Make Your Promotion Case Easy - Keep A Brag Journal

The 4 Pillars of ML Interview Success

In this segment of the course, we’re introduced to the core framework for succeeding in machine learning interviews: the four pillars of ML interview success. These pillars form the foundation of how we’re evaluated and what we should focus on during preparation.

- We need strong **software engineering foundations**, including clean coding, system design, and engineering best practices.
- We must demonstrate a solid understanding of **machine learning theory and algorithms**, knowing when and why to apply specific methods and models.
- We should be able to **design and implement end-to-end ML systems**, translating business problems into ML solutions while considering scalability, deployment, and data quality.
- We’re expected to show **business acumen**, aligning our technical decisions with product goals and user needs.
- Each interview round targets one or more of these pillars, and we’ll stand out by showing balanced strength across all four.

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/>

Are you a PIP risk? The Ultimate Guide To Navigating A PIP

The most obvious way to identify if you’re at risk for a PIP is if you’ve received poor ratings in prior performance review cycles. But this is a **lagging indicator**, so it may be too late to do anything at this point. Ideally, we’d like a **leading indicator** so you can take steps to avoid a PIP by discovering the warning signs early enough. 

The best leading indicators are: 

- Check-in with your peers and managers and get feedback
- Compare markers of progress: code output, design docs, and updates on tickets of projects. 

On the topics of ratings, you should understand the breakdown of what percent of employees get each rating. Companies may not reveal this info directly, so you can ask your manager or look up internal documentation.

If your manager and teammates start ignoring you or removing your scope, that’s an unhealthy sign.

Ace Your Tech Interview As A Software Engineer [Part 17] - Avoiding Scams

There is a lot of desperation among job seeking software engineers, and there's tragically a lot of evil people out there eager to take advantage of that. This lesson teaches you:

- The most common "job training" scam and how it works
- The relatively new fake check remote work scam and how it works
- How to keep yourself safe with the overall principle to keep in mind when it comes to identifying scams in general (not just when job searching)

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/)

Break Into Tech And Become A Software Engineer [Part 6] - Build A Side Project

In this lesson, Brian explains the value of building side projects that not only boost your technical skills but also help you stand out in the job market.

This lesson covers:

- How a well-crafted side project can help you learn new technologies and fill knowledge gaps without needing formal training or mentorship
- The importance of focusing on meaningful, long-term projects that you are passionate about, rather than numerous small, disconnected ones
- Using a self-assessment worksheet to identify your knowledge gaps, create a learning plan, and design side projects that address those gaps and align with your career goals

If you need extra help breaking into tech, join Brian's exclusive, cohort-based bootcamp (just 10 students per batch). Use this special link for $800 off: <https://www.parsity.io/taro>

Connect with Brian on LinkedIn: <https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianjenney/>

Career roadmap worksheet: <https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OpjXtJeQ93TGIz8z9u-p_lYNbhSbk32rPFPDecNMDyM/edit?usp=sharing>

How side projects can even get you into FAANG: [\[Case Study\] Building An App With 1,000,000+ Users To Get Into Facebook](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/jly45Gx6qR1kqQwBmJEy/case-study-building-an-app-with-1000000-users-to-get-into-facebook/)

Nail Your Promotion As A Software Engineer [Part 18] - Organizational Complexity

In order to get promoted to senior engineering levels and beyond, you can't just be good with code, you need to be good with people too. This lesson teaches you:

- A basic, straightforward framework to understand what the organizational complexity of your project is
- How to calculate the quantity of your organizational complexity
- How to calculate the quality of your organizational complexityIn rode

Ace Your Tech Interview As A Software Engineer [Part 35] - Temper Your Expectations

You just went through an interview as a software engineer and are eagerly awaiting the result. Is it time to get your hopes up? This lesson teaches you:

- The dangers of having the wrong mentality after an interview
- Why having tempered expectations is crucial for long-term success on the software engineer job hunt
- Why software engineers often overestimate how they performed on an interview, especially with top tech companies like FAANG
- The exact calculation and framework you should follow to set expectations appropriately after you have gone through an interview, particularly an onsite (final round)

"How did you decide to quit your job and make a startup?" - 9/13/2022

If you're interested in starting your own startup, check out our curated playlist for it here: [[Taro Top 10] Entrepreneurship And Tech Startups](https://www.jointaro.com/playlist/ArtlSzF17v7cad1K6TJG/)

- Alex has wanted to start his own thing for a while - Ever since his side projects started getting serious traction in 2015-2016 (25,000+ users each).
- The initial goal with [Tech Career Growth Community](https://www.linkedin.com/company/techcareergrowth/) wasn't to make a business out of it. The pandemic was happening and people were suffering - We just wanted to help people.
  - Tech Career Growth then grew beyond Rahul's and Alex's wildest imaginations.
  - This made them start thinking what they could accomplish if they worked on it full-time instead of part-time.
- For Alex, there are the core reasons why he decided to make the jump back in early 2022:
  - **Diminishing returns on "preparing" to make a startup** - He had the 0 to 1 experience from doing side projects and building Course Hero's Android apps from scratch. Meta was great helping him build soft skills.
  - **Tech Career Growth taking off** - Alex had more fun working on this community than working his full-time job at Robinhood (which is saying something as he *really* enjoyed working at Robinhood!).
  - **Getting into an incubator** - In late 2021, Alex and Rahul got into OnDeck, which gives the old YC deal of 125k for 7%.
  - **Life timing** - Alex is 30 as of the publishing date of this video, and creating a startup only gets harder as you age due to increasing responsibilities outside of work.

If you're interested in how Alex published ~30 apps that got ~3 million users combined, check these out:
- ["Finding a mobile app idea - How to do it?"](https://www.jointaro.com/question/KJ4VXh6rUhKbWeiJoRDe/finding-a-mobile-app-idea-how-to-do-it/)
- [[Masterclass] How To Come Up With 100k+ Users App Ideas You Can Build For Free](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/AI4zi759PSGn6RwIFT6f/masterclass-how-to-come-up-with-100k-users-app-ideas-you-can-build-for-free/)
- [[Masterclass] How To Build And Grow Tech Products To 500k+ Users For Free](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/OEuX0KMhcnNSTJ50Voee/masterclass-how-to-build-and-grow-tech-products-to-500k-users-for-free/)

Lastly, here's a great discussion on how hard startups are compared to leveling up at a "traditional" job: ["Career advancement or building a startup? Which one is harder?"](https://www.jointaro.com/question/EquWmWjZhqiiujyltreJ/career-advancement-or-building-a-startup-which-one-is-harder/)

Ace Your Tech Interview As A Software Engineer [Part 20] - Automated Coding Screen

Tech companies are trying to rely more and more on robots to screen software engineer job candidates out. This lesson teaches you:

- When automated coding screens appear
- What to expect when you get an automated coding screen like HackerRank
- Whether you should do automated coding screens

Build Deep Relationships Quickly In Tech [Part 4] - The 2-Step Process

Networking doesn't have to be overly complicated and fuzzy. This lesson teaches you:

- A very basic 2-step framework to approach networking with
- The spectrum of help and providing value to people
- How much help you should provide to someone, especially prospective people you want in your network
- Why you should always give a non-zero amount of help in a work environment, especially if you work at a strong tech company

PIP Stereotypes - The Ultimate Guide To Navigating A PIP

Given the secrecy and consequences of PIPs, you've probably a bunch of stereotypes about PIPs. This is a non-exhaustive list of beliefs that are simply not true:

- *"You must be incompetent or lazy"*
- *"Your manager or company must be horrible"*
- *"It’s impossible to keep your job on a PIP"*
- *"You'll no longer be employable"*

This thinking is reductive and will lead to more harm than good. A better way to think about a PIP is not to cast blame on one party or another. Instead, a PIP means **there was a mismatch in expectation between employee and employer**. 

The reality is that there are many potential reasons why you may receive a PIP, ranging from lack of support, poor management, lack of motivation, shifting company needs, etc.

Throughout the PIP process, one of the most difficult parts is that you’ll feel zero (or negative) support from key people around you. In order to find success at your job, and more broadly in your career, **you need to be an advocate for yourself**. Have the confidence that you are valuable. Too many engineers are their own worst critic, which exacerbates the negative spiral of performance.

Become An Open Source Master [Part 9] - Solve A Need

When choosing an open-source project to contribute to, we should:

- **Focus on solving a need:** Choose a project that you'll benefit from and have a passion for working on.
- **Assess the project's health:** Look for signs of active maintenance, such as merged pull requests and recent activity.
- **Seek insights from others:** Talk to people who have worked on the project to get their perspectives on the community and development process.

Connect with James: 

- GitHub: <https://github.com/jamesgpearce>
- Twitter (X): <https://twitter.com/jamespearce>

Rachel's Career Story: Waterloo, Yelp, Airbnb

To check out Rachel's excellent tech career advice, you can find the [full playlist here](https://link.jointaro.com/EFUYvmLHzenKQLRp6).

Rachel moved to Canada in high school, and then attended the University of Waterloo where she picked up programming for the first time. 
- She did various internships as part of the co-op program, and her first job out of college was at Yelp. 
- After 9 years at Yelp, Rachel had become a Director of Engineering there.
- Since 2020, Rachel has been an Engineering Lead at Airbnb, heading up the search product there.

**Rachel's core learning**: The times where you're uncomfortable and struggle are the times you learn the most. Stay calm and embrace the more difficult times in your career - When you view these situations as a growth opportunity, that's how you come out of them stronger than you were before.

How To Find The Best People For Your Professional Network

Many software engineers are introverts who have a hard time connecting with others - We've been there too! This can make it really daunting when trying to build your professional network: How do you identify those who you'll get along with? This video covers how you can find those people who would be great to bring into your professional network.

Here are the core points:
- **It's not too different from making friends** - The most basic barometer for a relationship's success is how much you two have in common. Having mutual interests and similar backgrounds maximizes the chance that you're able to interact and understand one another.
- **The most successfully relationships are bidirectional** - The most successful professional relationships are those where each person is able to provide a lot of value to the other. The split should be as close to 50/50 as possible - If there is one party providing an overwhelming majority of the value, this relationship is not meant to last. *When you're evaluating whether someone would be a great addition to your network, don't only think about how they can help you, think about how **you** can help them as well.*
- **Identify those who actively add value to others** - If someone is kind in a general setting and always happy to help others, it is likely they would be a great person to know in a more personal 1 on 1 way. When you strive to add value to these people, they will almost certainly return the favor, and at its core, this is what a healthy relationship looks like.

Related resources:
- [[Masterclass] How To Build Deep Relationships Quickly In Tech](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/tyaPFMXPoz2pmzB7OVzt/how-to-build-deep-relationships-quickly-in-tech-12172022/) - The full video where this clip was taken from
- [Effective Communication Guide - Building Relationships](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/488EjOLzU707WhdqMOK4/effective-communication-guide-part-3-building-relationships/)
- ["How to get referrals?"](https://www.jointaro.com/question/FQIi8us9uoTDIYdzMhvg/how-to-get-referrals/)

[Part 3] Meta Intern Success Series - Onboarding Efficiently

- Onboarding is arguably the most important part of your internship as it sets the foundation and tone for your entire software engineer internship.
- Set up a 30 to 45 minute meeting with your intern manager (IM) ASAP, so they can explain the codebase to you at a high-level (i.e. a component level).
- Make sure you have a recurring 1:1 meeting with your IM, which should be a weekly 30 minutes. Your IM should set this up for you, but in case they don't, you can work with them to set it up.
- You will get 2-5 onboarding tasks to work on across the first ~2 weeks. The purpose of these is to familiarize yourself with the codebase.
- Aim to put out your 1st diff by the end of Week 1. If you're doing this around the end of Week 2, you're really behind.
- Ask a ton of questions and learn to ask high-quality questions. Don't be afraid of "over-asking" questions: If you're polite while asking questions and attaching great context to them, you will be fine no matter how many questions you ask.
- Use Work Chat DMs to ask for help aggressively during this period as it's vital for you to become productive within the codebase very quickly

Related resources:
- [Asking Effective Questions That Get Great Answers Quickly](https://link.jointaro.com/E8eaKmMpZcKWNGkbA)
- ["How can I learn a large codebase fast as an intern?"](https://link.jointaro.com/L8tXjWah6ycdNpNf7)
- [There Is No Such Thing As A Stupid Question](https://link.jointaro.com/F4p3fL4eHqp5GXti7)

Write A Stellar Resume As A Software Engineer [Part 20] - Do Not Lie

The tech job market is incredibly brutal for software engineers, and this can make less ethical approaches far more appealing, including with your resume. This lesson teaches you:

- Why lying on your resume ultimately hurts you far more than it helps you
- What to do instead of lying when your resume is struggling

15 SWE Years In 1.5 Hours [Part 16] - Working With Your Manager

The single most important person in your professional life as a software developer is your engineering manager. This lesson teaches you:

- How most engineers perceive the engineer &lt;-&gt; engineering manager relationship incorrectly
- The importance of recurring 1 on 1 meetings between you and your manager
- How to get the most value from your manager 1 on 1s

To dive deeper into building a better relationship with your manager, take our course here: [Managing Up: Build Effective Relationships With Your Boss](https://www.jointaro.com/course/managing-up-build-effective-relationships-with-your-boss/)

This Is Why You Should NOT Work For Big Tech

Working at FAANG is great for many reasons, but the Big Tech life isn't for everybody. For many engineers, it doesn't really make complete sense to go there.

Here are the core scenarios where Big Tech might not be the best for you:
- **You have strong WLB needs** - Work-life balance generally becomes more important as you get older, and Big Tech is generally pretty bad at giving you that.
- **You don't like stress** - There's nothing wrong with wanting to chill and avoiding pressure. However, Big Tech is usually not a good place to do this.
- **You want to hyper-maximize your career growth** - Big Tech is often a consistent path that takes your career to a very good place. However, if you want to go to an astounding place (e.g. become a VP of Engineering by the time you're 30), startups are far superior. Startups have much higher risk but also much higher rewards.
- **You just want to code** - Engineers at Big Tech almost always need to become incredibly well-rounded, especially at senior and staff. If you don't want to play politics and spend mountains of time running meetings and writing planning docs, Big Tech is likely not the place for you.

Related resources:
- ["How to have FAANG level of career growth in startup?"](https://www.jointaro.com/question/VQgUHZPwbzqxjutaDU3W/how-to-have-faang-level-of-career-growth-in-startup/)
- ["When does it make sense to leave big tech?"](https://www.jointaro.com/question/v6GBLlfXb1ugNobkEm7w/when-does-it-make-sense-to-leave-big-tech/)

The Key Insight Behind Negotiation

Negotiation is fundamentally about leverage, and the strongest leverage comes from being able to walk away. Timing, preparation, and understanding the multifaceted nature of compensation are key to negotiating effectively.

- **Leverage is built through optionality**: The ability to walk away—especially when holding multiple offers—provides the greatest negotiating power. Desperation weakens a candidate’s position.
- **Don’t discuss compensation too early**: Deflect pre-interview compensation questions by focusing on mutual fit. Only begin negotiating after a formal offer is made.
- **Confirmed offers reflect high value**: By the time a company extends an offer, they've invested significant time and resources. With a low conversion rate from interviews to offers, candidates who make it to the offer stage are rare and valuable.
- **Companies don’t rescind offers for negotiating**: Especially in big tech, it’s extremely rare for a company to withdraw an offer just because a candidate is negotiating for better terms.
- **Compensation has multiple levers**: Salary, equity, and sign-on bonuses are negotiable components. Candidates can prioritize based on their risk profile and financial goals, trading one component for gains in another.

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.