[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Taro (YC S22): Private career growth comm...
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Launch HN: Taro (YC S22): Private career growth community for
software engineers
Hi HN! We're Rahul and Alex from Taro (https://jointaro.com,
https://app.jointaro.com/demo). We help software engineers get
onboarded and promoted faster. Career growth depends on having a
good manager and support group, but finding someone who advocates
for you is challenging. Especially in a post-pandemic world, where
many of our working hours are spent in isolation, we've lost many
of the hallway conversations + quick insights that are critical to
success in large organizations. Alex and I have spent our careers
at companies like Meta, Pinterest, Robinhood, and Course Hero,
eventually landing Staff+ IC and management positions. Despite
spending more than a decade in tech, we still stumbled our way
through our career: choosing a team, understanding how perf review
actually works, and finding a career path. We've had our share of
good and bad managers, and we've also personally mentored dozens of
engineers. (Interesting stat: the average engineer at Meta gets a
new manager every 1.2 years!) During the pandemic, we started
giving free talks about SWE career growth, explaining what we wish
we knew earlier. These livestreams routinely got 500+ concurrent
viewers, and our community ballooned to 40K software engineers who
were looking to understand promotion and influence as an engineer.
We spent weeks talking to 100s of engineers and discovered that
their career bottleneck was not coding ability, but all the other
_stuff_ that is essential for software engineering. For example, as
a mid-level backend engineer, how does my path to senior get
impacted if I switch to Android dev? A product manager added a last
minute requirement on my project which may cause the deadline to
slip - how do I handle the fallout? Engineers often neglect these
topics (project selection, effective communication, perf review)
which leads to career stagnation and frustration. For many
engineers, the current resources available online are
overwhelmingly irrelevant: they're about learning a new web
framework, or Leetcoding to switch jobs. If you're at an
established, fast-moving tech company, these resources won't help
with career advancement. Instead, the highest leverage activity is
to learn from peers + veterans in similar companies. Taro is the
product that emerged from our community: a Q&A database from real
engineers, where content is tagged by company + level. We also
adopted the "case study" model where an engineer or manager
discusses a specific story of how they ramped up or landed a
promotion-worthy project. This kind of info is difficult to come by
unless you know the right people within the company. Taro allows
you to get personalized help for your situation, while also
learning from the questions + answers of others. We make money by
charging software engineers directly for full access to the Q&A
database, plus the ability to ask their own questions. We currently
have 100+ Taro Premium members from companies like Meta, Google,
TikTok, and Amazon, along with thousands of free users. We designed
Taro for full time engineers at fast-moving tech companies - it's
not a good fit for freelancers or students who are still exploring
software engineering. Checkout a quick demo of Taro:
https://youtu.be/nMgUciFPJMs Feel free to browse through
https://app.jointaro.com. We'd love to know what resources you've
used for career growth. Thanks for your feedback!
Author : rpandey1234
Score : 68 points
Date : 2022-08-05 16:04 UTC (6 hours ago)
| joatmon-snoo wrote:
| Interesting! This reminds me of /r/cscareerquestions: both the
| good and the bad.
|
| Good: you're trying to create a space where a lot of people have
| similar professional goals and can riff off each other.
|
| Better: the two of you have a lot of content backed by your own,
| verifiable, professional experiences.
|
| Bad: why would someone qualified to give advice want to join the
| community? What prevents your forums from devolving into the
| blind leading the blind?
|
| Case in point: your video on "why you should start your career at
| a big tech co" is very clearly driven by your own personal
| experiences. At one point you allude to optimizing for
| compensation, but you don't discuss fintech options (Jane Street,
| Citadel, etc.). Skimming through some of your comments on other
| threads, I also just don't see a lot of respect for the nuances
| of different folks' individual circumstances: understandable
| given that you two are a finite resource, but you also need to
| attract users who can give that advice, and I don't see a carrot
| there for me.
| rpandey1234 wrote:
| Appreciate the feedback! You're right that a lot of Taro is
| powered by our own experiences for now, which comes with any
| biases we have. For the video you mentioned in particular about
| starting in big tech, I believe that's only on my YouTube (not
| Taro), where I try to share stronger opinions to a larger
| audience.
|
| For current Taro Premium members, a big part of the value prop
| is that we explicitly _want_ to capture their nuances in Q &A,
| and provide relevant feedback for that situation.
|
| To your point about attracting people to the community, the
| breakdown of our members is quite interesting. We have tons of
| engineers at top companies who have already "made it" -- from
| talking to dozens of them personally already, they have lots of
| insights which can meaningfully help others. Peer to peer
| learning can be very effective when people share their
| experiences openly and honestly.
|
| Finally, we also have tech veterans join to share case studies
| and answer question. We want Taro to reflect a vibrant
| community with nuanced, smart discussions (growing beyond the 2
| of us).
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| Bad: why would someone qualified to give advice want to join
| the community? What prevents your forums from devolving into
| the blind leading the blind?
|
| Yes, that's my experience with cscareerquestions, lots of
| questions about the big 4, doing leetcode to get into google,
| facebook, etc. A lot less about where most programmers are
| probably employed, small to medium businesses doing boring ETL,
| large companies in a enterprise environment using ITIL, doing
| lots of web development, and very little engineering.
| mhink wrote:
| As a side note: check out /r/ExperiencedDevs.
| abirch wrote:
| The difficult thing is seeing the forest from the trees. It's
| great that some advice worked for a particular person in a
| particular situation. It's impossible to have principal
| component analysis of what really worked.
|
| It's even more depressing to see what a large role that
| randomness plays in lives and careers. E.g., if Yahoo had
| bought out Larry & Sergey for a million, would their advice
| be worth more than now? If Steve Jobs never returned to
| Apple?
| bee_rider wrote:
| I know nobody wants to do the "software engineers vs engineers"
| debate again, but even if we are going come down on the
| "programmers are software engineers" side of that debate, a site
| which exclusively serves software engineers shouldn't advertise
| itself as for engineers generally. I was excited to see what EE's
| would be chit-chatting about. :(
|
| As a suggestion -- it might make sense to put a link to your demo
| page right near the top of your main 'jointaro' site somewhere,
| it did a good job of showing what the value proposition is.
| ryanSrich wrote:
| Yeah I agree. Even though I do work in software, when I read
| the post title I thought general engineering (civil,
| mechanical, electrical, etc.). In fact, I didn't even initially
| think software engineering at all.
| rpandey1234 wrote:
| Agreed that there's an important distinction between engineers
| generally vs software engineers. Hard to fit everything in the
| 80 characters for the title -- I hope the first line makes it
| clear.
|
| Thanks for the suggestion on surfacing the demo page more
| prominently, we definitely want to do better with embedding the
| actual content in the landing page.
| dang wrote:
| We could change the title to say "Software engineer" but then
| we'd have to drop the word "Private" and people would probably
| start complaining that they didn't expect it to be a closed
| community.
| bee_rider wrote:
| It isn't a huge deal really. But I think
|
| Launch HN: Taro (YC S22): Private software engineer career
| growth community
|
| or
|
| Launch HN: Taro (YC S22): Private career growth community for
| software engineers
|
| would fit, I think. IMO the latter is more clear anyway.
| dang wrote:
| Ok let's go with the latter. I was going to say "80 chars
| on the nose" but I had to mess with the punctuation--or
| rather, you did (with the double colon).
|
| Thanks!
| jeffwiederkehr wrote:
| Excited to see Taro on the front page of HN. I'm just finishing
| up my first internship at a Big Tech Co and the advice and
| discussions I've seen from Rahul/Alex were extremely valuable in
| helping me perform well.
|
| I feel somewhat connected to the product in a weird way in that I
| went through the non profit Codepaths interview prep summer
| course which is where I heard about Rahul and seems to solve a
| somewhat similar pain point in that outside of the interview prep
| piece it allowed me to make connections and receive mentorship
| from experienced engineers that was incredibly valuable
|
| Another company that I love that scratched that same itch was
| Hackpack. They charge a monthly membership fee and it's centered
| around interview prep but the main value I got from being part of
| the program was deep connections and mentorship with experienced
| engineers.
|
| I have some small user feedback with a sample size of 1. I love
| the content that you guys create and consume the majority of the
| blogs/youtube videos/linkedIn posts but don't use the app much.
| Content I consume on my phone is almost exclusively hackernews,
| reddit and youtube. I'm not sure what the blocker is but it is
| strange to me that given how much I enjoy the content that I
| don't use the app more.
|
| Congrats on the launch post and wish you both the best!
| alexc61 wrote:
| Thanks so much for the great feedback and consuming our
| content! The Taro app definitely has a long way to go, and
| we're also investing a lot into the web app right now as we
| know that a lot of folks prefer to consume professional content
| on their desktop.
|
| Taro is very early, and we know that a lot of product right now
| sucks. If you or anyone else here has any feedback, we're all
| ears at team@jointaro.com!
| simon--poole wrote:
| > The Taro app definitely has a long way to go, and we're
| also investing a lot into the web app right now as we know
| that a lot of folks prefer to consume professional content on
| their desktop.
|
| I definitely find this discrepancy interesting, since I found
| the app to work much better than the web application!
| Although this was _mostly_ a couple months ago, so I 'll have
| to take a closer look at the web app these days.
|
| That being said, I found the content super useful - although
| I found the ordering presenting in the free iOS app to be
| rather confusing, as I ended up jumping around a lot.
| rpandey1234 wrote:
| We had a landing page a few months ago (back when it was
| still Tech Career Growth), but this web app at
| app.jointaro.com just came out in the last 1.5 weeks! Try
| it out and I'm always open to feedback -- my direct email
| is rahul@jointaro.com.
| rpandey1234 wrote:
| Glad to hear that we were able to help during your internship!
| And very cool that you were part of Codepath -- it's been so
| much fun for me to help out over the years. In fact, my YouTube
| channel started largely because I learned about recording +
| video editing from Codepath.
|
| Regarding using the app, totally understandable you don't use
| Taro much on mobile. As an upskilling product for software
| engineers, we expect most of the usage to be on desktop, which
| is why we just released the web app.
| raunak wrote:
| very cool product - congrats!
|
| do you ever wonder if similar to the college application process,
| trying to "gamify" the promotion process doesn't actually lead to
| a competitive company?
|
| to be more clear, do you think that by training people to think
| of trying to get promoted as something they need to learn, rather
| than come by naturally, we're teaching people to follow XYZ
| funnel in order to attain ABC goal, at the expense of promoting
| people naturally?
|
| the reason i mention the college application process is because
| it's clear that's what that accomplishes today, as someone who
| recently went through it. there's a set of predefined formulas
| that can get you into an elite school, and they become more and
| more limited in scope as you become more and more limited
| demographic-wise, so everyone "learns" from prep academies,
| consultantnts, etc., the _exact_ right way to structure your
| application to get in.
|
| i still feel like i'm not clear, so i'll rephrase it as, do you
| think this sort of "teaching" leads to the right people getting
| promoted/accepted for the company/college (for long-term
| success)?
| Gear61 wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback and great question!
|
| There are definitely more toxic ways to get promoted,
| "gamifying" the process like you said. The prime example is
| playing infamous corporate politics, providing the perception
| of doing great work without actually doing it. I hate those
| kinds of games (I saw it ruin various orgs I've been on across
| my ~8 years working in Silicon Valley), and because of that,
| Taro isn't a product to teach software engineers how to play
| politics and other tricks.
|
| On the flip side, we really do believe that promotion,
| especially in the more innovative, modern tech companies, has
| many components stemming from actual growth. While Meta was far
| from perfect, I largely felt like promotion pushed me to
| develop skills that genuinely made me a better software
| engineer and person to work with. I learned to empathize with
| other parties, especially those who weren't in engineering, and
| factor in their perspectives when building alignment on
| projects. I learned to think proactively, clamping down risks
| early instead of letting them blow up the project and team
| later on down the road. I learned to work through others,
| mentoring more junior engineers, and taking on responsibility
| for their well-being. The even cooler thing is that I found
| myself applying those skills outside of work as well: I became
| a better listener and got better at hectic life activities like
| vacation planning.
|
| Taro is a product meant to teach those kinds of aforementioned,
| more "wholesome" skills, and Rahul and I have historically
| found it hard to find guidance to learn those skills. I didn't
| start seriously building those deeper behaviors until I rolled
| some incredible managers ~5 years into my career. We believe
| that this kind of learning should be far more accessible, and
| by doing so, we can help empower a workforce that's far more
| productive and positive.
| gorgonito wrote:
| I think you are doing really great job, guys! Wish you all the
| best on your ambitious mission!!
| Gear61 wrote:
| Thanks, really appreciate the kind words :)
| conanbatt wrote:
| The slack channel has 11k users, and messages have less than 10
| reactions.
|
| An Inspection of the user list shows a very suspicious list of
| names, with some names being repeated 200 times.
| rpandey1234 wrote:
| We have a separate Slack for Taro Premium, which is for paying
| members (a bit more than 100 people).
|
| I think you're referring to the Tech Career Growth Slack which
| we've built over the past 1.5 years. Users there come from my
| YouTube channel (https://youtube.com/rpandey1234) or our
| LinkedIn sessions
| (https://www.linkedin.com/company/techcareergrowth).
| midislack wrote:
| Is this just for code monkeys or do you need to be a licensed and
| bonded Engineer to join?
| rpandey1234 wrote:
| We're designed for software engineers and we're specifically
| _not_ designed for code monkeys :)
| davidgu wrote:
| Would Taro be a good fit for a startup CTO looking to improve
| their management skills, or is it mostly targeted towards ICs at
| larger companies?
| rpandey1234 wrote:
| The target user persona currently is an engineer in a
| medium/large tech company -- that's where we've seen the most
| impact for members, since there's more structure and
| predictability at these companies.
|
| There's still value for someone looking to improve their
| management skills, in terms of getting feedback from ICs and
| answering their questions, but you'd be in the minority of
| members for now.
| f6v wrote:
| Junior to senior in 2.5 years? I mean, you could do it, by
| playing politics. But are you really a senior engineer?
| simon--poole wrote:
| Depends how you measure senior engineer.
|
| Most sensible companies measure by impact - and Taro focuses on
| how to explain and justify that.
| ceeplusplus wrote:
| The thing that a lot of people don't understand about SWE (and
| a lot of other 10x professions) is that years of experience has
| a very weak correlation with skill. A top tier junior engineer
| could easily become better than a 15 yoe senior engineer who's
| not so top tier.
|
| If you work at a Fortune 500 and then jump to a FAANG, this
| difference is very obvious.
| f6v wrote:
| What's even a "10x profession"?
| ceeplusplus wrote:
| Jobs where the difference in output between the best and
| worst is 10x. Generally creative professions like movie
| director, writer/journalist, lawyer, etc. SWE tends to fall
| into this category because the difficulty of writing good
| code is in some respects like writing good prose: the space
| of "solutions" is vast and there are few well defined rules
| by which a "good" solution can be constructed. Not only
| that, but writing it quickly while maintaining quality is
| difficult as well.
|
| See for example this blog by Joel Spolsky [1].
|
| [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/07/25/hitting-the-
| high-n...
| rpandey1234 wrote:
| I'll share an anecdote here. I worked with an engineer at Meta
| who went from L3 (junior) to L6 (staff) in 2.5 years.
|
| And he truly did operate at the staff level -- I know because
| eng levels at Meta are private. As he was climbing the ladder,
| people who worked with him assumed he was already a Staff
| Engineer, and were shocked when they realized he was 1 or 2
| levels lower than that (this info would come out during perf
| review season).
|
| Seniority is generally about how much people can trust you in
| the team, to identify blockers, provide feedback, or plan a
| roadmap. You can call it politics, but no one on the team would
| have denied that this engineer was hugely impactful. We're
| trying to capture these lessons + case studies in Taro.
| f6v wrote:
| I mean, there're brilliant individuals in any profession. I
| don't see how that turns into a generalization. Most of
| engineers I've seen had to spend many years to become senior.
| Selling fast growth is denying the reality for most people.
| Terretta wrote:
| Yes, and ...
|
| If you want career growth, consider these three simple* tricks:
|
| 1. Grok CircleCI's engineering competency matrix, be honest with
| yourself, and work on your technical "level ups" across the
| board. These alone will generally not get you promoted without
| step 2.
|
| https://circleci.com/blog/why-we-re-designed-our-engineering...
|
| 2. Buy the book "The Leadership Pipeline", again be honest with
| yourself, and work on your management toolbelt progression. Level
| up within your company inside two years (an internal transfer can
| make this step easier).
|
| https://smile.amazon.com/Leadership-Pipeline-Build-Powered-C...
|
| 3. After leveling up, and within the two years, accept a role for
| 20% to 40% higher comp at a new company, or the next leadership
| level up, or both. (Preferably both.)
|
| Repeat.
|
| - - - - - - - - -
|
| Footnotes:
|
| * Simple doesn't mean without deliberate attention or work.
|
| ** Keep LinkedIn updated with every title or responsibility
| growth (new role same employer), as well adding to the key
| valuable outcome you delivered in that role's bullets, so (a)
| it's apparent to recruiters and employers that you are seen as
| promotable, (b) you are not updating it only when looking for a
| job.
|
| *** The Leadership Pipeline book implies it's for a company. On
| the contrary, use the framework to work on yourself.
| rpandey1234 wrote:
| good strategy :) And having a strong community really helps
| with "be honest with yourself"
| Terretta wrote:
| Not without intervention on what the community considers
| strong.
|
| See another book, "The Mom Test". Usually self-advertised
| "strong communities" are focused on being supportive or
| inclusive over honest, aka trying to be too nice to plainly
| tell you your shortcomings that need work.
|
| This is strongly related to why so many people are shocked,
| _shocked_ , to get let go after a string of positive
| performance reviews. Most companies gave up on honest reviews
| long ago, all reviews are glowing, so even terrible
| performance gets "good reviews". But managers still may have
| to let go the bottom 10 or 20 and they know who they are when
| their arms are twisted.
|
| Great coaches tell world class athletes what they can work to
| correct, just as great teams do in great retros, so the whole
| team levels up together.
| keepquestioning wrote:
| How would you stop this degenerating into Blind?
| Gear61 wrote:
| Good question, especially as Blind was a big "inspiration" for
| us (in that we wanted to build something explicitly _not_ like
| Blind).
|
| I think there are 2 things here: 1. The paywall creates a
| positive "walled garden" effect - Very few people are going to
| spend $50+ just to come in and be a jerk. The paywall alone
| should do a lot of work making sure that folks who come in are
| positive and non-toxic.
|
| 2. Heavy moderation - Rahul and I actually built a free version
| of this software engineer community called Tech Career Growth
| (https://www.linkedin.com/company/techcareergrowth/), which was
| the inspiration for us taking the model freemium so we could
| quit our jobs to pursue this passion full-time after the
| community grew to 15,000+ members. Despite its size, we were
| able to moderate it very well with almost no instances of
| toxicity (more spam than anything) through a combination of
| empowering other community champions, having a clear code of
| conduct, and a 0 tolerance policy for the kind of abuse you see
| on Blind. Taro Premium will naturally be more limited in terms
| of user numbers as it's paywalled, so we're pretty confident we
| can scale a positive atmosphere for quite a while (10k+
| members) as that's something we've already done with the much
| more open Tech Career Community.
| rpandey1234 wrote:
| Great question! We are similar to Blind, but focused on career
| progression instead of gossip/TC.
|
| Having a paywall inherently improves the quality of
| conversation, and the idea of "community" is also quite
| powerful to maintain a non-toxic environment.
| Dowwie wrote:
| Who is generating the case studies?
| rpandey1234 wrote:
| Alex and I have created several case studies (video + text)
| from our careers, and we also bring in speakers (e.g. David Pan
| on the demo page) to talk about specific stories from their
| career.
|
| As we get larger, we'll open up members to share case studies
| within Taro. We've found our existing members have really
| insightful stories that are quite applicable to others.
| endisneigh wrote:
| I don't think this is a bad idea but promotions are often very
| circumstantial and cannot really be normalized across companies.
|
| Meta promotions for instance generally happen faster than Google.
| This is to say nothing about the actual quality of the person
| being promoted.
|
| Other companies promote strictly with tenure. Unfortunately
| promotions are generally zero sum. As a hypothetical if everyone
| who is in the industry used this the main effect would ironically
| be making it harder for some poor sap who isn't using this to be
| promoted as the bar is raised.
|
| This is a good idea but I'd probably still prefer to find trusted
| people within my org and outside my org who've been promoted once
| or twice and are one, at most two levels from me and solicit
| their advice.
| rpandey1234 wrote:
| I agree there are certainly differences across companies with
| career growth, but there are also best practices that are
| generally applicable. As a concrete example, as a manager at
| Meta, I had a report who did a poor job of talking about his
| work in self-review. Giving him some structure made his impact
| much more obvious, and it was easier to get him the rating he
| deserved. The ability to explain your work is critical
| regardless of company.
|
| I also think that having multiple companies in the community
| makes it more valuable -- Taro can give you a valuable
| perspective from people at your company, along with a smart
| external perspective.
|
| Curious what kind of advice would you be looking for from
| trusted people within your company?
| wavesounds wrote:
| Maybe I'm being overly nostalgic but I miss the days when
| startups ruled and when it was all about building cool stuff.
| Nowadays tech feels so insanely corporate it's all about how to
| get a job at one of the biggest companies and how to play the
| corporate game to get more power and prestige.
| rpandey1234 wrote:
| I can see how it may appear that way. I view the non-coding
| skills within Taro to be less about power/prestige, and more
| about things that can genuinely help you become a better
| engineer.
|
| One interesting trend is how Big Tech is becoming... bigger.
| This is certainly a new phenomenon in tech, to have a handful
| of companies (Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon) employing
| literally hundreds of thousands of engineers. Being able to
| succeed in these companies, along with many others with a
| similar culture), is increasingly important for software
| engineers today.
| bckr wrote:
| I think this is a great idea and look forward to joining. I keep
| seeing others stumble on the "coding isn't all you need" kink in
| the carpet, and I'm personally trying to get all the help I can
| navigating a move to Big Tech Inc., where I'm having some
| challenges.
|
| It seems like it will fill a niche that's left unfulfilled by
| communities like Blind which are... let's say "cynical".
| rpandey1234 wrote:
| Exactly -- that's actually the most common reason for people to
| join Taro today. There's a huge emphasis on interview questions
| (DSA) and building side projects to get into Big Tech, but
| these skills don't help you succeed in the job.
|
| One way we think about Taro is a way to "fill in the gap" for
| what students don't learn in their CS degree or in a bootcamp.
| Gear61 wrote:
| Looking forward to having you with us! That carpet kink got me
| hard earlier in my career, haha.
| ipaddr wrote:
| A yearly membership to get access to a q/a database. This is a
| product from from ex facebook and ex robinhood employees which
| will selling everyone's data.
|
| The value prop seems limited but might be good for facebook
| interns because outside of those types of companies 99% of
| companies operate differently.
|
| The fact that past employment to questionable ethical companies
| is used as a selling point is a negative in my eyes.
| rpandey1234 wrote:
| These companies have talented engineers, and Alex and I learned
| a lot from working with them. Our goal is to share these
| insights and create a supportive community to collect best
| practices -- we think there are many SWEs who could benefit.
|
| We charge software engineers directly for access to the
| product, which includes the Q&A database, case studies, and
| member matching services. Hope you'll take a look at our
| content and track record to judge if it's valuable for you!
| ipaddr wrote:
| These companies filter employment based on leetcode ability
| and they also promote a workplace where you move up or out
| within 4 years. To tell employees to ignore leetcode means
| they are stuck at there current faang where getting promoted
| internally is much more difficult.
|
| This service is really for current faang employees who need
| career advice because developers outside this bubble are
| dealing with other challenges.
|
| I would make this a premium service and charge 1,000 per year
| because your target market is niche, uniquely rich and small.
| Developers outside of these bubbles are dealing with host of
| unique issue like startup problems, or government employees
| issues or issues working with large banks or freelancing.
| Developers want to know how to switch stacks after 10, 20
| years while keeping same pay. Developers want to know how to
| create a part-time startup while working fulltime. These
| issue don't apply to your service.
| sidcool wrote:
| Does it have material for 15+ years experience people?
| rpandey1234 wrote:
| Yes! I think about it more in terms of the career challenge
| facing the engineer. These are often correlated with years of
| experience, but not always.
|
| We categorize all content in Taro based on level, company, and
| topic, so it should be easy to find what's relevant for you.
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