Career Advice About Startups

I was laid off but used to work in big tech and with stock appreciation as well as living with my parents for the past few years, I have a sizable chunk of savings.

I'm living with my parents now and am very grateful that they don't charge me for living at home.

Now I'm debating what to do with my life. I could try to get back into big tech again, but it will be much of the same thing as what I already know. I want to try and maximize my career experiences since I don't need to worry about savings (provided I'm not reckless).

I'm thinking about joining a top startup to maximize my learning and experiences I have in life. Does anyone know how I can find these startups and what stage I should shoot for (ex -> Pre-Seed, Seed, Series A, etc)

I'm ok with making an average/below average salary as well as long as I maximize my learning and experiences.

For context, I was a mid-level SWE at FAANG with ~4.5 YOE working towards senior promo.

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?

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?

Hello, need some advice here.

I am a month into my new job - an AI startup, and my founder (who’s also my boss) has been scheduling 1-1s with me every other week to onboard me and give me time to ask questions. I feel like I am wasting this. I genuinely don’t have many questions to ask because I m mostly focussed on trying to complete my tickets as efficiently as possible (there is loads of work to do), and I already have been more or less briefed about the problem we are solving, KPIs and some big picture goals for the team.

I have another meeting with him tomorrow. I need some help - any questions on what I should ask?

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.

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?

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 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

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 got a new grad SWE job at a unicorn, but long term I see myself as an entrepreneur and I like being at the intersection of tech and business as opposed to doing just coding. I think a Technical Product Manager position aligns perfectly with my strengths and desires and future goals.

Given my current new job is solely coding, how do I gradually transition to a TPM role? At which point should I make the request to my manager?

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?

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.

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 a machine learning engineer (MLE) working on an e-commerce recommendation system, while our backend engineers manage the serving server. I’m facing communication challenges with the backend lead:

1. We're building an e-commerce search system, but he refuses to use a search engine due to maintenance overhead, insisting a regular database is sufficient for vector search. However, a search engine offers better algorithms, scalability, and faster improvements in click-through rates.

   • (a) Should I just acknowledge his opinion and say I'll bring it back to my team instead of debating in meetings? Because we are discussing the business requirement with PM in that meeting, not focusing on the tech stack.
   • (b) If he still refuses, should I find other collaborators or have MLEs maintain the search engine ourselves?

2. He often shares strong opinions on ML algorithms in meetings, but while 80% is correct, 20% contradicts my understanding. Our discussions are usually focused on system-level topics, if I challenge him, the meeting may go off track; if I don’t, others (PM and other engineers) might assume we agree, leading to misconceptions. How should I handle this?

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'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?

Hi,

I'm a solo fullstack intern at a company right now; no real mentorship and guidance (no code reviews etc) so I'm wondering what steps I could take to way to grow as dev here without a real mentor or team. Feels like a glorified side project

Trying my best to learn as much as I can and grow as an engineer while building out the features I have been assigned. Not 100% sure i will secure a return offer (i probably will take it for now), but going through the other taro courses on resume + behavioral to prep

Secondly, how would one track metrics if I don't really have any? Would like to include some numbers on my resume for the work I've done at this role

Thank you!

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?

I just completed several technical interviews with a company, and the next round will be a behavioral interview with the manager.

I’d like to know what questions I should ask to determine if they are a good manager and to spot any potential red flags. Aside from directly asking, what questions can I ask to better understand the manager's management style?

Additionally, I hope to work from home 2 to 3 days a week (that company has hybrid work policy). How can I ask about their attitude toward WFH without coming across as not being fully committed to work?

I've been working on a feature in the app for a while now. I completed the project and it's in the review stage right now. Since I've been only focusing on this project, I've become fatigued with it -- I'd like to work on other tasks or priorities for at least a sprint.

I know this feature is a high priority, but I am having a hard time focusing on it. Should I continue to push through? Or could I ask my manager if I can work on something else for a bit then jump back on it ?

I am working in a project where we have a pipeline which runs automated tests, lint, and other type checks.

But we are merging PRs even if the pipeline fails 😅

On my case, every time I got a pipeline error, I fix it in my PRs, and some of my coworkers are starting doing the same, but still we are merging some PRs with the pipeline failing.

Our manager is a software engineer too, and has the role of merging the PRs.

I tried to convince him to avoid merging PRs if the pipeline is failing, but while he is open to discuss this topic, he thinks that since other teams also need to merge things. He doesn't want to block them because of the pipeline.

More context:

• It is a startup and we want to get the job done faster.
• I have 2 months working there.
• The pipeline was always failing because of another step that was removed recently. I think they got used to ignore the pipeline because of that.

I believe we are paying 10x of the future time, for short term quick time (10 minutes of the future for 1 minute today).

I thing If we continue with this, all will blow up in our faces.

I am tiring of fix the pipeline almost every day, and checking my team PRs as well.

Not sure if I should just keep pushing, or stop worrying if the pipeline passes or not and just see how the things blow up, and then try to convince the team of keep the pipeline passing as a strict requisite to merge a PR.

What would you do in my case?

I've been at my current company for about a year and a half, the team I was hired for hasn't worked together until the last two months. because of some organizational decisions all the engineers on that team have been lent to other teams during the period I'm describing. My team didn't have a manager until three months ago, and this manager hasn't been doing a good job either, his onboarding feels slow and he's just started to get closer to the team.

Despite the fact that I don't really "own" anything as I've been working across the org in different initiatives, I'm a top performer in the company. And if things keep going like they are going, I'd hope to get a promotion to Staff in the upcoming 6-12 months (I've gotten meeting expectations once, and exceeding expectations twice).

All that said, I have the chance to join another team with a manager I really like that I've known for about six months, I really like him and I feel that our work styles are quite similar. I worked with his team for about two weeks and it was overall positive, nice, kind talented people.

I'm 90% sure this is the right move for me, but I have a few doubts:

1. Do you think that is going to hurt my momentum to get to Staff?
2. I'll be doing back-end work in this new team, I'm mostly a front-end engineer, but I've done some lightweight backend work in the past, and I'm really excited about working on something different (I'll be writing Kotlin/Ruby), the only downside of this is that I won't be as effective with this new language as I am with my current stack. Should I be worried about this?
3. What key questions you think I should ask this new manager before making the final call?

What do you think about this situation?

Appreciate your insight, thanks!