Career Advice About Startups

I’d like to be a very senior research engineer in a FAANG company. I’m currently a senior engineer at my medium-sized company but I want to move closer to the research side as a more senior IC. What does it look like to be Staff+ research engineer vs software engineer? How can I build those skills now?

I recently just got back a take home project for a start up, and the feedback I got was I don't deal with ambiguity well enough. I can't do anything actionable with this advice. Should I be asking more questions? Less? Better? Have a better understanding of what to do? What did you guys do to handle ambiguity better?

I have been working in this company for 1 year 3 months now, and I'm feeling burnt out. I'm looking to take a break for around a month and a half, which I know is on the lengthier side. Does anyone here have experience requesting this long a leave?

I’m working at a very early stage startup where there is no engineering career matrix, meaning that there’s no formal “Senior Engineer” level/title. What are some attributes of a senior engineer at a more established company like Google/Meta?

Hey all, I’ve been working at a pre-seed startup for the last two months and I think I haven’t “clicked” with the CTO yet (I’m the only engineer right now). To give you some context

1. We’re aiming to launch two experiments per week so they are more MVPs rather than complete features (I’m ok with cutting corners and making things “not the right way”)
2. Each experiment I’m launching sends data to Mixpanel so we can know if it “moves the needle” or not. These experiments are aligned with our KPIs (see #5)
3. My CTO who happens to be the co-founder has little experience working in tech, I assume 1.5 years tops. He's 25.
4. We're trying to find Product Market Fit
5. The KPI we're after are: Retention and Revenue
6. I've received praise from CTO and CEO about the work that I've done, and I'm extremely transparent with everything I do: Share status in Slack, and Linear, I record Looms, share screenshots, etc.
7. We have 18 months of runway.

He has said twice that even though I'm superb technically speaking; he's having a hard time seeing me thinking about the product and how to improve revenue/retention and he wants to see more ownership on my end; and that frustrates me because as I said on #1 and #6, I've successfully launched experiments week by week and have received praised from them multiple times. So IDK what's going on, I find this to be frustrating because from my POV I've done great work, I've spoken to users, shipped and tracked experiments, and improved our development workflow (we don't work with prod data anymore), proposed new things that we can do, etc...

The last time I talked to my CTO about this (this has happened twice now) he suggested that I should think more about "growing the business and taking ownership" without giving me a clear path forward, and I assume that when I meet with him again this week he's going to play that card again (being vague about how to improve/what am I doing wrong)

It frustrates me because it doesn't make sense to me to work in a place where my contributions are not appreciated.

• Have you been in a situation like this before?
• If he doesn't give me a clear path forward, what can I do then? it seems that I missed the point the first time.
• I know how bad the market is right now, but quitting is not out of the table (I have 12-18 months of runway/savings)

Thanks a lot!

We currently have a problem with test flakes happening very often.

Someone is currently working on a systemic fix, but in the meantime, I've taken it upon myself to be the leader in categorizing and assigning people to take on some of the existing flakes as they happen. I am assigning based on who has the most context or who wrote the original test.

My question is: How can I assign these in a way that doesn't cause people to dislike me? I ask as someone who needs to delegate in my role but also needs to get buy-in for various initiatives so its important that people like me.

A couple of things I've tried:

• Trying to be as helpful as possible, showing that as I'm assigning these I've done a little bit of investigation myself to try to fix it (even without much context) or give any info I can gather
• Asking in a polite way (maybe)? Here's a couple examples:
  • "@person, I saw this one flake a few times and noticed you were the original author. Would you be able to take a look when you get a chance?"
  • "@person it looks like we attempted to fix this here (link to github commit) but it seems to still be flaking. If it's ok, I'm gonna assign this one to you."

Any better wording of the "ask" or advice around this situation would be appreciated!

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?

Just joined a startup and it is everything I wanted - fast career growth, technical depth etc. The pay is also quite good, even higher in base pay than FAANG companies for my level.

I have seen people grow from SDE-1 to Principal in less than 3 years. The company itself is 3 years old and is valued at 4-5 billion dollars. It has about 200-300 engineers.

It is difficult to get such a combination in any company.

And I felt it is an pot of gold. There is incredible financial potential as well, since other companies in similar stage are valued at > 10 Billion dollars.

However, few things that have caused me to get burnt out:

• The founder mentioned financial implications on EMs whose systems see outages. Thus, people started hiding outages. Managers asked folks to move alerts from P1 to P2/P3 so that they dont get flagged to the CTO and there are no financial implications. Postmortems happen but are limited only to issues which impact user journey and see social media escalations, thus are not hidden.
• Most of the DB upgrade activities / deployments happen late night. Thus, while the day starts at 10-11 AM. It continues till 3 to 4 AM in late night. This has caused my health to deteriorate severely. When mentioning that this is causing my health to deteriorate, he mentioned that this is baseline expectation from leads / staff engineers. I am still trying to come up with ways to get these deployments done in day as well like adding redundancy. I have started having occassional fever / headaches due to this.

I always wanted such an organisation which would be fast growth but feeling burnt out and difficult to cope.

I have been thinking of what I should be doing more of. Would love your guidance.

I'm a premium member from India and want to be in the same club.

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?

I'm currently happily employed and I want to cultivate a strong network so that when I need a new job in the future, I am not struggling

I have watched the Taro course on referrals and cold emailing, but my issues is that I went to a small no-name state school and I don't know that many alumni. Also work at a 5-10 person YC backed startup so I don't interact with many people at my job

I understand networking is a long term game, but I feel stuck trying to build deeper relationships and especially trying to level up

I'd love something actionable on how I can add value to people and network that doesn't rely on my job/college

I'd also love to know how to leverage the fact that I work at a YC backed company to network with other YC backed startups?

Everyone wants to work at a YC backed company so I worry that the eng leads/founders get tons of spam email, so how can I stand out -- especially if they are a B2B company where I cant use their product and offer feedback or if they're more mature (series A/B) and I don't really have a lot of feedback

I know that it's in the company's best interest to lowball you: Is there a way to get around this without burning bridges? I'm wary of doing something like getting a counteroffer, since that feels very aggressive.

Adding on to this: Even though we're a startup, we do have a fairly defined career matrix. We have levels (junior, intermediate, senior, etc) and a performance review every 6 months where levels are reassessed and promotions/raise are given where appropriate. So that's a path that can be taken.

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 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 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!

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'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.

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

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.

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 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.

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?

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 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?