What Does a Day Working on Taro Look Like?

Yup, I'm the first and only software engineer hire so far! Most of my time is spent coding.

• There are three focus days where I am heads down and coding.
• There are two team collaboration days where I meet up with Alex and Rahul in person.

I am a pretty structured person, so my focus days look pretty similar. I use the first half of the day to knock out any bugs or smaller tasks. I usually have more concentration in the morning, so I can get into a nice coding cadence/flow. In the second half of the day, I will tackle larger projects or tasks that require more debugging.

On the team collaboration days, we will usually discuss the overall vision of the company or work together on tasks that require frequent input from everyone.

Compared to my last job, there are significantly fewer meetings and a lot less delegation.

I actually made a video about this a long time ago! You can watch it here: "What does your day to day look like?" - 8/19/2022

It was interesting going through it as a lot has changed since then:

• We're done fundraising
• We hired Charlie as our 1st engineer
• I have less meetings as I realized after making that video that I need focus blocks
• Taro Web is pretty good now!

In terms of what's still true:

• I don't code that much - Both because it's not the biggest problem to solve, and I don't have the time for it
• I strive to talk to every single Taro Premium member
• My life is filled with meetings
• It is near impossible to predict how my work life changes from month to month or even week to week!

...but am particularly interested in Charlie's answer since he's the main developer (right?)

Charlie is indeed the core engineer working on Taro. Rahul and I spend more time engaging with the overall Taro community and focusing on big picture issues concerning overall company direction.

Alex, are you concerned at all that your coding skills will decline with time?

My coding skills will definitely decline over time as I work on Taro, but I'm not concerned at all. Not because I'm moving on to the next phase of my career, but because I believe really deeply in my own learning ability. If I end up going back to a "traditional" SWE job, I'm sure I could pick up whatever tech stack gets thrown at me in a short amount of time.

Also, are you concerned that as you get more removed from your time from FAANG things will change such that your time there might be less relevant when giving advice?

Not really. Most of the stuff we teach in Taro is more around fundamental skills, and those don't really change.

Here's an update, starting off with myself (inspired by Sai's follow-up comment):

• We stopped doing intro 1 on 1s with every new Taro Premium member as it stopped scaling and we got diminishing returns on learning
• I am effectively a full-time course creator now (and I love that job!)
• Course creation is a very involved IC-style activity (and I'm a perfectionist), so most of my calendar is blocked off with focus blocks (I don't have too many meetings anymore)
• I still barely code - Sorry to everyone who uses the Taro mobile apps regularly!
• We still can't predict what's going to happen with Taro week-to-week and month-to-month 🤣
• Taro has grown enough to the point where we're semi-thinking (emphasis on semi) about hiring

On Rahul's end:

• Most of his mental energy and time is dedicating towards platformizing Taro courses (i.e. how can we get non-Rahul/non-Alex people to make courses for Taro?)
• He has a ton of meetings (as the CEO, he's more business-facing)

On Charlie's end:

• He still writes a lot of code 🧑‍💻

Thanks guys!

Alex, are you concerned at all that your coding skills will decline with time? I guess you've moved on to the next phase of your career, so that's not a big concern.

Also, are you concerned that as you get more removed from your time from FAANG things will change such that your time there might be less relevant when giving advice? I wouldn't expect that to happen soon and I would think talking with as many people as you do makes up for that, but still wondering.