Level Up Your Code Quality As A Software Engineer [Part 18] - Have A Test Plan

Test plans are something many tech companies don't do, and it's a shame. Pull request test plans are one of the easiest things you can do as a software engineer to really level up your code review experience and ultimately the quality of your code. This lesson will teach you:

- What a test plan is and the many, many benefits it provides. There's a reason Meta requires engineers to have a test plan in their diffs (pull requests)
- How to creative with your test plans when your code is hard to demo (very applicable for back-end facing engineers)
- The many benefits of having a thorough test plan and the many downsides of not having a test plan
- What the ideal test plan looks like, which we'll cover through a couple in-depth examples

Level Up Your Code Quality As A Software Engineer [Part 8] - Case Study: Instagram vs. Robinhood

Trying to nail down what good code looks like is equivalent to trying to staple jello to a wall. Almost every software engineer looks up to FAANG and FAANG-adjacent companies, and that's what this lesson will cover in-depth with an example. This lesson will teach you:

- The engineering philosophy behind Instagram's Android codebase, its unique attributes, and its priorities
- The engineering philosophy behind Robinhood's Android codebase, its unique attributes, and its priorities
- Why taking Instagram Android code and pasting it into Robinhood would have been terrible despite it being industry-leading in its own context (and vice-versa)

Senior Staff Engineer (L7) Describes Most Important Skill - Kaushik Gopal

[Kaushik](https://www.linkedin.com/in/gopalkaushik/) is a Senior Staff Engineer at Instacart.

- **Most important skill**: identify, deliver, and measure the impact. At the Senior Staff level, it's not enough to execute on a technical vision, you also need to spend time identifying and measuring impact.
- **Advice**: talk to stakeholders across the company to identify problems and areas of impact. This includes non-eng functions like PM, design, customer support.

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:

- [SWE2 --&gt; Principal Eng in 4 years](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/Lvf1TDKt1R4ZJSCr9BVv/rockstar-software-engineer-story-sw2-greater-principal-in-just-4-years/)
- Taro's top 10 to get promoted from [senior to staff engineer](https://www.jointaro.com/playlist/YD8LMCSlE71VUGUbNAWM/)
- [David Pan on what makes a great tech lead](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/uHqZZ15SK19MatEvLSO6/what-makes-a-truly-great-tech-lead-a-vp-of-engineerings-perspective/)
- [Kaushik on LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/gopalkaushik/)

How Effectively Do Big Tech Engineers Perform In Startups?

Make Your Promotion Case Easy - Keep A Brag Journal

20 Years Of Fighting Procrastination [Part 2] - The Right Mentality For Productivity

Many engineers think their lack of productivity is a motivation issue, so they start off by focusing on that. However, this is usually not the right way to go. Here are the core points from the lesson:

- Action creates motivation, not the other way around—starting small builds momentum
- Progress triggers a positive spiral: productivity → feeling good → more productivity
- You only need discipline for the first 5 minutes—after that, the task usually becomes easier

Beyond 'Cracking the Coding Interview': 10+ Years Of Tech Interview Evolution

For over a decade, *Cracking the Coding Interview* has been hailed as the "bible" of interview prep. Now, its high-anticipated sequel, [**Beyond Cracking the Coding Interview**](https://www.amazon.com/dp/195570600X), is out. While the original delved deeply into coding problems, the sequel shifts its focus to teaching you how to think—both in the context of technical interviews and throughout the job search process.

In this event, the authors of [**Beyond Cracking the Coding Interview**](https://www.amazon.com/dp/195570600X) will share how tech hiring has changed in the last decade. Ask them anything about interview prep, job stuff, negotiation, or algorithms and data structures. The authors are:

- [**Gayle Laakmann McDowell**](https://www.gayle.com/), the original author of CtCI
- [**Michael Mroczka**](https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-mroczka/), Google engineer and top interview coach on [**interviewing.io**](https://interviewing.io/?c=taro)
- [**Aline Lerner**](https://www.linkedin.com/in/alinelerner/), founder of [**interviewing.io**](https://interviewing.io/?c=taro)
- [**Nil Mamano**](https://www.linkedin.com/in/nilmamano/), Google engineer and algorithm researcher

Redeem a discounted mock interview from [interviewing.io](https://interviewing.io/?c=taro) on Taro Perks: [jointaro.com/perks/](https://www.jointaro.com/perks/)

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

Write A Stellar Resume As A Software Engineer [Part 9] - I Know (Suck At) Everything

When it comes tech stacks on your resume as a software engineer, less is usually more. This lesson teaches you:

- What employers are looking for when it comes to an engineer's technical skills on their resume
- Why it's dangerous to put a bunch of technical terms (i.e. keyword stuffing) on your resume
- A simple framework to determine whether or not you should put a technical term (programming language, library, domain) on your resume

Take the code quality course here: [Level Up Your Code Quality As A Software Engineer](https://www.jointaro.com/course/level-up-your-code-quality-as-a-software-engineer/)

Master The Behavioral Interview [Part 13] - Good Vs. Bad Questions To Ask

You're a software engineer and you have slogged through the behavioral round, answering many grueling questions. And now the interviewer opens up the floor to you: "Do you have any questions for me?". What do you do here? This lesson teaches you:

- What a good behavioral interview question to ask looks like through many examples, which you can ask word-for-word in your next behavioral interview
- What a bad behavioral interview question looks like (avoid these)
- The attributes of a high-quality question vs. a low quality question in a behavioral interview

Master The Behavioral Interview [Part 4] - Don't Memorize: Be Nimble

Too many software engineers keep thinking as if they're still in school, and this applies to how they study for interviews. Unfortunately, memorization is a terrible strategy with behavioral interviews. This lesson teaches you:

- The mindset you need to have to be a successful behavioral interviewer
- Why memorization doesn't work with behavioral interviews
- How to properly train your brain when it comes to behavioral interviews
- What good vs. bad looks like when it comes to what to remember with behavioral interviews

Nail Your Promotion As A Software Engineer [Part 4] - Do It For The Right Reasons

It's easy to become promotion-obsessed, especially at top companies like FAANG where promotions are so meaningful. However, this is a toxic mentality to have that ultimately hurts your career ambitions. This lesson teaches you:

- How to strike a delicate balance between deliberately pushing for promotion and having a healthy growth mentality
- The optimal mindset to have to get to extremely senior engineering levels
- Common pitfalls promotion-obsessed engineers fall into and what you should do instead for each of those situations

Related resources:

- ["How do I come up with innovative, impactful ideas and bring them to my team?"](https://www.jointaro.com/question/3QIJhAT4loA7n1hSfCuw/how-do-i-come-up-with-innovative-impactful-ideas-and-bring-them-to-my-team/?playlistId=EWIo3USNcsgXbCs5PS0h)
- ["How do I find projects for myself at work?"](https://www.jointaro.com/question/KitOGyYkpbsXFGoHPJUj/how-do-i-find-projects-for-myself-at-work/)
- ["How can I help juniors?"](https://www.jointaro.com/question/OzbQJCzLPbOKTEqpeSxF/how-can-i-help-juniors/)

Thank People (A Lot!)

Properly thanking people is how you build social capital. Social capital is how you advance your career, build influence, and get promoted.

**Noob way of saying thank you**: "Thanks for the pointer" ❌

**Better way of saying thank you**: "That was so helpful, you unblocked a critical milestone of this project" ✅

Some other tips: 

- Thank them  in-person or over a call
- Write a heartfelt thank you note (1 paragraph)
- Let their manager know
- Thank in public forums
- Give them recurring thanks, e.g. in standup, at the team meeting, and when the project finishes

Level Up Your Code Quality As A Software Engineer [Part 11] - Case Study: Signup Form Edge Cases

So how exactly do you figure out the edge cases with a piece of software? Well, it's hard work, especially as the volume of edge cases scales up exponentially with the complexity of the underlying feature. This video will teach you:

- A process to think through edge cases step-by-step through the stack with an *incredibly* in-depth example covering one of the most classic features virtual every tech company ever has: The email and password signup flow
- Why Big Tech companies hire so many software engineers to build out seemingly basic CRUD applications (hint: They're not basic, not at all, and the signup form case study will prove that to you)

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/)

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/)

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.