Rahul Pandey
The best software engineers: learn every new JavaScript framework, experiment with new ML techniques, and grind out 5 Leetcode problems a day. Right?
WRONG
The key to career advancement has very little to do with how many technologies you know, or how much time you spend coding. It's about your behavior and mindset within a team to build something great.
These skills don't get taught in school, and I've learned them the hard way in my career. This channel is to share what I've learned. I also run a membership designed to supercharge engineering careers, check it out at joinTaro.com
My background:
➤ Staff Engineer at Meta (Facebook)
➤ Founding engineer at a startup that got acquired by Pinterest
➤ BS and MS from Stanford
Posts
Rahul Pandey
Hiring 45 Software Engineers in the next 2 days to validate code snippets and conduct code reviews across various programming languages. Part-time, remote-friendly work with a guaranteed response from a human 🙋
Compensation is task-based: $10-$40/accepted task, with a typical pay of $75-$150/hour. Candidates should be able to articulate why certain code is preferred + how to improve it.
US-based engineers preferred, but other countries are also fine. The entire process takes ~1 hour to start earning. Apply here: grnh.se/hg7hby0z4us
6 months ago | [YT] | 40
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Rahul Pandey
My 2-minute career advice in @ALifeEngineered's recent holiday video: improve your storytelling ability.
Storytelling is about explaining your project, your job, and your career, and why you did the things you did.
Most engineers I talk to are passive participants in their own stories. They’ll say things like
- "I got laid off"
- "I got assigned a bad project"
- "I got stuck with an incompetent manager."
This makes it sounds like you’re the victim! Instead, you should own your story and be an active participant.
The people who have the best careers are those who tell themselves a powerful story, and then they share it with others.
1 year ago | [YT] | 22
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Rahul Pandey
My favorite reviews are ones with lots of red
1 year ago | [YT] | 78
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Rahul Pandey
I asked ex-Amazonians about the good ✅ and bad 🛑 of working at Amazon
➤ @ALifeEngineered was a Principal Engineer who spent 18 years at Amazon.
✅ Amazon has a powerful writing culture that forces clarity of thought.
🛑 The lack of level granularity (especially beyond Senior) drives many talented engineers to leave the company.
➤ Sanyukta is an SDE 2 who has worked at Amazon for 4 years.
✅ High-ownership culture where you can do a lot more than your job title.
🛑 Intense work culture: Amazon has worse on-calls and work/life balance compared to peer companies.
➤ Lee was an engineer and manager across 8+ years.
✅ Amazon has 16 Leadership Principles that guide decision making and understanding across the employees.
🛑 Performance reviews and management are opaque. Ratings may be adjusted down, and ad-hoc feedback can be harder to come by.
➤ Rúben was an engineer in Germany for almost 3 years.
✅ Huge potential for impact given the scale that Amazon operates. Lots of smart people to learn from.
🛑 Employees are expected to go above and beyond their job descriptions or risk being managed out.
1 year ago | [YT] | 13
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Rahul Pandey
I asked ex-Googlers about the good ✅ and bad 🛑 of working at Google
➤ Kuai was a New Grad in 2016
✅ Google has a prestigious brand; externally, people will assume you're smart.
🛑 Googlers are too comfortable. Many don't have an ambition or desire to learn anything new.
➤ Nitesh was a Senior Eng until 2022
✅ Dev tooling is incredible
🛑 Google has a promotion-driven culture. Every perf review has many steps and people 'playing the game.'
➤ Max was a Mid-Level Eng until 2020
✅ Google had many smart people with diverse backgrounds.
🛑 Too much process to get things done, e.g. writing a design docs. Some engineers refused to do work that didn't benefit their promotion.
➤ A Stanford friend was a New Grad in 2014
✅ Google is an amazing foundation for a career. It has world-class people, cutting-edge projects, and unmatched perks.
🛑 Burdensome restrictions on activities outside of Google. He felt uncomfortable publishing a side project or blog as an employee.
➤ Anon joined Google at L3 (Entry-Level) despite having 3+ YoE
✅ People were smart. Unlike prior companies, he never felt like Googlers were illogical in discussions.
🛑 Letting a problem explode and fixing it gives you more recognition compared to preventing the problem.
1 year ago | [YT] | 23
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Rahul Pandey
This boba shop knows 💯
1 year ago | [YT] | 37
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Rahul Pandey
Real talk - Googling for things efficiently is way harder than you think
1 year ago | [YT] | 90
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Rahul Pandey
A 1% change in NVIDIA stock price is worth more than the entire value of Snapchat 😳
Just a mind-boggling scale to operate at:
➤ 95% market share of data center GPUs
➤ $61B yearly revenue, more than doubling in the past year
➤ Top CEOs brag on earnings calls about how many NVIDIA H100s they can buy
➤ In the past 100 days, NVIDIA added the value of Snapchat to its market cap every 2 days
Just a monster of a company.
1 year ago | [YT] | 71
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