When To Join Big Tech

We suggest reframing the question from *"Should I join Big Tech?"* to *"When should I join Big Tech?"*, since careers are long and dynamic.

**Benefits of Joining Early in Career**:

- Helps build a strong technical foundation and network when you're still a “blank slate.”
- Younger professionals often tolerate intense work environments better and adapt more quickly.
- Early high compensation can fund future ventures, such as startups or sabbaticals.
- The prestige and connections can accelerate future career moves or entrepreneurial efforts.

**Risks of Joining Early**:

- You might get *addicted* to the high salary and lifestyle, making it hard to leave for riskier opportunities like startups.
- Over time, lifestyle creep (e.g., mortgage, luxury spending) can reduce your willingness to take professional risks.

**Benefits of Joining Later in Career**:

- Allows you to first take bold bets (e.g. startups) when personal financial obligations are low.
- You may be hired at a **higher level** based on your broader experience—potentially earning more equity than someone promoted internally.
- Helps avoid promotion bottlenecks (e.g. SD2 to SD3 at Amazon, L4 to L5 at Google) by lateral hiring into senior roles.

**Risks of Joining Later**:

- Financially, the expected value of going solo or taking high-risk paths is lower due to high startup failure rates.
- Missing out on earlier career momentum and brand-building that Big Tech can provide.

Maximize Your Equity And Benefits In Tech [Part 13] - Stock Option Basics

Stock options offer exciting upside but come with layers of tax complexity depending on type and timing. Here are the core points from the lesson:

- Private company stock options come in two forms: incentive stock options (ISOs) and non-qualified stock options (NSOs), each with different tax rules
- NSOs trigger ordinary income tax at exercise on the spread between strike price and fair market value, with additional capital gains tax upon sale
- ISOs can offer better tax treatment if held for 2 years from grant and 1 year from exercise, avoiding ordinary income tax but potentially triggering alternative minimum tax (AMT)
- Selling ISOs in the same year as exercising can help avoid AMT, but splitting the tax years may result in both AMT and ordinary income tax, creating a worst-case scenario

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/)

Assembling The Feedback "Avengers" For Your Promotion Case

System Design Example: TikTok Recommendation System

In this example, we apply the **5-part ML system design framework** to a product-focused recommendation system, like the “For You” page on TikTok. This walkthrough shows how to translate theory into a practical, high-impact system that balances user experience, business goals, and infrastructure at scale.

- **Problem Navigation**: We identify key functional and non-functional requirements—personalized video recommendations under 100ms latency for over a billion users. Product goals include maximizing watch time, retention, and creator growth, while supporting real-time responsiveness.

- **High-Level Design**: The system includes a content ingestion pipeline, feature extraction services, candidate generation and ranking models, a real-time serving layer, and a feedback loop. We distinguish between components that require real-time updates (e.g., inference) and those that can run in batch (e.g., daily retraining).

- **Data Strategy & Feature Engineering**: We engineer rich **user features** (behavioral, demographic), **video features** (metadata, embeddings), and **contextual features** (session state, time of day). Concrete examples include a **creator consistency score** and a **video novelty score**.

- **Modeling Approach**: We use a two-stage architecture:

  - **Candidate generation**: Options include two-tower models, matrix factorization, neural collaborative filtering, and graph-based models.

  - **Ranking**: GBDTs for interpretability or deep models for richer signal capture. We also plan for cold start solutions and use exploration strategies to mitigate popularity bias.

- **Evaluation, Deployment & Monitoring**: We evaluate offline with AUC and DCG, and run A/B tests in production to track watch time and session length. To meet latency goals, we apply compression, caching, and quantization. Monitoring covers drift, degradation, and business KPIs—with real user feedback continuously improving the system.

This structured approach helps us communicate clearly, think systemically, and demonstrate readiness for designing real-world ML systems at scale.

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/>

Ship & Grow 500k+ User Side Projects [Part 8] - Easy Design Wins

Creating a smooth, functional user experience isn't too hard. This lesson teaches you:

- How you can make features easier to access for users, explained with an in-depth example
- How to take care of users in trickier situations, explained with an in-depth example
- What you can do to lower the cognitive burden of using your product, explained with an in-depth example

Let them carry it. You’ve done your part.

You’ve seen the pieces.\
Now we pull them together.

This final act is about how ownership moves—how everything you’ve practiced shows up when things get messy, unclear, or just plain stuck.

It’s less about new ideas, more about recognizing the patterns, and deciding what to do when they land on your desk.

**Workbook:** [Creator’s Orientation](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sysZuPhlrLZbU5stxlJBqg3LAcGTy_S7/view?usp=sharing)

**Want to go deeper?**

- Explore more tools and courses at [**Taha’s Method**](https://www.tahasmethod.com/) — from interview prep to leadership development.

- Follow me on [**LinkedIn**](https://www.linkedin.com/in/tahahussain/) and subscribe to my weekly newsletter, [**The Conscious Leader**](https://tahahussain.substack.com/), for more lessons like these.

- Get 30% off [**Top Tech Leader**](https://bit.ly/tarotopleader) with code **ILOVETARO** (exclusive for Taro members).

SWE Internship Survival Guide [Part 17] - Midpoint Check-In

When you’re aiming for a return offer as an intern, your final performance review can feel like a high-stakes moment. But it *shouldn’t* feel like a mystery. This lesson focuses on how to avoid surprises by being proactive about getting feedback and tracking your progress during the internship. Here are the core points from the lesson:

- Performance reviews shouldn’t be surprises—interns should proactively schedule a midpoint check-in (around week 5 or 6 of a 12-week internship) to gauge how things are going
- Use this check-in to ask honest questions about how you’re doing, what areas need improvement, and how you’re trending toward a return offer
- Treat it as a formal feedback session: retitle the meeting, extend its duration, and come prepared with your accomplishments and areas for growth
- Ask for clarity on how interns are typically evaluated and where you currently stand—phrasing questions with curiosity can unlock more candid feedback

Become An Engineer Influencer [Part 13] - Importance of Process

Get The Rating You Deserve [Part 17] - Think Long Term

**In this section, we explored the importance of maintaining a long-term perspective in our careers.**

To cultivate a long-term mindset, we should:

- **Set long-term goals:** Define clear and ambitious goals for the next five, ten, or even twenty years.
- **Align short-term actions with long-term goals:** Make decisions that align with our long-term vision.
- **Build a strong personal brand:** Develop a reputation for reliability, integrity, and expertise.
- **Cultivate meaningful relationships:** Build and maintain strong relationships with colleagues, mentors, and sponsors.
- **Continuously learn and grow:** Invest in personal and professional development to stay ahead of the curve.

By adopting a long-term perspective, we can make more strategic decisions, increase our resilience, and achieve greater fulfillment in our careers.

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>.

Demystifying LLM Benchmarks -- How To Compare Large Language Models?

In the recent launch of Google's Large Language Model (LLM) Gemini, Google claimed that "Gemini beats human level performance on MMLU" but you might be wondering:

- What are the different evaulation criteria? Massive Multitask Language Understanding (**MMLU**)? General Language Understanding Evaluation (**GLUE**)? **HumanEval**?
- How can we know which model is good at coding tasks?
- What is considered "human-level performance"?
- How do they actually get the results for these benchmarks?

In this talk, Sai breaks down all the benchmarks you need to know to be better informed when papers claim to beat benchmarks.

The next paper reading session is on January 8 at 5pm: [**https://www.jointaro.com/event/paper-reading-group-4-mistral-7b/**](https://www.jointaro.com/event/paper-reading-group-4-mistral-7b/)

**Your host:**

[**Sai Shreyas Bhavanasi**](https://www.linkedin.com/in/b-sai/) has worked in Computer Vision and Reinforcement Learning and published 2 first-author papers. He has also worked as an MLE and Data Analyst.

High Expectations

Expectations at Big Tech companies are extremely high and that pressure really shapes the engineer experience. Here are the core points from the lesson:

- Big Tech roles pay top-of-market compensation, and in return companies expect top-tier productivity, output, and code quality
- Many engineers coming from non–Big Tech backgrounds experience culture shock due to stricter standards, faster pace, and more rigorous release processes
- Performance reviews are a major source of stress, heavily peer-comparative, and central to promotions and job security
- Past eras of “rest and vest” are largely gone; in today’s leaner, more competitive tech environment, expectations - especially for newer and more junior engineers - are higher than ever

Ship & Grow 500k+ User Side Projects [Part 21] - Go Deeper: Follow Through

A Taro member made a summary of the course: [Side Projects Shipping & Growing - Summary Doc](https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/tech-career-growth.appspot.com/o/courses%2Fgeneral_resources%2F%5BSUMMARY%5D%20Side%20Projects%20-%20Shipping%20%26%20Growing.pdf?alt=media&token=6d336c8b-26d6-45f2-a206-8682e64d21c5)

Related courses:

- [Build Side Projects With 500k+ Users: Coming Up With An Idea](https://www.jointaro.com/course/build-side-projects-with-500k-users-coming-up-with-an-idea/)
- [Level Up Your Code Quality As A Software Engineer](https://www.jointaro.com/course/level-up-your-code-quality-as-a-software-engineer/)

The Really Important Job Interview Questions Engineers Should Ask (But Don't)

Basic questions that engineers should ask when interviewing at any company. 

From the Posthog blog: <https://posthog.com/founders/what-to-ask-in-interviews>

Amazon Behavioral Interview [Part 21] - Disagreeing With Your Manager (Answer)

This video segment describes a situation where the interviewee disagreed with their manager's directive to implement a 15-minute response time for customer escalations.

- **Identified the Conflict:** The interviewee recognized that the 15-minute response time was unrealistic and impractical for their team, considering factors such as:

  - **Global Time Zones:** Many customers were located in different time zones, making immediate contact difficult.
  - **Internal Coordination:** Coordinating with internal stakeholders, such as sales teams, was necessary before contacting customers.
  - **Complexity of Escalations:** Resolving complex escalations often required significant internal investigation and coordination.

- **Proposed an Alternative Solution:**

  - The interviewee proposed a more realistic goal: contacting the customer within one hour of receiving the escalation.
  - They emphasized the importance of internal coordination and collaboration with sales teams.
  - They introduced a key performance indicator (KPI) of "time to first response" within one hour, focusing on a 90th percentile target.

- **Navigated Challenges:**

  - The interviewee faced resistance from both their manager and their team.
  - They effectively addressed the concerns of the sales team by improving communication and coordination.
  - They gathered data to support their proposed solution and successfully presented it to their manager.

- **Achieved Positive Outcomes:**

  - The team successfully met the 90th percentile target for time to first response.
  - Customer satisfaction improved.
  - The interviewee demonstrated effective communication, negotiation, and problem-solving skills.

This example demonstrates the interviewee's ability to: ***Challenge assumptions:*** *They questioned the feasibility of the 15-minute response time and proposed a more realistic alternative.* **Collaborate effectively:** They worked with their team and other stakeholders to address the challenges and implement the new approach. ***Drive positive change:*** *They successfully implemented a new process that improved customer satisfaction and team efficiency.* **Demonstrate resilience:** They persevered despite initial resistance from their manager and their team.

Learn more about Alan's job search program, Kadima Careers, using this [discount link](https://signup.kadimacareers.com/mQBsDvu).

Gilad’s Take: System Design Meeting Non-Participation

In this reflection on team participation during design reviews, we explored how group dynamics can have a powerful influence beyond the individuals themselves. The challenge highlights the importance of managing team culture and fostering an environment where all voices are heard.

- We acknowledge that **group behaviors can persist even as individual team members change**—a reminder that team culture is distinct and durable.
- Our role is to **introduce small, consistent deltas** that collectively improve psychological safety and encourage open participation.
- We focus on **building psychological safety** by recognizing barriers to contribution and intentionally working to lower them.
- Though these efforts may seem small or slow, **they compound into deep, sustainable cultural change** that supports long-term performance.
- Strong team cultures—like ones where everyone contributes—require persistent effort, but the payoff is a **resilient and high-performing team**.

If you want to learn more from Gilad, he shares free leadership advice daily on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/giladnaor/?utm_source=taro&utm_medium=course&utm_campaign=cta) and weekly on the[ δeltas newsletter](https://posts.managementdeltas.com/?utm_source=taro&utm_medium=course&utm_campaign=cta)

What Does An Engineering Manager Actually Do?

In order to work together optimally with your engineering manager (EMs), you should have a great understanding of their perspective and incentives.

Here are the core points from the video:
- **Engineering managers shouldn't do technical work** - They need to influence the code of the team without writing it, reviewing it, or designing it. This is an extremely hard job.
- **So what specifically do EMs do?** - Ultimately the EM's goal is to make the team land impact, and this can manifest in many different ways (some of which engineers don't want to hear about). If you are a good performer, it's in the manager's best interest to foster your talent and grow you. If you aren't (i.e. you're dragging the team down), it's possible the manager believes firing you to be the best choice for the team. Outside of managing performance, there are tasks like removing non-technical blockers and making people work better together that EMs do to keep the impact engine going.

Related resources:
- [[Taro Top 10] Software Engineer To Engineering Manager (IC -> M Track)](https://www.jointaro.com/playlist/oz0mnJvHHgM8NfVF7rgp/)
- [[Masterclass] What Software Engineers Should Look For In Their Engineering Manager](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/oeY7ncZhzJ5NO6dij5e7/masterclass-what-software-engineers-should-look-for-in-their-engineering-manager/)

Talent Density

Working at a Big Tech company means joining an environment that systematically attracts top-tier talent due to its high compensation and prestige. This creates a unique ecosystem where growth, learning, and problem-solving are significantly accelerated.

- **Talent Follows Compensation**: Competitive pay naturally draws in highly skilled engineers. While exceptions exist, the vast majority of engineers in Big Tech are above-average in both technical skills and motivation.
- **Noticeable Culture Shift**: Engineers often report that, compared to previous jobs, colleagues in Big Tech care more about code quality, engineering rigor, and continuous learning.
- **High Learning Potential**: Being surrounded by experienced and skilled engineers ensures a constant opportunity to learn. Teams often include individuals who are more experienced, creating a strong environment for mentorship and knowledge transfer.
- **Collective Wisdom and Problem Solving**: The scale and maturity of these organizations mean that most technical challenges have been encountered, and solved, before. Success often comes from leveraging internal networks to find engineers who’ve already navigated similar problems.
- **Standing on Shoulders of Giants**: Engineers thrive by observing and applying best practices from tech leads and staff engineers, accelerating their own effectiveness and impact through this ecosystem of shared expertise.

Maximize Your Equity And Benefits In Tech [Part 12] - RSUs (Private Company Equity)

Private company RSUs can be rewarding but come with unique structures, tax challenges, and limited liquidity options. Here are the core points from the lesson:

- Most private RSUs are double-trigger, requiring both time-based vesting and a liquidity event, unlike public RSUs which are typically single-trigger
- Single-trigger RSUs in private companies can create tax issues if you owe taxes on illiquid shares you can’t sell
- Liquidity events like tender offers, IPOs, direct listings, or acquisitions are when real decision-making occurs, though each comes with restrictions like lock-up periods or partial sell limits
- IPOs typically involve a six-month lock-up period, while direct listings may allow earlier sales and fewer constraints
- It’s essential to plan for taxes—sell-to-cover elections may not fully satisfy tax liability due to lower default withholding rates on equity compensation

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/)

How Engineering Managers Are Evaluated

In this lesson, we walk through how managers are evaluated, what “meeting” versus “exceeding” expectations looks like, and how we as ICs can help them succeed, which in turn helps us.

- We emphasize that a manager’s core responsibility is delivering team impact—not promotions, not firing—so our goal is to help them maximize that impact.
- We learn that strong managers are influential: they build relationships, earn trust, and can meaningfully sway decisions both across and above the team.
- We outline “managing down,” which includes recruiting top engineers, retaining high performers, setting priorities, enabling growth, and dealing directly with low performers through feedback, PIPs, or transitions.
- We highlight the importance of retention as a key evaluation metric—if everyone wants to leave a manager’s team, leadership sees that as a failure.
- We explore “managing up,” where managers frequently provide updates to directors/VPs, take ownership of escalations, and proactively communicate timelines, issues, and product health to leadership.

Maximize Your Equity And Benefits In Tech [Part 7] - Other Considerations (RSUs/Bonuses)

Even with a solid RSU strategy in place, there are a few overlooked tax and compliance details that can complicate things. Here are the core points from the lesson:

- Insider trading policies may limit your ability to auto-sell or manually sell RSUs immediately upon vesting, leading to short-term gains or losses you can’t always control
- Wash sale rules can disallow losses if you repurchase the same stock within 30 days of a sale, which can easily happen with monthly vesting schedules
- Incorrectly reporting RSU-related wash sales on your taxes may go unnoticed, but technically violates IRS rules and can affect your cost basis going forward

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/)

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.