Level Up Your Code Quality As A Software Engineer [Part 10] - Sweat The Details, Call Out Edge Cases

Building software that "works" is easy. Building software that truly works in all viable scenarios is hard and what separates the great engineers from the mediocre ones, especially at Big Tech. This lesson will teach you: 

- Why mistakes are extremely punishing in software
- The relationship between the happy flow and edge cases
- Why being detail-oriented is an extremely valuable asset in tech, especially for your code quality
- The mental framework to have as a software engineer to proactively call out edge cases in a systematic way

Top System Design Interview Mistakes [Part 5] - Don't Over or Under-Engineer a System

In system design interviews, it's crucial to strike the right balance between complexity and simplicity in your solutions. This video highlights the importance of avoiding both over-engineering and under-engineering:

- Designing systems with unnecessary complexity can lead to wasted resources, higher risks of bugs, and an impractical solution
- While caching can improve performance, indiscriminately adding caches without careful consideration can introduce inconsistencies and unnecessary complexity
- Rather than adding complexity for its own sake, stay focused on the unique challenges of the problem at hand to identify the most effective solutions
- Thoughtfully evaluate where to apply caching or other optimizations by weighing the benefits against the potential downsides
- Ensure that your design decisions are driven by the specific needs of the problem, rather than trying to impress the interviewer with buzzwords or unnecessary tools

This approach helps create efficient and practical solutions tailored to the specific challenges of the interview prompt.

If you need extra help with your system design interview, [Formation.dev](https://formation.dev/partners/taro) can provide you hands-on, personalized support. Join us here: <https://formation.dev/partners/taro>

Stop Getting Ghosted With Your Reachouts - How To Write A Great Cold Message

If you're a software engineer, you are likely going to do a cold reach out at some point in your career. This is almost always true when you're a junior engineer and don't have too deep a network yet. However, most software engineers go about this aspect of professional networking in the wrong way, especially when it comes to job searching and interviewing.

Here's how to write a cold message that actually has a chance of getting a response:

- **Mention your own background** - If you have any credibility, use it. What accomplishments do you have? What makes you special compared to everyone else and deserving of a response from this person?
- **Have a specific request** - The more pinpointed your ask is, the less effort it takes for the other person to figure out how to help you. Don't just ask for help with things like "career guidance" or "helping you find a job" - These categories are far too broad. Ask for tips on clearer areas like how to resolve disagreements in cross-team meetings or how you can pass behavioral interviews with &lt;50 person startups. For more advice here, check this out: [Asking Effective Questions That Get Great Answers Quickly](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/HV8sq75WxM9VhK0dhUun/asking-effective-questions-that-get-great-answers-quickly/)
- **Find commonality** - Having common ground is one of the most important factors with a successful relationship. Whether it's working on the same tech stack, coming from the same school, or playing the same video game, share that commonality to make yourself feel more familiar.
- **Build them up** - At the end of the day, everyone enjoys being praised. Put them on a pedestal and explain why *their* input in particular is valuable to you. Show that you didn't send the exact same message to 100+ different people.
- **Make up follow-up items clear** - Don't just ask for "guidance" or "mentorship": Make it clear what's the exact form of help you want? Is it a link to a useful blog post or video? Is it a 30 minute 1-on-1 meeting?

Related resources:

- [\[Course\] Effective Communication For Engineers](https://www.jointaro.com/course/effective-communication-for-engineers/)
- ["How to get referrals?"](https://www.jointaro.com/question/FQIi8us9uoTDIYdzMhvg/how-to-get-referrals/)

Why Most Companies Suck At Onboarding

You should not expect a good onboarding process at your company. Helping new employees ramp up is a good example of something that is *important but not urgent*. Tenured employees likely don't remember what it's like to be new.

While many companies will have insufficient or non-existent onboarding, the other end of the spectrum is also unfortunate: larger bureaucratic companies will have excessive onboarding, with months of training before you can do anything productive.

Even if the company has good intentions, building a solid onboarding plan is a hard problem: the tech industry's rate of change is very high, with people, tools, and technologies changing every year. Naturally, documentation and processes around onboarding become outdated.

Despite the difficulties, poor onboarding can be seen as an opportunity for new employees to have an immediate impact.

Managing Up: Understanding Your Boss

Understand the preferred communication style of your boss:

- Preferences/pet peeves

- Strengths and weaknesses

- Work to earn trust

- Share your own style and best environment

Connect with [**Ethan on LinkedIn**](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ethanevansvp/)

Taro members get a discount to join [Ethan's Level Up community](https://levelupwithethanevans.substack.com/taro25)

How The Best Software Engineers Learn A Tech Stack - The Lego Model

- "The Lego Model" is a way to view the world and understand your learning journey as a software engineer.
  - Technical components (e.g. rendering a list of items) are the individual legos
  - Complete products (e.g. a food delivery app) are the full lego creations
- There are 3 axes to evaluate your legos:
  - **Quantity:** How many you have
  - **Quality:** How good and sturdy your legos are
  - **Commonality:** How "in demand" your legos are (i.e. how many creations they can fit into)
- Most earlier-in-career engineers understand the 1st axis of quantity and incorrectly spend a lot of time learning different tech stacks and frameworks.
- Those same engineers often don't even realize the 2nd and 3rd axes exist:
  - When they learn a component, they will build it out with very low quality.
  - They will learn "flashier" components that aren't even used by most products/companies.

For examples on how to excel at the 2nd and 3rd axes, check out the related resources below!

Related resources:
- [[Masterclass] How To Learn Quickly In Tech](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/u9ldIvrTvV1wfWExccDR/masterclass-how-to-learn-quickly-in-tech/) - The full video this clip came from
- [This Is How Software Engineers Should Initially Learn](https://link.jointaro.com/iVBpCaB6pAHivhdi6)
- [Building Software For Optimal Learning Example - Login Flow](https://link.jointaro.com/oEkTB3pskKH6JHCX6)

Negotiation Course: How This Course Works

Your ability to negotiate is undeniably one of the highest-leverage skills you can learn. But tech workers are notoriously bad at negotiation. Based on discussions with 100s of tech workers, there are 2 common reasons for this: 

1. They choose not to negotiate. They somehow view negotiation as a perverse 'badge of honor' that they simply accept the first offer they receive and they don't want/need to ask for any adjustment. 
2. They try to negotiate but are ineffective. They don't have leverage or cannot defend why they're asking for certain things. 

This course is designed for tech employees who are exploring job opportunities and will receive a job offer in tech (and ideally multiple!). My goal is for you to feel confident and strong in discussions you have with recruiters and hiring managers.

This course is broken down into 3 major parts: 

1. **Principles** - How does negotiation work and why is it worthwhile?
2. **Planning** - What should you do (and not do) before and offer you receive an offer?
3. **Tactics** - What is the best course of action for various scenarios?

If you get more than a $10K increase in your compensation by following the tactics outlined in this course, send me an email at [rahul@jointaro.com](mailto:rahul@jointaro.com) -- we will celebrate together!

Why Onboarding Matters

This video discusses the importance of onboarding and how it can significantly impact your reputation and career growth. 

If you imagine a "**Trust Meter**" where 0 means you have no trust and 100 means absolute trust, your default score as the new engineer will be around 50. Existing employees will think you are smart and have good intentions, but you need to work hard to increase the score and unlock larger-scoped projects. This hard work begins in onboarding.

The other reason the initial months in the company are important is because the tech industry is changing increasingly rapidly. When the average tenure at a company is &lt; 2 years, you need to figure out how to fully ramp up in a fraction of that time. Even within the same company, you will likely switch teams multiple times. Re-orgs are so common!

By approaching onboarding with a proactive plan and a sense of urgency, you can set yourself up for success and build strong relationships quickly.

DSA Crash Course [Part 10] - Most Frequent Char Approach

In this lesson, Alvin explores the strategy to solving the following interview problem:

> Write a function, *most_frequent_char*, that takes in a string as an argument. The function should return the most frequent character of the string. If there are ties, return the character that appears earlier in the string.
>
> You can assume that the input string is non-empty.

```
most_frequent_char('bookeeper') # -> 'e'
```

```
most_frequent_char('david') # -> 'd'
```

```
most_frequent_char('abby') # -> 'b'
```

```
most_frequent_char('mississippi') # -> 'i'
```

If you need additional support taking these DSA skills and actually applying them, take [**Alvin's**](https://www.linkedin.com/in/alvin-zablan-b73a92117/) *complete* data structures and algorithms course on [**Structy**](https://structy.net/?utm_source=taro). You can try out the concepts yourself in their interactive code editor and learn advanced DSA patterns like stack exhaustive recursion.

Use [**this link to get 20% off**](https://structy.net/purchase?promo_code=taro20) the entire Structy DSA learning experience.

Follow Alvin on LinkedIn: <https://www.linkedin.com/in/alvin-zablan-b73a92117/>

[Masterclass] How To Build And Grow Tech Products To 500k+ Users For Free

Here are our Top 5 points from this session:
- **Side projects are incredibly powerful** - They improve your portfolio, increase your coding velocity, and give you holistic experience around building products end-to-end.
- **Care deeply about quality** - Users notice when your app or website is buggy. Strive to cover all edge cases and provide a truly polished experience.
- **Eat your own dogfood** - The best way to know how to improve your product is to use it yourself. This was a staple of Meta's engineering culture.
- **Least clicks design** - At the end of the day, it doesn't matter how "pretty" your product looks if it isn't efficient. Think about how you can have your "hero flow" take as few clicks as possible.
- **Understand SEO** - Work backwards from what people will be searching for when they need a product like yours. Then have those words in your product title and relevant metadata.

Related resources:
- [Presentation Slides](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1lfSCWI_OUtchWpIEKwG8JkII8IUvBeACRqEJlnTErjU/edit?usp=sharing)
- [How To Come Up With Product Ideas That Get 100k+ Users](https://link.jointaro.com/7Q8cDrda23zv2omU9)
- [How Side Projects Make Recruiters Come To You](https://link.jointaro.com/rxqDDu4sgMQbP6LT8)
- [Why Side Projects Are So Powerful For Junior Engineers](https://link.jointaro.com/cFo3doiWDeE5dpa67)
- [How To Split Your Time Properly Between Work & Side Projects](https://link.jointaro.com/YFCmNrsdqhuMSeUw5)

Engineer Your Ideal Tech Career [Part 2] - How Do You Spend Your Time?

In this video, we explore key areas that software engineers spend their time throughout their day, and we talk through the differences between each.

Depending on which areas you want to optimize to spend your most time, your long-term career path can vary. Try to assign a different rating to each to give yourself a clearer picture!

We cover what it really means to:

- Be making product/business decisions
- Be architecting solutions
- Be hiring
- Be mentoring

Looking for mentorship from tech’s top engineers + personalized job hunt assistance and interview prep? [Formation.dev](http://Formation.dev) can provide you unlimited career coaching, technical mentorship, personalized practice, and mock interviews. Join us here: <https://formation.dev/partners/taro>

Worksheet: [Formation - Coding Your Career](https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/tech-career-growth.appspot.com/o/courses%2Fslides%2FFormation%20Career%20Direction%20Worksheet.pdf?alt=media&token=f6344b78-529a-411e-a449-7a34a8d55fc8)

Top System Design Interview Mistakes [Part 6] - Freezing on the Spot

In system design interviews, clear communication is crucial. Many candidates struggle not because they lack knowledge, but because they fail to express their ideas effectively. This video highlights a common issue: Freezing under pressure.

- Instead of freezing when faced with a complex problem, keep the conversation going by asking clarifying questions. This not only helps you gather necessary information but also engages the interviewer.
- If unsure what to ask, focus on understanding the system’s functionality. Questions about the product’s purpose and user journey can guide your design process.
- Involving the interviewer through questions shows your experience and keeps the interview on track.

In short, don’t let nerves stop you—ask questions to maintain momentum and communicate effectively.

If you need extra help with your system design interview, [Formation.dev](https://formation.dev/partners/taro) can provide you hands-on, personalized support. Join us here: <https://formation.dev/partners/taro>

How To Be An Effective Tech Lead [Part 1] - How This Course Works

As a software engineer, you need to eventually grow into a tech lead to pursue more senior levels. However, it's much easier being a bad tech lead instead of a good tech lead - This course is here to help you be the latter. Here are the core parts of the lesson:

- Your instructor [Jocelin Ho](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jocelinho/) walks you through her extensive 10+ year tech background as a Meta tech lead and the CTO/Cofounder of Cooby (Sequoia-backed startup), where she built engineering teams from scratch and mentored other tech leads

- You'll understand if this course is a good fit for you

- We walk you through the course objectives. By the end of the course, you will know:

  - 💡 The full definition of an effective tech lead

  - 💻 What technological skills tech leads must possess

  - 🙌 How tech leads demonstrate true leadership

  - ✅ Practical tips to start acting as a tech lead

Level Up Your Code Quality As A Software Engineer [Part 13] - Lay Out The Plan

It's tempting as a software engineer to leap straight into the code and start being productive. However, this can often cost you time in the long-term, especially with more technically complex tasks. This lesson will teach you:

- Why it's important to create a plan to increase your code quality, move faster, and build up relationships with your teammates
- What goes into a rock-solid coding plan (hopefully you were paying attention during the prior parts of the course!)
- Exactly what a good technical plan looks like with a concrete, real-life example from Taro

Level Up Your Code Quality As A Software Engineer [Part 9] - Focus, Focus, Focus

A lot of software engineers falsely believe that having every tech stack ever on your resume means that you are the perfect interview candidate as you qualify for the most jobs. The reverse is actually true, and championing that strategy leads to massive gains in both your code quality and job prospects. This lesson will teach you:

- The real recipe for being highly paid and easily hired as a software engineer
- Signs that you have become a true technical master in your domain and are now ready to move on to other tech stacks
- How to structure your journey as an earlier-in-career software engineer (5 years of experience or less)
- How to navigate the junior engineer career trap that is "full-stack" engineer
- What hiring managers look for in engineering candidates, especially at Big Tech
- The overall technical mastery trajectory for software engineers and how you can reach the top
- Why focus is so important for your longer-term learning as a software engineer

Amazon Case Study: The Ultimate Guide To Navigating A PIP

Case studies are valuable to (1) realize that you are not alone and (2) learn from the experiences of others and see what you can apply.

We’ll start with a new grad Amazon engineer who joined during the pandemic.

- **Before**: First job out of college, was on Focus after 6 months
- **During**: Shocked when they found out (URA quota suspected). Manager became more “HR-like”, less candid
- **After**: Went through the PIP and failed, even though they showed improvement

The Talk & Observe Framework

This framework ([Talk & Observe](https://www.jointaro.com/blog/talk-and-observe-a-framework-for-engineering-onboarding/)) captures the two most important ways you’ll learn as a new engineer.

1. **Talk** with various people on the team to learn what they do and what you need to know.

   1. To add more structure to this conversation, follow the advice from Boz (CTO at Meta): [Career Cold Start Algorithm](https://boz.com/articles/career-cold-start)

   2. Ask people’s priorities and what concerns they have.

2. **Observe** how others operate at the company by studying the artifacts of their work. As engineers, we naturally have tons of markers to our progress.

   1. Look at code commits, comments on code reviews, design docs, calendar blocks, team meeting notes, etc.
   2. Spending 10-15 minutes to observe ("*stalk*") every person on your team will reveal tons of insight. For example, someone may say that project A is the top priority, but all their time is spent on project B -- this mismatch is an opportunity for you as the new person.

[Case Study] Solving A Multi-Million $$ Instagram Bug

- A big part of moving from L4 (mid-level) to L5 (senior level) is being able to create your own scope. You can't just expect a perfect suite of projects to come from your manager.
- Like in this session's case study, bugs are a great source of finding your own scope!
- The bug was very slight: Instagram story ads started off on the wrong part when they were resurfaced to a user. As an Android engineer, Alex discovered this in IG Android initially. This bug had been in production *for over a year* at this point.
- How Alex expanded the scope after finding this bug:
  - Worked with iOS to see if the bug was there (it was)
  - Worked with PMMs to confirm that this violated the advertiser contract and merited a refund. This made the bug an immediate SEV.
  - Worked with a data scientist to figure out exactly how many times this bug occurred and calculate the exactly refund to advertisers ($2M+)
  - Put the fix behind an A/B test to measure impact and make sure it was working
- How you can incorporate the learnings from this case study:
  - Be detail-oriented. At Big Tech in particular, seemingly small issues can have massive impact.
  - Don't just silently fix bugs. Take the time to figure out its entire scope - It could be a SEV!
  - Understand the world outside of yours. Look for opportunities to bring in others (especially those of different roles) into what you're working on to expand scope for everyone!

Here's the [link to the slides](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1vPtelhi5caMsZNC-XFGhy1FtRveIbNxg0k3LZctRPOs/edit?usp=sharing).

For more resources around creating scope:
- ["How do I come up with innovative, impactful ideas and bring them to my team?"](https://link.jointaro.com/uBcb5LjZiD5DasfB9)
- ["How can I come up with big initiatives, especially those at a Staff level?"](https://link.jointaro.com/6MWig3VSr3nVo81w9)

[Masterclass] How To Choose A Good Company And Team As A Software Engineer

Choosing the right company (or team) is one of the highest leverage decisions you'll make in your career, so it's worth doing some reflection!

It’s all about your priorities

- Figure out what’s important to you and what’s not. Create a stack-ranked list of all of these and work backwards from the top 2-3 to figure out the best opportunities for you
- People don’t realize how many angles there are to this. Here’s all the ones from the presentation: *Compensation, work-life balance, company prestige, supportiveness of team, growth opportunities, stability, maximum outcome (risk), remote work, product space, company ethics, technical space, level/title, benefits, location*

Supportiveness and overall quality of the team are often underrated

- It’s really hard to grow and have a healthy work life without this
- If you like your manager/teammates and you feel like you’re regularly learning/being challenged by them, deeply cherish that. People underestimate how hard it is to find an environment like this. Even in a prestigious company like Big Tech, this is difficult to find.

Big Tech vs. Startups

- At the end of the day, it’s all about your risk tolerance - Startups can have insane monetary/promotion outcomes, but they also might collapse the next year.
- In a vacuum: Start off at a Big Tech company to build a good foundation and then switch into smaller companies to have more scope/ownership

Some things you should NOT spend time on:

❌ Don't focus on how much you liked (or did not like) the people in the interview process. The recruiter/interviewer is NOT representative of your life at the company. Instead, focus on trends of the people joining the company, rather than individual data points.

❌ Don't spend time looking at the financials of the company. Even if you do decide to dig into the numbers, there's a good chance you'll screw up the interpretation -- humans have a really hard time with exponential growth.

Learning the quality of a team

- Talk to engineers/ICs if you can - The manager will inherently be biased towards their own team as they are often goaled on hiring
- Make sure that the team has a healthy oncall process and fast code review iteration

Related resources:

- [\[Masterclass\] 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/)
- [“How can you tell if a large public company is going in the right direction?”](https://www.jointaro.com/question/TrlweQQ7DveTnYBP9VUH/how-can-you-tell-if-a-large-public-company-is-going-in-the-right-direction/)
- [“What does it mean to not have enough scope to be promoted?”](https://www.jointaro.com/question/bJuagPwOEEy5vkcXKkqh/what-does-it-mean-to-not-have-enough-scope-to-be-promoted/)
- [“What should I look for in a new team in terms of growth?”](https://www.jointaro.com/question/i2bOMPrqaRc0NUZ7918F/what-should-i-look-for-in-a-new-team-in-terms-of-growth/)
- [Presentation Slides](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1S_kULq5zzVLkcoKy0bKJ2IHSrjL3s2VbOLe8p1TQJ7s/edit?usp=sharing)

[Masterclass] How To Write A Stellar Tech Resume That Gets You More Job Opportunities

Writing an effective resume is crucial for succeeding within the tech industry, especially for software engineers. It's the primary step you need to clear before getting a chance with an interview opportunity. Unfortunately, there is a lot of misinformation around how to write a good resume: For 80%+ of junior software engineers struggling to break into tech, a poorly written resume is one of the main causes.

All that being said, here are our Top 5 points from the sessions (in no particular order):
1. *Remember that a recruiter is reading your resume and will, on average, only spend ~10 seconds on it*
    - They are almost certainly non-technical. Make things very accessible and easy to understand: Avoid jargon!
    - Be ruthlessly concise. For the vast majority of cases, your resume should only be 1 page.
2. Having a spelling or grammar mistake is the easiest way to get your resume thrown out
    - You have an effectively infinite amount of time to polish your resume. If you can't even catch basic mistakes like these, it shows that you have poor attention to detail or bad prioritization.
3. Show, don't tell
    - Don't just say that you're great, prove it
    - Example: Talking about the Android apps you've built with 100k+ users is much more effective than just saying you're a great Android engineer
4. Traps to avoid:
    - Having a summary section at the top
    - Self-rating yourself across skills
5. In the end, your resume needs to be approved by a human, not just an ATS
    - Making your resume very weird to "optimize" for the ATS is the epitome of winning a battle to lose the war. It's pointless

For an effective example + template you can use, [check out Alex's latest resume here.](https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/tech-career-growth.appspot.com/o/articles%2FAlex%20Chiou%20Resume%20-%20FINAL%20FOR%20SHARING.docx?alt=media&token=3a75b8b2-09e8-4b68-b80d-22761055c3b2) You can import it into Microsoft Word online and swap out all of his content with yours.

Related resources:
- [[Masterclass] How To Ace Your Big Tech Interview - Data Structures And Algorithms](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/V4sTACzfOh22nMVcUV3w/masterclass-how-to-ace-your-big-tech-interview-data-structures-and-algorithms/)
- [[Masterclass] How To Ace Your Big Tech Interview - System Design](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/J3I9fTW9ulr6T9KjxpqY/masterclass-how-to-ace-your-big-tech-interview-system-design/)
- [Presentation Slides](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/15eLqE_WmePLA--lYTG0ZJVcHhpEld2qNTck_w0t_E9k/edit?usp=sharing)

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.