Career Advice About Startups

Hello. For anonymity, my name is John, and my coworker is Bob.

Bob is relatively new, so I help Bob out when he's blocked on a JIRA ticket. I don't mind helping, but Bob only mentions my name during standup when he's unsure of something (e.g., John and I worked on this ticket, and we think this might be the issue).

During the times my name was mentioned, I probably did think that was the issue, but these are incomplete thoughts + theories that I'd rather not be publicized if I am wrong (I don't mind being wrong in public, but I'd rather be wrong on my terms).

I don't think Bob is doing the above on purpose, but it does bother me.

Here are some possible solutions I've considered:

• (a) After sharing a theory, tell Bob that he doesn't have to mention this theory and/or my name during standup
• (b) Only share theories with Bob that I can 100% back up
• (c) Say something to Bob about their past behavioral patterns

I think (c) is too confrontational, and given that I don't think that Bob is doing it on purpose, I can probably skip this. I want to stick with only (b), but I want the option to share an incomplete theory as it may indirectly help Bob to a solution or teach them something new.

What do you all think?

I am at the final stage of a interview with the CTO of a startup.

All my interviews were scheduled via an automated system on their end and hence have no method to contact a recruiter or anyone from the said company. The interviews till now followed a “big tech” process with tech phone screens, system design, etc.

This final interview is for 30min and i am guessing its going to be behavioral and some “getting to know each other” type of thing.

What are some questions i can ask to show I'm interested in the company and the role. But, at the same time i want to understand their long term plan (think 6 months, 1 year and forward)?

A side question: Should i keep interviewing for public companies? Given I'm on a visa, but the tricky situation for me being that my current employer will be undergoing a layoff in the last week of April. If i do end up getting an offer from this startup should i still be looking out for jobs at more stable companies? (i do acknowledge that there isn't any such thing as “stability”)? Any pointers or guidance on this would really help me out in making a final decision 🙏

Note: they are willing to sponsor visa

Hi! I have been working at pre-Series A AI/ML startup for nearly a year. I was hired at a Principal Engineer level and then was promoted to Director level. Currently, nearly 15 engineers report to me. Despite the growth opportunities, I am not very sure of the overall success of the company. I am more keen to switch jobs and, hopefully, work at L6+ level at a Big Tech company. Any advice on how to go about that?

Right now, I'm on the test side in my company, writing some automated tests but doing a lot of manual tests as well. I would like to transition to software engineering, but I'm not entirely clear on my path there. There has been precedent of making that transition within my company, but I don't have any hard commitments there on allowing me to do the same. Any advice on how I can plan out this switch?

I recently became CTO of a small early-stage startup where I'm leading all technical efforts, including by still doing some coding, but am mostly managing other engineers and focusing on the broader technical needs of the company. Previously, I was a technical lead and IC at startups where I had led small teams of other software engineers on product development, but was more in the weeds technically/coding a lot and was not responsible for people management. I'd like to learn about resources I can utilize to further develop my engineering leadership and people management skills.

What resources would you recommend to learn more about the following:

• How to build people management skills as a first time engineering people manager? Are there open source or free trainings or resources that are good for this?
• The latest engineering leadership topics, especially in a startup environment (e.g. how other leaders are tackling common technical and leadership challenges)
• How to meet or connect with other engineering managers/leaders (e.g. startup CTOs, VP of engineering, or technical founders) outside my company to learn from their experiences or share lessons or knowledge with each other

Interested in any types of resources including blogs, podcasts, YouTube channels, or virtual or in-person communities or meetups (particularly in NYC) etc. I have some favorite resources so far, but it would be great to learn about what resources others in the Taro community find useful. Thanks!

I know this is different for Alex, Rahul, and Charlie, but am particularly interested in Charlie's answer since he's the main developer (right?)

I’m considering leaving a startup because of 2 things I’ve seen on Taro:

1. faang+ as a long term investment in your career
2. .

2019 Goal of Joining a Startup

• Learn a lot about how to be a good software engineer

• Be an early employee at a startup that makes it big

• Quickly become an Engineering Manager because I like working with people, helping others

2023 Thoughts on Staying as an Eng Manager or Joining Big Tech

• Dream of being an EM, is happening on small start up scale with a growing number of reports who like my management so far

• The dream is to be early at a unicorn and that is close, but

  • The new standard should be 10B not 1B

  • Doing this with a first job is not necessary and high risk

• In 2-4 years I’d likely still be a engineering manager from a no-name startup

• L5+ engineer in big tech may fit well with my personality right away based on Taro, where I love collaboration, helping people, product and technical challenges

  • I like not just spending 80% of my time heads down coding and that may be possible and expected right away in big tech, no need to be a manager

• Getting a 2 FAANG+ badges on my resume over the next 4 years would be more way more worth it than even a million dollar payout from a startup

  • Could have many doors opened for high level roles at startups OR faang depending on what I feel like at the time

  • Big tech stock offer may also easily be worth 1M in 4 years

Priorities 2019

• Supportiveness of team

• Growth opportunities

• Company prestige

• Maximum outcome (Risk)

• Compensation

• Company ethics

• Product space

• Technical space

• Work-life balance

• Level/title

• Benefits

• Location

• Stability

• Remote work

Priorities 2023

• Supportiveness of team +0

• Work-life balance +7

• Compensation +2

• Company prestige -1

• Growth opportunities -3

• Stability +7

• Company ethics -2

• Remote work +6

• Level/title +1

• Benefits +1

• Location +1

• Product space -5

• Technical space -5

• Maximum outcome (Risk) -10

Taro priorities video is

Startup Stats

• 150 people, 25 engineers (doubled from a year ago)

• Fall 2021 had 50% investment at 250M valuation

• Dec 2022 450M valuation

• Revenue has since doubled in last year to 125M

• Profitable per years with 20% gross margin

• Growing industry

• Not venture backed, so not expecting 20x growth

• Estimated in 2-4 years to sell for 1-2B

How to evaluate a startup video

Current job stats

• Team lead for a year after 2.5 years as Software Engineer

• 0.1% equity, 100k cash

• 18th employee, 4th engineer

• Dream of being an early employee at a unicorn, seems close

• Would lose all stock if I leave before acquisition/ipo

• Biggest point for discussion: ***2-4 years of being manager at a small startup may not qualify me to be an EM in big tech***

FAANG+ Offer

• L4 equivalent

• 190k cash, 350k stock over 4 years, 60k sign on bonus

• Work life balance is supposed to be great

• Great food, big tech lifestyle that I’ve always heard/dreamed about

• Would work to be promoted to L5 in 1-2 years, then manager a year after that.

• Being a new person at a fresh company sounds very exciting now, I know the business fully and the tech stack of the current place to the point where many things Ive see before and feel stale/boring

Questions

1. Based on my write up about values, priorities, liking collaboration, would I like being an IC L4 coming from being a manager where I have solid tech skills but strong soft skills that I enjoy using.

2. If I stay at the start up would I be able to get a big tech EM offer with 3-4 years of management experience at the start up? Note this question shows what I’m learning now as a manager.

3. Should I down level myself from L5 to L4 if I think I could get the offer at L5 but am not sure about the certainty of success? (Question asked separately )

Context: I work as a Entry Level SWE at Series B Startup with 25 people; the SWE team is 7 people total. I am the only person currently under my manager & my coworkers are fairly clear about what I am building & why. Also, the SWE team morale is strong and productivity seems to be at a sustainable rate.

In general, I think my manager & mentor is an incredible engineer & empathetic person open to feedback/trying new things. He’s personable, highly knowledgable, is available to answer my questions, & answers all my noobie questions. While I love these aspects, I do feel he is a bit reactive as a manager. When I asked him if he wanted to be my mentor, he agreed but I think he interprets it as being available to answering more of my questions. I don't think he is used to being a mentor or a manager and would like to see a more proactive effort from his side to help me level up as a engineer (right now I am mostly bringing up the ideas for 1:1 meetings, and creating a growth plan, etc).

So how do I help him?

I just joined a new company (7 months of industry experience) and I want to make sure I can come in quickly and make an impact. More specifically, I want to become a quality contributor to the team as soon as I can.

I'm relatively new to software so would love to understand more here. In particular, what does it look like at Big Tech compared to other companies? My goal is to eventually transition into a Big Tech company - Do you always need to work 60+ hours a week to do well there?

I’ve come to realize more and more that the greatest thing holding me back by far as a software engineer has been perfectionism. By perfectionism, I mean the mental attitude that says that what I have done isn’t good enough so I need to spend more time on it, or that I’m not ready to do something. This attitude is pretty much the opposite of Meta’s “Move fast and break things”.

Here are a few of the ways that this mindset has hobbled me throughout my career:

• University (I studied Engineering): thinking I had to read the textbook and do all the assigned questions. My GPA suffered. In reality, my time would have been better spent doing past tests/exams and forming better friendships and study groups with other students to learn what was most valuable to know. I’m speaking from both a GPA-maximizing viewpoint, but also from a long-term viewpoint in the case of better relationships with classmates.
• Immediate Post-University: Thinking that my coding skills weren’t good enough and that I needed to do a 6-month bootcamp which I did. Hindsight is 20/20, but getting my first job and working from there would probably have been better.
• First job: Struggling with moving fast. I was at a tiny (<10 people) start-up and they wanted speed. I struggled with the pace they wanted because of things like writing formulaic unit tests that didn’t add much value and needing to constantly walk through my code with a debugger. I do believe that this particular company had unrealistic, unhealthy expectations for a newbie, but I also believe I could have moved faster.
• General learning: Prioritizing online courses over side projects.
• Job Hunting: Aiming to get done 150 interview questions before applying, rather than applying and doing mock interviews from the get-go.

I believe perfectionism is particularly harmful in tech compared to other industries since things change so fast.

Maybe this is better answered by a life coach or therapist, but what are some things I can do to limit the pernicious effects of this mindset?

1. What are the pros and cons associated with picking a founding full-stack engineer role at a pre-seed startup over a senior SWE role in a platform engineering team at a decently high-scale late-stage post-IPO startup?
2. Does being a founding engineer make you unemployable even if you have 5-6 years of experience?
3. Will working on larger-scale infrastructure projects make a significant difference in terms of employability?
4. Are there any other career risks associated with being a founding engineer?

To put this into context, the question refers more to people who have already been at the company for a while, not onboarding engineers.

In my experience working only at startups, almost all learning has been the responsibility of the employee. There is a "spike" period where the engineer is given time to come up to speed, but it has always seemed to me a bit careless for managers to just give someone a list of technologies and say "learn this."

I guess this question is really a proxy for asking: how does FAANG approach "bootcamping" engineers on a new and important stack? Are workshops, training courses, and L&D actually effective? Suppose that I am a senior engineer who wants all the junior engineers in my team to learn how to use AI assist tools like Copilot, how would I approach making this mandatory if I really think it's a technology that's as crucial as git?

Context:-

1. My team is going to work on a new project which involves upgrading a service and migrating/enabling all of the dependents to use the new service.
2. This service provides a business critical functionality for our teams and the new version attempts to solve a lot of high impact pain points with the previous version.
3. We have just inherited this service and none of us have worked with it or any of its dependents before. We have some support from the previous team that worked on this project but only in a consultation capacity.
4. This is a project that has been attempted multiple times by various teams over the years - unsuccessfully or with little progress. My perception is that it's going to be a difficult project with low-moderate chances of success.
5. There is a lot documentation but most of it is somewhat outdated. There are a lot of PRs as well but these are for the unsuccessful attempts so I'm not sure how impactful it would be to go through them.
6. The plans for the previous attempts only had internal milestones for the team and a single big-bang completion milestone for stakeholders.

Questions:-

1. How can I identify smaller, independent high-level milestones that are relevant for external stakeholders?
2. How can I come up with broad estimates and capacity requirements for the external and internal milestones if I'm not clear on what these milestones would require for completion?
3. How can I think about de-risking this attempt of the project and improving the probability of success?

Everyone on my team is significantly more experienced than me. I feel a bit intimidated criticizing the decisions that engineers far more senior than me are making. How can I start contributing?

I'm working as a senior SWE at a series C startup. I'm looking to specifically grow my technical skills on priority.

My manager has shared a few projects that are upcoming in the roadmap for my team. Given that the requirements and constraints for these project options are yet to be fully defined, how do I identify which projects will have sufficient technical depth to allow me to push the boundaries of my technical skills?

I have been working as a backend engineer for almost 3 years now as a self-taught engineer, and I've enjoyed this field a lot as I go deeper into system design and strengthening my CS fundamentals as I don't have any CS background in university. In my previous 2 companies, I've got good reviews from my peers and managers, and currently I'm in a team where I'm the only woman and also the youngest.

From networking and discussions, I understand that I am super fortunate to have the current position that I have and I have a lot to be grateful for because I manage to be entrusted with a really big end-to-end project and be equivalent to my peers who are much more senior than me.

However, I'm just tired because every time I need help for brainstorming and pairing, my peers will help me, but not without bragging themselves in the end ("how come you don't know this?", "I managed to be able to do this for the 1st time", etc). Also, I sense some hesitation from my peers to ask me questions (at least publicly in group chats), even for projects that I've done in the past and for which only I have the contexts. I sense this because my peers would only ask me through private chats and sometimes they would even go to the length of asking their other peer who would then ask me because he doesn't know the answer

I really hope that it's an issue with my performance, because then I can fix it, but sometimes I can't help but wonder if it's because of my gender and age and they just don't wanna look more "incompetent" than a "woman" and a "junior". Everytime I do something good outside of work such as becoming a tech speaker or teaching a bootcamp and I share it, I feel like I'm being shot down with words such as "I've done better than that", "Why did you even take up that speaker gig? Are you pretending to be a senior?". I mean, what's with the bragging? The insecurities? If you're more senior than me and you have more experience than me, of course they all look simple to you. There is no need to bring people down when they're trying to grow.

Adding more salt to that, they often joke with stuff such as "I still have slots for 3 more wives" "Why are you not married yet? The rest of us are married already, you don't wanna be an old spinster" and sometimes they would talk in detail about what they do with their wives that morning. All of these are wearing me down and make it hard for me to focus on my job and my passion, which is the tech stuff. I'm scared and uncomfortable of bringing this up with my manager and my HR because I'm scared of being labelled "sensitive" and "weak" for being offended by things like this because of the culture that I'm from. The minority of my coworkers (who are males) have actually noticed this problem and have shared their concerns too with me, but it seems that my manager doesn't want to acknowledge this problem at all and he thinks that it's all perfectly normal and just a banal banter. How should I proceed with this? Any advice? (preferably from females who have gone through this and succeeded in thriving through this). I would like to switch companies as soon as possible, but given the current market and I only joined this company for less than 7 months, I don't think quitting now is an option

My work is in C (which I do not have much experience in), so if I don’t understand some error that emerges (after ofc trying Google & Stack overflow & my own tests), are you sure it would be appropriate to ask a question around that??

It seems to me that after asking a few questions, my team members may feel that I should be able unstuck myself or that getting myself unstuck is simply a natural part of the process of growing as an engineer.

I'm following the guide in around asking for help after being stuck for 15-20 min, but I worry this might be too frequent.

I've never worked in big tech or Tier 1 companies but I'm aiming to grow as a engineer and would like to know and learn how different companies make such decisions?

1. Does it vary for startups and FAANG+ companies?
2. How do you answer such a question if asked during an interview?
3. How much autonomy each senior engineer (L5 or L6) has in such decisions?

Could you please share an example case study here? What does the entire process look like? Thank you.

I have never worked at a big tech company, but I'm just preparing continuously for the same, though my resume is not getting shortlisted, so I rarely try applying and keep studying.

Can I get a resume review and some pathway to stay in the interviewing loop?

I went through and kudos to her for doing a great job at articulating everything so well.

But I was wondering at the same time if there are any differences in leading a tech team at a startup (100 engineers company) vs a FAANG company?

Hello.

I have a busy senior/manager. We used to have 1-1s twice a week, and now I'm lucky if I even get a single 1-1 every other week. I understand that it's because he has a lot of responsibilities (e.g., coding, managing, scrum'ing) and end-of-year deadlines.

Here are some things I've done to make up for the lack of 1-1's:

• I over-communicate via IMs (even if he doesn't respond) to let him know how I'm progressing so he can "smoke test" my theories if I'm heading the wrong way.
• I present high-level overviews of the code (<15 bullet points) I'm working on to avoid doing deep dives into the implementation.
• I deliver short standup updates with easy-to-remember keywords that my manager has mentioned before.
• I try to offload some of his managerial tasks (e.g., onboarding new engineers) to free up some of his time.

Does anyone else have a busy senior? Should I be doing anything else? Thanks!