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.

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

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)