Is Distinguished Engineer Worth It? Dealing With Pressure And Work/Life Balance

Andrew became a Distinguished Engineer at Pinterest after working there for more than 9 years. He talks about: 

- The importance of persuasion and executive communication at this level.
- The amount of hours he put in to attain the Distinguished Engineer title at Pinterest. Andrew would frequently stay at the office until midnight, and his work/life balance suffered for years.
- Why he left his role at Pinterest (he made it to the top of the career ladder, literally could not get promoted further) to start a startup. 

Relevant links: 
- [How do you stay on top of everything?](https://www.jointaro.com/question/tgoVPigLZjzx7Z3qmMNH/how-do-you-stay-on-top-of-everything/)
- [How to keep my mental health while working in a competitive team and having kids?](https://www.jointaro.com/question/wpPPjI1gZtM5eNaCxlB0/how-to-keep-my-mental-health-while-working-in-a-competitive-team-and-having-kids/)
- [Master The Art of Successful Negotiations](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/zQWx8Vq89OA2lERWnjvL/master-the-art-of-successful-negotiations-unlock-your-full-potential/)
- [Andrew on LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-zhai-2796ab34/)

Laid Off. What’s Next? The Case For Optimism

NOTE: This video was published in January 2023.

If you lost your job, right now is actually a great time to get laid off. It's obviously not fun to wake up and discover that your work access has been cutoff, but all things considered, you're going to be ok.

Many laid-off tech workers are getting generous severance packages which can be used for a well-earned vacation, taking time between jobs, or starting your own project. Historically, tons of companies were started in the midst of a recession, including Microsoft, Electronic Arts, Uber, and Instagram.

- [\[Masterclass\] How To Survive Tech Industry Layoffs](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/axnVXYox5QeOneqcoyuH/masterclass-how-to-survive-tech-industry-layoffs/)
- [Inside The Layoff Era of Big Tech (Meta, Google, Amazon Layoffs)](https://www.jointaro.com/blog/inside-the-new-layoff-era-of-big-tech/)
- [Checkout all the layoff resources + discussions on Taro](https://www.jointaro.com/topic/layoffs/)

Other resources:

- [PG's essay about startups in a recession](http://www.paulgraham.com/badeconomy.html)
- [Laid Off Tech Workers Quickly Find New Jobs](https://www.wsj.com/articles/laid-off-tech-workers-quickly-find-new-jobs-11672097730)
- [Taro's LinkedIn community](https://linkedin.com/company/jointaro)

FAANG: Great For Compensation, Less So For Promotion

Getting into FAANG is the dominant thing on so many software engineers' minds, but most of them are making the mistake of not thinking about what happens after they get in. When it comes to that, hitting a growth wall is a very common (and painful) career trap Big Tech engineers run into.

Here are the core points from the video:
- **Most big problems have been solved** - Many teams at FAANG are maintaining flagship products at this point. While these products are great for consumers by being universally known and very useful, they are usually not great for engineers looking to grow. Since they are so hyper-optimized, it's very common for a software engineer to run 10 experiments on a product like Facebook home feed only to have every single one of them fail.
- **Getting to senior/staff is very hard** - Because scope gets so hard to find, these promotions in particular can be *extremely* difficult. SDE 2 -> SDE 3 at Amazon is notoriously impossible, and L4 -> L5 at Google is known to be very tricky as well.
- **You're competing against teammates** - While scope can be created and expanded, there is often a finite amount of it. This means that Big Tech engineers are often jockeying against their very talented peers to own this limited resource. In the worst case scenario, this leads to very dirty politics.

Related resources:
- ["What does it mean to not have enough scope to be promoted?"](https://www.jointaro.com/question/bJuagPwOEEy5vkcXKkqh/what-does-it-mean-to-not-have-enough-scope-to-be-promoted/)
- ["What should I look for in a new team in terms of growth?"](https://www.jointaro.com/question/i2bOMPrqaRc0NUZ7918F/what-should-i-look-for-in-a-new-team-in-terms-of-growth/)

So Many Software Engineers Get This Wrong About FAANG - Big Tech Isn't A Monolith

Many software engineers who aspire to get into Big Tech have this consistent, utopian vision of what working there is like. This couldn't be further from the truth and thinking in this way severely holds back your career direction.

Here are the core points from the video:
- **Big Tech companies aren't all the same** - Even though there are commonalities working at companies with such massive scale, each company has its own culture and unique way of doing things. For example, the life of the average engineer at Amazon is going to be *very* different from that of the average engineer at Microsoft.
- **Big Tech can vary within themselves** - Once you reach 5,000+ employees, it is impossible to maintain a completely homogenous culture throughout the entire company. Organizations and teams will develop unique sub-cultures, so even 2 engineers within the same company can have very different experiences, even if they're the same level and working on the same tech stack.
  - Meta is an extreme example by giving its major acquisitions (WhatsApp, Instagram, Oculus) a lot of autonomy in how they run. Meta is almost like 4 different companies in 1.

Related resources:
- [[Masterclass] Should You Work At FAANG? - What Big Tech Is Like For Software Engineers](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/JnEnRphdi5TaPZl1Zrl8/masterclass-should-you-work-at-faang-what-big-tech-is-like-for-software-engineers/) - The full video where this clip was taken from
- ["Typical Day of Average FAANG Software Engineer?"](https://www.jointaro.com/question/sOoGZwl8fsQ3hq8yv10v/typical-day-of-average-faang-software-engineer/)
- ["How much is the tech culture within a company a predictor of its overall growth?"](https://www.jointaro.com/question/o7CVNROK0yiRa7YEeFNH/how-much-is-the-tech-culture-within-a-company-a-predictor-of-its-overall-growth/)
- [promotions.fyi](https://www.promotions.fyi/) - This is the website Rahul mentions at the end of the video

[Case Study] Building An Engineering Brand - Why And How (LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, Substack)

Most of Taro's success has come from the social presence of Rahul and Alex. For Rahul, his follower counts as of April 2023 are **75K on YouTube, 61K on LinkedIn, and 13K on Twitter**. Followers are an imperfect measurement of influence, but they are generally correlated. 

### Why invest in brand building?

- Be helpful for others
- Helps you learn more
- Increase your luck surface area
  - Inbound instead of outbound
  - Connect with other creators
  - Compounding value over time

Brand building is definitely *NOT* required to be a good engineer, but it will become more valuable over time.

### Which platform should I invest in?

The options I recommend are **LinkedIn** and **YouTube**. You should pick a platform with built-in distribution. That means a blog is almost always a bad idea (Substack is a bit different since it does have some distribution methods). 

Another dimension to think about is the competition on that platform -- how hard is it to get noticed? 
- Which audience are you trying to reach? (B2B vs B2C, students or professionals)
- How much effort is required to produce content? Videos are much more work than essays, which are much more work than tweets.

You can also take a bet here on a growing platform like TikTok, but there are risks around what kind of content is valued, and the longevity of the platform.

### Getting started as a creator

- Keep in mind the **spotlight effect**: "The psychological phenomenon by which people tend to believe they are being noticed more than they really are"
- Since no one really cares about you when you start out, you should focus on quantity over quality. Just make a lot of content, get feedback, and keep improving. 
- Focus on having your content actually add value. Just reposting articles, or making a list of 20 news articles is not that interesting. (It may get engagement, but you're not actually building a brand.)

### Aim for virality

A significant amount of my growth on LinkedIn came from 3 viral posts: [1](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/rpandey1234_learntocode-softwareengineer-activity-7052287566544306177-sn9R/), [2](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/rpandey1234_softwareengineering-compensation-licreatoraccelerator-activity-6989278004149465088-V-IF/), [3](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6917123048710000640/) 

Some of your content will be "conversion" content, designed to get people to take action such as signing up for an email newsletter. These posts won't do as well, but you should also focus on having "distribution" content, which is the type of thing that can go viral. 

Once you have a viral hit, you can also repurpose the content on other platforms in order to maximize the value from it. That's what Rahul did with the "Learn To Code" video that he initially published on YouTube: 
- [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awB99NJ2G38)
- [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/rpandey1234_learntocode-softwareengineer-activity-7052287566544306177-sn9R/)
- [Twitter](https://twitter.com/rpandey1234/status/1646060396082790400)

### Practical tips
- Post content deliberately about one domain, e.g. engineering growth. Don't jump between topics. 
   - This is how you build a brand. 
   - Make it clear what value you provide, “e.g. the Car Dealership Guy” or “The No-Code Lady”
- Use content scheduling features to be consistent with posting
- Look up resources on copywriting
   - Start with a number
   - Nail the hook, e.g. *"Let me be clear."*
   - Tell a story: Instead of "A happened and then B happened", say "A happened, but X, so then B happened"

-------------

This is a recording of a Taro Premium session from April 20, 2023. See other discussions about [content creation on Taro.](https://www.jointaro.com/topic/content-creation/)

[What to be careful about when starting a blog or LinkedIn audience.](https://www.jointaro.com/question/O5qwwCqT6SAsWSNqlD2V/making-content-as-a-software-engineer-what-to-look-out-for/)

Market Expansion: The Similarity Between Startups And Content Creators

Steve supports several hundred engineers at Amazon as a Principal Engineer. After finding himself giving out the same advice repeatedly, he decided to package up his insights into a YouTube channel. However, similar to Rahul's content, the applicability of his advice turns out to be much broader than just software engineers.

Steve is focused on having the maximum impact on as many people as possible, which means that he welcomes the “pivot” into the broader audience of knowledge workers.

This is a common pattern within content creation and startups: you start by focusing on a specific niche and being hyper-focused on serving them. But you realize that the product or content you created is actually applicable to a much broader set of people. 

- [How to evaluate a startup?](https://www.jointaro.com/question/UCG4XxyEOTjjyg4pEuwY/how-to-evaluate-a-startup/) 
- [“How much am I hurting my career with this startup?”](https://www.jointaro.com/question/dqCvmYhI9WE0k33orZEP/how-much-am-i-hurting-my-career-by-staying-at-a-startup-pressure-to-work-for-big-tech/)

Connect with Steve: 
- [Taro](https://www.jointaro.com/profile/aZJL3ucq9dQnscO09F4JDRkgPo72/)
- [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/@ALifeEngineered)

[Masterclass] How To Be An Amazing Interviewer In Tech

For all the core points, you can find them in the slides below. For this video summary, we're going to share our Top 5 insights from the session:
- The tension of being a great interviewer is that you need to balance getting signal of the candidate's ability while maximizing candidate experience.
  - Can you make it so that the candidate had a good time even if they failed?
- Getting signal happens when the candidate has to figure out a challenge. *This means that you need to be very careful giving hints*. If you give too many hints, you are solving the problem for them.
- **Never ever end an interview early due to poor candidate performance, especially an onsite round**. Turn the interview into a fun pair programming exercise where you build cool stuff and help them become a better engineer.
- If you're the candidate, communicate as much as possible and don't fish for hints. This gives the interviewer more opportunities to help you out. Doing the opposite can doom your chances.
- At the end of the day, the interview process is made up of people on both sides, interviewee and interviewer. Let's all make the world a little better by striving to be good interviewers!

Related resources:
-  [Presentation slides](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1oBNstU-3TJlPGc8Rc5K7AfUUdr7OUo1ADT3JPa4ecSk/edit?usp=sharing)
- [In-depth session on acing your DSA interview](https://link.jointaro.com/cponWycMZZfkRNBW8)
- [In-depth session on acing your system design interview](https://link.jointaro.com/FWp3fithS4xzp3dx7)

Philip's Biggest Concern: The Future Of Work

He Bought Coffee For ALL Meta Employees On His Last Day

What To Do If Your Manager Seems Detached

This segment addresses the common experience of feeling disconnected from a manager and provides tactical advice for becoming more visible and driving engagement in that relationship. The message is rooted in realism: most managers are overwhelmed, and visibility must be earned through structured communication.

- **Managers often appear detached—not maliciously, but due to bandwidth**: With many reports and constant demands, a manager may not track every individual’s progress or struggles unless the impact is urgent or visible.
- **Visibility must be self-driven**: It's essential to lower the "activation energy" required for a manager to know what’s going on. Regular updates make it easier for them to stay engaged and supportive.
- **Weekly written updates are powerful**: Creating a consistent cadence of updates helps establish a communication rhythm. These should include:
  - *Top of mind*: What’s currently being prioritized.

  - *Priorities*: Key goals from the current or past week.

  - *Actions*: Clear tasks being worked on, by either the employee or the manager.
- **Proactive documentation helps managers help more effectively**: Preparing and sharing this structure before one-on-ones gives the manager context and allows for more productive, actionable feedback.
- **Taking initiative builds influence**: Instead of expecting a manager to chase progress or identify gaps, the individual contributor can shape the relationship by driving clarity and making collaboration easier.

One Of Management’s Hardest Tasks: Properly Giving Feedback

This video explores the complexities of effective feedback in engineering management, emphasizing the balance between honesty and empathy. It also highlights how mentoring approaches must evolve based on the experience level of the engineer receiving feedback.

- **Honest feedback is essential for growth**: Engineering managers must avoid both extremes—being overly harsh or too protective of emotions—and instead aim to deliver candid, constructive feedback with empathy.
- **Empathy does not mean avoidance**: Withholding critical feedback to preserve feelings can be detrimental to an engineer’s development; it’s important to be honest even when the message is difficult.
- **Good mentorship goes beyond directives**: Effective managers explain the *why* behind advice, helping reports internalize the underlying principles rather than just follow instructions blindly.
- **Tailor feedback to experience level**: Junior and mid-level engineers often need clear, actionable advice, while senior engineers should be given higher-level guidance and trusted to translate it into execution independently.
- **Mentoring is a skill that evolves**: The ability to adjust mentoring style across a range of experience levels is a key marker of a strong engineering manager.

1 on 1 Meetings Are An Exercise In Proactivity

Why should you err on the side of creating a 1 on 1 meeting instead of waiting for it to be absolutely necessary?

True or false: Team meetings are more important than 1 on 1 meetings, so you should create them more aggressively for everyone to stay in sync.

Being proactive about setting up one-on-one meetings helps build strong relationships and avoid costly misalignments down the line.

- **Default to setting them up**: It’s better to create a recurring one-on-one and cancel it later than to realize too late that it was needed.
- **Low time cost, high value**: One-on-ones only use two people’s time, making them much less costly than poorly-run team meetings.
- **Prevent bigger issues**: Skipping one-on-ones can lead to being misaligned with key collaborators, which may cause serious problems later in a project.
- **Sync early with core stakeholders**: Especially in cross-functional teams or shared ownership scenarios, early and regular one-on-ones help prevent misunderstandings and build trust.

Become A Debugging Master [Part 2] - Why You Should Love Bugs

Bugs are often seen as a nuisance, but in reality, they offer one of the highest-impact ways to grow and succeed as an engineer. Here are the core points from the lesson:

- Junior engineers often avoid bugs to chase “cool” feature work, but experienced engineers recognize bugs as critical for making meaningful product impact
- Owning and fixing bugs can accelerate your career growth, even to senior levels like Staff or Senior Staff Engineer, by demonstrating deep technical skill
- Debugging teaches you to dive across teams, codebases, and systems—skills that are rare, valuable, and highly rewarded
- Fixing bugs ensures real, lasting impact compared to feature work, where many experiments and launches often quietly fail
- Mature engineers view the endless supply of bugs as opportunities to create visible, undeniable value by removing problems that directly affect users

Related resources:

- Code quality course: [Level Up Your Code Quality As A Software Engineer](https://www.jointaro.com/course/level-up-your-code-quality-as-a-software-engineer/)
- [Girish Patangay: The billion versions of Facebook you’ve never seen](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXGgc79sGwY)

15 SWE Years In 1.5 Hours [Part 13] - The Secret To Growing Fast

Getting better isn't about which AI tool you use or what books you read or even which company you work for. How fast you improve comes down to one fundamental skill that most people struggle with. This lesson teaches you:

- Why feedback is the fuel for rapid engineer growth
- How many engineers respond incorrectly when it comes to getting feedback
- The right mentality to have when it comes to feedback overall
- Why an incorrect piece of feedback can actually be a good thing

DSA Crash Course [Part 10] - Most Frequent Char Approach

In this lesson, Alvin explores the strategy to solving the following interview problem:

> Write a function, *most_frequent_char*, that takes in a string as an argument. The function should return the most frequent character of the string. If there are ties, return the character that appears earlier in the string.
>
> You can assume that the input string is non-empty.

```
most_frequent_char('bookeeper') # -> 'e'
```

```
most_frequent_char('david') # -> 'd'
```

```
most_frequent_char('abby') # -> 'b'
```

```
most_frequent_char('mississippi') # -> 'i'
```

If you need additional support taking these DSA skills and actually applying them, take [**Alvin's**](https://www.linkedin.com/in/alvin-zablan-b73a92117/) *complete* data structures and algorithms course on [**Structy**](https://structy.net/?utm_source=taro). You can try out the concepts yourself in their interactive code editor and learn advanced DSA patterns like stack exhaustive recursion.

Use [**this link to get 20% off**](https://structy.net/purchase?promo_code=taro20) the entire Structy DSA learning experience.

Follow Alvin on LinkedIn: <https://www.linkedin.com/in/alvin-zablan-b73a92117/>

How to Crack System Design Interviews - Part 1: Introduction to the course

This course will help you understand system design interviews, prepare for them, and learn what to keep in mind during the process. Here's what we'll cover:

- **Understanding the Interview:** We'll review the structure of a system design interview and how it evaluates your skills, focusing on preparation, communication, and problem-solving.
- **Importance of Communication:** We'll discuss how to effectively communicate your ideas, understand requirements, and collaborate with the interviewer.
- **Technical and Problem-Solving Skills:** We'll explore how to leverage your experience and knowledge to answer questions effectively, drawing on real-world examples and theoretical understanding.
- **Preparation Strategies:** We'll cover various methods for preparing for system design interviews, including mock interviews, independent learning, and structured courses.
- **Step-by-Step Guidance:** We'll break down the interview process into manageable steps, offering clear and concise instructions to help you succeed.

Do mock interviews from one of the services on the [perks page](https://www.jointaro.com/perks/) (e.g. [Exponent](https://www.tryexponent.com/?ref=taro)) or [Taro's networking tool](https://www.jointaro.com/networking/?selectedServices=Mock+Interviews).

[Gaurav Sen](https://www.linkedin.com/in/gkcs/) has conducted 1000s of system design interviews while working at Uber and building his [YouTube channel](https://www.youtube.com/@gkcs) to 500K+ subscribers. His platform [InterviewReady](https://interviewready.io/?_aff=JOINTARO) combines video explainers, live Zoom classes, and an automated System Design Judge.

Master The DSA Interview [Part 23] - Don't Just Surrender

When preparing data structures and algorithms, you will almost certainly get frustrated at many points in the process. How you react to those moments will dictate how well you do in those interviews:

- What to do when you're stuck on a data structures and algorithms problem in prep so you can actually learn the problem and its concepts
- How to unblock yourself on a data structures and algorithms problem properly in prep, shown with an in-depth example

Master The DSA Interview [Part 16] - Alternate Approaches

The beautiful (and sometimes frustrating) thing about software engineering is that almost every technical problem has a ton of possible solutions. This lesson teaches you:

- Why being able to come up with alternate approaches is so important as a software engineer at the top level
- How to have a proper discussion with your interviewer about alternate approaches
- What a great alternate approach discussion looks like, discussed with an in-depth example

Dive deeper into real system design here: [\[Course\] System Design Masterclass: Shipping Real Features To Production](https://www.jointaro.com/course/frontend-system-design-masterclass-building-playlists/)

Master The DSA Interview [Part 9] - Outline Your Approach

Once you have clarified exactly what you need to deliver with a data structures and algorithms interview problem, you need to figure out how to deliver it. This lesson teaches you:

- How to come up with a data structures and algorithms solution plan
- The many benefits of coming up with a plan proactively
- What a good data structures and algorithms plan looks like, explained with an in-depth example

Grow From Junior To Mid-Level Engineer [Part 2] - At A Glance: Junior Vs. Mid-Level

What exactly does it mean to be a junior engineer vs. a mid-level engineer? What's the gap? This lesson teaches you:

- What it means at a high-level to be a junior vs. a mid-level engineer
- The difference in execution between a junior engineer and a mid-level engineer
- The types of tasks junior engineers work on vs. a mid-level engineer
- The ownership and scope difference between a junior vs. a mid-level engineer
- The difference in organizational complexity between junior engineers and mid-level engineers

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.