Nail Your Promotion: Junior To Mid-Level (L3 -> L4)

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.

Congratulations on breaking into tech and becoming a junior engineer! Now how do we make it so people stop calling you "junior" as soon as possible? 😅

Well, you do that by growing from a junior engineer to a mid-level engineer. The good news is that if you are on a decent team, your destiny is completely in your hands when it comes to this promotion. When you play your cards right, you will make this level up fast. By the end of the course, you will:

• 💡 Truly understand the difference between a junior engineer and a mid-level engineer

• 🛠️ Learn to code like a mid-level engineer

• 💪 Know what it means to be truly independent

• 🧠 Have the right mindset to act as a mid-level

• ✅ Define a clear roadmap to mid-level

Being a junior engineer is scary - You don't know what to do, and the job market is the harshest towards you. But worry not: After going through all the lessons in this course, you will have the necessary tools to quickly grow from a clueless junior engineer to a fearless, respected, and extremely capable member of your team!

Learn how to build successful, effective relationships with your manager, skip level, and senior peers.

This class contains a systematic, focused process for Managing Up successfully. It covers how to manage up in a variety of situations and to different people such as senior peers and skip level leaders.

Managing up is not just about getting recognition for one's work, but rather about investing in the relationship and understanding what the other person likes and dislikes, just as one would with friends or family.

Building a good relationship with your boss will make everything else easier, including handling conflicts and opportunities.

Your manager relationship is the single most important relationship you have at work; make it count!

Key Skills Covered

Working Well With Your Boss

• Understanding Your Boss
• Effective Communication

Handling Tricky Situations

• Problem Solving and Decision Making
• Conflict Resolution
• Giving Upward Feedback
• Managing Expectations

Driving Your Professional Development

• Ask for Career Support
• Earn and Get Investment From Leaders

Peers, Skip Levels, and Politics

• Peers and Skip Levels
• Politics and Ethics
• Enabling People to Manage Up to You

With the infinite amount of tutorials and infrastructure services out there nowadays, writing code really isn't hard - Just getting things to work is much easier than ever before. This means that if you want to stand out as a software engineer, you need to write much better code than almost everybody else.

Every engineer needs high code quality, especially at Big Tech companies like FAANG where even the slightest mistake can hurt hundreds of thousands of users and cost millions of $$. After going through this course, you will:

• 🔎 Understand what good code looks like (and doesn’t look like)
• 🌱 Set up the right growth mentality around code quality
• 💻 Learn how to submit a quality pull request
• 🍝 Avoid common messy code patterns

Now you might be looking at this and thinking, "I need to move fast, I don't have time to write the perfect code". This is a very understandable misconception many engineers have before getting to the highest-levels, but it couldn't be further from the truth: When you write better code, you will actually move faster as a software engineer. Don't believe us? - Take the course and find out why!

Learn how to build successful, effective relationships with your manager, skip level, and senior peers.

This class contains a systematic, focused process for Managing Up successfully. It covers how to manage up in a variety of situations and to different people such as senior peers and skip level leaders.

Managing up is not just about getting recognition for one's work, but rather about investing in the relationship and understanding what the other person likes and dislikes, just as one would with friends or family.

Building a good relationship with your boss will make everything else easier, including handling conflicts and opportunities.

Your manager relationship is the single most important relationship you have at work; make it count!

Key Skills Covered

Working Well With Your Boss

• Understanding Your Boss
• Effective Communication

Handling Tricky Situations

• Problem Solving and Decision Making
• Conflict Resolution
• Giving Upward Feedback
• Managing Expectations

Driving Your Professional Development

• Ask for Career Support
• Earn and Get Investment From Leaders

Peers, Skip Levels, and Politics

• Peers and Skip Levels
• Politics and Ethics
• Enabling People to Manage Up to You

Becoming a go-to person gets you promoted.

In this course, you'll learn what a go-to person is, why becoming a go-to person is one of the most impactful things you can do for your career, and how to become one. Jordan's experience in becoming a go-to person led to his back-to-back promotions from Junior to Senior Engineer in 2 years.

• You could be the "database expert," "Python expert," "caching expert," "frontend expert," "Typescript expert", etc.
• You can also be an expert in specific product domains, like the "onboarding flow expert," "payment portal expert," "home timeline expert," etc.

When people come to you for advice or feedback, you become a leader. Leadership is the prerequisite for a career to Senior and beyond.

What this course covers:

• 📈 Why being an expert will help you get to the senior level

• 🔎 How to find the best thing for you to become an expert in

• 💻 How to become an expert in that area

Strap in for stories, visuals, examples, and exercises to figure out what you should become a go-to person for and exactly how to do it.