Too many engineers are completely unaware of career norms. A recent conversation I had about job tenure really brought this to light. In the tech industry, there's something of an art to timing your exits and entries in the job market. It's an art that can deeply influence how you're perceived professionally. Most people know you can stay at a company for too short a period, but the inverse is also true: you can also stay at a company for too long. And being on either extreme can hinder your future career prospects. So, let's clear the air: How long is too long, and how short is too short, wh ..read more

I've had a variation of this conversation many times in my career. I'll ping you offline via DM about the perf cycle in the next sprint cycle. Ack Ack is right! Whether you're brand new to tech or a grizzled veteran with decades of experience, this industry will present you with a daunting number of acronyms, made-up words, and slang. In the above exchange, "ack" is short for acknowledged, used to quickly tell the recipient that their message has been received (often during production issues). Use the browser's find option to jump directly to the term you're confused about, or read on to imbi ..read more

This post summarizes the beginning of the book “Fundamentals of Data Engineering” by Joe Reis and Matt Housley. I recently delivered a talk on this info via Taro. The talk for Chapter 2 is happening on February 18. Looking forward to seeing you there! Without further ado, let’s get right into it. Preface In the book's preface, the authors describe their motivations for writing it. The authors describe themselves as “recovering data scientists.” By this, they mean that they started off as data scientists, but realized that before companies can do good data science work, they need to do good d ..read more

We got started in 2022, but 2023 was Taro's first full year of existence. Our mission remains unchanged: accelerate career growth for software engineers. [1] Our data reveals insights about what software engineers were looking for: Learning the traits of high performing software engineers. [video] Developing the right mindset for interviews. [video] Switching domains in tech. [discussion] Looking back, 2023 was a year of infrastructure. We added a lot of "obvious" functionality that you'd expect in any kind of community: better Q&A support, native events, and more community options. We ..read more

This article is the 2nd in my series breaking down Meta interview questions which I actually gave as an interviewer during my time there. There's a lot of misinformation around how Big Tech judges candidates, and this series' goal is to demystify all that and help you study data structure and algorithms (DSA) properly. If you want to read the 1st article, you can find it here: Meta Software Engineer Interview Question Breakdown: Finding Unique Integers While the 1st article covered my warm-up phone screen question, this one takes us into the Big Leagues: The onsite. I'll cover the primary pro ..read more

The demand for custom software in the world is insatiable. Tech companies create value with their software products, but the demand is far broader than the tech industry: software is eating the world across law, real estate, and much more. Writing code is one way to build custom software (and one which will remain valuable), but the rise of no-code tools makes it even easier. That’s why even coders should consider adopting no-code tools. Ask any successful Software Engineer and they'll point to the many projects they've built. Side projects are one of the best ways for developers to hone thei ..read more

Back when I was at Meta, I interviewed ~100 engineers, specializing with data structures and algorithms (DSA) questions (internally known as the "Ninja Round"). Meta has a pretty rigorous and standardized process for training its interviewers, and I really came to appreciate that as I worked at the company and absorbed its incredible engineering culture. In this new series, I will go through the interview questions I asked at Meta in-depth, including how I graded them. I'm hoping this helps you understand: How to properly solve DSA problems and treat them as more than a raw memorization grin ..read more

In 2021, the last full year I worked at Meta, I made more than $800,000 dollars. In this post, I'll break down my compensation and how it changed each year. Here's the proof from one of my last paystubs in 2021: I joined Facebook, now known as Meta, in 2017 with a total comp (TC) of $400K, and over the next 4.5 years, my compensation more than doubled. Here’s my total yearly compensation across 4.5 years of working at Meta: 2017: $390,000 2018: $370,000 2019: $504,000 2020: $703,000 2021: $823,000 ? But my journey was not a straight shot to counting $100 bills. In fact, for the first 6 mon ..read more

In this article, I’m just going to go over all the Git commands I use on a day to day basis, split up by concept and use-case. I will also cover a lot of pitfalls junior Git users fall into and how to avoid them. I have noticed that the Git education in a lot of universities (my alma mater included) is quite poor, so I have seen a lot of messy Git usage across my career. So let’s jump into how you can use Git more cleanly and keep your team happy. Pushing Code Changes Status Git is constantly tracking what’s going on as you make changes locally. To figure out what it sees, you do: git status ..read more

I've been "the new engineer" at 7 different companies in my career, at varying levels of seniority and company size. I've also directly worked with 100s of software engineers where the same topic comes up repeatedly: onboarding. The onboarding period, usually the first 2-3 months in the company, is critical for learning and building relationships. The Talk and Observe framework enables exactly that: quick and confident ramp-up for engineers. It's impossible to "solve" onboarding for software engineers, but based on the feedback I've heard, this gets us pretty close ? What happens in onboardin ..read more