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Rahul Pandey, former staff engineer at Meta, credits much of his career trajectory to good fortune. But you can still make your own luck — at least in part.
“You can manufacture luck in the sense of being curious about the people and the opportunities around you,” Pandey said on an episode of “The Developing Dev” podcast.
Pandey’s path through tech started right out of college, when he joined a startup run by one of his former professors at Stanford. From there, he bounced from Pinterest to Meta, where he eventually climbed to staff engineer before leaving to start Taro, a YC-backed startup that offers career coaching to software engineers.
To line up those kinds of opportunities takes a degree of luck, Pandey acknowledged. But they’re more likely to come if you develop a network — and do it by being genuine, he said. By reaching out on the basis of real curiosity and making sure you have something to share, you can avoid making a cold reach-out feel clinical.
“Me doing a lot of the job hops in my career have come from just, again, being kind of in the know on — what are the people doing that I respect?” he said. “And so I think that can be a repeatable algorithm or repeatable process that’s not dependent on luck. Just change your approach to networking or talking to people, and that’s a really good way to manufacture luck.”
If your conversations feel stilted, Pandey suggests evaluating whether there’s an equal balance of give-and-take.
“I do think that one of the best ways to develop a relationship with someone is not just by asking a ton of questions or asking for mentorship,” he said. “A really good way to develop a relationship is say, ‘Hey, here’s something I’ve worked on which might be interesting to you.'”
Pandey said the strategy of “being thoughtful about what are you sharing” makes the speaker more likely to build productive relationships.
“You create gravity,” he said. “People gravitate toward you because they want to get your opinion on things, too. So it’s like a two-way street.”
When first deciding to start his career at a fledgling company, Pandey said he felt it was a high-risk, high-reward option.
On the one hand, “it could go really, really well,” he said; but even in the worst case, it’d be a “good story to tell.”
“I felt like it was almost too good of a story to pass up. I could be one of 10,000 or 20,000 engineers in Big Tech if I go join Google or Microsoft or Meta — and I had received offers at all of them,” Pandey said. “But then I felt like, okay, this is a story where I had this connection, relationship with the professor. He trusts me, I trust him, and it just feels like a Silicon Valley unique story.”
Pandey said he used a decision-making framework of thinking of his career paths being either a one-way or a two-way door. That helped him decide between gambling on a startup or going the more traditional (and usually more secure) route of signing on with a big-name company.
“Most things in your career are two-way doors, in the sense that you try it out, you learn something, you experiment, and then you can always back out,” he said. “You can always decide to leave the startup and then go to Big Tech if needed, so that was one consideration.'”
Another consideration: Pandey had already taken on an internship with Meta the summer before his graduation and felt like he’d already earned a level of “approval” from Big Tech. Also important, he added, was the “often overlooked” storytelling potential of the riskier route.
“The narrative that you can create about what you did, why you did it, and why it’s interesting — that is incredibly powerful,” Pandey said. He got a lot of mileage out of being able to describe his experience as an “enterprising young engineer” who “took a bet on a startup,” he added.
When you’re on the precipice of a big career decision, Pandey suggested it could be useful to consider what might eventually be the better story. Those opportunities, he added, are typically the ones that allow you to meet more people and take on unique responsibilities.
“One of the things I tell people, on Taro or just in general when I mentor people, is that if you have a choice between A and B, and you feel like A is the one which will give you exposure to more unique opportunity, unique people, unique stories — that’s a really good argument to pick option A,” Pandey said, “because it just will broaden your perspective and give you that storytelling ability.”
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