Is it okay to consider switching teams if I’m not having vibing with my teammates?

Question

I joined a big tech company 6 months ago. The project is good, but I don’t like the people. It is a very small team with one senior engineer and 3 of us juniors, and that senior (who is mentoring all 3 of us) doesn’t treat me well, doesn’t trust me and always makes me feel inferior when I ask him questions. It feels very toxic. I want to enjoy my work and be excited to come to work everyday. But I see myself complaining about my team a lot recently and I feel very drained.

I have an interview coming up in 3 weeks, I don’t think I can prepare well if my mental state is bad. I’m considering switching teams since I’ve lost touch with leetcode and I’m not confident in clearing the interviews with this drained energy.

Any suggestions would be very helpful!

Alex Chiou · Accepted Answer

It's 100% okay, but switching teams so early can be logistically difficulty, especially for a SW1. At Meta, it was almost impossible to switch until you had minimum 1 year tenure on your current team.

In terms of working with the toxic senior engineer, the first thing I recommend doing is talking to your junior peers and seeing how they feel about the TL. If they also don't like him, then he's certainly the problem and you either need to jump ship or escalate (i.e. talk to your manager). Check out a similar thread here (I recommend the linked discussions from there too): "How to work with a non-helpful tech lead?"

I do recommend spending some amount of time trying to defuse the situation as it's not sustainable to run away whenever a bad teammate appears. There's tons of people like this in Big Tech in particular as it's so political. You will eventually have to learn how to deal with them, or you will be switching teams every 6 months.

Is it okay to consider switching teams if I’m not having vibing with my teammates?

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