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My IM is on PTO for a bit but I’m about to complete some stuff that will put my about 3-4 weeks ahead on my project. My next few tasks aren’t scoped out at all, would it be a strong signal if I start dismbiguating these on my own and see if I can get them done? I’m not sure if I should go for this or just ask one of my peers to do it in case I do something wrong. My IM did say that for a high rating he’s going to see if I can solve some tasks that aren’t scoped much in the future but this seems like a good chance to do it right now.

EDIT: To clarify, the level of info the future tasks have now is a title and the template IMs are supposed to use for the tasks not filled out. 

Would it be good to start scoping future work out myself as an Intern while my IM is on PTO?

Alex lists out 10+ edge cases in K closest points. I had a few Qs

1. He mentions that many candidates would miss int overflow, but what if youre working in python? theres no int overflow or worrying about data types? I'm guessing you would just mention this?
2. Do you just literally list out the edge cases? how does it work in practice? esp for the billion+ numbers. Do you just ask oh can the input have billion+ numbers or do you need to also provide a solution for every single edge case? because its if you have a trillion numbers you cant just use an array youd need a more sophisticated system which derails from DSA
3. Alex mentions Strong Yes candidates ask 80%(\~8+) clarifying questions and 80%(\~8+) edge cases. Wouldnt this take up so much time. Assuming you spend 20 seconds per questions and 20 seconds per response to each edge cases thats 16 questions you'd ask which is almost 5-7 mins spent. If you need to do 2 problems thats almost 10-15 mins just asking questions

Incoming New Grad SWE @ unicorn at Taro Community

I'll be joining a mid-sized unicorn (500-1000 people) and my company has a referral system and awards a referral bonus to employees.

Given the state of the job market right now I know many people who haven't found a job yet. I want to help people but I'm worried if I source too many candidates who fail the interviews, I'd get a reputation for sourcing bad candidates. So I have the following questions:

1. Is it true that if you refer too many "bad" candidates, you'll get a bad reputation? What would the consequence of this be and what's the blast radius?
2. How do referrals in big tech differ from mid-sized companies? I'd imagine the smaller the company, the more your individual reputation matters. Does reputation still matter in big tech?
3. What would be considered a "bad" candidate? Let's say I refer a friend who passed the resume screen but failed the recruiter screen, would I be liable to sourcing a bad candidate?
4. Can you rank the scenarios in terms of what damages my reputation from most to least:
   1. I refer 10 candidates, all of them make it to the onsite but none of them get the offer
   2. I refer 10 candidates, 9 of them fail the resume screen but one gets the offer
   3. I refer 10 candidates, all of them get offers but turn out to be low performers

How selective should I be in giving referrals?

I joined a big tech company 6 months ago. The project is good, but I don’t like the people. It is a very small team with one senior engineer and 3 of us juniors, and that senior (who is mentoring all 3 of us) doesn’t treat me well, doesn’t trust me and always makes me feel inferior when I ask him questions. It feels very toxic. I want to enjoy my work and be excited to come to work everyday. But I see myself complaining about my team a lot recently and I feel very drained.

I have an interview coming up in 3 weeks, I don’t think I can prepare well if my mental state is bad. I’m considering switching teams since I’ve lost touch with leetcode and I’m not confident in clearing the interviews with this drained energy.

Any suggestions would be very helpful!

Is it okay to consider switching teams if I’m not having vibing with my teammates?

Mid-Level Software Engineer at Taro Community

I am curious if you proceed to the team matching stage after clearing HC & you have a call with the manager.

**Overall questions:**

- Is it like an interview? Do you have prepare for it?
- What is the manager evaluating here?
- If a company only has one team for team matching & you don't like it, can you just wait for more time?

**More specific situation:**

1. On [levels.fyi](http://levels.fyi), their Staff matches with other company's senior level. But it seems money-wise their staff-level is more. I am not sure how to match up levels here.
2. Also wanted to ask, when do you negotiate the offer here before or after the team match?
3. They seem to have only one team available right now. I am not fan of that work. But she said their maybe more one team in August. Does waiting for longer time hurt my chances?

Software Engineer [Senior Associate] at Taro Community

I’ve been a SWE in my bank’s 1.5 year rotational program (will hit 2 years at the company in Aug). 

Rotation 1 (Year 1) – contractor‑heavy team, so “real” intent was rare. For 7 months, I picked up only tiny tickets before the whole project was canned. GenAI hype exploded right then; my skip kept nudging us to automate business workflows, so I pitched use cases and wound up leading a handful of GenAI web‑app POCs - literally the only work our team had for a quarter.

Right before that rotation ended, I got promoted to the next level at my company (between junior and mid level - most get promoted at the 1.5-2.5 yr mark). Was told the promo was mostly due to my very strong communication + customer focus skills, not raw tech depth. Still, those soft‑skill wins earned killer product buy‑in and are now showing up on the official roadmap.

**Recruiting sabbatical (per Alex’s advice) Results:**

**‑ Late‑stage startup:** aced the system design, bombed on a coding round.

**‑ Google:** interviewed at L4, down‑leveled to L3, made project match… then HC said no; failed a lot of other junior/mid interviews

When I rotated, I landed on a greenfield GenAI team last year. Cool domain, but heavy upstream dependencies meant two months of spike work and only trickles of real intent, so my engineering muscles aren’t exactly sore. I’m shooting for L4 at FAANG/late‑stage startups, but the L3→L4 course shows there is still a delta in the behaviors and output I exhibit and produce and that of an L4. With no PM and senior engineers stretched thin, I’m mentoring a junior and handling unplanned tasks - some of which I could close by consistently practicing L4 behaviors.

On rough weeks I flirt with a PM pivot (promo feedback praised my communication & customer focus and I wonder if that would play more to my strengths), but the relative scarcity of roles in comparison to SWE at every level and lower comp keep me in SWE. Meanwhile I’m recruiting again and hacking on a passion side project but am torn between:

• **Patience** – growing here, polish skills, ship the side project

• **Big Tech** – dream but higher risk of sinking (per Alex’s code quality video some things only come with time - wonder if I can just “brute force” survival at the L4 level)

• **Startup bridge** – upside is nonstop shipping which might help bridge the gap between where I am and big tech but don’t like the idea of 12+ hour days

Any advice would be helpful - thanks in advance!

Jumping to L4 or Startup or Growing in Current Role

I was talking to an experienced manager (E7+) and mentioned how I wanted to get to tech lead/manager much faster than the expected timeline at my company. They asked me why I wanted to get promoted faster and I was confused by that question. Promotion and climbing the ladder just seems like the natural thing to work towards as a new grad, so I was taken aback. I ultimately said “you get more money, you have more impact, it looks better on your resume, so why wouldn’t you do it?”.

He then advised me that promotion shouldn’t be the means to an end and advised me to focus on growth as an engineer and the promotions will come. They’ve seen people who burn out after several years even if their career looks great from the outside.

I’ve always thought career success = seniority+brand+TC and this model seems to fit pretty well if you look at people (non-founders) who are successful. So when this manager suggested to not focus on promotions, that effectively gets rid of the level/TC portion of the equation. **So if not TC or seniority, then what is the KPI that makes a career successful? How do you measure career progression?**

The manager’s advice reminded me of Alex’s video on balancing growth and promo. The video gives me the impression that promo-obsessed people are toxic, but I don’t see how there’s some inherent tradeoff between being a good person and being obsessed with promotion? **Can’t you be a good human being and be promo hungry? A huge focus of Taro and other career growth resources is getting promoted fast, so why shouldn’t we be focused on accelerating promotion timelines?**

Hi, I am wondering if you have best practices on using Cursor or github copilot to investigate codes / bugs / and ramp up on a certain process.

I have been learning codebase by making and breaking things to understand. But I was wondering if there are better practices using AI to do all these triages / investigations.

Thank you

Using AI to increase codebase understanding

Staff Software Engineer at Taro Community

Hi I am a senior engineer recently laid off by a company which is public by performance based layoff.

I recently applied for job but I do not know how to answer employment status. Last year, it seems layoff is neutral and does not affect interviews. But increasingly, I saw people sharing laid off status from "performance based" branded have had offers [rescinded. (](https://www.reddit.com/r/Layoffs/comments/1kh6yon/had_a_verbal_offer_taken_back_because_they/?share_id=9I3GewbgjiixOSG6pXIgF&utm_content=2&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_source=share&utm_term=3)[Similar Post](https://www.jointaro.com/question/ZPBlaVjQ9jpwfMxf6P7x/received-offer-but-have-not-disclosed-latest-employment-termination/)[)](https://www.reddit.com/r/Layoffs/comments/1kh6yon/had_a_verbal_offer_taken_back_because_they/?share_id=9I3GewbgjiixOSG6pXIgF&utm_content=2&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_source=share&utm_term=3)

Knowing that my company does not share laid off status during background check, do you think using other rationales such as "venturing into entrepreneurship / finding opportunities to upskill in AI" are ok if asked on current employment status?

Another context is that I was just employed less than 8 months. So it added to the nuances of why these are also not ideal responses.

Thank you

Getting "performance driven" laid off by a company

Mid-Level Software Engineer [L4] at Google

Hi All,\
\
I work on ML in Google Ads. I spend most of my time training models and running experiments. I spent little time writing code but more on analyzing the experiments, followed by hypothesizing and designing new experiments. 

Most startups are using LLMs from frontier labs or open-source models and prompting them to work for their use case. It feels that my knowledge in building models is not particularly useful because these startups are not building LLMs from scratch, and most of the work is done in prompting, evals, and building infrastructure to support these models. I feel this mainly involves backend skills and the required ML skills like prompting, evals can easily be picked up by general SWEs too.

I feel that, unless you work on frontier AI research, the skills of an applied MLE are not that useful in building or working at a startup.

Would love to hear what people think about this.

Thanks!

Are applied MLE skills are not useful at a startup?

Senior Software Engineer at Taro Community

I just joined as a paid member. All I see are videos and discussions like reddit. Is that all we have here? Or am I not using it to the full extent?

I noticed that Taro has hosted multiple career coaches/mentors and I'm interested in doing career coaching on top of Taro. Specifically to help accelerate promo timeline. The reason being that the company I'm joining has fast career growth opportunities (junior -&gt; senior promo is \~2-3 years) but also high expectations and fast ramp-up times (first project lasts 2-3 months, 2-3 day onboarding period, etc.). The org is pretty flat - junior, senior and manager are the only "levels", meaning the jump in behavior changes would be huge. I think having personalized guidance would really help. So I wanted to ask a few questions:

1. What benefits can 1:1 mentorship bring to me vs general resources like Taro?
2. What are some points for consideration if I want to get a mentor or not?
3. How can I spot a good mentor vs a bad one? How can I quickly tell that they're a good fit for me?
4. Let's say I have an intro call with mentors. What are some questions I should ask to determine fit?

Software Engineering Intern at Unemployed

Hi everyone,

I just wrapped up my first week as a Software Engineering Intern at Meta, and wow — it really moves fast. Monday was off, so had 4 days.

**What I’ve Done So Far:**

- Met my manager and had 6+ 1:1s with teammates and XFNs.
- Learned about:
  - The org’s mission and how success is measured.
  - My team’s active projects and what impact looks like.
  - Got context on my own project, understood some of the challenges, and identified POCs for different milestones.

**Where I Need Insight:**

As I go into my second week, my goal is to gain deep understanding quickly so I can land impactful diffs fast. I want to operate from a top-down perspective — understand the “why” of the project before diving into the “how.”

**Questions I’m Asking Myself:**

- Do I understand the full scope and intended impact of my project?
- What’s the success criteria? What does a “win” look like?
- What milestones am I missing that could slow me down later (e.g., data structure design, performance constraints, visual clarity, integration points)?
- Where do I see potential pitfalls or ambiguity?
- There are some documentations that I have a really hard time understanding because I think of how I am going to apply it and if I don’t find a way it does not render a meaning. Like what is an ent, etc.?

**Questions I’m Thinking of Asking My Manager / Team:**

- Can we walk through the high-level architecture of the codebase?
- How do people usually ramp up quickly on this team?
- Can we break down my project into 1–2 week milestone chunks with deliverables?
- What does the software platform that I am building my project on do?

**What I Want to Know From You:**

- What do you do in your second week to accelerate?
- How do you balance learning with execution when the ramp-up time is short?
- What’s your favorite way to get a mental model of a new codebase?
- How do you build trust with your manager and teammates early on?
- What questions would you ask yourself for clarity of what you should do?
- What questions would you ask your manager and team to hit a bulls eye with the information that will be useful for executing deliverables for your project?

Any insights or battle-tested advice would be greatly appreciated!

Also to add, what are some things I can think about and also work on everyday, to execute and collaborate better. For analogy, if I want to run fast, I run my best everyday. I also think about ways I can improve my running.

Hi Taro, I need an advice

I was laid off as a engineer when I started the interview process.They never asked, so I did not proactively tell.

But then I received a nice offer from them months after termination date. I was considering if I should proactively tell the employer that I was no longer working

**There are 2 actions I am thinking:**

1. **Proactively tell**: I would lay off this message to the HR \
   \
   *I’m thrilled about the opportunity to join \[company_name\] and wanted to proactively share a quick update. Since our hiring process, my role at \[prev_company_name\] was impacted by recent restructuring in April.*

   *I didn't want to introduce uncertainty mid-process since the restructuring wasn't performance related and doesn't impact my ability to join. Now that we are at the offer stage, I wanted to make sure everything aligns for a smooth transition.*

   *I’ve been excited to bring my experience to \[company_name\] and contribute to \[specific team/project you discussed\].*

   *My goal is to be highly transparent and I am happy to provide any additional details. I look forward to the next steps.*

2. **Did not tell:** Will just ignore letting them know.

**I have been thinking about these actions:**

- **For number 1**, my worry is that I will be seen as not truthful (I did not lie, they also never asked) especially after offer is out. The recent layoff is also marketed as "low performance" issue which might have contributed to my not telling.

- **For number 2**, HR might know due to background check and when they have the start/end date.

Any advice on how to approach this from recruiter point of view and minimizing the chance of offer rescinded?

If number 1 is preferred, should I tell the HR verbally or written (email)? What would be the best way to approach this action?

Thank you

Received Offer but have not disclosed latest employment termination

Entry-Level Software Engineer at Unemployed

Hello, I'm focusing on building right now since I'm not getting many, if any, interviews, but I want to be prepared for the occasional assessments like HackerRanks that I do get. How should I split up my study time?

Hi all,

I wanna ask if anyone know on how to keep yourself updated on latest trends that are relevant to your work? 

As a context, I am working as RecSys MLE and I am expected to connect the dots with the latest research/trend. 

How do you search relevant research papers? Then how do you quickly understand them enough to use in your project?

Thanks

Tips on Learning and Implementing Research Paper

Hi all,

**Context on myself:** <https://www.jointaro.com/question/j3DNfsURCj64oIKzveoA/staff-engineer-to-principal-engineer-mindset-change/>

I am inspired by ideology practice on second brain (Tiago Forte). I am trying to prepare good practice on notetaking/knowledge building before I ramp up as E7 at Meta IG RecSys.

In Google, I just use google docs. But I was wondering if tools such as Logseq/ Obsidian / Notion will double my productivity to ramp up quickly as E7. 

- Any anecdotes and tips on leveling up my notetaking with 1:1 / meetings for E7 work at Meta?
- How about using AI (e.g: Notion AI / ChatGPT)?

Thank you

Best practice on Second brain / Note Taking

I know typically at Taro folks ask questions about how to apply for jobs posted on the official website of a tech company.

Have you heard of people informational interviewing enough that a company creates a position for them (outside of early stage startups)? 

Unheard of for FAANGMULA or other major VC backed companies or?? 

I think this would typically apply for senior software engineer, SVP and higher positions, but wanted to ask folks if they had experience with that, what that's like--how to negotiate for that. I do know few people who have done it, but they come with a high level of expertise and a high need from the company. Lots of jobs also aren't posted on the website and teams are also often secret at companies as well. Asking an 'in the know' / inner circle question.

Have you heard of people informational interviewing enough that a company creates a position for them (outside of early stage startups)?

**I left a startup where I suffered from burnout about 1.5 years ago and am now finally back in a cadence coding everyday and I feel like I was so rusty (on web dev), the time I 'took a break' from paid professional work, I spent a lot more time on AI and iOS development.** 

***What advice do you have for someone who wants to avoid burnout, wants to take breaks, but has a tendency to overwork and switch between different tech stacks?*** 

***How do you also differentiate where to spend your time?*** 

**Time audit**

- **Rest**
  - Even though I have taken this step to really look closely at where my time is going (using trackers and time estimation tools like Toggl, Rize, Sunsama, planners, Kanban, Goblin tools etc.), ***I feel like my biggest lag is sometimes oddly, is rest and doing the boring/mundane things you have to do (overhead tasks from the LNO framework) even though when I take it, it actually is the best thing to get me unblocked (from debugging code) etc.***
- **High Leverage Tasks - Which Part of the Stack to Focus On Most?** 
  - For example, I was able to track my time and differentiate between real L (High Leverage) work vs. O - overhead work.
  - I've tried to ruthlessly track my time totaling at least 40 hours a week and found, it still did not feel enough time to get everything I needed to do done (mostly because I found I spent way too much time on dev admin, debugging, or explaining context to an AI which left me frustrated wasting time vs doing 'real work' on the logic). This has happened - the AI piece failing for me, too many times, that I almost want to avoid it completely outside of writing code snippets I already know how to do, and only generate answers from GPT, Grok (Cursor sometimes even when I merge changes and Git, some things get lost and I feel like I end up with a lot of bloat, having to debug harder, or things break and I need to start a project over completely).
  - ***When switching between stacks (that I do need to do), how do I differentiate between high leverage tasks (web dev doesn't pay me directly to pay the bills, but still necessary vs. the work I spend more time on AI, iOS development etc.)? Or do I just drop a stack entirely so that I'm more productive and not burnt out? What tasks also that is defined as "rest" or non-technical overhead, should I drop so I don't burnout?***

How to Time Audit High Leverage Tasks - Which Part of the Stack to Focus On Most?

Hey team,\
\
Sr SWE with 10 years experience here. Keep seeing ads for Jimmy Koppel's Mirdin course with crazy testimonials (FAANG hires, big salary bumps, etc.) but can't find any real discussion about it on Reddit or forums.

I want to get better at articulating design decisions instead of just having a "gut feeling" something's wrong with an architecture. The course looks expensive but has a refund policy.

Anyone actually taken it? is it worth it ? Open to other suggestions for advanced software design training too.

Thanks!

Has anyone taken Jimmy Koppel's Advanced Software Design course?

Join The Discussion

Share insights on complex topics like system design, code review, tech leadership, interpersonal communication, and more.

Would it be good to start scoping future work out myself as an Intern while my IM is on PTO?

RE: Edge cases in Alex's DSA course

How selective should I be in giving referrals?

Is it okay to consider switching teams if I’m not having vibing with my teammates?

Team matching

Jumping to L4 or Startup or Growing in Current Role

How do you measure a career?

Using AI to increase codebase understanding

Getting "performance driven" laid off by a company

Are applied MLE skills are not useful at a startup?

how do you use this site?

Points to consider for career coaching?

Second week at Meta Help