Advice for Feeling recognized in the team, while switching domain (e.g. C++ to python)

Do you do anything outside of the job role to bring yourself up to speed with the new technology? There's a couple things I'd consider:

1. Do you get a consistent push of other work minimally to keep you busy besides tech work? Adjusting into a leadership career now is not necessarily a bad move.
2. Your coworkers having style guidelines and everything is ok, but have you poked around with anyone else and asked how you can contribute more? You don't know how they want you to react if you don't ask them.

I don't want to alarm you, but I also don't want to sugar coat anything: I think you may be at risk for a PIP.

As you have mentioned in your post, a senior engineer is expected to work on big problems, ship quality work, and lead. It seems like you're not getting much of that in your team. You should have an honest conversation with your manager ASAP about your current performance and how you're trending. Check out this video here: How To Work With Your Manager To Get The Performance Review Rating You Want

If you have more time, you should watch the entire masterclass the above video is clipped from: [Masterclass] How To Work Better With Your Engineering Manager

When it comes to learning a new tech stack, check out the following thread and follow the attached resources as much as you can: "What is the effective way to understand new repository in order to make the required changes in that repo?"

Thanks, @Brad and @ Alex for your advice. I followed your advice and did implement certain things.

I got the performance appraisal today. I am not in PIP(at least Officially), but also I am not in one of the averages.

I am noting myself as I am in PIP and would like to improve myself to a high-performing engineer next year.

I guess I will be using a lot of the content here to improve my performance. The key point that my manager said is communication. He said I am working in complex technical things like a senior but his peers and managers are not able to know about it. That is why I need to communicate what I am doing to everyone such that it becomes easy for him to pitch during my appraisal.

I don't want to nitpick but this year my managers changed twice so it was tough for me to adjust to this change. I was confused by every change.

Help me to direct me to articles and specific blogs to improve in writing quick documents or articles of what I have done in my work and growing

Thanks for sharing the update! It sucks that you're not fully meeting expectations, but I'm really glad you aren't formally on a PIP. This means that improving the situation should be quite feasible.

Your feedback around visibility and communication is fortunately something I have seen many times before which is also fairly fixable (at least from my experience). The resource that immediately came to my mind was this one: "How to get more visibility on work?". While Meta is admittedly an outlier with its usage of Workplace, the habit of writing weekly to biweekly project updates is a behavior that can be translated to pretty much every tech company.

Another thing I recommend doing is making extremely high-quality technical design docs and socializing them with the team. You can learn how to do that with my course here: [Course] Frontend System Design Masterclass - Building Playlists. While it is front-end focused, all of the underlying core concepts are applicable to literally any stack. Following the advice of the course has 2 benefits:

• It produces a clear artifact with the design doc that shows your technical depth in great detail
• The meetings you hold to optimize your docs further build up your presence among the team, giving you the opportunity to show your sharp technical communication firsthand and definitively prove to everyone that you're a rock-solid senior engineer

Best of luck! I hope your next update is about how your manager's feedback of you has greatly improved. 💪

I'm going to second what Alex has said here. As a senior, you need to be communicative and get yourself out there. To an extent, you also need to start advising the business on trends they should look at adopting and how that should be implemented in the business.

You definitely want to start with what Alex has said though and just increase your visibility within the team through design documents, mentoring, great code review feedback, and giving managers regular, but concise updates on how things are going across the project portfolio.

One thing to keep in mind is that all managers have a different update cadence as well as workers, so just have a talk with them about what they feel is appropriate.

I get the feeling once you dial this in, you should be in a good place. This is something that is so easy to fix and I expect it to happen naturally. Think about it this way, I had something happen in my business earlier today and first thing I did was communicate with my business partner and set up a meeting.

Remember your manager and coworkers are your partners and you want to work together with them to drive the best business outcomes possible.