Nail Your Promotion: Mid-Level To Senior (L4 -> L5)

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.

"Senior Software Engineer" is a title with a beautiful ring to it, and it's one that every software engineer aspires to. Top-notch senior engineers are incredibly coveted by tech companies, especially Big Tech, as there's simply not enough of them. With the massive rush of people into tech during the pandemic, the median software engineer is now Mid-Level. If you are Senior, you are special.

However, the Senior Engineer promotion is brutally difficult, especially at FAANG. There are so many engineers struggling with Meta E4 -> E5 and Google L4 -> L5. Amazon SDE 2 -> SDE 3 is notorious for being the hardest senior promotion in the industry with engineers taking up to 10 years to make the jump.

So why is this level up so frustrating, being the first promotion 95%+ of engineers really struggle with? It's because Mid-Level to Senior is the first promotion that requires a fundamental dynamic shift, which this course thoroughly breaks down. By the end of the course, you will:

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

• 🧠 Have the right mindset to behave as a senior engineer

• 🛠️ Identify your technical gaps to senior engineer

• 📃 Figure out your fundamental gaps to senior engineer

• ✅ Define a clear roadmap to senior engineer

After going through all the lessons here, you will have the necessary tools to become a high-performing senior engineer at a top tech company like FAANG. This promotion is particularly exciting as senior is when doors start seriously opening up for your career, with the primary one being the option to become an engineering manager!

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!

System design: It's a become a staple topic among software engineers for its prevalence in interviews. However, unlike data structures and algorithms, system design is actually something engineers have to do on the job, especially at senior levels and beyond.

In this course, you will learn:

• How tech leads at top companies like Big Tech design high-quality, scalable systems
• Common design patterns and things to look out for as a frontend engineer or anybody who's working more on the product side
• A good format you can use for your own technical design documents
• The process to follow to find the best overall engineering approach to a hard problem
• How to socialize your technical ideas to get buy-in

Grow past the memorization of fancy FAANG tech components and become an engineer who's capable of writing code that lasts.

Being a good tech lead is incredibly hard. While many tech leads don't do much more than ask "Is it done yet?" every week, good tech leads must add value to the engineers they're leading while getting an immense amount of work done themselves.

If you have earned the trust of your team and achieved the role of tech lead, you must take that responsibility incredibly seriously and strive to be a good tech lead. Because if you don't, people struggle.

This is what this course is here to help you with. After going through it, 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

As a tech lead, you don't have the formal authority that a manager does. Despite this, you need to exercise an equivalent amount of influence (often times more) on engineering decisions. In a nutshell, this course will empower you to be a true leader despite not being a boss.

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.

Communication is a skill that software engineers often underestimate in terms of importance, and being good at it is effectively a senior engineer requirement. In this series, you will learn how to:

• Earn trust quickly and make people like you fast
• Resolve disagreements
• Make it easy for others to understand and resonate with you
• Be a friendly, visible, and high-performing presence on any team (both remote and in-person)