Building Relationships Q&A and Videos

I just finished my first week at my first Big Tech company. I onboarded with another engineer who I'm working closely with on a series of projects. That engineer was really helpful to me this week in getting my environment set up. He knows the tools and frameworks we'll be using a lot better than I do so I'm really grateful he's around to help me. I've thanked him a lot on Slack privately and on our video calls. I'd like to publicly thank him on the company directory. My concern is that if I do that, our manager might see me as the weaker engineer of the two (which I am right now).

Should I let that stop me from publicly thanking him?

Thanks in advance!

My team has 1 E5 iOS (me), 1 E5 Android, 1 E4 iOS, 1 E4 Android, and several backend engineers. We also have a few web engineers, but I don't work with them.

I optimize for quality even if it takes more time, while my E4 iOS optimizes for speed (often cutting corners, skimping on testing, neglecting edge cases, etc.). My E5 Android's quality is somewhere in the middle of my E4 iOS's and mine, but he takes a lot longer than me on comparable tasks.

My E5 Android tends to push tasks onto others, with the excuse that he "doesn't have time". For example, our team's manager wanted our mobile engineers to learn the backend, so she specifically assigned a backend task to the E5 Android engineer. However, in a 1:1, the Android engineer asked me to take that backend task "if I have time" -- I had finished my iOS tasks early, so I technically had time, but I was hoping to work on a side project to demonstrate E6 scope. When I mentioned that I didn't have time because I was writing a 1-pager, he asked me to share it with him. Then he said we should focus on finishing our existing projects before starting new ones and added a lot of negative comments to my 1-pager, which made it more difficult for me to get buy-in from other engineers.

My team's EM had told me I could DRI a particular project I was excited about. However, the E5 Android convinced our PM that we should finish existing projects before starting new ones, so they forced me to deprioritize the project I was excited about to work on some boring E4 tasks. My E4 iOS was busy with another project, so he didn't have the bandwidth to take those tasks. However, I was hoping the E4 could take those E4 tasks after he finished his current project.

Do you have an tips on how to navigate this? I get the impression that the E5 Android pushes a lot of tasks onto the E4 Android as well, based on the latter's annoyed look in meetings when it happens.

My team will start our H2 scoping soon. Apparently the E5 Android engineer already set expectations with my team's EM that Android will take a lot longer than iOS for that project that I'll DRI.