Career Advice About Startups

What will you recommend me at this stage of my career to go back from leading teams to writing code or being a tech lead / tech lead manager role? The industry has changed and senior/director level roles have vanished.

From my observations, only my experience at big or well known companies have been valued when i am interviewing. It doesn't matter if i have done more impactful projects in smaller companies, nobody wants to hear about it. I am trying to decide between joining a big company versus a high growth startup and i am a mid-career professional. I feel like i don't want to take risks with startups anymore since that might hinder my hire-ability in the job market after the stints. But i like the speed of growth at startups.

Any thoughts on this?

Thanks!

Aside from LC questions, what do interviews for senior mobile roles (L5 equivalent), specifically iOS Engineering, look like at FAANG-like companies? If they are system design heavy, are there resources for mobile specific system design questions, since most of content out there is geared towards web system design?

How can I best prepare for these interviews?

Thanks!

I'm driving a project with ~5 engineers. Even though we're on track to make it now, the initial road was somewhat rocky. We had to go through a lot of conversations to get execution started, spending ~50% of the allotted time on planning and alignment. This led to scope being reduced for v1 and us building less features that we would have liked.

As a startup, I know that we should be moving faster - What's the best way to handle the project from here and how can I improve in this area in the future?

I started full-stack at start-ups and then became increasingly front-end as I often found myself on small dev teams that didn't want to worry about FE and I was happy to fill in. I am wondering if it makes most sense to rotate back to be a full-stack role or lean more into management or product?

I haven't met many devs on Front-end who have advanced very far in their career so specializing in Front-end is beginning to look like a dead-end to me.

I've been talking with different founders about startups and exploring different getting started with Entrepreneurship And Tech Startups? I also watched several of the . and it got me thinking about when the right time might be to start my own venture. Since I have high tolerance for risk, Could you provide some insights into what are strategies of finding co-founders?

Moreover, what are your thoughts on working on side projects or trial work with potential co-founders before fully committing to a startup? How effective is this approach for building strong, collaborative teams and testing ideas?

Additionally, I remember Alex and Rahul did explore incubators and accelerators as part of this process from one of the Taro Videos. These programs often facilitate co-founder matchmaking and provide a supportive environment. I also got accepted to On-Deck Program for their next cohort for 1 intensive week and thinking about applying to YC in the future with future co-founders. How beneficial are these resources for someone in the early stages of startup planning?

How beneficial are these resources, and which ones would you recommend prioritizing in the early stages of startup planning?

Both Alex and Rahul have mentored a great set of engineers while being at Meta and starting Taro seems like a natural extension to their expertise to mentor 1000s of engineers.

I'm curious about the early life of founding a startup. What are some of the troubles you faced when starting the startup? Was getting into accelerators like Y Combinator and raising funds pretty easy as you were at a very senior level at Meta? How hard was convincing co-founders, early employees, customers and investors? Looking back in the journey, are there any things you would have done differently?

Right now, I’m the only fully dedicated Android engineer in my company. My career goal is to lead a group of engineers, teaching them how to code and helping out with their problems in general. How can I shape my career to achieve this vision?

I read , and I like the advice about doing homework so you can be more effective once the meeting comes.

However, I imagine there's a potential negative extreme here in spending too much time preparing for the meeting. What's a reasonable amount of time here?

I work on a very small engineering team, and I'm trying to build up a more impressive suite of projects and business impact. Given that, I'm having trouble figuring out how I can "level up" what I'm doing.

Some additional context:

• I'm very good with data
• Something I'm working on is the company's core website which gets thousands of visitors per month

In my company, there is an axis called "Strategic Impact", which is separate from product work. The idea is that you add value to the engineering ecosystem through efforts like refactoring and improving internal tools. How can I find great ideas in this area and does anybody have any examples? I work on the mobile side.

Questions for Alex and Rahul which I know were covered in some videos somewhere in snippets, but maybe not all in one question. Taro has amassed a lot of great content in its courses and blogs -- how long did it take to create initial MVP of quiz app before the Taro founders quit their jobs to go and work on Taro full time as a startup entrepreneurs?

• When did the founders pivot?
• How long did it take to create initial content (blogs over the years, lots of videos, powerpoints etc.)?

It's impressive to see the amount of rich content, how long did it take for Rahul and Alex to conceptualize Taro (in its early form, name), what ways did they test the success metrics of various pieces of content for a single feature (video series, single video/blog etc.) - how well did they perform over a given period of time?

In, Alex answered that the key insight behind rapid career growth is good communication.

He points the reader to the "Effective Communication for Software Engineers" course and some other resources.

I feel like a ton of effective communication is , and so finding a good way to teach it outside of observing those who are already good at communication in the context a job is tricky. Specific case studies could be really helpful. I think Alex's course and the other linked resources were a really good introduction to effective communication, but if this is the key skill behind great performance I want to learn more! I've put most of the tips and tricks that Alex taught into practice at my current job and it's really improved my performance and my managers' trust in me already. A huge mindset shift for me was that it's better to risk over-communication than under-communication; it's better to be aligned but slightly annoyed by receiving a lot of messages than not aligned.

My question is: What is a good way to go about building my effective communication skills? Are there more really high-quality resources you recommend for building good communication skills?

I've been struggling to put my resume together for new senior/lead front end roles. My current position came through a referral and only needed my resume as a formality so didn't really put thought into it. Now that I'm looking for new roles and going through the application process, I've struggled to get any traction. I've gone through the how to write a stellar resume course here and implemented a lot of that thinking. I believe the one thing I'm missing is metrics. Unfortunately they're hard to get at my company but I've built custom features for large clients who use our platform. Is there a way to get around specifying number of users and what are some other metrics I can use?

Why does Disney Plus use an entirely different video component when wanting to display ads?

During my making of a browser extension that either manipulates current subtitles or adds new ones to a video on various platforms:

I have to partially reverse engineer how each site is going about the displaying of subtitles and the handling of their video client.

I found myself encountering a random edge case with Disney+ that every 5 - 10 reloads of a video - my extension would break due to the expected elements not being there.

What was happening was that Disney+ would add a completely different video client with completely overwritten HTML5 video element APIs and an arbitrary offset of 20 seconds to the time.

Other video platforms such as YouTube, Netflix etc don't function like this and have a standard video client with adverts working with that standard client.

Is this just bad engineering from Disney Plus's part or part of some type of AB test or is there something more technical I haven't thought about?

Tricky to answer for certain unless you've worked there but I'm interested in the different perspectives.

I'm 30 from Mumbai, India. At the moment I don't have any dependencies as such, though I need to plan well, as an Software Development Engineer - 2 India I think I perform well enough in solving problems for a digital products.

Now my parents wants me to settle down, own a house, etc etc. I've evaluated my current city and commute the state government etc and got in the conclusion that I don't want to live in this place for the next decades of my life. My parents are supporting me for this and I feel I can choose any city + country to minimum learn for an year or start working there straight away.

I have two thoughts in my mind; after doing 6 years of SWE, I think I understand the digital realm. I was thinking of leadership roles or being part of the startups, but I'm not sure how to connect to them. Maybe I can relocate first and then join them? I feel competent that I can crack interviews.

Also a major setback at this moment is my current org has been a bit insecure, that they have made us all sign a 3 months notice period.

Please ask me more and give me some ideas.

Hi All,

I'm Gary, Chief Opportunist (CO) at Yoga Plus Tech Inc. (I don't prefer calling myself CEO or Founder because I believe all of us are opportunitsts, and I'm no different) I recently got inducted into , which btw is a giant leap forward in laser-focused discussions like they used to happen on reddit. Huge thanks to @Rahul Pandey and @AlexChiou.

I like to bring candour in conversations, but it's hard to do it without any sound, so the hearing sense for you right now is unused as you read forward. In fact if you memorise our business idea, you would be able to envision it just as I see it, by even [trying to temporarily] losing your sense of sight, you control your sense of vision. In a similar fashion we are delivering Control of all the Six Senses of the body though our Tech Solution.

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Opportunist @YogaPlusTech
Yellow Jacket @GeorgiaTech

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Hey there!

I am trying to decide between joining a big tech company and a high growth startup.

The team and work at the big tech company seems amazing, its the domain that i am really interested in. The team is growing and hence there seems to be quite a bit of work. But its the company thats well known for its work life balance (read laidback culture) so creating impact might take time. I think i will have to invest at least 4-5 years to create meaningful impact and to see growth in my career.

The team and work at the startup is in the field of Devex, I don't get to code much, but i would be involved in solving their CI pipeline issues and improve the developer experience. I might also get to do other related things in the Infrastructure domain. This sounds exciting since it's a startup and there would be so many challenges to solve. I wouldn't be so excited by this domain outside of a startup since there are so many external tools that bigger companies use to solve Devex problems.

By going with the big company, i am securing my domain, my brand and my stability as a good hire in the market. However, i might not grow too much as an engineer. I have a lot of time in my hands and i dont mind working in pressured environments (not too toxic of course) and have a lot of ownership so the environment might get boring for me. But i will have a secure future for sure.

By going with the startup, i might end up having fun and creating a lot of impact and experience growth as an engineer but end up with a confused/unclear domain and might end up as a non favourable candidate to big companies once i am out of it due to my experience here.

They are both paying me almost an equal amount and the small difference doesn't really matter to me at this stage.

Would love to know your opinions on what i should choose and why.

I am a mid-level machine learning engineer in the advertising field, and I often need to provide PMs with performance numbers that are not available in the dashboard so that they can communicate with clients or make business decisions. Sometimes this need is urgent, such as needing to write code to find the number of customers who made purchases in the past seven days that meet a certain condition within half a day to a day.

I have encountered a few problems:

1. The conditions are different each time, and the code is difficult to reuse. I am not sure if it is worth investing time to write unit tests. Is there any way to make sure my code is bug-free?
2. Sometimes the calculated numbers do not seem intuitive, and I am worried about providing wrong numbers, so I spend extra time checking them, but I am also told that it takes so long to calculate such a simple thing. Indeed sometimes the code itself is not difficult to write, but the main time is spent verifying the correctness of the results. How to communicate this?
3. Sometimes I ask my colleagues to help me check my code or results, but I am worried that my manager will think that I cannot complete my work independently and that I am not meeting the company's expectations of a mid-level engineer.

I'm currently working closer to the product side (i.e. consumer-facing) on my team. However, I want to move deeper into the infra layer, more into the back-end and away from the front-end, as that's what I'm more passionate about and this area should be more technically complex.

I've brought this up with my manager a couple times, but they said that since I'm already doing great in my current role, they would prefer for me to stay here. How can I navigate this conversation and convince them of this move?

Hey y'all!

I've been interviewing for a startup. I'm in the reference check step. This was supposed to be the last step before getting an offer, but they wanted to interview me again to (paraphrasing) dive deeper into topics they hadn't had the chance to ask before.

This feels odd to me; from previous experiences, the reference check is the final step before getting an offer. They also said this in my email after passing the "final interview": they needed to do a reference check before extending an offer.

Question:

• Do you consider this to be a red flag from them?
• Should I be worried?
• Would it be okay to ask upfront what's concerning and take it from there?
• Is this common? This is the first time this has happened to me (I've had 5+ jobs).

Thanks!

I finished my PhD in Computer Science in 2021 and started working as an engineer in tech. I'm starting to build projects at my company more independently and doing some system design for my projects at the company. I'm 29 years old now. My eventual goal is to build a successful startup. I try to read some business books after work to improve my understanding business in general.

I'm worried that if I start the startup too late, then it might be hard to manage with family. But if I start too early, I don't have a strong enough financial base and experience to build large projects. What would be a good age and experience level to start a startup in general? Should I wait until I am a few years into an L5 role? Or should I aim to reach L6 role before starting a startup? What side projects should I do or experience I should gain now while still working to better equip myself to be a founder?

I'm curious about your journey at Y Combinator.

• What's the accelerator program like? What's your daily schedule while being part of Y Combinator?
• What are the resources Y Combinator provides to startups? What is the skillset Y Combinator intends to teach?
• What are your biggest learnings or takeaways after graduating from Y Combinator?
• Did being part of Y Combinator open up any new opportunities that you wouldn't have otherwise gotten?
• What's the success ratio of startups in general vs startups part of Y Combinator?
• As both Alex and Rahul have a high income before starting Taro, I'm guessing raising $500K money isn't the primary motivation to join Y Combinator. You also have a lot of technical and leadership experience being staff engineers. My feeling was that YC teaches entrepreneurship skills to founders in early stages of their career who doesn't have much expertise and financial base. So, I'm curious about your motivation to join YC. Is giving away so much equity at such an early stage worth it? Would you encourage other senior enginers who want to build startups also to join YC?