He Bought Coffee For ALL Meta Employees On His Last Day

What Should I Do In The First 10 Minutes?

In this lesson we talk about how to strategically approach the first 10 minutes of an AI-assisted coding interview to set yourself up for success.

- **Resist the urge to dive in immediately** — instead of jumping straight into coding or prompting the AI, start by restating the problem in your own words and doing a strategic skim of the codebase to understand existing functionality and function signatures.
- **Uncover hidden requirements** — as you explore the code, actively look for things like bot user filtering, non-active event handling, or data normalization that may not have been spelled out in the prompt, and clarify these with your interviewer.
- **Turn requirements into tests early** — unlike traditional interviews, convert each discovered requirement into an executable test case upfront (using AI to help generate them if needed), since verifying AI-generated code is a core part of the assessment.

The AI Frontier: Get Paid To Build Smarter LLMs

The future of AI is being built by a handful of companies: OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind, among others. One of the core ingredients for improving the performance of LLMs is the use of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF).

Join us for a live conversation with Mercor's cofounder and CTO, [**Adarsh Hiremath**](https://www.linkedin.com/in/adarsh-h-623941204) hosted by Taro's cofounder and CEO, [**Rahul Pandey**](https://www.linkedin.com/in/rpandey1234/). Mercor is a key partner to enable RLHF for many frontier model companies. As part of this, Mercor offers 1000s of part-time, remote-friendly roles with competitive compensation.

This is a new type of white-collar work that involves debugging, validating, and creating scenarios for LLMs. As the capabilities of models improve, the expertise required to train models keeps increasing. One of the highest-priority areas is around coding, which means Software Engineers have a special role to play in this type of work.

This event explains the pros and cons of AI lab gig work, what exactly the work entails, and how much you can earn.

Some topics we’ll cover:

- Typical hourly rates and the compensation model
- Project-to-project variability
- Unique challenges of remote collaboration in this type of work
- What does the day-to-day look like with this type of work?
- How does this work impact the development of LLMs and AI agents?
- How will this work evolve over the next 5 years?

There will also be time for open Q&A from the audience.

Mercor is an AI-powered recruiting platform that has become one of the largest sources for human labor for foundation model companies. Mercor has raised more than $100 million dollars and is located in San Francisco, CA. Explore [**relevant jobs on Mercor here**](https://work.mercor.com/?referralCode=91aab11f-ce55-40b3-9c2d-f74576cac28f) (100+ Software Engineering jobs available).

Philip's Biggest Concern: The Future Of Work

Well Roundedness

Working in Big Tech expands far beyond engineering; it shapes individuals into well-rounded professionals by pushing them to develop skills in communication, leadership, and cross-functional collaboration.

- **Development of cross-functional skills**: Navigating product launches or technical changes in a large organization requires coordination across many stakeholders, honing project management, communication, relationship-building, and system design abilities.
- **Environment fosters personal growth**: Operating within a large, complex structure forces individuals to adapt, influence, and lead through collaboration—skills less emphasized in smaller, more agile companies.
- **Preparation for an AI-driven future**: As coding becomes more automated, the remaining 80% of a top engineer’s job like communication, strategy, and leadership becomes even more valuable. This environment equips engineers for longevity in their careers.
- **Transferable experience for career switchers**: Even those new to tech can succeed by leveraging skills from prior careers (e.g., hospitality, education, operations). Communication and stakeholder management experience, in particular, translate well.
- **Resilience through versatility**: Focusing on foundational skills that transcend tech stacks or tools creates career durability, avoiding dependency on niche or outdated technologies.

How Managers Hire Great Engineers [Part 11] - Meetups and Conferences

When it comes to relationship building, you simply cannot beat in-person interaction. From this lesson, you will:

- Understand the value of making personal connections at meetups and conferences to stand out from the noise of digital outreach
- Learn strategies for building a network by engaging with people at events, collecting their contact information for future outreach
- Discover how creating and hosting your own events can establish your brand as a company and attract potential candidates
- Realize the benefits of long-term recruitment through sustained relationships with event attendees and speakers
- Explore how relationships with speakers at your events can evolve into hiring opportunities for top talent in the future

Connect with John Egan on LinkedIn: <https://www.linkedin.com/in/jwegan/>

Politics

As companies scale, politics become inevitable - Big Tech companies are no exception. While these environments offer great compensation and talent density, navigating organizational complexity and interpersonal dynamics becomes a critical part of engineering success.

- **Politics Are Inevitable in Large Orgs**: As tech companies grow, layers of leadership and cross-functional dependencies make decision-making complex. Engineers must often align with numerous stakeholders, especially when aiming for senior or staff roles.
- **Shipping Requires Consensus-Building**: Even seemingly minor changes can require significant internal negotiation. One example cited involved a six-month project to enlarge a button being blocked just before launch due to last-minute leadership disagreement.
- **People Over Code**: The technical work is often less challenging than influencing and winning over colleagues who may disagree or have competing priorities.
- **Burnout from Frustrated Efforts**: Senior engineers can burn out after investing months into initiatives that get shut down due to misaligned incentives or lack of political foresight.
- **Success Requires “Playing the Game”**: Engineers who are averse to navigating internal politics may struggle, especially in high-visibility roles. Building relationships proactively is often essential for seeing projects through.

Paper Reading - Gemini: A Family of Highly Capable Multimodal Models

Paper Discussion led by: [Akshika Wijesundara PhD](https://www.linkedin.com/in/akshika/)

Abstract: Google researchers recently unveiled Gemini, a ground breaking family of multimodal AI models capable of understanding and reasoning across images, audio, video, and text. The largest Gemini model, Ultra, achieved human-expert performance on several benchmarks and advanced the state of the art across a range of multimodal tasks.

In this paper reading, we will discuss key details from Google's paper introducing Gemini models. Topics will include:

- The Gemini model architectures and how they achieve cross-modal understanding
- Performance benchmarks and state-of-the-art results across text, image, audio, and video tasks
- Applications and use cases enabled by Gemini's multimodal reasoning
- Approaches to responsible deployment of large language models like Gemini

This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the exciting new capabilities of Google's Gemini project. Whether you're an AI researcher, engineer, or simply curious about the state of the art in multimodal AI, join us for an in-depth look at this new model family.\
\
Paper link: [**https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.11805**](https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.11805)\
Event link:  **[https://www.jointaro.com/event/paper-reading-gemini-a-family-of-highly-capable-multimodal-models/](https://www.jointaro.com/event/paper-reading-gemini-a-family-of-highly-capable-multimodal-models/)**

"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.

Amazon Behavioral Interview [Part 17] - Handling Unclear Expectations From Leadership (Answer)

This video segment describes a situation where the interviewee faced conflicting demands from leadership: the need to drive customer satisfaction and improve resolution times while also maintaining employee engagement and retention.

Here are the key takeaways:

- **Identified the Conflict:** The interviewee recognized the conflicting demands from leadership regarding customer satisfaction metrics and employee well-being, particularly during a challenging period with COVID-19.
- **Navigated the Challenges:**
  - **Open Communication:** They fostered open communication with their team, actively seeking feedback and addressing concerns.
  - **Prioritized Employee Well-being:** Despite the pressure to meet performance metrics, they prioritized employee well-being by:
    - Implementing measures to reduce stress, such as virtual happy hours and flexible work arrangements.
    - Actively listening to employee feedback and addressing their concerns.
  - **Balanced Priorities:** They successfully navigated the competing demands by finding a balance between meeting performance targets and maintaining employee morale.
- **Demonstrated Leadership:** The interviewee demonstrated strong leadership by:
  - Proactively addressing the challenges and seeking solutions.
  - Effectively communicating expectations and priorities to their team.
  - Building trust and fostering a supportive team environment.

This example highlights the interviewee's ability to navigate complex situations, prioritize competing demands, and effectively lead and motivate their team.

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

Taro Book Club: Designing Data Intensive Applications - Chapter 3

Topic: Chapter 3 - Storage and Retrieval

In this #taro-bookclub discussion, we talk about Chapter 3 of [**"Designing Data-Intensive Applications"**](https://www.amazon.com/Designing-Data-Intensive-Applications-Reliable-Maintainable/dp/1449373321) by Martin Kleppmann.

Here's the agenda:

- Let’s get to know each other with some quick introductions.
- We’ll break down and discuss the key concepts from Chapter 3.
- There will also be time for any questions and answers you might have.

Thanks to [**Suraj Singh**](https://www.linkedin.com/in/suraj-singh-495b192b/) and [**Sangavi Pari**](https://www.linkedin.com/in/sangavi-pari/) for leading this session!

Can A Company Demand High Performance AND Allow Learning?

Engineering Managers Day-To-Day

In this lesson, we break down what an engineering manager’s day-to-day really looks like—why their calendars are packed with meetings, how they handle technical planning, and why the emotional side of the role is often underestimated.

- We highlight that EM calendars are dominated by 1:1s, alignment discussions, and cross-team negotiations, much of which shields us from logistical or resourcing debates.
- We explain that managers need enough technical depth to estimate project scope, evaluate dependencies, and participate meaningfully in planning without writing code themselves.
- We note that much of the real work happens outside meetings—reviewing docs, giving feedback, writing updates, and communicating progress upward to directors and VPs.
- We emphasize that people management is a huge portion of the job: coordinating collaboration, following up for junior engineers, resolving interpersonal issues, and handling performance challenges.
- We discuss the emotional burden managers carry handling compensation, performance ratings, personal struggles, and burnout and how this makes them part-time therapists as well as leaders.

Ship & Grow 500k+ User Side Projects [Part 9] - Leverage Existing Patterns

Just because you're an engineer doesn't mean that you can't be a solid product designer. This lesson teaches you:

- The easiest way to bootstrap a product design from scratch
- What the pinnacle of front-end UI/UX looks like and the company behind it
- A company you can use as inspiration for a back-end project
- A company you can use as inspiration for an ML project

Paper Reading - Attention is All You Need

Paper Discussion led by [Mandar Deshpande](https://www.linkedin.com/in/mandardeshpande1995/)

"Attention is All You Need" is a seminal research paper published by researchers at Google in 2017, introducing the Transformer model. The paper revolutionized natural language processing and machine translation by proposing a new architecture that relies solely on self-attention mechanisms, eliminating the need for recurrent or convolutional layers.

This paper and the Transformer model it introduced are crucial in the context of Large Language Models (LLMs) for several reasons:

- Parallelization
- Long-Range Dependencies
- Efficient Attention
- Mechanism Pre-training and Transfer Learning

We will be discussing the internals of the Transformer architecture which will help guide our journey into the LLM space.

Paper link - <https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762?ref=blog.oxen.ai>\
Event link - <https://www.jointaro.com/event/paper-reading-attention-is-all-you-need/>

How Managers Hire Great Engineers [Part 12] - Outreach Basics

So you've found a great candidate - Now it's time to get them into your interview loop. From this lesson, you will:

- Understand the benchmark for a good response rate when sourcing candidates, with 15% as the target for moving candidates forward in the recruitment process
- Learn that email outreaches typically yield higher response rates than LinkedIn InMails and why finding a candidate’s personal email can be more effective
- Discover the advantages of outreach coming directly from an engineering manager rather than a recruiter to significantly increase the likelihood of a response
- Explore tools and methods for finding candidate emails, including using services like Clearbit and experimenting with Gmail to predict email addresses
- Gain insights into how personalizing the outreach process by handling initial replies and interactions can make a meaningful impact on recruitment outcomes

Connect with John Egan on LinkedIn: [https://www.linkedin.com/in/jwegan/​](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jwegan/%E2%80%8B)

Hi, I’m Alex

If you want direct interview support from Alex and Uzair, take their live Maven course with discount code **TARO10**: <https://maven.com/alex-kliotzkin/acing-em-interviews>

In this video, I introduce myself and share my mission to help tech leaders thrive, which is a passion of mine.

- I have over 18 years of experience in the tech industry, including more than 8 years in leadership roles, and I graduated with a bachelor's in software engineering from the University of Waterloo.
- My goal is to assist individuals in becoming better versions of themselves through effective leadership. I encourage viewers to engage with me on this journey of growth and development.

Amazon Behavioral Interview [Part 13] - Delivering Results (Answer)

In this video, the speaker describes a situation where they had to implement a new process quickly to improve internal communication and efficiency. Here are the key takeaways in 3 bullet points:

- **Identified a Problem:** The speaker's team was facing issues due to multiple channels for internal stakeholders to submit escalations. This created confusion and made it difficult to track issues.
- **Implemented a Solution:** The speaker quickly developed a plan to create a single point of entry (\[email address removed\]) for all escalations. This streamlined the process and ensured that issues were not falling through the cracks.
- **Achieved Results:** The new process was successfully launched within a tight deadline. While there was some initial resistance from some stakeholders, the speaker was able to address concerns and ultimately achieve nearly 100% compliance.

Overall, the speaker's experience highlights the importance of being adaptable and resourceful in a fast-paced work environment. It also demonstrates the value of clear communication and collaboration in achieving successful outcomes.

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

Become An Engineer Influencer [Part 12] - Engineering Topics

The Case AGAINST Big Tech

We discuss reasons why Big Tech may not be the right fit for everyone, especially as career goals and personal priorities evolve over time.

- **High Work-Life Balance Needs**: For those with growing personal commitments—like family, health, or other priorities—Big Tech’s demanding environment may no longer be sustainable or fulfilling.
- **Low Tolerance for Pressure**: The performance-driven, competitive nature of Big Tech can be overwhelming for those who prefer a calmer, less intense work atmosphere.
- **Preference for Independent, Heads-Down Work**: Engineers who thrive in solo coding environments without heavy documentation, collaboration, or politics may find the collaborative and process-heavy style of Big Tech frustrating.
- **Avoidance of Office Politics**: Success often requires political navigation, influence-building, and strategic communication—elements that don't appeal to everyone.
- **Desire for Simplicity**: Not everyone aspires to climb the corporate ladder; for those who just want to write good code without excessive overhead, there are better environments than Big Tech.

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.