Ask Me Anything (AMA) with a Meta and Databricks Eng Director - Ritendra Datta

[**Ritendra Datta**](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ritendradatta/) is a Senior Director of Engineering at Databricks.

Previously, he was the Head of FB Reels and Video Recommendations (Director of Engineering) at Meta, where he worked from 2019 - 2023. Prior to that, he was a Senior Staff Software Engineer and Tech Lead working at Google in Mountain View. See the [Q&A Ritendra led in the discussion forum](https://www.jointaro.com/question/FaRXsBFD3JpNtFlsmC6Q/im-ritendra-ex-metagoogle-current-senior-director-at-databricks-ama/).

In this Ask Me Anything (AMA), Ritendra answered many questions about tech leadership and career growth!

**Career Preferences in Small vs Large Companies**

Ritendra explained that he enjoys working in smaller, more self-contained companies where he can have a greater impact and more direct relationships with colleagues and superiors. He also highlighted his discomfort in large companies where there are more people than problems and where he would rather focus on technical work than fighting for scope. He ended by stating that his 'sweet spot' is in smaller companies like Databricks or the early days of Google.

**Manager Evaluation and Influence Strategies**

Ritendra discussed how to evaluate a manager and increase influence in a new company. Rahul asked for advice on evaluating a manager, and Ritendra emphasized the importance of empathy, understanding, and a focus on the employee's growth. He suggested asking existing reports about their manager's responses to failure and success, and their approach to career growth. Later, Rahul asked about increasing influence in a new company, and Ritendra advised understanding the company's pain points and focusing on solving them. He cautioned against bringing in new problems to solve, as it can be dismissed due to the existing workload. He also mentioned that introducing a new perspective can also lead to influence.

**Director's Tech Role: Problems and Strategies**

Ritendra discussed the common people problems faced by a director in a technology leading role. Ritendra highlighted the issue of conflict within an overgrown organization, where there are too many people and not enough problems, leading to fights over scope and misaligned career aspirations. He also shared his personal strategy of moving to a different part of the company where the problem is less prevalent. Rahul asked about identifying fast-growing opportunities within a company, to which Ritendra suggested evaluating visibility and impact potential. He advised focusing on areas that are important to the business outcomes but not heavily crowded, and not always following the CEO's narrative.

**Executive Presence: Leading Beyond Teams**

Ritendra shared his personal experience of receiving feedback about his lack of executive presence early in his career and his subsequent efforts to develop it. They also emphasized the importance of understanding and executing on leaders' strategies, as well as effective communication with senior leadership. The conversation touched on the importance of taking action items and follow-ups, and maintaining a balance between being assertive and respectful in discussions with senior leaders. They concluded that executive presence is not solely about intelligence or technical expertise, but also about understanding and acting on strategic directions.

**Relationship-Building and Communication Strategies**

Jordan queried how to optimize the value of one-on-one meetings, to which Ritendra expressed his preference for these meetings due to their potential for honest communication and vulnerability. He shared his personal experience of joining a new company to highlight the significance of openness in establishing deep connections with others. Ritendra cautioned against frequent complaining, recommending a balance of 70% positive communication and 30% expressing struggles.

**Managing Difficult Relationships and Career Advice**

If you have a difficult manager relationship, Ritendra suggested that one should make a judgment call on whether the manager has already given up on them and advised seeking an exit if the relationship can't be repaired. He also mentioned that negative performance reviews often lead to further negative reviews, making it less likely for a turnaround. The topic of how much senior leadership knows about struggling mid or senior-level engineers was also discussed, with Ritendra confirming that such information does spread up the reporting chain. Lastly, Rahul asked about Ritendra's relationship with money as he climbed the career ladder. Ritendra stated that beyond a certain compensation, money doesn't significantly change one's quality of life and that he values his daily happiness over a higher salary.

**AI and ML Advice From Experienced Engineer**

Ritendra advises to focus on the areas surrounding the problem at hand, follow industry experts, read Linkedin articles, and listen to podcasts for new ideas. He emphasized that companies typically focus on fundamental knowledge rather than specific details about recent developments. Ritendra also suggested the use of co-pilot tools, such as AI assisted code writing, to make lives easier and recommended learning about the psychology of engineering and technology.

Relevant links:

- See the [Q&A Ritendra led in the discussion forum](https://www.jointaro.com/question/FaRXsBFD3JpNtFlsmC6Q/im-ritendra-ex-metagoogle-current-senior-director-at-databricks-ama/).
- Check out [**Ritendra's Substack here**](https://tldr0.substack.com/) and [**Medium here**](https://tldr0.medium.com/). (He wrote about his prior [**AMA from Blind**](https://tldr0.substack.com/p/a-fascinating-q-and-a-with-meta-employees) here.)
- Check out discussions with another [**Senior Eng Leader, David Pan, here**](https://www.jointaro.com/topic/david-pan/) and [**Rachel Zhao, here**](https://www.jointaro.com/topic/rachel-zhao/).

Rahul's Compensation Journey To $800K (and behind-the-scenes)

In 2021, the last full year Rahul worked at Meta, he made $823K. When he joined Facebook (Meta) in 2017, his total compensation was $390K. See the full details [in the YouTube video](https://youtu.be/inydj1VZ0y0).

In this session, Rahul documents how his yearly compensation more than doubled over the 4.5 years he was employed at the company. This talk will cover details that didn't fit into the YouTube video while exploring angles of it more in-depth.

Topics:

- What components of compensation matter the most in a typical tech company
- Parts of a company's compensation philosophy which have large consquences, but are not often understood or discussed
- How to think about level and negotiation when job hopping
- The psychology around pay changes, and how people change their spending when hitting certain compensation milestones

Related content:

- [How To Earn Respect Fast - Senior Engineer Onboarding Story](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/FaD8tVGXP6SiRQfee4SD/how-to-earn-respect-fast-senior-engineer-onboarding-story/)
- ["How can I think like a staff engineer?"](https://www.jointaro.com/question/RU3Mof8NeEYQP30l6giW/how-can-i-think-like-a-staff-engineer/)
- [This Is Why FAANG Engineers Make So Much Money - Tech Compensation Breakdown](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/1aKjiSKcHDttnyTAYXy4/this-is-why-faang-engineers-make-so-much-money-tech-compensation-breakdown/)
- [\[Masterclass\] Understanding And Optimizing Your Pay In Tech](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/gk408yBIV2fa5RjVR213/masterclass-understanding-and-optimizing-your-pay-in-tech/)

[Part 4] Software Engineer Onboarding: Understand Strategic Decisions

Learn the business to make good strategic decisions.

By the time you're a month or more into your job, you should start execution on your projects, but you should continue gathering context about your team and company. You should document key decision points in your work, and reflect on who is involved, how long various steps take, and the level of detail various stakeholders ask for.

------

This is part 4 of a 4 part series from Daniel about how to **most efficiently** and **most effectively** onboard into a new team or company. What should you spend your time doing in the first few months of joining, and how should that change based on your level? 

This masterclass covers this topic from the perspective of Daniel Tomko, a 20 year Big Tech veteran. Daniel spent 11 years at Microsoft and 8 years at Meta in various senior IC and management positions. 

- [Go back to part 1 of the masterclass here](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/IYZRmwp33E3TBeFQFr9c/part-1-software-engineer-onboarding-embrace-your-lack-of-knowledge/)
- Connect with Daniel Tomko on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/danieltomko/)
- Check out the [Formation.dev discount](https://www.jointaro.com/perks/) for Taro Premium members
- [How To Figure Out If A Team Is Important To A Company](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/9OwPRwFFSMvEoVj6Zt5Q/how-to-figure-out-if-a-team-is-important-to-a-company/)
- [How To Find A Good Team With Career Growth Opportunities](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/UGIUC9zaGccK0tOarBri/how-to-find-a-good-team-with-career-growth-opportunities/)
- [This Is How You Get Feedback - Making The Process Smooth](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/aGuxjGbFjYb34ofhRxjs/this-is-how-you-get-feedback-making-the-process-smooth/)

"What is the growth plan for Taro Premium?" - 8/18/2022

There are 2 core areas at play here:
1. Empowering Taro Premium members to share their diverse wealth of perspectives and wisdom
2. Tactical areas of improvement

**Communal Sharing**
- Right now, Rahul and I are doing the thing that doesn't scale in true startup fashion: Providing the vast majority of career guidance ourselves.
- However, not only does this not scale, we firmly believe that this isn't the right thing to do long term: Our perspectives are only 2 out of millions of incredible people working in tech.
- Let me be frank: While we've had a diverse range of experience and pushed to understand as many angles of the tech scene as possible, our perspective is narrow. We've only worked in the Silicon Valley. We're around the same age. We spent the lion's share of our careers working at Meta. We're both Asian men. Because of this, there's a lot of stuff we don't know and aren't well equipped to talk about.
- This is where the community comes in. At the time of release of this video, we have ~170 members in Taro Premium, and I've been blown away by the diversity of backgrounds present. If we can enable, reward, and empower all these incredible folks in tech to share their perspectives and help one another, we can create what is truly the greatest repository of tech career advice on Earth.

**Tactical Stuff**
- Our main priority right now is opening up the Q&A career advice platform, so that all members of Taro Premium can easily ask and answer questions.
- While this was recently made possible, there's still a lot lacking. There's no notifications to know when your question has been answered, and we all know that the UI/UX has a ton of room for improvement, especially on web.
- We're working with a contract designer right now to completely overhaul the look and feel of the Taro web app.
- Another thing we want to figure out is member matching. For now, we're mainly matching folks of similar level as the incentives get wonky when you pair folks of different levels. However, this "algorithm" is still quite naive, and we have a long way to go before we can sustainably have folks network with one another in a way where all parties feel like they got value.

Understanding Performance Review Ratings

- The end goal of a performance review is to assign every employee a rating, which is like a grade in school.
- Know what ratings are good
  - What's average?
  - What puts you in the "danger zone" or on a formal performance improvement plan (PIP)?
  - Which rating is great?
- Understand which rating is necessary for promotion

What To Do If You Don’t Mesh Well With Your Manager

This clip discusses the **importance of manager-report alignment**, especially around communication preferences and expectations. A common failure mode arises when managers assume their team members operate and think the same way they do, without checking for alignment.

- **Reciprocity can backfire without context**: Managers often expect others to operate as they did when they were individual contributors—such as sending frequent updates—without recognizing that not everyone shares the same style or comfort level.
- **Avoiding mislabeling of behavior**: What feels like diligence to one person (e.g., weekly updates) might feel like micromanagement to another. This mismatch can create tension or disengagement if not addressed.
- **Meta conversations build alignment**: Discussing communication styles, feedback preferences, career goals, and working habits helps avoid misunderstandings. These conversations create a shared context for more effective collaboration.
- **Feedback delivery should be customized**: Some individuals prefer written feedback over verbal critiques. Adapting delivery style to the recipient’s comfort increases the chance that the feedback is received productively.
- **Mutual respect strengthens manager-report relationships**: Respecting differences in working style and proactively aligning on expectations can prevent unnecessary friction and improve team dynamics.

What Does A High Trust Team Mean For Code Review?

In this closing section, we focus on the importance of **building and operating within a high-trust engineering team**. Trust is not just a feel-good concept—it directly affects our productivity and velocity when shipping code.

- **We prioritize speed and trust in code review.** When we trust our teammates, we don’t block diffs unnecessarily. Instead, we approve with minor suggestions, knowing the author will follow through responsibly.
- **We use “accept with nits” to keep things moving.** For small, straightforward changes—like renaming variables—we leave a “nit” comment but still approve the diff to avoid introducing unnecessary delay.
- **We avoid slowing each other down over trivial issues.** Each extra cycle of “request changes” can delay code by 1–2 days. We conserve team momentum by trusting competent authors to resolve minor feedback themselves.
- **We treat time as our most precious resource.** Code review should add value without becoming a bottleneck. High-trust practices help us operate with both quality and speed.
- **We maintain expectations through communication.** Even when approving with nits, we clarify, *“Please address before landing,”* so everyone stays aligned on expectations without blocking forward motion.

Don't Forget: Code Review Is Public And Has Huge Consequences

In this final segment, we emphasize how **code review is not just a technical exercise—it’s a public, cultural signal**. Especially for tech leads and senior engineers, the way feedback is delivered in code review has real consequences for team morale, inclusion, and career development.

### Key Takeaways:

- **We treat code review as a public cultural forum**: Comments are visible to others on the team and can impact how engineers—especially juniors or new hires—are perceived. Feedback that embarrasses someone publicly can harm confidence and even affect performance reviews.
- **We avoid harsh criticism in public threads**: If we’re truly concerned about someone’s patterns (e.g., lack of testing mindset or carelessness), we give that feedback in private, not in a code review. We follow the rule: *Praise in public, critique in private.*
- **We understand the leadership signal we send**: As tech leads, our tone sets the bar. If we leave demoralizing or curt comments, we implicitly encourage others to do the same—fostering a negative or toxic culture.
- **We handle serious feedback face-to-face**: When needed, we schedule a quick 15-minute conversation to deliver constructive criticism with nuance and care—ensuring it’s received in the spirit of growth, not shame.
- **We use code reviews to build people up, not tear them down**: Every interaction is a chance to create a safer, stronger engineering culture. We remember that what we say—and how we say it—has lasting impact.

Ultimately, we believe that **code review is leadership in action**—and great leaders use it to uplift their teams, not diminish them.

Introduction

Machine learning interviews are brutal—and most engineers prep for them the wrong way. This course flips that on its head. Here’s what's covered in this lesson:

- Your instructor Yayun Jin walks you through her background as an ML lead who’s been on both sides of the interview table. She goes through her journey breaking into the ML world, working across startups and big tech, and interviewing 100+ ML candidates.
- You’ll learn why most prep strategies fail: They're too scattered, too theoretical, and completely disconnected from how interviews actually work.
- We’ll walk you through the course game plan so you know exactly what to expect:
  - 🧭 Learn how to prep for ML interviews with structure instead of chaos

  - 🔍 Understand key differences between ML roles (ML engineer, infra, AI engineer) so you don’t waste time on irrelevant material

  - 🧱 See what great performance looks like in each interview type: coding, modeling, system design, and behavioral

  - 🚀 Get actionable prep tactics tailored for both current ML pros and SWE-to-ML switchers

  - 🎯 Understand how expectations shift based on seniority—so you’re not prepping like a junior when you’re going for a senior role

If you want to learn even more from Yayun:

- Book 1 on 1 career guidance with her here: <https://calendly.com/your-friend-yayun/1on1>
- Follow her on LinkedIn: <https://www.linkedin.com/in/yayunjin/>

20 Years Of Fighting Procrastination [Part 11] - Decompose Aggressively

Decomposition is one of the most reliable habits for making progress feel easy, especially when applied daily. Here are the core points from the lesson:

- Breaking down large, ambiguous tasks into small, concrete steps helps reduce mental friction and makes it easier to start taking action
- Practicing decomposition builds leadership skills and supports team collaboration, since assigning scoped work is essential for effective delegation
- Writing down one key task the night before primes your brain to subconsciously begin planning, leading to more clarity and momentum the next morning

20 Years Of Fighting Procrastination [Part 10] - The Simple Playbook For Sleep

Sleep is often underestimated, yet it’s one of the most powerful levers for improving productivity, health, and mental clarity. Here are the core points from the lesson:

- Sleep has greater long-term health impact than alcohol or smoking, and chronic deprivation leads to worse mood, lower energy, and reduced cognitive function
- Treating yourself as “a good sleeper” and following a consistent wind-down routine (e.g. reading, brushing teeth early, reflecting on the next day) can drastically improve sleep quality
- Physical activity, especially group-based with accountability, helps regulate sleep and creates natural productivity deadlines
- Even small efforts like 10–15 minutes of movement or consistent pre-bed rituals can create compounding benefits for both rest and output

Engineer Your Ideal Tech Career [Part 12] - Mitali Gala: Choosing The Engineering Manager Route

Next, [Mitali Gala](https://www.linkedin.com/in/mitali-gala) (a Mentor at Formation) discusses her decision to charge forward as an Engineering Manager and what that entails for her day-to-day work.

She reflects on some of the challenges, some of the highlights, why she is passionate about this work, and who it would be a good fit for.

Looking for mentorship from tech’s top engineers like Mitali + personalized job hunt assistance and interview prep? [Formation.dev](http://Formation.dev) can provide you unlimited career coaching, technical mentorship, personalized practice, and mock interviews. Join us here: <https://formation.dev/partners/taro>

Worksheet: [Formation - Coding Your Career](https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/tech-career-growth.appspot.com/o/courses%2Fslides%2FFormation%20Career%20Direction%20Worksheet.pdf?alt=media&token=f6344b78-529a-411e-a449-7a34a8d55fc8)

Engineer Your Ideal Tech Career [Part 4] - What Type Of Environment Are You In?

In this video, we walk through the different environments you can or may be working in throughout your career. Depending on where you feel you most thrive, it may make some roles or companies more or less fulfilling.

Avoid choosing the middle number for each of these — do the hard work of making actual trade-offs for each option to make your preferences clearer.

We cover key environments and what they mean, like:

- Fast Paced vs. Methodical
- Job Stability & Cash Comp vs. High Risk, High Reward
- Mentorship & Guidance vs. Independence & Autonomy

Looking for mentorship from tech’s top engineers + personalized job hunt assistance and interview prep? [Formation.dev](http://Formation.dev) can provide you unlimited career coaching, technical mentorship, personalized practice, and mock interviews. Join us here: <https://formation.dev/partners/taro>

Worksheet: [Formation - Coding Your Career](https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/tech-career-growth.appspot.com/o/courses%2Fslides%2FFormation%20Career%20Direction%20Worksheet.pdf?alt=media&token=f6344b78-529a-411e-a449-7a34a8d55fc8)

15 SWE Years In 1.5 Hours [Part 15] - Onboarding

You have started a fancy new job at a company you really like. How do you hit the ground running and impress people fast? This lesson teaches you:

- Why being new is actually a superpower, not a weakness like many engineers think
- Why you need to be aggressive and extremely deliberate when onboarding, especially at the very beginning
- What you can do to *add value* while onboarding instead of merely absorbing value

To dive deeper into onboarding, take our course here: [The Complete Onboarding Guide For Software Engineers](https://www.jointaro.com/course/the-complete-onboarding-guide-for-software-engineers-succeeding-when-youre-new/)

15 SWE Years In 1.5 Hours [Part 7] - Imposter Syndrome (Building Confidence)

Software engineers are constantly underestimating themselves. This lesson teaches you:

- How to flip your mentality when it comes to everyone in tech being smarter than you
- The best environment to be in to maximize your growth
- How to quickly become stronger and get rid of your imposter syndrome

Come Up With 500k+ User Project Ideas [Part 17] - Just Keep Building

Failure is a part of life and software side projects are no exception. This lesson teaches you:

- The builder mindset you absolutely must have to succeed with side projects
- Why a failed side project really isn't that bad, especially if you're following the advice from this course
- How Alex made several stupid side projects destined for failure so you don't make the same mistakes he did

Come Up With 500k+ User Project Ideas [Part 8] - The 3 Levels Of Tech

One of the easiest and most common ways to sabotage a side project is build out an idea that's way too technically complex. This lesson teaches you:

- A 3-layer framework you can use to categorize side project ideas and their technical difficulty
- The difficulties of any level beyond Level 1 with Level 2 being incredibly hard and Level 3 being insane
- Why you should stick to Level 1 project ideas as an engineer working on side projects, especially if you're earlier-in-career

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/)

Come Up With 500k+ User Project Ideas [Part 6] - Your Idea Is Worthless (For Now)

While the idea behind a side project or any tech product is extremely important, ideas as a whole are usually placed on a pedestal they don't deserve. This lesson teaches you:

- Why ideas are initially worthless
- What truly makes a side project valuable (hint: it's not that much about the idea)
- Why you shouldn't build out the vision of that random MBA you just met for 0 pay and 10% equity

DSA Crash Course [Part 67] - Fibonacci Approach

In this lesson, Alvin explains the fundamentals of dynamic programming by applying dynamic programming to fibonacci:

> Write a function *fib* that takes in a number argument, *n*, and returns the *n*\-th number of the Fibonacci sequence.
>
> The 0-th number of the sequence is 0.
>
> The 1-st number of the sequence is 1.
>
> To generate further numbers of the sequence, calculate the sum of previous two numbers.
>
> Solve this recursively.

```
fib(0); # -> 0
```

```
fib(1); # -> 1
```

```
fib(2); # -> 1
```

```
fib(3); # -> 2
```

```
fib(4); # -> 3
```

```
fib(5); # -> 5
```

```
fib(35); # -> 9227465
```

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/**](https://www.linkedin.com/in/alvin-zablan-b73a92117/)

DSA Crash Course [Part 37] - Binary Tree Intro Lecture

In this lecture, Alvin explains the basic structure of a binary tree.

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/>

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.