Nail Your Promotion: Senior To Staff (L5 -> L6)

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.

The Staff Engineer promotion can feel impossible: it requires a level of initiative and ownership that engineers rarely demonstrate. However, the reward is immense: Staff Engineers are clear leaders in their org, often commanding $500K+ in total compensation (TC).

This course is about breaking beyond the senior level as an individual contributor. We'll cover frameworks and tactics to optimize your promotion to Staff Engineer.

The most common reasons for a failed Staff Engineer promotion are:

• "You don't have enough scope"
• "You're not working strategically enough"
• "You need to drive problems with more technical complexity"

It's easy to hear this and feel stuck. How can I translate this into action?

The promotion beyond Senior Engineer (generally called Staff or Principal Engineer) is not about working faster or longer -- it's about behavior change that enables you to tackle more difficult problems.

By the end of the course, you will:

• 💡 Truly understand the difference between a senior engineer and a staff engineer (more than a career matrix)
• 🧠 Create clear mental models to develop L6 behavior
• 📃 Identify your fundamental gaps to staff
• 🗺️ Chart a path to Staff Engineer
• 🧐 Go through Staff Engineer archetypes to find your fit

Who is this course for?

• You're a senior engineer in Big Tech looking to get promoted, but struggling to find scope and influence. e.g. Google L5, Amazon SDE 3
• You're an engineering manager or director and want to provide concrete guidance for your engineers to achieve career growth.
• You're an engineer who wants to validate your career direction by learning how very senior engineers are evaluated at larger companies.

Most engineers strive to become a Tech Lead (TL) without a clear understanding of the job.

There’s no job role/designation called “tech lead” at most tech companies. Most engineers get thrown into tech lead roles naturally, without ever being told what exactly the role is and how to grow as one. Most advice on the internet on how to be a TL is: do your job well, take responsibility, help others, or something even more vague like “be a leader”.

In this course, Lalit, a seasoned engineer, breaks down his experience playing the TL role in various capacities across the company, from a team of 3 up to a team of 45.

Lalit goes beyond truisms to share tactical advice for success as a Tech Lead. He talks about topics such as interfacing with management, upleveling team productivity, and dealing with poor performers.

The course is broken down into 4 modules:

• 🧐 What is a TL?
• 🎨 TL role: why and archetypes
• ✊🏽 TL duties
• 🐐 Great TL patterns (and tricky situations)

You're back on the job search, but you aren't getting any good interviews because nobody is willing to give you a referral. You're on the hunt for a promotion, but you don't have enough peers willing to give you glowing feedback, vouching for your ability to perform at the next level.

Millions of engineers go through this every year, and this is how they learn the hard way that they didn't invest nearly enough time building up their network.

This course is here to make sure that these negative situations never happen to you ever again. After taking it, you will:

• 🌟 Understand the #1 rule of networking
• 2️⃣ Set up a basic 2-step process for networking
• 🤝 Know how to find the best people for your network
• 🏃 Develop tools to build relationships fast
• 🛑 Save time by avoiding common mistakes

When it comes to an industry as hyper-competitive and complicated as tech, the reality is harsh but straightforward - If you don't have a massive squad of people behind you who truly have your back and are happy to fight for your success, you are not going to make it as an engineer.

This is why it's so important to build up your social skills and expand your network. A strong network comes with a huge plethora of tactical benefits, and it simply makes your tech journey a lot more fun as well.