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How to uplevel understanding of lead's questions

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Senior Software Engineer at Taro Community2 months ago

I struggle sometimes to understand leadership's points or questions. If I interpret it as-is, the answer is too detailed or in-depth for their purpose. If I poke some more, with some back and forth, I may get the question; but when I look around for other more senior eng, they don't seem to have this issue. I was told I need to uplevel my thoughts. Not sure how I go about that, anyone have been through this?

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    Tech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
    a month ago

    I'm going to be honest - "Uplevel your thoughts" seems like lazy feedback and isn't very useful 😕. I'm not entirely sure what do here, so I'll just share some ideas:

    1. Improve your English overall - I recommend this thread: "Does anybody have recommendations for English speaking, writing course/coach?
    2. Ask for help from other senior engineers - If they don't have trouble understanding leadership, you should mind meld with them and try to see how their brain works. Take 3-5 communications from leadership that you didn't understand and ask one (or more) of these senior engineers how they interpreted these comms (i.e. how did they translate it into something that's more easily understood). From there, ask them to break down how they broke down the communication mentally word-for-word/sentence-by-sentence.
    3. Use AI - ChatGPT and LLMs overall are pretty good at this corporate doublespeak-style communication. Put in the communications and ask them to translate into more layman's terms.

    Understanding very senior leadership can be tough as execs need to communicate in a more flowery and politically correct way. It can take time getting used to, especially if English isn't your first language as it is for most software engineers.