Career Advice About Startups

I don't really know what I want to do in my career. I finished university one year ago, and I work as a full stack engineer right now, and I'm quite interested in ML. I'm more frontend-facing right now, but I see low returns on spending too much time learning new frontend frameworks my entire career. I'm more interested in becoming a well-rounded engineer, so I feel that there would be higher returns on digging down into the backend more. I have been looking at trying to join some big tech company as a backend engineer, but I just went on an interview for a small tech company which does quite alot of ML with the hopes that they were looking for another ML engineer. Instead they presented me with a broad-scoped data engineer role which sounded pretty cool.

My strategy up until this point has just been to find cool roles where I get to learn useful stuff as an engineer from people who are way smarter than me. Sometimes I think "If I would make a startup, would this skill come in handy?" Is that a poor framework? Should I have a plan? I don't even know if I ever want to make a startup lol. I'm interested in joining big tech, but other than that I'm not really sure. I just enjoy building stuff, and I see this as an opportunity of learning data engineering really well (which I don't know very well), but that is perhaps not a wise career choice? Any guidance on how to think as a new grad is appreciated lol.

Hey Taro community. So I saw on and Alex touched on seed startups being not really good for early careers. I wanted to ask: So I met this person at a tech meet up and we exchanged twitter names over the summer. She’s currently building in health tech now. She made a tweet asking if any engineers wanted to work at a seed stage AI devtools startup (round led by top tier technical firm) and to DM her if you were interesting.

Should I do it or just leave it? Knowing how the climate is now just thought about beggars can’t be choosers.

Context

I have secured a job offer as a Tech Lead at Zepto - a series F startup based out of India.

The company is operating in quick commerce space which is like e-commerce in 10 minutes using Demand Prediction and Dark Stores in a certain region.

Career Aspirations

I have aspirations for career growth as an IC and the HR were rolling out offer for Staff as well, but stuck with Lead Software Engineer for now, so as to establish myself better first and then move towards staff role.

The Hiring Manager mentioned that it is possible to quickly progress to staff role in 4-5 months, which is a pure IC based role while Lead Software Engineer involved some level of team task prioritisation/planning etc. also

I had been trying to move ahead to Lead Software Engineer position in my previous company for a lot of years and did not get enough support.

Thus, I am really grateful to this offer and just want to give my best.

Would love any hear your thoughts on how to succeed as a Tech Lead.

Introductory call with CTO

With the context setup, The introductory calls are being scheduled now each coming week.

The first call being with the Company CTO.

I want to be able to have good learning and career growth at the company.

What are some of the questions I can ask as a to be Tech Lead at Zepto so as to make the best use of my call with him?

I was thinking about the following:

• What are some of the focus areas for us at Zepto in 2024?
• Does this translate to some high level focus areas for engineering teams? - such as building abstractions or a platform using which we can enable business better?
• Are there some technical hindrances that are being faced to achieve the focus areas for the business? or What could be some reasons to not be able to achieve above focus areas? And how are we planning to preempt them?
• Are there some areas of improvement you are seeing from an operational perspective in Tech & Product teams? Are we doing anything towards that?

Would love to hear your thoughts on the above. And hear more about the things I can discuss in the call.

My goal is to succeed as a Tech Lead for my team at Zepto, contribute as much as I can in terms of impact and learn from the experience.

References in comments due to character limit

I'm currently SE2 in my company, which is the earlier side of mid-level and am trying to make progress to SE3 and then senior engineer. Knowing that, how can I start making headway towards that SE3 promo? Do I need to be able to draw the line between my work and business impact?

I graduated University of Toronto computer science () with a decent GPA around a year ago. Following graduation, I applied to hundreds of jobs, networked aggressively, and skilled up as much as possible for around three months straight, every day, for the entire day. I landed a ridiculously small number of interviews, and I ended up landing a low-paying dev job with a stack I did not want in a tiny company with no employee benefits. Not exactly the tech bro dream 🥲.

Comparing with many of my peers who have similar backgrounds to me and who landed great jobs straight out of college, it's hard for me to know whether I'm falling victim to LinkedIn survivorship bias (i.e. I'm only seeing those who succeed) or if I am missing something here. Perhaps it's that I didn't do any internships during college, or that the market is bad right now, or that one simply needs referrals to get interviews. I am hoping to gain clarity on this.

My formal questions:

1. I am a graduate of one of the top computer science programs in North America, have a decent GPA, and have a portfolio of college projects. It's hard for me to assume my resume is that suboptimal that it undoes those facts. Why are companies not interested in interviewing me?
2. I have two years of experience total at two different companies, both of which are very small consultancies owned by friends of friends, which I suspect may be hurting my application. Is it better to apply for recent grad jobs or internships (which I'm applying for anyway) with no professional experience listed on my resume?
3. Something that I've seen emphasized on Taro is that it is much more attractive to specialize. For example, in the resume course, Alex recommends applying with a small number of technologies you are proficient in / have experience with. As a recent grad not getting interviews, I am (a) nervous I'll get thrown into a tech stack I don't care for, but thereafter only have a real chance at success interviewing for jobs with that stack, and (b) not actually proficient with any tech stack, so not sure I can craft a "specialized" resume. What are your thoughts on this, and what does a strong recent grad resume look like?

Thank you very much for taking the time to answer and for Taro's support in the job search!

I have 3+ years in the industry and have been privy to layoffs since 2023. I wish to understand how you view/process these layoffs and is the current situation unprecedented or just a sine wave occurrence in the industry.

Since our company is so small (< 10 engineers), we do code reviews across platforms – so I review iOS and web code even though I’m an Android engineer.

I haven’t gotten any negative feedback on my code review yet, but I want to make sure I’m doing it properly. How can I suggest improvements on other engineer’s code, even if they’re on a different platform, or if they’re more senior than me?

When I was hired, the hiring manager said they were debating between mid-level and entry-level for me, but decided to go with the more conservative approach since I don’t know the tech stack here. How can I quickly show my technical skills despite not knowing the stack?

I would love to hear what others here have learned while working with their PMs past and present. I have brushed shoulders with a few and only closely worked with two PMs in our sort-of-cross-functional team, in my career thus far. They are both likable people but it took me a long time to realize that their feature requests were poorly scoped, lacking crucial details, and oftentimes had no acceptance criteria. In hindsight, I am not sure why none of the IC's with years under their belt never really spoke up about that (which led me to believe that was just the way things were).

Fortunately, our goals with Product are better aligned these days and our relationship has been healthy, so we are pretty comfortable give/taking feedback during Sprint Retros, so much of said issues have diminished. However, the lack of clarity in the tickets is still present from time to time, and now when I notice this, it fatigues me to know that I will have to set aside time to hop on a call and ask them for information (which in my mind, should already have been in the ticket?). I see most of my teammates having to do this as well, but I have not noticed their irritation over it. Sometimes, I wonder if I am wishing for an ideal that is rare or does not exist.

Mini rant aside, I would love to know some of your guys's good/bad experiences with Product and how you navigated through them. (i.e. What made it smooth/difficult to work with them? What steps did you take to mitigate the issues?) Thank you!

I work in AI and am considering working in my next company, Google, Meta/Facebook, and Apple have all called given my reputation in the industry as a past startup founder and well known open source contributor.

What should I think about in joining a company beyond perks and benefits? Should I optimize for learning with an AI legend in their early stage venture that has raised half a billion but hasn’t built or released a product yet, or go for a larger publicly traded company with many layers of management that has established promotion paths and product market fit. What else should I consider before taking a job?

A feature I'm building has no straightforward process or to-do list, where designs are unfinished, and designing and development go hand in hand for weeks.

We have been pushed to develop in parallel, creating much rework.

All my engineering manager asks now is ETA, even when they know it is difficult to achieve, and asks why it is late, pushing us to work late at night or on the weekends.

They do it in front of everyone or via Slack to create pressure.

What is the fundamental role of the Engineering Manager?

A mixture of Silicon Valley and The Social Network is what inspired me quite a few years ago that pursing a start-up was even a possibility.

I even learnt the concept of what a "kanban" board was from Jared (played by Zach Woods).

Pursing this start-up ended up getting me into an incubator and then into a software job (after having no $ to continue the venture lol)

As someone who has never been to America, let alone the bay area and has never worked in big tech/a real start-up:

How close is the show to reality?

Met any Russ Hanneman types haha

I'm a junior engineer, and I have a second-round software developer interview coming up where the format is as follows: Group technical interview with three product managers (director, senior, senior) and one software engineer.

I can't find any more information about this interview online (Reddit, Glassdoor), and the HR coordinator/recruiter has not answered my follow-up question in terms of live-coding.

The first round was a behavioral recorded video interview with nine questions, and I feel like I did not over/undersell experience.

Any tips for how to prepare for this interview or redirects to existing Taro questions with this information would be appreciated. I would be glad to provide more information as well; I am trying to manage my nerves.

Hey everyone, I've been working at a seed stage startup in London for 5 months now. I am the sole contributor to an ML product the company is launching and I'm taking care of the entire ML life cycle (training/testing/deploying/monitoring/integrating)

But the startup is trying to scale vertically (creating a suite of products/ecosystem of tools for its niche). This is the company's second product and is the bigger product compared to the first product they launched and has more revenue opportunities

I haven't had much exposure to the software side of the product as there is currently so much scope for ML opportunities

I am also a junior. I have about .75 YoE before I started working here and I am terrified that the company is going to lay me off once they get enough of this AI product done and its time to move on to the next. I worry they're gonna want some SWE with 10 YoE and I'm not that. I don't want to have to job search in this market as well

About me: my expertise is 70% ML and 30% SWE. I also have a bs in cs so I'm not a noob at SWE. MLE is also 80% SWE and 20% ML realistically

Questions

1. How to ensure that if the company decides to start another product that they won't just ditch me
2. How to figure out the long term plans? I've tried asking to figure out but with such early stage startups it's hard to know what their plans are

I am totally okay and happy to contribute to the software efforts as well should they decide to move on. just don't want to get laid off!

Hey Folks,

I have the famous question here : Big tech -> startup : Should I do it?

Context:

I have a pretty toxic leadership. I have even got offers internally, but the leadership played political and I didn't end up switching teams. Also to note, I was told that I have been given "meets most" or the lowest rating a person can get.

This was a pretty horrible, as I was in exceeds in my mid year. I am not sure why they are being nasty.

And rumor is that they will be letting folks with this rating go this month. ( All on blind, and some managers from other teams also confirmed, but I have not been given a last day yet)

Given this a context, I just want to see if I should take up a startup offer.

I have 10+ YOE, and I see that I am not getting as many calls as I used to just 2 years back. And the interviews are much more random. This makes me concerned.

I am not on visa. But moving from big tech -> start up is a huge paycut.

What do you suggest I do?

So it's been 3 months at my startup.

The day I get there, I see that our product is way worse than advertised (ie. saying we had 20 core features when we actually had 2). That's okay I guess, the team was just selling their vision during the interview process.

After 1 month, one of the cofounders quits. The next day, another one of the cofounders quits. I'm panicking, but I realize I'm stuck here because it's my first job. (looks bad if I leave so early)

After another month, we get an impromptu Zoom invite. 1/3 of the engineers have been fired. Everyone is working 60+ hour weeks at this point to keep the same velocity. The firings were not due to lack of funding btw.

And just the other day, we had mid year reviews. The CEO says my engineering speed is slow. (he claims to be able to do in 1 day what I do in 1 week) However, he's never been a SWE before so not sure how he knows.

My gut tells me to leave, but where will I go? Hopefully I can strive for a FAANG company or somewhere that has a strong engineering culture, but I feel pretty trapped right now.

Reflection:

I think part of the issue may be that the CEO wants FAANG-level performance + ridiculous work hours while providing only 60-70% of the actual comp of these firms. Something about expectations and leveling seems to be amiss here

Personal Context:

I have no problems getting interviews (thankfully, even as a new grad) because I spent a few months contributing to open-source. Just debating if it's worth cracking out the LeetCode for a few companies

I work at a relatively small private company, and we spend pretty much all of our time churning out features as customers request them. I'm wondering if it makes sense to also spend some time digging into data to better understand user behavior. I'm trying to find ways to add value to the company besides just feature work.

Hello! Are there any websites to assist with evaluating startup offers (e.g. salary and equity)? Pave and Carta are focused on providing benchmarks for the offer-givers, not the offer-receivers. seems interesting, but I'm not sure how much I can trust it?

Is it possible to just use Pave / Carta without paying for it?

Thanks!

I've got a performance review coming up. It's not my first one at the company, but it will be the first time I'll be actively pushing for a promotion. It's also the first review with a new format, where we'll need to align our accomplishments with company values and our roles' "competencies"—10 in total, which seems like quite a lot to me. In light of that, I have a few questions:

1. How long should a self-review generally be?
2. Should I cover all or as many of these values and competencies as I can, or should I focus on just a few of them?
3. Should I prioritize quality over quantity and share only the strongest achievements? Or does it make sense to include both the biggest achievements and just good ones?

I was watching the course on "" video from the coding course

As an MLE how narrow should my focus of a tech stack be? and what constitutes as a tech stack?

99% of my work is in Python, but at 1 job I did 90% of my work in PyTorch

At my current job I'm doing 40% sklearn/keras (it's a simpler version of PyTorch implementing same things, but is mostly used for ML stuff where models need low customization) + Pandas

Rest 60% of my job needed me to start working with Polars which is pandas but faster and is more heavy weight (similar to PySpark/Dask)

Is that too much branching? or Should I be narrowing my focus?

TL;DR it's ideal to hone in on 1 tech stack, but changing circumstances need me to use different frameworks depending on the problem. Is that bad?

Since I’ve only worked in smaller companies, I sometimes feel uncertain about my abilities as an engineer compared to FAANG engineers. How can I identify the gaps between my current skill set and those of FAANG companies?

In my organization, there are SDE roles till level 4, and then on top of that, you become an EM. Many times, an SDE 3/4 (who is considered a technical lead) gives tasks or creates the sprint. But then when the junior engineer goes to an EM to show their work, the EM changes the entire approach or assigns vague tasks.

This impacts the velocity of the sprint. I do want to understand: How do I put it out to the upper management such that this doesn't happen? Also, should an EM make technical decisions in this way?

I have 2 core goals:

1. Learn from the best engineers and pick up as many skills from them as possible
2. Become a founder

Given that, should I work on side projects full-time and apply to incubators or continue doing internships like my current one and doing side projects on the side?