prior LeetCode Experience](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/ZYiTbN21FsqFxFdpwt5a/how-alex-got-into-meta-with-0-prior-leetcode-experience/)

"How can I get the most out of Taro Premium?" - 9/7/2022

- **Ask us questions!** 🙏 🙏 🙏
  - You can do it from the Taro web app [here](https://app.jointaro.com/questions/create).
  - A lot of your growth corresponds to how much you put yourself out there. The more you share, the more opportunities you're giving yourself to "get lucky" and receive some incredible, insightful advice you can apply to your job and level up.
  - *You don't need to have a good question or even a full question at all to ask something.* Taro is a judgment-free zone. Feel free to just share your current situation and thoughts on it and end your question with something like, "Do any of you have thoughts on how I can improve this situation?"
- Follow the tag corresponding to your level
  - The biggest commonality when it comes to career issues is level.
  - There are very clear patterns among senior engineers pushing for staff, mid-level engineers pushing for senior, etc.
  - In the Taro mobile app, go to the tags page and find the one for your level. If you follow it (or unfollow and then follow it again), it will float to the top of your home feed.
- Share your feedback
  - Every Taro Premium member is effectively a "mini product manager" of the company.
  - If you find a bug or have a feature idea that would help you a lot, please let us know!

This Is Required To Put The Interviewer On Your Side

Related resources:
- [[Taro Top 10] Effective Interview Prep](https://www.jointaro.com/playlist/HLBYxJI7D1j8STolrwum/)
- [[Taro Top 10] Finding A Tech Job](https://www.jointaro.com/playlist/E6R0wVJ5EyCfVnVrlfno/)

This Tool Is Especially Amazing For Big Tech Interviews

Master The DSA Interview [Part 17] - How To Pass FAANG DSA Rounds

Why is it so hard to break into FAANG? Well, it's because FAANG tends to push engineers far harder on data structures and interviews problems. This lesson teaches you:

- The score spectrum FAANG interviewers use to grade candidate
- What it means to get a "Yes" vote on a data structures and algorithms round
- What it means to get a "Strong Yes" vote on a data structures and algorithms round (very important when the market is bad)
- What a strong passing data structures and algorithms interview performance looks like, explained with an in-depth example

Asking Great Questions [Part 1] - How This Course Works

As a software engineer, you need to learn fast, and in order to do this, you simply have to ask a *ton* of questions. This course is here to teach you how you can ask high quality questions that get you the answers you need while *increasing* your reputation among the team. Here are the core parts of the lesson:

- Your instructor [Alex Chiou](https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexander-chiou/) walks you through his extensive 10+ year Silicon Valley background across top companies like Meta and Robinhood, explaining how he was able to raise new-grad Meta engineers \[E3\] all the way to high-performing tech leads \[E5, Greatly Exceeds Expectations\] in just 3 years

- You'll understand why asking questions is an art with a high skill ceiling, not a binary choice between *"Do I ask"* and *"Do I not ask?"*

- We walk you through the course objectives. By the end of the course, you will:

  - 🧠 Have the right **mentality** behind asking questions

  - 💡 Turn questions into a **strength**, not a weakness

  - ✨ Understand the difference between a **high-quality** question and a **low-quality** question

  - ⚙️ Ask stellar **technical** questions

  - 🙏 Ask for **favors** effectively

If you want to learn how Alex got his mentees promoted so quickly: [\[Case Study\] Mentoring Junior SWEs \[E3\] to Senior \[E5\] In Just 2.5 Years At Meta](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/EX9563YnxcJb62cCmetg/case-study-mentoring-junior-swes-e3-to-senior-e5-in-just-25-years-at-meta/)

Maximize Your Productivity As A Software Engineer [Part 9] - Focus Blocks

Context switching is one of your biggest enemies as a software engineer. This lesson teaches you:

- What a focus block is
- Why getting back into coding is so difficult, especially at Big Tech
- The power of focus blocks with involved tasks, particularly with writing code

Master The Behavioral Interview [Part 17] - Staff Engineer

Staff engineer is a level that most engineers never reach (when using the expectations and compensation that FAANG/FAANG-adjacent companies have of Staff). This lesson teaches you:

- The expectations from a staff engineer overall and how that reflects in behavioral interviews
- The kinds of stories staff engineers tell in behavioral interviews

You can learn about Staff Engineer archetypes in our senior -&gt; staff course here: <https://www.jointaro.com/course/grow-from-senior-to-staff-engineer-l5-to-l6/why-have-archetypes/>

Nail Your Promotion As A Software Engineer [Part 5] - Underleveled? It's A Feature, Not A Bug

You're doing better than almost all other engineers at your current level, at least the ones you can easily compare yourself to. So why aren't you getting promoted? Well, it might actually be dangerous to do so. This lesson teaches you:

- Why if a company is doing promotion properly, getting to the next level always involves fundamental behavior change
- The Peter Principle and how it explains the danger of promoting engineers based on their mastery of their current level
- What lagging promotion is and why it's important, both for you and the company
- A framework to understand what it means to go from one level to the next, paired with an in-depth example of the mid-level to senior transition

If you want to learn more about the concrete differences between engineering levels: [\[Taro Top 10\] Understanding Engineering Levels](https://www.jointaro.com/playlist/e9rjATPbSyvRPsukXiHn/)

Rack Up Small Wins

A promising sign for a new employee is if they can have a quick win, no matter how small. This means you want to avoid ambiguous or complex projects.

Ideas for quick wins:

- Share something your learned
- Update docs and tell people about it (not to brag, but to invite feedback)
- Improve wikis by adding screenshots: e.g. a screenshot or video of the setup flow
- Fix a "papercut," e.g. a misspelling in the code or a minor bug

Notice that many of the ideas above don't even involve committing code!

Talk link: [Don't Walk Away from Complexity, Run! (Venkat Subramaniam)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6CYdTOLW8I)

[Distributed Systems Deep Dive] Wide-column NoSQL DB / Cassandra

If you're interested in how to design a wide-column NoSQL database, this session is for you. We'll start with the basics: what Cassandra is and why it's a popular choice for handling massive amounts of data. Expect a clear explanation of its architecture and how it spreads data across multiple servers. We'll cover how Cassandra keeps your data in sync and the trade-offs you might face.

- **Cassandra Basics:** Learn what Cassandra is made for and when it's better than other database options.

- **Architecture Overview:** Understand Cassandra's setup and how it's built for horizontal scaling.

- **Data Duplication:** Find out how Cassandra copies data to protect against outages.

- **Consistency Levels:** See how you can control consistency in Cassandra to fit your use case.

- **Writes and Reads:** Get into the details of how Cassandra handles your data when you're adding or retrieving it.

- **Node Communication:** Discover how Cassandra's nodes talk to each other to stay up to date.

- **Space Management:** Take a look at how Cassandra keeps disk space in check by getting rid of unnecessary data.

- **Dealing with Deletions:** Understand how Cassandra handles the cleanup of deleted records.

Thanks to [Alex Poon](https://www.linkedin.com/in/thealexpoon/) for leading this session!

For more system design resources:

- [\[Masterclass\] How To Ace Your Big Tech Interview - System Design](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/J3I9fTW9ulr6T9KjxpqY/masterclass-how-to-ace-your-big-tech-interview-system-design/)
- [\[Course\] Frontend System Design Masterclass - Building Playlists](https://www.jointaro.com/course/frontend-system-design-masterclass-building-playlists/)

Level Up Your Code Quality As A Software Engineer [Part 10] - Sweat The Details, Call Out Edge Cases

Building software that "works" is easy. Building software that truly works in all viable scenarios is hard and what separates the great engineers from the mediocre ones, especially at Big Tech. This lesson will teach you: 

- Why mistakes are extremely punishing in software
- The relationship between the happy flow and edge cases
- Why being detail-oriented is an extremely valuable asset in tech, especially for your code quality
- The mental framework to have as a software engineer to proactively call out edge cases in a systematic way

Entry-Level Engineer (L3) Describes Most Important Skill - Uriel Sejas

Uriel is a new grad engineer at Slack.

- Most important skill: understand and follow patterns in the codebase. There's likely a well-defined template or approach you can follow to complete your work. 
- Advice: take time to connect with other engineers. An engineer on a different team (build system or UI framework) can share something that otherwise would have taken hours/days to figure out.

Here's the full playlist asking engineers what the most important skill is for their level: [Asking 7 Levels Of Engineers The Most Important Skill](https://www.jointaro.com/playlist/J9Io5lDGaYUpI8vGrUyI/)

Helpful links:
- [[Masterclass] How To Write Better Code Faster As A Software Engineer](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/iYpRj8XfyzCSaTYnce3y/masterclass-how-to-write-better-code-faster-as-a-software-engineer/)
- [How Neetcode Got Promoted From L3 to L4 (Mid-Level) Engineer At Google - Tips + Insights](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/mP1jyI09NsCHDsi5yTEX/how-neetcode-got-promoted-from-l3-to-l4-mid-level-engineer-at-google-tips-insights/)
- Taro's top 10 to get promoted from [entry-level to mid-level engineer](https://www.jointaro.com/playlist/iBKHYpkjd0BRWWLKQG2j/)
- Taro's top 10 to get promoted from [mid-level to senior engineer](https://www.jointaro.com/playlist/AUMiBTvYUv0gcOzuu26V/)
- [Uriel on LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/uriel-sejas/)

Tech Career Growth Videos

Our instructional videos provide software engineers with insights needed for career growth. Masterclasses go incredibly in-depth on a specific tech topic while case studies are real examples from established engineering leaders.