Rahul Pandey’s Post

As a new hire, onboarding is your responsibility, not your manager's. The first few months in your job are crucial for creating first impressions and relationships that can either accelerate your success or limit your potential. 30% of employees leave their jobs within 90 days. Leaving that soon means something didn't work out. This is a shockingly high number of people and is the source of tons of wasted time and money. I'll be sharing tactics you can apply to onboard in a Lightning Lesson on Maven. Join me on Wednesday: https://bit.ly/3U3KV1t

"Whatever is worth doing is worth doing well" conflicts with "Done is better than perfect" ❌ "Don't worry what other people think" conflicts with "Reputation is everything" ❌ "Don't judge a book by its cover" conflicts with "First impressions are everything" ❌ How can you follow contradictory advice? It's literally impossible. Given how common these quotes are, they must work in many situations. Your job is to figure out what situation you're in and then apply the *right* advice. How do you know what situation you're in? A few ways: 1️⃣ Identify role models, and then follow the advice they follow 2️⃣ Get feedback from someone who understands your situation and goals 3️⃣ Do first-principles thinking and ignore the "shortcuts" of common wisdom I'd love to hear from you: how do you deal with the bombardment of best practices and advice?

One of my favorite Taro events to run is the Senior to Staff office hours I hold every 1.5 months. It's open to all Taro members, but it's especially valuable for engineers who have taken my 'Senior to Staff' cohort-based course. We discuss what promotion strategies are working (or not) and share insights from various Big Tech companies. Event on Friday: https://lnkd.in/gB5jPRmK I decided recently I'll do another run of the cohort, so if you'd like to get notified when I finalize the dates, drop your email here: https://lnkd.in/g2rGCA6Y

Introducing the Taro Side Project Guarantee 🔒 Many engineers fear that if they build something cool, they'll have to deal with expensive APIs/infra as their product blows up. This fear is irrational. Please don't let the prospect of a large bill deter you from publishing your work. If you have enough users to drive up your bill, you have a problem of the privileged few. Today, we're introducing the 𝐓𝐚𝐫𝐨 𝐒𝐢𝐝𝐞 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐣𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐆𝐮𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐞 🔒 to give you financial peace of mind from unexpected charges. If you unexpectedly get a bill above $50, ping me and I'll cover the cost for a month. We'll help you determine next steps. Here's how it works: ➤ You must share your project with the Taro community and share receipts with me. The cost should come from users (not training or one-off purchases). ➤ We'll cover up to $1K (potentially more on a case-by-case basis). ➤ This guarantee is valid for the year of 2024 for Taro Premium members. ➤ Reference this post: https://lnkd.in/gUX293Rb If you don't have a side project or startup idea, join me for my upcoming office hours: https://lnkd.in/gPDF-Z7D

Many engineers don't realize Mark Zuckerberg's importance in ushering in the age of extremely high compensation for tech workers. In the 2000s, Big Tech cos infamously colluded to keep salaries low and avoid poaching each other's employees. Documents show that Google, Apple, Intel, and Adobe took part in this scheme, with Apple CEO Steve Jobs as the leader. (This lawsuit was settled in 2015 for $415MM.) But as Facebook experienced a meteoric rise, Zuck decided not to play by the existing rules. He recruited top programmers out of these companies and paid unreasonable amounts for them. After a few years of this, the unreasonable compensation for top programmers became reasonable. This was the new normal. #compensation #facebook #stevejobs

PSA: you shouldn't blindly send AI-generated content to another human 🛑 LinkedIn recently released an AI writer to easily message others. The AI-generated text asking about Charlie's experience at Pinterest has at least 3 issues. The most obvious issue is simple: humans don't write like this. If the recipient determines that you're AI-blasting them, your cold message has done more harm than good. Not only will the recipient ignore you, but they'll also view any future interaction suspiciously. Artificial Intelligence makes it much faster and cheaper to produce text, but success in cold messaging is antithetical to mass outreach. You win by being genuinely human. (I'm talking about exactly this topic in a few hours: https://lnkd.in/gU-eB85x)

In 2021 I interviewed with Humane, the AI Pin, for an engineering role. A friend of a friend worked there and I was compelled by the idea: replace your phone and humanize our interaction with technology. Plus, Humane had tons of funding and amazing talent (ex-Apple execs and backed by Sam Altman). Five days ago, YouTube reviewer MKBHD released a very harsh assessment of Humane's first product: https://lnkd.in/ggKRZVs2. I'll be honest: I don't know if the company can succeed after such starkly negative reviews. However, not only will Humane's employees be ok, but their careers will accelerate even faster 😲 As someone who worked on another high-profile failed AI hardware product (Portal from Meta), the engineers come out with better job prospects. Humane employees lost their compensation equity but gained tons of brand equity. And when you're looking for a new job, brand equity is paramount. Even if the AI pin fails, engineers can talk about their work and people will understand what they're talking about. This tolerance for failure, especially when you learn something, is why Silicon Valley is magical. Lots of people find success by 'failing up.' p.s. in case you're curious, I didn't get an offer at Humane 😌

If you want above-average outcomes in your career, you can't copy the behaviors of average engineers. The average engineer applies to jobs on LinkedIn. They're competing with 10s of thousands of other engineers who lazily apply for open roles and then get ghosted. The above-average engineer will find more niche websites to apply, where they have access to unique jobs and better (more niche) opportunities. The response rate is dramatically higher and they actually get to talk to a human. The idea here is to figure out what makes you unique (your location, your expertise in Ruby, your passion for ClimateTech) and then find opportunities relevant to that. The Taro community shared an awesome list of resources for tech jobs here: https://lnkd.in/gbAcWzyr Please add your favorite websites for open jobs in the comments, this is a huge help for job seekers!

"By trying to do too much, you risk not doing enough" This advice from Peggy Noonan was in a political context, but it's especially true for tech workers. As an engineer, you must learn a dizzying number of programming languages, frameworks, and libraries. Any attempt to "learn it all" is not only futile but also counterproductive. You can't hold down a job if you spend all your time trying to learn. So what is a curious engineer to do? Instead of following technologies, follow people. Learn what the people around you are learning (especially if they're Senior+ and have a track record of success). My full answer (along with great answers from Lalit Kundu and Alex Chiou): https://lnkd.in/gWc3estw

Too many engineers glorify the Product Management job when in reality, most PMs add zero value and will be first in line for layoffs. Don't get me wrong. A great PM can be worth their weight in gold, but very few PMs reach that level. I can understand the appeal of product management: they define the product strategy, spend all day talking to smart people, and discover user insights. Then they simply wave their hands and get engineers to do the work. But this is not the reality, especially for junior PMs. Junior PMs have pretty awful jobs since they need to influence the direction of the product without any meaningful authority. As a result, they often end up slowing things down instead of helping the team. Here's the proper way to think about the transition from eng to PM: https://lnkd.in/gcSwE2bG