Leverage Your Allies In The Process

This segment highlights a commonly overlooked advantage in the interview process: *building relationships with your recruiter and hiring manager*. They can be powerful advocates if approached thoughtfully.

- **Leverage your recruiter** by asking proactive questions about the interview structure, topics, and panel. They can offer inside tips that guide your preparation.

- **Treat the recruiter as a partner**, not just a scheduler. Showing curiosity and seriousness can reflect well on you.

- **Engage your hiring manager** with thoughtful questions about the team’s goals, challenges, and how your experience aligns with their work.

- **Recognize their influence**—hiring managers often hold sway in final decisions, even in committee-driven processes.

- **Use every conversation as a chance to stand out**, demonstrating preparation, alignment, and initiative.

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/>

The Hidden Reasons People Get Fired

In this lesson, we discuss the **less visible reasons people can lose their jobs even when the official explanation focuses on performance**. Beyond clear performance or conduct issues, a major source of conflict can be incompatibility between an employee and their manager—differences in working style, priorities, or philosophy that gradually become personal. The discussion also explores how senior leaders may sometimes recognize these mismatches and move an employee elsewhere rather than allowing the situation to end in termination.

- **Performance may not tell the whole story:** Formal documentation may focus on performance, while the underlying issue can be a persistent mismatch in working styles, priorities, or expectations between an employee and their manager.
- **Professional disagreements can become personal:** Differences such as technical excellence versus business outcomes can gradually turn into negative labels. Once each person begins interpreting the other’s actions through that lens, repairing the relationship becomes much harder.
- **Sometimes the problem is compatibility, not capability:** A skip-level leader who recognizes that an employee can succeed under different leadership may choose to move them rather than lose them, acknowledging that even strong performers and capable managers are not always effective working together.

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

Two Paths To The Top

In this lesson, we discuss how **solving meaningful problems for your manager can become one of the most effective paths to career advancement**. By becoming the person leadership trusts with difficult problems, you increase your value and create leverage to pursue your own career goals. At the same time, career growth doesn’t have to come exclusively from assigned work—high performers can also create their own opportunities by identifying promising ideas, taking calculated risks, and turning them into meaningful business impact.

- **“Solve problems for your boss” is a powerful career strategy:** Taking ownership of difficult problems builds trust and makes you someone your manager wants to retain, support, and advocate for.
- **Create opportunities instead of waiting for them:** Career-defining impact can also come from identifying problems or opportunities yourself and pursuing ideas that leadership may not initially recognize or prioritize.
- **Balance execution with calculated experimentation:** Deliver on the work your organization depends on while reserving room for thoughtful bets of your own. Not every experiment will succeed, so recognize failures quickly while maintaining a strong overall track record.

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

Build Support Groups

We explain why building community after a layoff can dramatically improve both emotional resilience and job-search outcomes. Here are the core points from the lesson:

- Layoffs create a natural sense of solidarity, and bringing laid-off peers together helps transform an isolating experience into a shared support system.
- Being proactive about forming or joining support groups—through spreadsheets, LinkedIn, or communities like Taro—creates powerful networks of talented people who can help one another.
- Regular check-ins, shared encouragement, and activities like mock interviews provide structure, accountability, and momentum during the job search.

Becoming Valuable Over Time As An SWE

In this lesson, Philip reflects on how the skills that make an engineer valuable change over the course of a career. Early on, he distinguished himself through raw execution speed and an ability to outwork others. With experience, however, his advantage shifted from simply moving faster to developing better judgment—knowing which direction to pursue, recognizing warning signs earlier, and preventing teams from wasting time on the wrong problems.

- **Experience can turn speed into efficiency.** Younger engineers may execute faster, while experienced engineers can create greater impact by recognizing dead ends, anticipating problems, and ensuring their effort is directed toward the right things.
- **Alignment can matter more than finding the perfect answer.** Philip learned that an entire team moving together in a direction that is slightly imperfect can accomplish more than a divided team debating the theoretically optimal path—an idea reflected in the principle of “disagree and commit.”
- **Your strengths can evolve throughout your career.** Physical stamina and raw execution speed may decline, but judgment, pattern recognition, prioritization, and leadership can continue improving, allowing experienced engineers to create value in different—and potentially more leveraged—ways.

Verify Your Severance Package

We explain what to do immediately after a layoff to protect yourself financially and legally, and to reduce unnecessary stress. Here are the core points from the lesson:

- Most large tech companies provide severance due to legal requirements and long-term reputational incentives, but layoffs are messy, so you must carefully review all paperwork and verify dates, vesting, and severance amounts.
- Never sign termination documents on the spot; take time to review them, ask questions, and involve a lawyer if possible, especially for severance disputes or visa-related considerations.
- After a layoff, it’s critical to understand your personal burn rate and runway by reviewing your finances, since clarity around how long you can sustain yourself reduces anxiety and helps you plan your next steps.

Your Leverage When You're Being Let Go

In this lesson, we discuss how **employees may still have leverage when they are being managed out, even when it initially feels like the company holds all the power**. Severance and negotiated exits can benefit both sides: the employee gains financial breathing room, while the manager may avoid a lengthy performance process, reduce disruption, and create a more amicable departure. The discussion also explores why formal performance plans often signal that a manager has already reached a firm conclusion about the situation.

- **Understand where your leverage comes from:** A negotiated departure can save a manager the time, documentation, and administrative burden involved in formal performance management while also allowing for a smoother transition.
- **Don’t be afraid to buy time and discuss an amicable exit:** Employees can ask for space before responding to difficult performance conversations and explore whether financial support or another transition arrangement is possible rather than assuming they have no options.
- **Recognize when the decision may already be advanced:** By the time a formal performance improvement process begins, a manager may believe they have exhausted other options. Rather than assuming stronger performance will necessarily reverse that conclusion, it can be important to understand the situation and consider what terms or next steps are available.

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

Getting Promoted To IC9

In this lesson, Philip explains what operating at the E9 level looked like during his time leading Meta’s London engineering office. After arriving with just 12 engineers, he helped grow the organization to roughly 400–500 people—a shift that dramatically changed the complexity, ambiguity, and time horizon of the decisions he was responsible for making.

- **Greater seniority means solving increasingly ambiguous problems.** As organizations grow, decisions become less black-and-white, requiring leaders to navigate complexity, competing priorities, and uncertainty.
- **Senior-level impact requires thinking much further ahead.** At E9, Philip was making data-driven decisions about hiring and organizational needs as much as 18 months before their effects would be realized.
- **Scope is measured by both breadth and time horizon.** Progressing to the highest levels means influencing larger groups of people while identifying strategic problems and opportunities that others may not yet be thinking about.

Business Dynamics

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>

Many engineers struggle with engineering manager (EM) interviews because they underestimate how different they are from individual contributor (IC) roles. This course aims to prepare candidates for the unique expectations, mindset, and evaluation criteria involved in EM interviews.

- **Shift in Role and Expectations**: Transitioning from IC to EM is not just a promotion but a full career change, requiring a shift from deep technical implementation to broad people and strategy responsibilities.
- **Interview Criteria Differences**: For EM roles, **80% of the evaluation is behavioral** (trust, leadership, communication) and only 20% is technical (system design, operational excellence), the reverse of IC interviews.
- **Understanding the Hiring Manager's World**: EM interviewers, typically directors or above, prioritize reliability, trust, emotional maturity, and ownership. Candidates must show they can simplify complexity and manage uncertainty.
- **Research and Business Alignment**: Successful candidates understand the business context of the role (e.g., quality for physical products, speed for startups, security for regulated industries) and tailor their answers accordingly.
- **Empowerment Over Expertise**: EMs don’t need to be the most technical on the team. Their primary responsibility is to ensure the team delivers by empowering others and focusing on strategic growth and impact.

Paper Reading: DeepSeek R1 - Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning

Session led by [Mike A](https://www.linkedin.com/in/malik-mike-a-32b63818b/) 

Join us for an insightful session on the groundbreaking paper, DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning. In this session, we will explore DeepSeek-R1, a state-of-the-art reasoning model that pushes the boundaries of reinforcement learning (RL) applied to large language models (LLMs). 

This paper introduces two novel models, DeepSeek-R1-Zero and DeepSeek-R1, showcasing advancements in reasoning capabilities through RL-driven self-evolution. Unlike traditional models relying heavily on supervised fine-tuning (SFT), DeepSeek-R1-Zero develops its reasoning abilities purely through RL, while DeepSeek-R1 combines RL with a multi-stage training pipeline for enhanced performance. 

The paper highlights exceptional benchmarks achieved by DeepSeek-R1 on math, coding, and STEM-related reasoning tasks, where its performance rivals that of leading closed-source models such as OpenAI's o1-1217. Additionally, we’ll discuss distilling these capabilities into smaller, more efficient models to make advanced reasoning accessible for diverse applications. 

Whether you're a researcher, developer, or enthusiast in AI and LLMs, this paper reading will provide an in-depth understanding of the novel reinforcement learning techniques driving DeepSeek-R1 and its implications for the future of AI-driven reasoning systems. Don't miss this opportunity to engage with cutting-edge advancements in the field! \[2501.12948\] DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning 

GitHub - deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1 

Mark Chen X Post: <https://x.com/markchen90/status/1884303237186216272?s=12&t=BSlMYtugAr8LLWXLnMLLrQ> 

GRPO Diagram: <https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1i78sfs/deepseek_r1_grpo_code_open_sourced/#lightbox> 

The Bitter Lesson: <http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html> 

Gradient Descent Image: <https://miro.medium.com/v2/format:webp/1\\\*f9a162GhpMbiTVTAua_lLQ.png> 

V3: <https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.19437> 

DeepSeek Math: <https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03300> 

rstar-math: <https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.04519> 

Verify Step-by-Step: <https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.20050> 

DeepSeek catch-up chart: <https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/v2/D4E22AQG552O63UNJWg/feedshare-shrink_800/B4EZTN\\\[…\\\]41824000&v=beta&t=ubyKQniaCJTL37PzIOJi9YZRo1AF8yipuauSioyn59U> 

UC Berkeley Student $30 replication of Aha: <https://x.com/jiayi_pirate/status/1882839370505621655> 

Deep Agent R1-V replication: <https://x.com/liangchen5518/status/1886171667522842856> 

s1: <https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.19393> 

DeepSeek-r1 cost breakdown: <https://semianalysis.com/2025/01/31/deepseek-debates/> 

R1 Deep Dive: <https://fireworks.ai/blog/deepseek-r1-deepdive> 

All in Podcast: <https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/all-in-with-chamath-jason-sacks-friedberg/id1502871393?i=1000687638652> 

Peter Gostev LinkedIn: <https://www.linkedin.com/in/peter-gostev/> 

LLM Agents Learning: <https://llmagents-learning.org/sp25>

Defending Your Org

In this lesson, we discuss how to **build enough influence and organizational strength that targeting you—or your team—simply isn’t worth the effort**. Whether dealing with a self-interested colleague or another organization competing for your scope, protection comes from understanding other people’s motivations, building strong support around your work, maintaining high performance, and creating a compelling narrative for why your organization should remain intact.

1. **Build enough soft power to become an unattractive target:** Strong relationships, allies, organizational support, and a track record of performance can make attempts to undermine you significantly more difficult and costly.
2. **Understand the story other people tell themselves:** People rarely view their own actions as malicious. Understanding how others rationalize their behavior can help you anticipate their moves and frame cooperation with you as the most practical choice.
3. **Defend your organization with performance and narrative:** When other teams compete for your scope, demonstrate the value and complexity of your work, highlight the costs and risks of disruption, and clearly articulate why keeping the organization intact serves the broader business.

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

Paper Reading Session: Simple Testing Can Prevent Most Critical Failures

Paper Discussion led by [Sudhi Awasthi](https://www.linkedin.com/in/sudhiawasthi/)

In this session, we will be discussing this paper titled "[Simple Testing Can Prevent Most Critical Failures: An Analysis of Production Failures in Distributed Data-Intensive Systems](https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/osdi14/osdi14-paper-yuan.pdf)".

Large, production quality distributed systems still fail periodically, and do so sometimes catastrophically, where most or all users experience an outage or data loss. This paper presents the result of a comprehensive study investigating 198 randomly selected, user-reported failures that occurred on Cassandra, HBase, Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), Hadoop MapReduce, and Redis, with the goal of understanding how one or multiple faults eventually evolve into a user-visible failure and how simple testing can prevent majority of them.\
\
Event Link: <https://www.jointaro.com/event/paper-reading-session-simple-testing-can-prevent-most-critical-failures/>

[Paper Reading] ROSE: Robust Caches for Amazon Product Search

Session led by: [Dharin Shah](https://www.linkedin.com/in/dharinshah/)

ROSE introduces a robust caching system that tolerates misspellings and typos while maintaining the efficiency of traditional caches. The core innovation is a randomized hashing schema that allows ROSE to index and retrieve a vast set of queries with constant memory and time. This system is robust against query intent, typos, and grammatical errors, offering theoretical guarantees of its performance.

Extensive experiments on real-world datasets highlight ROSE's effectiveness and efficiency, showcasing significant improvements in Amazon's search engine performance across key business metrics.\
\
In this session we deep dive into the query caching layer at Amazon that allows for far better and robust search performance

[**https://drive.google.com/file/d/13YwkeCc1XwnRVDVkcuE7MKt2r7aqld24/view**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/13YwkeCc1XwnRVDVkcuE7MKt2r7aqld24/view)

Paper Reading: AutoDev: Automated AI-Driven Development

Are you interested in tools like the recently announced Devin?\
\
Join us for an enlightening session as we delve into the cutting-edge world of agentic AI-driven software development, featuring a comprehensive exploration of the AutoDev framework, Microsoft's agentic AI-driven software development framework.

This reading event will elucidate how AutoDev will revolutionize the software development process. Through enabling autonomous planning and the execution of complex engineering tasks, AI agents such as AutoDev will be fully integrated into common tools and technologies such as VSCode and GitHub. Discover how these agents can perform multiple operations on a codebase, from file editing and testing to git operations, all within a secure Docker-based environment.

Moreover, we will examine AutoDev's impressive performance on the HumanEval dataset, achieving remarkable scores of 91.5% and 87.8% for Pass@1 in code generation and test generation tasks, respectively. We will also discuss the implications of this research for the future of AI-assisted software development.

This event is a must-attend for software developers, researchers, and tech enthusiasts eager to understand the future of agentic AI-driven software development and its potential impact on the software development landscape. Whether you're interested in improving your development workflow, exploring AI applications in software engineering, or simply curious about the latest advancements in AI-driven development tools, this paper reading offers valuable insights and discussions on the forefront of technology innovation.

Mark your calendars and join us for an exciting hour of "AutoDev: Automated AI-Driven Development" exploration!

Paper Reading: Mamba - Revolutionizing Sequence Modeling

Session led by: [Akshika Wijesundara, PhD](https://www.linkedin.com/in/akshika/overlay/about-this-profile/)

*Abstract:*

Explore the Mamba paper's groundbreaking approach to sequence modeling efficiency in this event. Uncover how Mamba addresses computational inefficiencies in transformers, especially for long sequences.

*Overview:*

Discover the motivation behind Mamba, highlighting its improvements over subquadratic-time architectures struggling with language tasks. Learn about Mamba's content-based reasoning and enhancements for superior performance.

*Key Features:*

1\. **Selective Structured State Space Models (SSMs):** Mamba introduces adaptive SSM parameters for content-based reasoning, allowing selective information handling for discrete modalities.

2\. **Hardware-Aware Parallel Algorithm:** Despite forgoing efficient convolutions, Mamba's hardware-aware parallel algorithm maintains fast inference and linear scaling in sequence length.

3\. **Architecture Overview:** Dive into Mamba's streamlined architecture without attention or MLP blocks, achieving efficiency without sacrificing effectiveness.

4\. **Performance Metrics:** Witness Mamba's 5× higher throughput than Transformers, with linear scaling, showcasing its real-world improvements in language, audio, and genomics tasks.

5\. **Comparison with Transformers:** See Mamba outperforms Transformers of the same size and match larger Transformers, especially in language modeling.

Join us in unraveling the secrets of Mamba, poised to redefine sequence modeling standards. Anticipate a paradigm shift in efficiency and performance in deep learning.\
\
paper link: \[[**https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.00752**](https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.00752)\]

[Office Hours] Doubling Your Impact As An Engineer By Doubling Your Empathy

Session led by [Ryan Kuck](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-kuck/)

A core theme on Taro is that by increasing empathy you will build better, stronger relationships with your teammates. Additionally by having empathy for your manager, you will simplify your communication with them and make it easy for them to see your impact. And while it is tempting to put up a pull request as soon as the code is done, taking extra time to divide it into small, thoughtfully crafted pull requests that make OTHER people's life easier will make you a joy to work with. All of this is *slightly* counterintuitively about taking time to understand someone else better to make their life better which actually is a practice that makes your life a lot better.

Let's get together and swap stories about this! If you landed a promotion from thinking about the user's perspective and building a new feature for them, or you built an internal tool that saved other folks from having to do a repetitive task, please join and share! Also welcome is anyone who has a challenging work situation and is wondering if increasing empathy could help improve it.

Paper Reading: Refactoring vs Refuctoring: Advancing the state of AI-automated code improvements

Paper Discussion led by [Adi Pratheek](https://www.linkedin.com/in/pratheekadi/)

"**Refactoring vs Refuctoring**" is the conclusion of a benchmark study of the most popular Large Language Models (LLMs) and their ability to generate code for refactoring tasks. This paper aims to illustrate the current standards and limitations, and seek to show new methodologies with higher confidence results.

**What's in store?**

In this paper reading session, we will be examining:

- The performance of the most popular Large Language Models (LLMs) on code refactoring
- How does an AI err?
- A novel innovation by CodeScene for fact-checking the AI-output and augmenting the proposed refactorings by measuring the confidence levels

Companies build pretty substantial codebases over a period of time (sometimes decades). As and when the companies grow, a significant amount of time and energy are constantly invested by development teams on code refactoring (also covered in this paper).

But, how well do the existing AI tools/models actually perform this task? Are we there yet to confidently say "**AI will replace software developers**"? Join this session where we dive deep into the paper to find more answers.

Link to the paper: [**Refactoring vs Refuctoring: Advancing the state of AI automated code improvements**](https://codescene.com/hubfs/whitepapers/Refactoring-vs-Refuctoring-Advancing-the-state-of-AI-automated-code-improvements.pdf)\
Event Link: <https://www.jointaro.com/event/paper-reading-refactoring-vs-refuctoring-advancing-the-state-of-ai-automated-code-improvements/>

Building Trust & Likeability

In this lesson, we discuss how **earning a senior promotion requires more than simply being ready for the next level—especially when multiple qualified people are competing for limited opportunities**. When candidates have comparable skills and performance, factors such as trust, relationships, and how others experience working with you can influence who receives the opportunity.

- **Build trust by showing up when things go wrong:** Senior leaders need people they can rely on without micromanaging. Handling crises, setbacks, and difficult situations effectively can demonstrate that you can be trusted when the stakes are high.

- **Relationships matter when qualifications are similar:** When two candidates are equally capable, leaders may gravitate toward the person they find easier and more enjoyable to work with, particularly when the promotion means spending considerably more time together.

- **Become someone people want in the room:** Your interpersonal presence can affect your progression at senior levels. Being helpful, constructive, and pleasant to work with can make others actively want your involvement in important conversations and opportunities.

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

Writing Well As A Software Engineer

In this lesson, Philip explains how he transformed from someone who dismissed writing and other “soft skills” into a prolific writer who considers communication essential for technical professionals. He shares how reading great literature changed his appreciation for language and how deliberate practice—especially rewriting and editing his own work—helped him develop his distinctive writing style.

- **To write well, read well.** Philip developed his appreciation for writing by reading exceptional authors and paying attention to how they structure sentences, tell stories, and communicate ideas. He continues to notice and learn from effective rhetorical techniques in other people’s writing.
- **Great writing comes through rewriting.** Many of Philip’s posts went through multiple revisions before publication. Being willing to edit heavily, discard material, experiment with structure, and occasionally seek professional feedback helped him continually improve.
- **Writing creates leverage for technical ideas.** Strong communication allows engineers to share knowledge beyond the people they work with directly. Philip’s Great Posts Explorer extended this idea by helping employees rediscover valuable, evergreen writing that might otherwise have disappeared into the company’s history.

The BIG Difference Between The Mindset of American And European Tech Workers

Belief in growth is the primary difference between Software Engineers in the USA vs Europe. Many American tech workers understand that their equity options can be huge if their company succeeds. However, European tech workers are often more geeky and "pure" as engineers.

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.