Ace The ML System Design Interview [Part 9] - Common Problems

While specific interview questions vary, common themes emerge, and preparing for these can significantly improve readiness. Here are the core points from this lesson:

- Scaled recommendation systems are frequently encountered, with core components like filtering, ranking, and embedding computation remaining relevant despite variations in specific use cases
- Adapt recommendation system designs to different contexts, such as local recommendations, where rule-based systems might complement or replace certain machine learning components
- Harmful content detection is another common topic, requiring a feedback loop to generate training data, particularly from ambiguous cases in the "maybe" category
- Be prepared to explain how to handle ambiguous cases, as this demonstrates a deeper understanding of the problem
- Understanding the general concepts behind these two question types will provide a strong foundation for tackling many other interview questions

If you like what Ilya has to say, subscribe to his YouTube for more high-quality ML/AI career guidance: [MLEpath - YouTube](https://go.mlepath.com/taro-youtube-mlepath)

If you want hands-on support from Ilya to crack the FAANG ML interview, join his coaching program: [MLEpath - Coaching Program](https://go.mlepath.com/taro-march-25)

Does Your Job Performance Matter For Building A Startup?

In college, the common wisdom these days for Computer Science students is “your grades don’t matter, just focus on your network and building cool stuff.” 

**Does the same logic apply for aspiring entrepreneurs who are working in Big Tech?**

If you know you want to leave to start a startup, how much should you focus on getting the highest ratings and quickest promotions on the job, vs just doing enough to get by?

In Eric's case, he was was content with doing just enough to get by -- his time and energy was better spent preparing for his startup. Eric was barely getting a Meets All (MA) rating at Meta, and in fact, he was about to be put on a PIP before he left!

Instead of focusing on your ratings on the job, you should instead focus on having positive relationships with the people you work with. You want them to vouch for you as someone who is trustworthy, hard-working, and easy to work with. 

**Your network is your biggest asset as a founder.** Your job is not to be the expert who knows everything. Instead, your job is to have a deep network of people (advisors, friends, employees) who you can leverage to arrive at the best decision. 

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

DSA Interview Step #2: Figure Out Your Overall Strategy

Related resources:
- [[Taro Top 10] Effective Interview Prep](https://www.jointaro.com/playlist/HLBYxJI7D1j8STolrwum/)
- [[Taro Top 10] Finding A Tech Job](https://www.jointaro.com/playlist/E6R0wVJ5EyCfVnVrlfno/)

David Pan's Career Journey - Becoming An Engineering Manager

In this lesson we talk about David Pan's unexpected transition from Product Manager to Engineering Manager at Amazon and the career insights that came from embracing an unplanned opportunity.

- **Sometimes crisis creates opportunity** — when David's engineering manager partner on the Kindle Fire project had to step back for health reasons just months before launch, David stepped up to do double duty as both PM and EM, which ultimately led to his manager offering him the permanent engineering leadership role.
- **The best opportunities often don't look like your plan** — despite his doubts about technical credibility, introversion, and fear of derailing his PM career path, David took the risk and discovered a fulfilling 10+ year engineering leadership trajectory spanning Amazon, Twitter, and Mixpanel (eventually becoming VP of Engineering).
- **Don't think too rigidly about career progression** — the most valuable opportunities often emerge from what the company needs right now rather than your predetermined roadmap; embracing these unplanned moments leads to growth and earns you the support of those around you.

SWE Internship Survival Guide [Part 7] - Feedback Is Your Growth Fuel

Feedback is the most important growth tool for interns—and how you seek, receive, and apply it can define your success. Here are the core points from this lesson:

- Regularly ask for feedback (ideally weekly or biweekly), and be specific—ask what you should start, stop, or continue doing to improve
- Synchronous conversations (in-person or video) lead to deeper, more honest feedback than async messages—don’t rely only on Slack or email
- Always thank people for feedback, turn it into action items, and follow up to show progress—this builds trust and reinforces your coachability
- Make your improvements visible (e.g. call out test validation or coding pattern adherence in PRs) so your growth is legible to others
- Interns are evaluated heavily on growth rate (“slope”)—even if you start off behind, showing fast, consistent improvement is what earns return offers

SWE Internship Survival Guide [Part 8] - Ask Great Questions

As an intern, asking high-quality questions is one of the most important ways to learn quickly, make progress on your project, and build strong relationships with your team. But not all questions are equal—there’s a right way to do this that can significantly increase your chances of getting a return offer. Here are the core points from the lesson:

- There’s a sweet spot between asking too few questions (and struggling in silence) and asking too many low-effort ones (which can burden your team). Most struggling interns fall on the “not asking enough” side
- Every question is a chance to build trust and relationships. They help others evaluate your growth and give you valuable feedback—so don’t underestimate their importance
- High-quality questions include just enough context (like screenshots or code snippets), are well-structured, and are ideally asked in public forums like Slack channels to benefit others too
- Avoid “leading hellos” (e.g. *“Hey, got a sec?”*). Instead, ask your question directly in the first message to reduce unnecessary back-and-forth and show respect for others’ time

Take the full question asking course here: [Ask Great Questions That Get Great Answers Quickly](https://www.jointaro.com/course/ask-great-questions-that-get-great-answers-quickly/)

Maximize Your Equity And Benefits In Tech [Part 5] - Taxes (RSUs/Bonuses)

Many tech employees misunderstand the tax treatment of RSUs, leading to unexpected bills and avoidable penalties. Here are the core points from the lesson:

- When RSUs vest, their value is taxed immediately as ordinary income—similar to receiving a cash bonus
- Default federal withholding on RSUs is typically 22%, which is often too low for high earners, potentially resulting in underpayment penalties
- To avoid penalties, aim to meet the IRS Safe Harbor rule—usually by paying 110% of last year’s tax liability if your income exceeds $150k

Next steps with Andy:

- [Connect with Andy on LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/andymoranio)
- [Leave feedback and/or sign up for Andy’s newsletter](https://subscribepage.io/taroequitycourse)
- [Schedule a consultation](http://adastrafp.com/contact-us/)

Get The Rating You Deserve [Part 14] - Regular Check Ins

**In this section, we explored the importance of regular check-ins with key stakeholders.**

To effectively leverage regular check-ins, we should:

- **Prioritize career discussions:** Shift the focus of our one-on-one meetings from status updates to career development.
- **Proactively communicate:** Initiate conversations about our goals, aspirations, and challenges.
- **Exhaust the feedback process:** Actively seek and incorporate feedback to improve our performance.
- **Communicate effectively:** Clearly articulate our needs and desires, using compassionate language.
- **Be patient and persistent:** Understand that change takes time and be persistent in our efforts to achieve our goals.

By effectively utilizing regular check-ins, we can accelerate our career progression and build strong relationships with our colleagues and managers.

If you want to get personalized support from Yogi, you can reach out to him at [coaching@yogisharma.com](mailto:coaching@yogisharma.com) or schedule an introductory call to dive into your situation at <https://tinyurl.com/meetyogi>.

How To Get Interviews, Secure Offers, and Make More Money in Big Tech

Alan Stein, former executive and hiring manager at Google, Meta, Salesforce, and Tableau shares how jobs are really acquired at the world's top tech companies. 

No BS about resumes, cover letters, or LinkedIn profiles. Rather, Alan shares what actions you should actually take to land more interviews, offers, and earn more money.

Feel free to connect with [**Alan and say hi on LinkedIn**](https://www.linkedin.com/in/alanjstein/).

Ship & Grow 500k+ User Side Projects [Part 15] - ASO

When it comes to mobile apps, you have a much simpler tool in your arsenal to get users. This lesson teaches you:

- What ASO (app store optimization) is
- Why ASO is much simpler than SEO
- The highest leverage thing you can do to optimize your ASO, explained with a simple example
- Basic, largely technical ways to improve your ASO, which you should just already be doing anyways as a good engineer

Make amazing mobile app pictures for free here: <https://app-mockup.com/>

Get The Rating You Deserve [Part 16] - Spend Time On Your Career

**In this section, we explored the importance of maintaining an empowering state to sustain long-term success.**

To cultivate an empowering state, we should:

- **Prioritize long-term goals:** Focus on building a sustainable career and avoiding short-term sacrifices that may hinder long-term growth.
- **Cultivate a growth mindset:** Embrace challenges as opportunities for learning and development.
- **Practice self-care:** Prioritize physical and mental health to maintain energy and focus.
- **Build strong relationships:** Foster meaningful connections with others to provide support and inspiration.
- **Maintain a positive mindset:** Cultivate a positive outlook and practice gratitude to reduce stress and anxiety.

By adopting these strategies, we can increase our resilience, motivation, and overall well-being, enabling us to achieve long-term success.

If you want to get personalized support from Yogi, you can reach out to him at [coaching@yogisharma.com](mailto:coaching@yogisharma.com) or schedule an introductory call to dive into your situation at <https://tinyurl.com/meetyogi>.

This Tool Is Especially Amazing For Big Tech Interviews

The Resource You Need For Promotion That Few Understand

Which of the following is the resource needed for promotion that many engineers don't understand or even realize exists, particularly more junior ones?

True or false: When you are onboarding as a software engineer, the one and only thing that matters is your ability to understand the codebase and extend it.

Why is social capital important for senior engineers?

Part 6 [RBP] Create Hooks For Your Context Providers

This lesson presents a best practice for working with context providers in React, specifically addressing situations where a meaningful default value isn't available.

- **The Problem with Undefined Context:** Understand the challenges of using context providers without a proper default value, leading to potential silent failures and difficulties in debugging.
- **Custom Hooks for Context Providers:** Learn how to create custom hooks that encapsulate the logic for accessing and validating context values, ensuring that errors are caught early in the development process.
- **Improving Code Reliability and Reusability:** Discover how this approach improves code readability, promotes reusability of context-related logic, and provides more informative error messages, making your React applications more robust.

Links:

- Florian’s free web development playlist on YouTube: <https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrnPJCHvNZuDG6BWjUFVxeWyYlve_SVJO>
- Code link: <https://github.com/codinginflow/react-best-practices/tree/context-hook/src/app>

Clear Communication For SWEs [Part 15] - Reflection And Practical Exercises

In this video, I provide reflection prompts, practical exercises, and tips for continuous improvement to enhance communication skills. Viewers are encouraged to reflect on recent communications, analyze communication structures, and assess clarity, engagement, listening, adaptability, and feedback. Practical exercises and suggestions for continuous improvement are also shared to help viewers continuously enhance their communication skills.

Connect with me on LinkedIn: <https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-wiens/>

Maximize Your Equity And Benefits In Tech [Part 8] - What, How, Why (ESPP)

Employee Stock Purchase Programs (ESPPs) can offer meaningful value, especially at companies that provide favorable terms or lack large RSU grants. Here are the core points from the lesson:

- ESPPs let employees buy company stock at a discount (up to 15%) with a $25,000 annual contribution cap and often include “lookback” provisions to buy at the lower price between the start and end of the offering period

- Programs with multiple purchase periods inside long offering windows—like those at Adobe or NVIDIA—can dramatically increase the value of purchases if the stock appreciates

- Some companies may impose holding periods before you can sell shares, so it's essential to understand your specific plan’s rules before committing

Next steps with Andy:

- [Connect with Andy on LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/andymoranio)
- [Leave feedback and/or sign up for Andy’s newsletter](https://subscribepage.io/taroequitycourse)
- [Schedule a consultation](http://adastrafp.com/contact-us/)

Autism Allyship and Identity in Tech - By Lee McKeeman & Jaswir Raghoe

[Lee McKeeman](https://www.linkedin.com/in/lmckeeman/) and [Jaswir Raghoe](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaswir-raghoe/) give an insightful talk on Autism Allyship in the tech industry, and how one can discover the power of creating inclusive workplaces for autistic individuals while gaining valuable tips on how to be an effective ally to autistic colleagues.

Lee and Jaswir talk about how autism is a spectrum with individuals having a wide range of abilities and needs. They give a deeper understanding of general biases and assumptions about autism, and learn why it's crucial to challenge them. They expound on the importance of asking autistic individuals about their preferences and needs, while understanding the significance of respecting their boundaries. Jaswir and Lee uncover the value of patience and understanding, as well as the importance of not expecting autistic individuals to always conform to social norms.

Join us in celebrating the diversity of autistic individuals and learn how you can become an advocate for their inclusion in the workplace.

Don't miss this enlightening talk that will empower you to create a more inclusive and supportive environment for all.

Incase you missed it, also check out Lee McKeeman's previous talk about his career journey: [An Autistic Journey To Google Staff Engineer [L6] From Software Analyst](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/nujUVma6boGJxGAQzoiX/an-autistic-journey-to-google-staff-engineer-l6-from-software-analyst-by-lee-mckeeman/)

Become A Debugging Master [Part 17] - Share The Learning

A lot of engineers move on immediately after landing a fix, but the best ones take the time to reflect and prevent similar issues in the future. Here are the core points from the lesson:

- Retrospectives help you identify root causes and system weaknesses so you can either prevent a future incident or make it much easier to detect and fix
- A good postmortem analyzes what went well and what didn’t across detection, notification, response, mitigation, and analysis, with detailed documentation to capture all learnings
- Writing a clean, detailed doc with screenshots and explanations makes it much easier for future engineers to learn from the incident without having to dig through chaotic logs or chat threads
- Big tech cultures like Facebook normalize failure and focus on minimizing damage and learning quickly, often using formal SEV reviews to improve systems and processes over time

Round Structure

In this section, we dive into one of the most important—and often most hands-on—parts of the ML interview process: the practical machine learning coding and modeling round. This is where we demonstrate how we think and work like real ML practitioners.

- We’ll usually work in a **Jupyter notebook environment**, either in a take-home format or during a live 60–90 minute session.
- The task typically involves a **real-world problem** like text classification or demand forecasting, where we're expected to deliver an end-to-end ML workflow.
- Unlike algorithm rounds, we’re **encouraged to use standard ML libraries** (e.g., pandas, scikit-learn, TensorFlow, PyTorch) to solve the problem efficiently.
- We’ll be evaluated on how we **explore data, engineer features, choose models, tune hyperparameters**, and **communicate our results**.
- This round is about **thinking like an ML practitioner**, showing that we can handle messy, ambiguous problems using practical tools to deliver meaningful solutions.

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/>

SWE Internship Survival Guide [Part 20] - Go Deeper: Follow Through

Congrats on making it to the end of the course! Here are additional resources to help you follow through with nailing your internship return offer:

- Take the 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/)
- Take the question asking course: [Ask Great Questions That Get Great Answers Quickly](https://www.jointaro.com/course/ask-great-questions-that-get-great-answers-quickly/)
- Take the onboarding course: [The Complete Onboarding Guide For Software Engineers](https://www.jointaro.com/course/the-complete-onboarding-guide-for-software-engineers-succeeding-when-youre-new/)
- To become a rockstar (Top 5%) intern: [Grow From Junior To Mid-Level Engineer: L3 To L4](https://www.jointaro.com/course/grow-from-junior-to-mid-level-engineer-l3-to-l4/)

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.