Philip's Biggest Concern: The Future Of Work

"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.

IC9 Expectations

In this lesson, **Adam Ernst**, Software Engineer at **Meta**, shares how his mindset evolved after reaching the highest levels of the Individual Contributor career path. Rather than obsessing over whether his work was "IC9-level," Adam explains why he stopped measuring success by job expectations and instead focused on solving meaningful problems. He discusses the importance of trusting feedback from managers, staying aligned with organizational priorities, and pursuing work that is both impactful and personally motivating.

- **Stop Chasing the Title, Start Solving Problems:** Adam believes that constantly worrying about whether your work is "senior enough" is counterproductive. Instead, focus on delivering meaningful solutions to the most important problems facing your organization.
- **Use Feedback as a Course Correction:** Regular check-ins with your manager help ensure you're investing your time in high-impact work. Honest performance feedback should be viewed as guidance to adjust direction—not as a measure of personal worth.
- **Do Work You Enjoy:** Adam attributes much of his long-term success to working on problems he genuinely enjoys. By aligning personal interests with organizational priorities, engineers can produce their best work without becoming consumed by the pressure of meeting a particular career level.

Original podcast link: [**https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YA_OYJF3Mmw**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YA_OYJF3Mmw)

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 - 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/)**

Swingy Compensation

While Big Tech compensation packages can be extremely lucrative, they are also highly volatile. Much of the reward is tied to company stock, which fluctuates dramatically and is largely outside any individual engineer’s control. Here are the core points from the lesson:

- **Equity Makes Up the Majority of Pay at Senior Levels** - Compensation often includes base salary, a bonus, and a large portion in restricted stock units (RSUs), especially as engineers become more senior.
- **Stock Price Volatility Can Be Emotionally Draining** - Engineers may become fixated on stock movements - checking daily gains or losses that can translate to tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in value swings.
- **Lack of Control Over Equity Value** - Company-wide factors like earnings calls or buyback announcements - rather than individual performance—drive major stock movements. A 26% drop in Meta's stock once erased $250 billion in market cap overnight.
- **Advice: Sell Regularly, Avoid Emotional Attachment** - Diversification and emotional detachment are key. Holding too much company stock creates psychological and financial vulnerability, especially in market downturns.
- **Stock-Based Wealth Is Largely Unpredictable** - Stock spikes and crashes often follow unexpected logic, making it nearly impossible for individual employees to anticipate or influence outcomes.

Where's The Scope?

Here are the core points from the lesson:

- **Too Many Smart Engineers, Too Few Big Problems Left** - Decades of optimization have left many core products (like Facebook Home Feed) nearly maxed out, making impactful changes rare and promotions harder to earn.
- **Engineers Flee Mature Teams in Search of Scope** - Engineers often transfer to newer initiatives (e.g., Meta’s Portal) to find unclaimed problems they can own—especially critical in systems with forced promotion deadlines.
- **Forced Promotion Policies Increase Pressure** - At Meta for instance, engineers must be promoted from mid-level (E4) to senior (E5) within five years or face termination, driving a scramble for high-impact work. This is awkward when there's a profound lack of scope.
- **Promotion Bottlenecks Are Common** - Transitions like Amazon SD2 → SD3 or Google L4 → L5 are notorious for being highly competitive, political, and frustrating due to overlapping ambitions.
- **Scarcity of Senior/Staff-Level Scope** - Teams without senior-level problems to solve—or ones where existing staff already own them—make it nearly impossible for newer engineers to grow beyond a certain level.

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).

Can A Company Demand High Performance AND Allow Learning?

The Hidden Agenda In Reorganizations

In this lesson, we discuss the **hidden considerations that can shape company reorganizations beyond their stated business purpose**. While reorgs are often triggered by legitimate changes such as entering a new market, launching a project, integrating an acquisition, or responding to a leader’s departure, senior leaders may also use them as an opportunity to address promotions, retention, performance, and leadership development at the same time.

- **Reorgs often serve multiple objectives:** Once the business need for a reorganization is established, leaders may also consider who needs greater scope, which high performers they want to retain, and where different employees should sit within the new structure.
- **Retention and performance influence the design:** Leaders may use a reorg to give valued employees more attractive opportunities while structuring changes so that the potential departure of lower-priority employees is less disruptive.
- **Leadership changes can create cascading reorgs:** When a senior leader leaves or moves roles, entire teams may need to be reassigned, sometimes placing teams under unexpected leaders or using the transition as an opportunity to stretch someone into a broader leadership role.

Original podcast link:[ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WaeGfLnRvc&t=24s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WaeGfLnRvc&t=24s)

SWE Internship Survival Guide [Part 19] - The Real Treasure

Internships are a unique chance to grow your network alongside your technical skills. Here are the core points from the lesson:

- The other interns you work with often become valuable long-term connections—professionally and personally
- Shared experiences during an internship create natural bonding opportunities, so don’t miss out by being overly heads-down
- Building your network isn’t just about being social—it’s also about doing great work and being helpful to others

Learn how to build relationships here: [**\[Masterclass\] How To Build Deep Relationships Quickly In Tech**](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/tyaPFMXPoz2pmzB7OVzt/masterclass-how-to-build-deep-relationships-quickly-in-tech/)

How Managers Hire Great Engineers [Part 21] - Level-Specific Info

Hiring great engineers gets exponentially harder the more senior the headcount you are looking for. From this lesson, you will:

- Understand the need to adjust sourcing tactics for different engineering levels, such as using root sourcing primarily for more seasoned engineers (L6 and above).
- Learn that junior roles (L3, L4) may not benefit as much from certain tactics like source-a-thons due to senior engineers typically not having extensive networks of junior engineers.
- Recognize that closing efforts must be scaled according to the candidate's level, with more senior candidates (L7 and above) requiring more extensive efforts to secure their acceptance.

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

Become An Engineer Influencer [Part 11] - Advice, Passion, and Build In Public

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/>

Overrated Career Goals

We explain which attributes engineers tend to over-prioritize and why doing so often leads to bad career decisions.

Here are the core points from the lesson:

- We see many early-career engineers chase trendy product spaces (ML, AR/VR, blockchain) without genuine passion, ignoring the high risk that trends fizzle and leave teams stagnant; survivorship bias makes the rare success stories seem more common than they are.
- We highlight a similar trap with technical stacks: engineers often assume “more modern is better,” jumping between new technologies and hurting long-term growth, when stable, proven stacks at strong companies typically offer better learning and career durability.
- We show that over-prioritizing level/title or short-term compensation can backfire, since inflated titles at weak companies and high pay tied to terrible work-life balance rarely lead to long-term career success or well-being; growth opportunities and supportive teams tend to drive compensation naturally over time.
- We stress that compensation is multi-variable (base vs. equity vs. upside potential), and examples like Barnes & Noble illustrate how deceptively high salaries may underperform compared to equity-rich tech roles over a multi-year horizon.

Become An Engineer Influencer [Part 26] - Cohort Based Courses

Amazon Behavioral Interview [Part 23] - Sacrificing Short-Term For Long-Term (Answer)

This video segment describes a situation where the interviewee had to make a difficult decision to sacrifice short-term gains for long-term value.

- **Identified the Problem:** The interviewee inherited a team with three regional teams operating independently, leading to inefficiencies and hindering the team's ability to scale and meet growing demands.
- **Made a Difficult Decision:** The interviewee made the difficult decision to transition the team from a regional model to a globally aligned model. This decision faced significant resistance from the team, leading to setbacks and the loss of some team members.
- **Overcame Challenges:** Despite the challenges, the interviewee successfully implemented the new model, resulting in significant improvements:
  - Reduced resolution times from seven hours to two hours.
  - Increased customer satisfaction (CSAT) significantly.
  - Improved operational efficiency and team productivity.
- **Learnings and Reflections:** The interviewee acknowledged that they could have improved their communication and change management strategies. They recognized the importance of more proactively communicating the need for change and the potential benefits of the new model to the team.

This example demonstrates the interviewee's ability to: 

- **Identify and address systemic issues:** They recognized the limitations of the existing system and proposed a solution to improve efficiency and effectiveness. 
- **Make difficult decisions:** They made a difficult decision despite facing resistance from their team. 
- **Overcome challenges:** They successfully navigated the challenges of the transition, including team resistance and operational hurdles. 
- **Focus on long-term value:** They prioritized long-term benefits for the team and the organization, even when it meant short-term disruption.
- **Learn from experience:** They identified areas for improvement in their communication and change management strategies.

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

Become An Engineer Influencer [Part 9] - Community-First Approach

How Managers Hire Great Engineers [Part 8] - School Websites

One of the biggest predictors of engineer quality is the university they went to. From this lesson, you will:

- Learn how to use Google and school directories to find potential candidates, particularly for new grad PhDs or specialized fields like machine learning
- Discover how to locate personal web pages of grad students and alumni by using targeted search queries, such as searching for specific domains like “site:[stanford.edu](http://stanford.edu)”
- Understand the advantage of sourcing candidates through school websites as a way to reach individuals who are less inundated with recruiting contacts compared to those on LinkedIn

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

Role-Specific System Design Focus

In this part of the system design section, we explore how **ML system design interviews vary depending on the role and level** we’re applying for. Knowing what’s emphasized helps us tailor our preparation strategically.

- For **product-focused ML roles**, we focus on modeling choices, feature engineering, and connecting ML decisions to tangible business impact.
- **ML infrastructure roles** emphasize architecture, scalability, reliability, and serving systems—including distributed training and feature stores.
- **Research-oriented roles** dive into experimentation frameworks, novel modeling techniques, and how to transition prototypes into production.
- In **ML generalist roles** (common at startups or smaller teams), we’re expected to demonstrate a balanced understanding across the full ML lifecycle.
- Importantly, **interview expectations are tied more to seniority level than company size**—a senior role at a startup may involve deeper system questions than a junior role at a large tech company.

Next, we’ll learn a system design framework that can flex across these scenarios and help us organize our thinking effectively.

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/>

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.