Launch HN: Taro (YC S22): Private career growth community for software engineers
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: https://youtu.be/nMgUciFPJMs
Feel free to browse through https://app.jointaro.com. We’d love to know what resources you’ve used for career growth. Thanks for your feedback!
78 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 133 ms ] threadAs 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.
Thanks for the suggestion on surfacing the demo page more prominently, we definitely want to do better with embedding the actual content in the landing page.
Launch HN: Taro (YC S22): Private software engineer career growth community
or
Launch HN: Taro (YC S22): Private career growth community for software engineers
would fit, I think. IMO the latter is more clear anyway.
Thanks!
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)?
There are definitely more toxic ways to get promoted, "gamifying" the process like you said. The prime example is playing infamous corporate politics, providing the perception of doing great work without actually doing it. I hate those kinds of games (I saw it ruin various orgs I've been on across my ~8 years working in Silicon Valley), and because of that, Taro isn't a product to teach software engineers how to play politics and other tricks.
On the flip side, we really do believe that promotion, especially in the more innovative, modern tech companies, has many components stemming from actual growth. While Meta was far from perfect, I largely felt like promotion pushed me to develop skills that genuinely made me a better software engineer and person to work with. I learned to empathize with other parties, especially those who weren't in engineering, and factor in their perspectives when building alignment on projects. I learned to think proactively, clamping down risks early instead of letting them blow up the project and team later on down the road. I learned to work through others, mentoring more junior engineers, and taking on responsibility for their well-being. The even cooler thing is that I found myself applying those skills outside of work as well: I became a better listener and got better at hectic life activities like vacation planning.
Taro is a product meant to teach those kinds of aforementioned, more "wholesome" skills, and Rahul and I have historically found it hard to find guidance to learn those skills. I didn't start seriously building those deeper behaviors until I rolled some incredible managers ~5 years into my career. We believe that this kind of learning should be far more accessible, and by doing so, we can help empower a workforce that's far more productive and positive.
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 valuable
Another 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!
Taro is very early, and we know that a lot of product right now sucks. If you or anyone else here has any feedback, we're all ears at team@jointaro.com!
I definitely find this discrepancy interesting, since I found the app to work much better than the web application! Although this was mostly a couple months ago, so I'll have to take a closer look at the web app these days.
That being said, I found the content super useful - although I found the ordering presenting in the free iOS app to be rather confusing, as I ended up jumping around a lot.
Regarding using the app, totally understandable you don't use Taro much on mobile. As an upskilling product for software engineers, we expect most of the usage to be on desktop, which is why we just released the web app.
It seems like it will fill a niche that's left unfulfilled by communities like Blind which are... let's say "cynical".
One way we think about Taro is a way to "fill in the gap" for what students don't learn in their CS degree or in a bootcamp.
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.
We charge software engineers directly for access to the product, which includes the Q&A database, case studies, and member matching services. Hope you'll take a look at our content and track record to judge if it's valuable for you!
This service is really for current faang employees who need career advice because developers outside this bubble are dealing with other challenges.
I would make this a premium service and charge 1,000 per year because your target market is niche, uniquely rich and small. Developers outside of these bubbles are dealing with host of unique issue like startup problems, or government employees issues or issues working with large banks or freelancing. Developers want to know how to switch stacks after 10, 20 years while keeping same pay. Developers want to know how to create a part-time startup while working fulltime. These issue don't apply to your service.
There's still value for someone looking to improve their management skills, in terms of getting feedback from ICs and answering their questions, but you'd be in the minority of members for now.
We categorize all content in Taro based on level, company, and topic, so it should be easy to find what's relevant for you.
As we get larger, we'll open up members to share case studies within Taro. We've found our existing members have really insightful stories that are quite applicable to others.
I think there are 2 things here: 1. The paywall creates a positive "walled garden" effect - Very few people are going to spend $50+ just to come in and be a jerk. The paywall alone should do a lot of work making sure that folks who come in are positive and non-toxic.
2. Heavy moderation - Rahul and I actually built a free version of this software engineer community called Tech Career Growth (https://www.linkedin.com/company/techcareergrowth/), which was the inspiration for us taking the model freemium so we could quit our jobs to pursue this passion full-time after the community grew to 15,000+ members. Despite its size, we were able to moderate it very well with almost no instances of toxicity (more spam than anything) through a combination of empowering other community champions, having a clear code of conduct, and a 0 tolerance policy for the kind of abuse you see on Blind. Taro Premium will naturally be more limited in terms of user numbers as it's paywalled, so we're pretty confident we can scale a positive atmosphere for quite a while (10k+ members) as that's something we've already done with the much more open Tech Career Community.
Having a paywall inherently improves the quality of conversation, and the idea of "community" is also quite powerful to maintain a non-toxic environment.
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.
I also think that having multiple companies in the community makes it more valuable -- Taro can give you a valuable perspective from people at your company, along with a smart external perspective.
Curious what kind of advice would you be looking for from trusted people within your company?
One interesting trend is how Big Tech is becoming... bigger. This is certainly a new phenomenon in tech, to have a handful of companies (Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon) employing literally hundreds of thousands of engineers. Being able to succeed in these companies, along with many others with a similar culture), is increasingly important for software engineers today.
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.
For current Taro Premium members, a big part of the value prop is that we explicitly want to capture their nuances in Q&A, and provide relevant feedback for that situation.
To your point about attracting people to the community, the breakdown of our members is quite interesting. We have tons of engineers at top companies who have already "made it" -- from talking to dozens of them personally already, they have lots of insights which can meaningfully help others. Peer to peer learning can be very effective when people share their experiences openly and honestly.
Finally, we also have tech veterans join to share case studies and answer question. We want Taro to reflect a vibrant community with nuanced, smart discussions (growing beyond the 2 of us).
Yes, that's my experience with cscareerquestions, lots of questions about the big 4, doing leetcode to get into google, facebook, etc. A lot less about where most programmers are probably employed, small to medium businesses doing boring ETL, large companies in a enterprise environment using ITIL, doing lots of web development, and very little engineering.
It's even more depressing to see what a large role that randomness plays in lives and careers. E.g., if Yahoo had bought out Larry & Sergey for a million, would their advice be worth more than now? If Steve Jobs never returned to Apple?
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.
https://circleci.com/blog/why-we-re-designed-our-engineering...
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).
https://smile.amazon.com/Leadership-Pipeline-Build-Powered-C...
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.
See another book, “The Mom Test”. Usually self-advertised “strong communities” are focused on being supportive or inclusive over honest, aka trying to be too nice to plainly tell you your shortcomings that need work.
This is strongly related to why so many people are shocked, shocked, to get let go after a string of positive performance reviews. Most companies gave up on honest reviews long ago, all reviews are glowing, so even terrible performance gets “good reviews”. But managers still may have to let go the bottom 10 or 20 and they know who they are when their arms are twisted.
Great coaches tell world class athletes what they can work to correct, just as great teams do in great retros, so the whole team levels up together.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/131XZCEb8LoXqy79WWrhC...
Here's a Scribd link to a (public) version of the competency matrix. Unsure when it was uploaded:
https://www.scribd.com/document/503555180/CircleCI-Engineeri...
If you work at a Fortune 500 and then jump to a FAANG, this difference is very obvious.
See for example this blog by Joel Spolsky [1].
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/07/25/hitting-the-high-n...
It also provides data showing that speed and correctness are essentially uncorrelated between different people - i.e. just because two different people finish at different speeds, does not mean the faster person has a less correct solution, at least in this specific setting. If you assume that's true generally, that makes the idea that there is a large gap between F500 programmers and FAANG ones even more credible, since the best programmers both produce better solutions and produce them faster.
Most sensible companies measure by impact - and Taro focuses on how to explain and justify that.
And he truly did operate at the staff level -- I know because eng levels at Meta are private. As he was climbing the ladder, people who worked with him assumed he was already a Staff Engineer, and were shocked when they realized he was 1 or 2 levels lower than that (this info would come out during perf review season).
Seniority is generally about how much people can trust you in the team, to identify blockers, provide feedback, or plan a roadmap. You can call it politics, but no one on the team would have denied that this engineer was hugely impactful. We're trying to capture these lessons + case studies in Taro.
When I joined a big tech company the hardest part of ramping up was learning how to operate in that environment. There are a lot of implicit behaviours a "good" engineer is supposed to that you mostly have to figure out by yourself. Some of them are genuinely useful, but I think a lot are basically a kind of filter: https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1555077502803947520.
From what I've seen, the main skill for promotion in my company isn't engineering a well designed system, it's being visible and finding/creating the right projects.
I completely believe that someone could figure out how to behave like a higher level engineer and even succeed in their team, then get put in a different environment and completely flounder because they were mostly just copying behaviours that worked in their current environment, not learning fundamentals.
I'm also curious, vaguely what archetype was this Staff engineer: https://staffeng.com/guides/staff-archetypes.
You're right there is some element of pattern-matching that happens for a higher level engineer, but in my experience this has to be backed up with actually earning the trust of the broader team, and that requires strong fundamentals.
An Inspection of the user list shows a very suspicious list of names, with some names being repeated 200 times.
I think you're referring to the Tech Career Growth Slack which we've built over the past 1.5 years. Users there come from my YouTube channel (https://youtube.com/rpandey1234) or our LinkedIn sessions (https://www.linkedin.com/company/techcareergrowth).
However, for many other roles, there's still a ton of insights + best practices that can meaningfully help engineers achieve their career goal. Alex and I don't have all the answers, but as a community with ambitious people, there's a very good chance you can find what you need.
> 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.
Definitely agree that the advice that moves the needle depends on the engineer. That's why we like the community + Q&A angle to capture the nuances for each engineer.
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?
I view our product as more than a Q&A database. Certainly getting questions answered is valuable part, and our goal is to make that interaction high-quality and easy (a coach can often be hundreds of dollars an hour). However, we also offer case studies from tech veterans and community features such as member matching.
We're focused on delivering as much career growth to members as possible. Working with this group of software engineers, the cost of upskilling pays for itself very, very quickly (we charge <0.1% of yearly comp for typical mid-level engineer in FAANG).
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.
Mutually beneficial 'perk' - smart! :)