Nail Your Promotion As A Software Engineer
Switching jobs is great, but it can only get you so far. The true foundation of any ultra-successful tech career is promotion. When you look at software engineers at the pinnacle of career achievement like the FAANG Principal Engineer [L8] making $1,000,000+, you'll notice that the overwhelmingly majority of them have very long stints at a particular company with several promotions.
Despite this, promotion gets a bad reputation as it's sorely misunderstood, both by individual engineers and entire tech companies. This leads to many engineers getting stuck at certain levels, giving up, and just hopping companies to escape the pain. This course is here to demystify promotion and teach you how you can plant roots and actually climb up the tech career ladder. By the end of the course, you will understand:
- 💡 How promotion actually works, particularly at top companies like FAANG
- 🧠 The framework to understand the senior engineering career ladder
- 📃 How to define a clear plan to get to the next level
- ✅ What it takes to get maximum credit for every project
- 🚀 What it means to master your performance review and produce the best promo packet
Now here's the beautiful thing about pushing for promotion and following the advice of this course: It will make you a much better software engineer. The skills you build up to make a serious promotion case are genuinely useful for your long-term development. This is in contrast to interviewing where you're largely trying to fake mastery. At Taro, we're all about a "growth first" mentality, which is why we're so excited to share this course with you.
Alex Chiou is a proven Silicon Valley engineer with 10+ years of experience across top tech companies like PayPal, Course Hero (now Learneo, a $3.6B unicorn), Meta, and Robinhood.
He became a tech lead just a couple years into his career by owning the entire Course Hero Android app (100k+ users) as their 1st Android engineer. After that, he expanded his scope as a tech lead at Meta and Robinhood, shipping multiple $10 million+ revenue projects with 15+ engineer teams.
From Ineffective Junior -> Rockstar TL
It wasn't all sunshine and roses for Alex as he started off his career in 2014 as a junior engineer at PayPal doing pretty much nothing. He would spend more of his day playing foosball than writing code. His career trajectory was completely stagnant, and he was making every mistake in the book.
Eventually, Alex woke up and took control of his career. He began thinking more proactively and making deliberate moves to ascend up the career ladder, striving to do amazing work and add as much value as possible to those around him. Fast forward 7 years to 2021 and Alex was making ~$750k/year as a high-performing Robinhood tech lead at the age of 29, leading 25+ person projects.
Mentoring Engineers To ⚡ Fast Promotions
What Alex is even prouder of than his own career trajectory is those of his mentees, particularly those at Meta. Across his ~4 years at Meta, Alex mentored 30+ engineers and achieved these incredible outcomes:
- Got 10+ junior engineers [E3] promoted to mid-level engineers [E4] in just 1 year (2x faster than industry average)
- Got 5+ mid-level engineers [E4] promoted to senior engineers [E5] in just 1 year (5x faster than industry average)
- Got new-grad E3s promoted all the way to E5 with "Greatly Exceeds Expectations" ratings in just 3 years ($200k TC -> $500k TC)
These trajectories are way faster than what Alex was able to accomplish himself, which was his goal. Every great teacher dreams of having their students surpass them, and Alex is no exception.
With this course, Alex is taking the largely unknown tactics he shared with his direct mentees and sharing them with you 🤲. With this newfound knowledge, you can also level up at 🚀 speed and help Alex achieve his dream on an even grander scale.
This course demystified the career growth and promotion process. I particularly appreciated the sections on how to find the right team and how project credit is determined.
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Really solid course with $1000's of dollars of wisdom packed in there. Taro is too good for the world!
Love the course!
I learned from my manager today my promotion from Google L3 to L4 is approved. The Taro community and this course are the most helpful resource in the software industry as far as I know.
I read through lots of Taro App's discussion, especially regarding L3 to L4, that gave me lots of understanding about the tech industry, how promotions works, and changed my mindsets.
I know I love Taro because as someone who doesn't usually enjoy courses, I learned and absorbed so much wisdom from this course. It took me forever to 'complete' this as I had to go back and review the jam-packed knowledge in each slide but here I finally am, yay! That isn't to say I won't be coming back to revisit some slides to check up on myself as I use the skills shared in my current day-to-day 🙃.
Good content
Going through nail your promotion, great content, clearing my doubts.
Getting more clarity on some of the aspects, learned some of these things after getting lot of scars, wish you guys started this 5 years ago.
Another masterpiece by Taro!
Setup great mindset following these guidance and you are pretty much guaranteed a successful career!
