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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 profe

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.

rpandey1234 4y ago
Appreciate the feedback! You're right that a lot of Taro is powered by our own experiences for now, which comes with any biases we have. For the video you mentioned in particular about starting in big tech, I believe that's only on my YouTube (not Taro), where I try to share stronger opinions to a larger audience. 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).
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
calvinmorrison 4y ago
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? 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.
- abirch 4y ago
  The difficult thing is seeing the forest from the trees. It's great that some advice worked for a particular person in a particular situation. It's impossible to have principal component analysis of what really worked. 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?
- mhink 4y ago
  As a side note: check out /r/ExperiencedDevs.
  - rpandey1234 4y ago
    I wasn't aware of this subreddit, thanks.
  - calvinmorrison 4y ago
    Nice. anyone have suggestions for 'i was a dev now i work in a businesss facing role'?
    - tfehring 4y ago
      There might be a subreddit for your specific business-facing role, e.g. /r/ProductManagement and /r/FPandA are both pretty good in my experience.
fragmede 4y ago
It's funny you mention the blind since it's the name of an another approach in the same space, teamblind.com
- cercatrova 4y ago
  TC (total compensation) or GTFO, is their oft-touted mantra, for good or ill.
  - alfiedotwtf 4y ago
    901 LC Hard, 25/8/366

rpandey1234 4y ago

Appreciate the feedback! You're right that a lot of Taro is powered by our own experiences for now, which comes with any biases we have. For the video you mentioned in particular about starting in big tech, I believe that's only on my YouTube (not Taro), where I try to share stronger opinions to a larger audience. 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).

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

calvinmorrison 4y ago

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? 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.

abirch 4y ago
The difficult thing is seeing the forest from the trees. It's great that some advice worked for a particular person in a particular situation. It's impossible to have principal component analysis of what really worked. 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?
mhink 4y ago
As a side note: check out /r/ExperiencedDevs.
- rpandey1234 4y ago
  I wasn't aware of this subreddit, thanks.
- calvinmorrison 4y ago
  Nice. anyone have suggestions for 'i was a dev now i work in a businesss facing role'?
  - tfehring 4y ago
    There might be a subreddit for your specific business-facing role, e.g. /r/ProductManagement and /r/FPandA are both pretty good in my experience.

fragmede 4y ago

It's funny you mention the blind since it's the name of an another approach in the same space, teamblind.com

cercatrova 4y ago
TC (total compensation) or GTFO, is their oft-touted mantra, for good or ill.
- alfiedotwtf 4y ago
  901 LC Hard, 25/8/366