Selling for Technical Founders (B2B)

Session led by [Karthik Balachandran](https://www.linkedin.com/in/kbalachandran/)

This session is for technical founders, CTOs, and soon-to-be entrepreneurs looking to enhance their B2B selling skills.

Customer behavior is rapidly changing. Your ability to sell effectively is as crucial as the technology itself. Recognizing this expectation shift and the skill gap, we're excited to announce this session: "B2B Selling for Technical Founders"

We will cover:

- Understand the latest trends in B2B sales
- Common mistakes made by technical founders
- Building effective sales strategies

Whether you're in the early stages of your startup or looking to scale, this session will equip you with the knowledge and tools to drive your sales efforts forward.\
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Event Page: <https://www.jointaro.com/event/selling-for-technical-founders-b2b/>

Ace Your Tech Interview As A Software Engineer [Part 26] - Object-Oriented Programming (OOP)

Many programming languages are Object-Oriented Programming languages, otherwise known as OOP languages. This lesson teaches you:

- What OOP interview rounds are and when to expect it
- The optimal way to prepare for an OOP interview round
- What a good OOP diagram looks like

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

Ace Your Tech Interview As A Software Engineer [Part 19] - Take Home Assignments

Take home assignments are one of the most brutal screening mechanisms tech companies use to filter out software engineer job candidates. This lesson teaches you:

- Why take homes are horrible
- How to skip take homes as much as you can
- A framework you can use to figure out whether or not you should do a take home

If you have no other option but to do a take-home, follow these resources:

- ["How do I make software less overwhelming?"](https://www.jointaro.com/question/YseMPDw538jhyS1MWlTs/how-do-i-make-software-less-overwhelming/)
- ["How Long to Complete Take-Home Assignment II"](https://www.jointaro.com/question/7PfT1CWSY0Dd1jiLYTou/how-long-to-complete-take-home-assignment-ii/)
- [\[Course\] Level Up Your Code Quality As A Software Engineer](https://www.jointaro.com/course/level-up-your-code-quality-as-a-software-engineer/)

Taro Book Club - The Fundamentals of Data Engineering - Chapter 3: Designing Good Data Architecture

Discussion led by [Gideon Blinick](https://www.linkedin.com/in/gideonblinick/)\
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In this session, we'll discuss Chapter 3 (Designing Good Data Architecture) of [**"The Fundamentals Of Data Engineering"**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZM6Wf-uyFjO5TXFGF8vIaVKi4XEhAeYf/view?usp=drive_link).

How do you do good Data Architecture? Wouldn’t it be great if there were principles you could follow? Well, there are! Google has 5 in their Principles for Cloud-Native Architecture. Amazon has 6 in their AWS Well-Architected Framework. But I’m here to tell you that there are 9.

This is a great chapter for those interested in System Design!

Check out #taro-bookclub in the [**Taro Premium**](https://www.jointaro.com/membership/) Slack for more details.\
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Event link: <https://www.jointaro.com/event/taro-book-club-the-fundamentals-of-data-engineering-chapter-3-designing-good-data-architecture/>

Taro Book Club: Designing Data Intensive Applications - Chapter 1

Discussion led by: [**Ankur Agrawal**](https://www.linkedin.com/in/erankuragr/) & [**Raj Shah**](https://www.linkedin.com/in/therajshah/)\
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In this #taro-bookclub discussion, we'll go over Chapter 1 of the book [**"Designing Data-Intensive Applications"**](https://www.amazon.com/Designing-Data-Intensive-Applications-Reliable-Maintainable/dp/1449373321) by Martin Kleppmann. This chapter is about Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Applications and will provide good mental models to think about reliability, scalability and maintainability of Distributed Data Systems.

Here's the agenda:

- We’ll break down and discuss the key concepts from Chapter 1.
- There will also be time for any questions and answers you might have.

Get ready for our first session on this engaging and informative book!

We hope to see you for Chapter 2 as well: [**Taro Book Club: Designing Data Intensive Applications - Chapter 2 (Data Models and Query Languages)**](https://www.jointaro.com/event/taro-book-club-designing-data-intensive-applications-chapter-2-data-models-and-query-languages/)

If you don't have a Taro Premium membership, you can get it at a discount with Ankur's special link here: [**https://www.jointaro.com/r/eventu507/**](https://www.jointaro.com/r/eventu507/)

Paper Reading: AlphaGeometry: Advancing Automated Reasoning in Olympiad-Level Geometry

Paper Discussion led by [Lucia Mocz](https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucia-mocz-ph-d-35a98a1b6/)

Solving mathematical problems at the Olympiad level is incredibly difficult, requiring advanced problem-solving skills, a deep understanding of mathematical principles, and the ability to think critically and creatively under pressure. Those who excel in Olympiad-level problem solving usually have exceptional talent, undergo extensive preparation, and possess a unique problem-solving mindset. Achieving human-level automated reasoning in mathematical theorem proving, especially when competing with top performers, is a significant milestone in artificial intelligence research.

In this paper reading session, we introduce AlphaGeometry, a groundbreaking theorem prover tailored for Euclidean plane geometry. Unlike traditional methods that rely on human demonstrations, AlphaGeometry autonomously synthesizes millions of theorems and proofs across various complexities without human intervention. By combining a neural language model trained on vast synthetic data with a symbolic deduction engine, AlphaGeometry employs a neuro-symbolic approach to navigate intricate problem spaces. Notably, AlphaGeometry generates human-readable proofs and has successfully tackled challenging problems from previous International Mathematical Olympiads, even discovering new generalizations of established theorems.

Whether you're an AI researcher, engineer, or simply curious about this achievement in AI research, join us as we explore the intricacies of AlphaGeometry and its potential implications for automated reasoning in mathematics.\
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Paper: [**https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06747-5**](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06747-5)\
Event Link: <https://www.jointaro.com/event/paper-reading-alphageometry-advancing-automated-reasoning-in-olympiad-level-geometry/>

Blog: [**https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/alphageometry-an-olympiad-level-ai-system-for-geometry/**](https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/alphageometry-an-olympiad-level-ai-system-for-geometry/)

GitHub: [**https://github.com/google-deepmind/alphageometry**](https://github.com/google-deepmind/alphageometry)

Life After PIP: The Ultimate Guide To Navigating A PIP

One of the biggest concerns for anyone who has received a PIP is about how it may effect their future job prospects. The answer is, no, a **PIP does not need to follow you around**. You can (and will) find a fresh start and a thriving career if you want it. 

Remember, a PIP is about **both** employee and employer. When you change jobs, your employer is changing, so the situation leading to the PIP is very different.

As you reflect on your next role, it’s worthwhile to allocate some time to reflect: 

- Collect feedback from others: at the minimum, save a copy of your PIP and figure out what feedback there is transferable to another job.
- Collect feedback from yourself: Write down your reflections: what did you enjoy (or not) about your past work experience. What types of projects and people were fun for you?

Meta Manager Case Study: The Ultimate Guide To Navigating A PIP

This was an Engineering Manager at Meta who has put 20+ employees on PIPs throughout their career.

- PIPs come from a mismatch of a “square peg, round hole”

- PIPs should never be a surprise. PIPs get discussed with the skip manager and HR

- Designed to be achievable with effort

- Across 20+ PIPs, has never had anyone continue employment

- **Advice**: “Clarity is more important than agreement”

MongoDB Manager Case Study: The Ultimate Guide To Navigating A PIP

This was a manager at MongoDB who shared a specific story of putting one of their employees on a PIP.

- PIP delivered to people who needed a lot of handholding

  - “Problem presenters” instead of “problem solvers”

- PIPs are hard but not impossible. Goal is to help the employee overcome the situation and contribute to the health of the team.

- **Advice**: “Understand every single word in the PIP”

Meta Case Study: The Ultimate Guide To Navigating A PIP

This was a veteran engineer with more than 15 years of experience at other large tech companies before joining Meta.

- **Before**: Hired in as Staff Engineer \[**E6**\], brought in as a domain expert. Worked for almost 2 years before the PIP

- **During**: Not surprised based on rating trends. Main issue was code productivity, inability to use tooling such as version control

- **After**: Struggled with the PIP for a few months, then negotiated a severance package

Joining a company at too high a level is not good

If an employee's performance is subpar, it's better to act on that early, both for the employee and the team.

At a high level, your job is to lead the team and teach others. It’s ok if you don’t know the tooling, but you should not let that get in the way of landing code. Code output was poor.

Quitting a PIP: The Ultimate Guide To Navigating A PIP

You got the PIP, and you made the difficult (or maybe not-so-difficult) decision to quit. You’ll soon be off to greener pastures, but there is a strategy around leaving the company that is critical to get right.

Once you've decided to leave your company, your priority should shift to optimizing your professional and financial prospects. Most companies will provide a severance package to employees who are laid off or terminated. A severance package is the *compensation that an employee receives when they leave a company*.

While companies may care (at least a tiny bit) about the well-being of their employees, generosity is **not** the primary reason that businesses provide severance. In exchange for severance, companies will require you to sign certain documents to protect the business:

- **Non-disparagement** so you agree not to speak poorly about the company in public. The company protects their business interests by maintaining relationships and reputation.
- **Invention assignment** so there is no theft of intellectual property (IP) or source code.
- **Other agreements** such as not suing the company or not poaching employees for a set amount of time.

The Human Resources (HR) team will want your agreement on these terms, which means **you have leverage**. The asks from these companies are not too onerous, which means it doesn't cost much to agree -- very few employees end up suing their former employer anyway.

### Severance checklist

Here is the "severance checklist", the most common dimensions on which you can negotiate:

- Salary

- Health insurance (COBRA payments)

- Last day of employment

- Equity vesting acceleration

- Outplacement services

Remember, **you only get what you ask for**. Since you're on your way out anyway, it's fine to get rejected when asking for more. If you express your concern and headache from the termination ("*I just moved my family here from out of state*"), companies are often willing to meet you halfway for things like:

- Your last day of employment
- Extending and paying for health insurance for several additional months
- Accelerating the next vesting date by a few weeks

Finally, we present a "goodbye checklist":

- Contact info for relevant colleagues

- How will this be communicated to the team?

- What will your employer disclose to a future employer?

- What’s the “cooldown period”?

**Relevant links**:

- [The Key Insight Behind Negotiation](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/YliP9kVbd1zym9kmv9Gg/the-key-insight-behind-negotiation/)
- [\[Masterclass\] Understanding And Optimizing Your Pay In Tech](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/gk408yBIV2fa5RjVR213/masterclass-understanding-and-optimizing-your-pay-in-tech/)
- [Amazon VP talks about negotiating a severance package](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7161390728533741568/)

**Discussions**:

- [Does severance package get reduced in subsequent rounds of layoffs?](https://www.jointaro.com/question/FIFJWOVz2ILICZ0dOLqy/does-severance-package-get-reduced-in-subsequent-rounds-of-layoffs/)
- [Severance in companies tied to tenure?](https://www.jointaro.com/question/9nzrgmga50Dn0UEIH6Ad/severance-in-companies-tied-to-tenure/?revalidate=true)

Reactions After A PIP: The Ultimate Guide To Navigating A PIP

If you received a PIP, be ok with a flood of emotion. Anger, sadness, and humiliation are normal, and you should give yourself at **least half a day** simply to process. Don’t take any action erratically. 

Once you’ve had time to process, confide in a mentor or trusted friend. Online communities like Taro can help you feel less lonely. You should **not** over-share this information with your colleagues. There is a negative bias associated with a PIP, so sharing the news with people who don’t truly care about you may end up backfiring. 

Do ✅:

- Confide in a mentor or trusted friend
- Find a community (like Taro!)

Don't ❌:

- Act from a place of emotional instability
- Over-share with colleagues

A PIP is not entirely your fault, but it's also not entirely your company's fault. Do some honest reflection about what has been working and what has not.

Some recipients of a PIP are (understandably) outraged and want to take take legal action. In theory, you could sue the company, but in practice is almost never recommended. Given that employment is “at-will”, you’ll need ot clear a very high bar to show that you were unlawfully targeted to be let go or put on a PIP. In addition, to collect evidence of unfair treatment which could take dozens of hours, there’s also a high cost associated with finding legal assistance. Ou recommendation is to focus your energy on the next career move, where you can work with people that value you, rather than focusing on an unfortunate job that will soon be in your past.

Paper Reading Session: Simple Testing Can Prevent Most Critical Failures

In this session, we will be discussing this paper titled "[**Simple Testing Can Prevent Most Critical Failures: An Analysis of Production Failures in Distributed Data-Intensive Systems**](https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/osdi14/osdi14-paper-yuan.pdf)".

Large, production quality distributed systems still fail periodically, and do so sometimes catastrophically, where most or all users experience an outage or data loss. This paper presents the result of a comprehensive study investigating 198 randomly selected, user-reported failures that occurred on Cassandra, HBase, Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), Hadoop MapReduce, and Redis, with the goal of understanding how one or multiple faults eventually evolve into a user-visible failure and how simple testing can prevent majority of them.

Presented by [Sudhi Awasthi](https://www.jointaro.com/p/sudhi-awasthi/), an engineer working at Bloomberg. Connect with her on LinkedIn: <https://www.linkedin.com/in/sudhiawasthi/>.

Here's How To Identify A Superstar Leader

[**Ethan Evans**](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ethanevansvp/) is a retired Amazon VP who led teams of up to 800. Here are his two criteria to see your manager is worth working for.

**1\. Investing in people:**

- Look for a manager with a track record of **growing and promoting their team members**.
- Signs of this include:
  - Do reports of your manager often get promoted or take on higher responsibilities?
  - Does your manager actively create opportunities for your development and growth?
  - Does your manager provide good mentorship and guidance?
  - Managers with a loyal following strongly indicate their leadership qualities.

**2\. Personal trajectory:**

- Assess your manager's **career progression**.
- Look for:
  - Consistent upward movement and promotions.
  - A history of exceeding expectations and taking on greater challenges.
  - Faster-than-average advancement compared to peers.

**Reasoning:**

- A manager who invests in their people will more likely create a supportive and growth-oriented environment for you.
- A manager on a consistent upward trajectory signifies their competence and ability, potentially opening doors for their team's growth as well.

Explore more: 

- [Turning the Spotlight on Unsung Efforts: How to Be Perceived as Important and Impactful?](https://www.jointaro.com/question/G91Qd0GbID5AtnRbfGJE/turning-the-spotlight-on-unsung-efforts-how-to-be-perceived-as-important-and-impactful/)
- [How to manage a team towards high performance?](https://www.jointaro.com/question/O8vtGxsrwZebiSSlOlRd/how-to-manage-a-team-towards-high-performance/)
- [**\[Taro Top 10\] Software Engineer To Engineering Manager (IC -&gt; M Track)**](https://www.jointaro.com/playlist/oz0mnJvHHgM8NfVF7rgp/)

Are Big Tech Incubation Labs Good Preparation For Being A Startup Founder?

Many companies will have a skunkworks or incubation division. Meta has **New Product Experimentation (NPE)**, Google has **Area 120**, and companies like Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, and others all have toy projects. 

Despite being branded as a “startup within a big company”, there are some important differences to keep in mind between these roles and real entrepreneurship: 
- Apps launched within larger companies have a huge unfair advantage in being able to leverage the parent company’s distribution channels. 
- There’s not as much urgency or risk in these divisions since, even if the app fails, the staff will just get reallocated to other parts of the company.
- Most of these projects eventually get killed by the parent company since they’re looking for multi-billion dollar market opportunities.

Connect with [Eric](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericbahn/)

The 3 Core Performance Review System Archetypes

- 3 archetypes:
  - Ad-hoc spaghetti (small companies): No ratings, no recurring timeline, no formal process to get feedback
  - Manager determines all (traditional companies): Manager determines 90%+ of your rating. Used by most companies.
  - **360 feedback** (modern, mature companies): Get feedback from all directions.
- 360 feedback is the best system, and it's used by pretty much all the top companies like Meta and Google.

The Cardinal Sin Of Management: Micromanaging

This segment outlines why micromanagement is a hallmark of poor engineering leadership and how effective managers empower their teams instead of controlling them. It offers a comprehensive look at how hands-off, trust-based leadership enables better team performance and growth.

- **Micromanagement is a red flag**: Hovering over engineers’ work or constantly asking for status updates wastes time, erodes trust, and stifles ownership.
- **Effective managers lead through trust and empowerment**: Autonomy allows engineers to make decisions and own outcomes, with structured check-ins (e.g., weekly or bi-weekly) to stay aligned.
- **Staying out of technical weeds is critical**: A manager's role should focus on people, not code reviews, engineering meetings, or day-to-day task assignments—those should be handled by tech leads or the engineers themselves.
- **Micromanagement creates systemic risks**: It builds dependency, slows down team velocity, and makes the manager a single point of failure. If the manager leaves, the team may lack the tools or confidence to function independently.
- **Lack of trust leads to poor career growth**: Engineers under micromanagement are less likely to take initiative or learn leadership skills, hindering their path to promotion and long-term development.

Understanding ESPP - 85k Salary Example

This segment breaks down a numerical example of how **Employee Stock Purchase Plans (ESPPs)** work in practice. While ESPPs may offer modest financial gains, they remain a valuable benefit—especially at companies that don't provide RSUs.

- **Basic Example:** With an $85,000 base salary, contributing the maximum 10% ($8,500) into an ESPP with a 15% discount allows purchase of 100 shares at $85/share when market price is $100/share—equating to $10,000 worth of stock.
- **Annual Gain:** This results in an immediate $1,500 gain, illustrating the perk's effective “free money” nature through discounted stock purchasing.
- **Complex Structure:** Though ESPPs involve layers such as salary withholding, fund accumulation, and exercise schedules, the benefit is relatively straightforward once broken down.
- **Limited Upside:** Because ESPPs are tied to salary and offer a modest discount, the overall financial impact is smaller than RSUs—yet still meaningful.
- **Prevalence at Non-Big Tech Companies:** Many companies, particularly outside top-tier tech, offer ESPPs instead of RSUs. For example, PayPal provided only ESPP (no RSUs) to new grads eight years ago.

The First Thing You Must Figure Out

Choosing the right company or team is hard because what’s “great” truly depends on our individual priorities.

Here are the core points from the lesson:

- We emphasize that people differ in life stage, location, responsibilities, and goals, which means there is no universal “best” company or team, only what is best for our personal priorities.
- We caution against blindly chasing FAANG or big tech, noting that while it can be optimal for some, it can be a poor match for others depending on what they value and need at this stage of their career.
- We outline the key first step: listing all potential priorities and stack-ranking them to create a clear, personalized hierarchy that guides the next career move.

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.