Launch HN: Taro (YC S22): Private career growth community for software engineers

107 pointsby rpandey1234almost 3 years ago

Hi HN! We’re Rahul and Alex from Taro (<a href="https://jointaro.com" rel="nofollow">https://jointaro.com</a>, <a href="https://app.jointaro.com/demo" rel="nofollow">https://app.jointaro.com/demo</a>). We help software engineers get onboarded and promoted faster.Career growth depends on having a good manager and support group, but finding someone who advocates for you is challenging. Especially in a post-pandemic world, where many of our working hours are spent in isolation, we’ve lost many of the hallway conversations + quick insights that are critical to success in large organizations.Alex and I have spent our careers at companies like Meta, Pinterest, Robinhood, and Course Hero, eventually landing Staff+ IC and management positions. Despite spending more than a decade in tech, we still stumbled our way through our career: choosing a team, understanding how perf review actually works, and finding a career path. We’ve had our share of good and bad managers, and we’ve also personally mentored dozens of engineers. (Interesting stat: the average engineer at Meta gets a new manager every 1.2 years!) During the pandemic, we started giving free talks about SWE career growth, explaining what we wish we knew earlier. These livestreams routinely got 500+ concurrent viewers, and our community ballooned to 40K software engineers who were looking to understand promotion and influence as an engineer.We spent weeks talking to 100s of engineers and discovered that their career bottleneck was not coding ability, but all the other _stuff_ that is essential for software engineering. For example, as a mid-level backend engineer, how does my path to senior get impacted if I switch to Android dev? A product manager added a last minute requirement on my project which may cause the deadline to slip – how do I handle the fallout? Engineers often neglect these topics (project selection, effective communication, perf review) which leads to career stagnation and frustration.For many engineers, the current resources available online are overwhelmingly irrelevant: they’re about learning a new web framework, or Leetcoding to switch jobs. If you’re at an established, fast-moving tech company, these resources won’t help with career advancement. Instead, the highest leverage activity is to learn from peers + veterans in similar companies.Taro is the product that emerged from our community: a Q&A database from real engineers, where content is tagged by company + level. We also adopted the "case study" model where an engineer or manager discusses a specific story of how they ramped up or landed a promotion-worthy project. This kind of info is difficult to come by unless you know the right people within the company. Taro allows you to get personalized help for your situation, while also learning from the questions + answers of others.We make money by charging software engineers directly for full access to the Q&A database, plus the ability to ask their own questions. We currently have 100+ Taro Premium members from companies like Meta, Google, TikTok, and Amazon, along with thousands of free users. We designed Taro for full time engineers at fast-moving tech companies – it’s not a good fit for freelancers or students who are still exploring software engineering.Checkout a quick demo of Taro: <a href="https://youtu.be/nMgUciFPJMs" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/nMgUciFPJMs</a>Feel free to browse through <a href="https://app.jointaro.com" rel="nofollow">https://app.jointaro.com</a>. We’d love to know what resources you’ve used for career growth. Thanks for your feedback!

24 comments

Terrettaalmost 3 years ago

Yes, and …If you want career growth, consider these three simple* tricks:1. Grok CircleCI’s engineering competency matrix, be honest with yourself, and work on your technical “level ups” across the board. These alone will generally not get you promoted without step 2.<a href="https://circleci.com/blog/why-we-re-designed-our-engineering-career-paths-at-circleci/" rel="nofollow">https://circleci.com/blog/why-we-re-designed-our-engineering...</a>2. Buy the book “The Leadership Pipeline”, again be honest with yourself, and work on your management toolbelt progression. Level up within your company inside two years (an internal transfer can make this step easier).<a href="https://smile.amazon.com/Leadership-Pipeline-Build-Powered-Company/dp/0470894563" rel="nofollow">https://smile.amazon.com/Leadership-Pipeline-Build-Powered-C...</a>3. After leveling up, and within the two years, accept a role for 20% to 40% higher comp at a new company, or the next leadership level up, or both. (Preferably both.)Repeat.- - - - - - - - -Footnotes:* Simple doesn’t mean without deliberate attention or work.** Keep LinkedIn updated with every title or responsibility growth (new role same employer), as well adding to the key valuable outcome you delivered in that role’s bullets, so (a) it’s apparent to recruiters and employers that you are seen as promotable, (b) you are not updating it only when looking for a job.*** The Leadership Pipeline book implies it’s for a company. On the contrary, use the framework to work on yourself.

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joatmon-snooalmost 3 years ago

Interesting! This reminds me of /r/cscareerquestions: both the good and the bad.Good: you're trying to create a space where a lot of people have similar professional goals and can riff off each other.Better: the two of you have a lot of content backed by your own, verifiable, professional experiences.Bad: why would someone qualified to give advice want to join the community? What prevents your forums from devolving into the blind leading the blind?Case in point: your video on "why you should start your career at a big tech co" is very clearly driven by your own personal experiences. At one point you allude to optimizing for compensation, but you don't discuss fintech options (Jane Street, Citadel, etc.). Skimming through some of your comments on other threads, I also just don't see a lot of respect for the nuances of different folks' individual circumstances: understandable given that you two are a finite resource, but you also need to attract users who can give that advice, and I don't see a carrot there for me.

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jeffwiederkehralmost 3 years ago

Excited to see Taro on the front page of HN. I’m just finishing up my first internship at a Big Tech Co and the advice and discussions I’ve seen from Rahul/Alex were extremely valuable in helping me perform well.I feel somewhat connected to the product in a weird way in that I went through the non profit Codepaths interview prep summer course which is where I heard about Rahul and seems to solve a somewhat similar pain point in that outside of the interview prep piece it allowed me to make connections and receive mentorship from experienced engineers that was incredibly valuableAnother company that I love that scratched that same itch was Hackpack. They charge a monthly membership fee and it's centered around interview prep but the main value I got from being part of the program was deep connections and mentorship with experienced engineers.I have some small user feedback with a sample size of 1. I love the content that you guys create and consume the majority of the blogs/youtube videos/linkedIn posts but don't use the app much. Content I consume on my phone is almost exclusively hackernews, reddit and youtube. I'm not sure what the blocker is but it is strange to me that given how much I enjoy the content that I don't use the app more.Congrats on the launch post and wish you both the best!

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wavesoundsalmost 3 years ago

Maybe I'm being overly nostalgic but I miss the days when startups ruled and when it was all about building cool stuff. Nowadays tech feels so insanely corporate it's all about how to get a job at one of the biggest companies and how to play the corporate game to get more power and prestige.

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endisneighalmost 3 years ago

I don’t think this is a bad idea but promotions are often very circumstantial and cannot really be normalized across companies.Meta promotions for instance generally happen faster than Google. This is to say nothing about the actual quality of the person being promoted.Other companies promote strictly with tenure. Unfortunately promotions are generally zero sum. As a hypothetical if everyone who is in the industry used this the main effect would ironically be making it harder for some poor sap who isn’t using this to be promoted as the bar is raised.This is a good idea but I’d probably still prefer to find trusted people within my org and outside my org who’ve been promoted once or twice and are one, at most two levels from me and solicit their advice.

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raunakalmost 3 years ago

very cool product - congrats!do you ever wonder if similar to the college application process, trying to "gamify" the promotion process doesn't actually lead to a competitive company?to be more clear, do you think that by training people to think of trying to get promoted as something they need to learn, rather than come by naturally, we're teaching people to follow XYZ funnel in order to attain ABC goal, at the expense of promoting people naturally?the reason i mention the college application process is because it's clear that's what that accomplishes today, as someone who recently went through it. there's a set of predefined formulas that can get you into an elite school, and they become more and more limited in scope as you become more and more limited demographic-wise, so everyone "learns" from prep academies, consultantnts, etc., the _exact_ right way to structure your application to get in.i still feel like i'm not clear, so i'll rephrase it as, do you think this sort of "teaching" leads to the right people getting promoted/accepted for the company/college (for long-term success)?

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CSMastermindalmost 3 years ago

First off congrats on the launch!> We spent weeks talking to 100s of engineers and discovered that their career bottleneck was not coding ability, but all the other _stuff_ that is essential for software engineering.At this point I've managed hundreds of software engineers and my assessment of the situation is in line with yours. So much so that I actually have a deck prepared for explaining this exact point to engineers.What I've found is not that engineers need any one piece of advice. That would be different for different people (for the most part), it's that they need a framework to understand all the skills which are important to being an engineer and our industry has woefully underserved them when it comes to explaining things.

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f6valmost 3 years ago

Junior to senior in 2.5 years? I mean, you could do it, by playing politics. But are you really a senior engineer?

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chimtimalmost 3 years ago

I've been working in the SW industry for around two decades now, and I see a distinct difference since the last 5 years, which is that everyone is optimizing all their actions towards their next promotion.Prior to this time frame and more so in the last decade, there was a lot of focus on mastery of SW skills and even towards random exploration and learning, and all of that appears to have been lost. I personally felt all this has accelerated with the increase in big tech compensation, and levels.fyi and blind information.The challenge with a greedy approach is that a career spans over multiple decades, and a lot of careers plateau over local minima and often one may have to down level or restart careers to find their true calling and excellence and the career growth that follows. This is better done at the beginning of the career when risks are lower than at a late career stage.

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ipaddralmost 3 years ago

A yearly membership to get access to a q/a database. This is a product from from ex facebook and ex robinhood employees which will selling everyone's data.The value prop seems limited but might be good for facebook interns because outside of those types of companies 99% of companies operate differently.The fact that past employment to questionable ethical companies is used as a selling point is a negative in my eyes.

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conanbattalmost 3 years ago

The slack channel has 11k users, and messages have less than 10 reactions.An Inspection of the user list shows a very suspicious list of names, with some names being repeated 200 times.

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bckralmost 3 years ago

I think this is a great idea and look forward to joining. I keep seeing others stumble on the "coding isn't all you need" kink in the carpet, and I'm personally trying to get all the help I can navigating a move to Big Tech Inc., where I'm having some challenges.It seems like it will fill a niche that's left unfulfilled by communities like Blind which are... let's say "cynical".

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davidgualmost 3 years ago

Would Taro be a good fit for a startup CTO looking to improve their management skills, or is it mostly targeted towards ICs at larger companies?

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keepquestioningalmost 3 years ago

How would you stop this degenerating into Blind?

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wcunningalmost 3 years ago

After looking through these comments and thinking through my own career to date in Big 3 automotive followed by AV work, I think I have to agree -- the lift to get from your Meta/Robinhood experience to information useful to the people in the other 80+% of the software industry, much less hardware/embedded/non-software-software companies is going to be enormous. I wish that there was a good solution for people who want to be Chief Engineer somewhere else, but it's about networking in your industry/company and not about lurking in leetcode forums.

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hnxsalmost 3 years ago

At first glance, I like the idea. But after thinking about it, there is something I really dislike. So much that it would make me want to lurk exclusively.I will be paying you money for the privilege of posting questions (content) to your platform.These questions will generate answers and discussions (more content). You now own this content, and it will be used to lure future customers by giving them an enticing preview, followed by a paywall. Once they are past the paywall, this content, that I helped create, and that you now own, will be something that adds value to your product.I am assuming that the people providing advice during early stages are primarily paid seeders, and/or contributors with other incentives, such as shares in your company.I assume that the long-term plan is that both sides will consist of paid subscribers.I’m sure there are people who will pay to freely provide you with ownership of their advice for others. They might not even need the money. They will be content with receiving access to a community that is paywalled, unanonymous, and heavily moderated, in exchange for the subscription fee and their efforts.But that’s not how I feel. So my question is, where’s my cut?

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SheinhardtWigCoalmost 3 years ago

> Intro 1 on 1 conversation with Taro founders, so we can understand how to best help you growMutually beneficial 'perk' - smart! :)

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jn31415almost 3 years ago

Do you happen to be hiring for customer support / support engineering roles?

faangiqalmost 3 years ago

Leet and work on your English skills. That’s all there is really.

sidcoolalmost 3 years ago

Does it have material for 15+ years experience people?

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Dowwiealmost 3 years ago

Who is generating the case studies?

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gorgonitoalmost 3 years ago

I think you are doing really great job, guys! Wish you all the best on your ambitious mission!!

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midislackalmost 3 years ago

Is this just for code monkeys or do you need to be a licensed and bonded Engineer to join?

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bee_rideralmost 3 years ago

I know nobody wants to do the "software engineers vs engineers" debate again, but even if we are going come down on the "programmers are software engineers" side of that debate, a site which exclusively serves software engineers shouldn't advertise itself as for engineers generally. I was excited to see what EE's would be chit-chatting about. :(As a suggestion -- it might make sense to put a link to your demo page right near the top of your main 'jointaro' site somewhere, it did a good job of showing what the value proposition is.

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