Building Relationships Q&A and Videos

On H1B visa. New to US. I need some information on what other H1Bs are doing related to finances, buying a house, green card etc. Unfortunately, only people I know are the ones from my office. I have tried meetup apps and still have not gotten anyone with experience in the topics that I have mentioned. I have some senior collegues who are/were on H1B. Is it okay to ask these personal questions? All we have are office team lunches. When to bring up these questions? How to keep in touch with them even after we leave the team/company?

DoorDash has a tradition where your manager sends a "Dashiversary" email to the entire company on your work anniversaries. The manager creates a Google doc and collects notes & photos from your colleagues and cross-functional partners, then adds his/her own note at the top of the email. Given the impact of Deep Thanks, what should I write in these notes to leverage these opportunities to build relationships?

I want to highlight the good work a coworker has done for me by helping me out a lot and being really attentive and on top of things. Per The Power of Thanks, I want to let their manager know. We don't have ThanksBot, so I'll be thanking via email. Do I CC my peer, or just my own manager in my email to my peer's manager? Or do I address the email to my peer and CC their manager and my manager? Thanks!

I'm more of an extrovert, while my tech lead is more of an introvert. I feel like our relationship isn't as open and honest as it should be, particularly around sharing feedback. They often times have major feedback for me, but it will come too late, either deep into project execution or as late as performance review. How can I make this relationship more fluid, so I can get feedback to improve earlier?

I have been tasked to port a project of porting a ML project that has been running on someone's laptop to the cloud and make it production ready. It is very difficult for this person to give the full picture of the process. This could be due to he is not actually remembering very well, given that the project has been actually done 1 year ago, or he doesn't like to lose the single point of failure / control situation. I actually don't care about the reason and I want to get this project to success. How may I deal with this situation? Current blocker is that I am unable to properly estimate the time it may take for this project.

I'm exploring distance MBA courses to enhance my career as a software engineer. Could you recommend a program that offers a strong alumni network, opportunities for leadership development, and a comprehensive curriculum in engineering management? I'm particularly interested in globally recognized institutions like Indian School of Business or IIM, but I'm open to suggestions for the best fit. My goal is to improve my organizational skills, gain business acumen, and expand my network to excel in leadership roles.

I am a Staff Engineer and the Principal Engineer always gives me feedback in meetings. How do I politely ask him to do it in private or offline in chat? The engineer referred me in the company and I think the intent is positive, but I feel threatened and embarrassed all the time. Also my credibility always goes to zero level. Key Points I would like to Keep in Mind: Tone: Keep your tone appreciative and non-confrontational. The goal is to make it a collaborative request rather than a criticism. Timing: Raise this when the Principal Engineer is not busy or in a meeting. Be Open: Acknowledge their current style and express willingness to work together on finding a middle ground. What do you think about something like that? > ###### Hi [Principal Engineer's Name], > > I really value your feedback and the insights you share during our meetings. They’ve been incredibly helpful in refining my work. > That said, I’d like to ask if it might be possible to provide me feedback privately or offline in the future—for example, via chat or a quick one-on-one. I find it easier to process and act on the feedback in a focused setting. > > Let me know if that works for you, and thank you again for taking the time to share your thoughts. I really appreciate it!

Hi Taro staff, I wanted to know if there are any other study groups running? The ones I have seen with system design seemed more passive as of late and prior had some really good ones for DSA/technical interview prep. Wondering who will run the next round of events, has this just rotated with volunteer members organizing this?

Our office in Bellevue, WA has a beer pub next to it, is it common for people to get team building starting after work with a pizza or a draft IPA in company like Meta?

My ex-manager used to gaslight me often and I've endured covert abuse for 2 years in his unit. I have no idea what I was going through but I thought to fix the situation by being kind and by doing all the work. I used to question certain aspects that hinder my work in my 1-on-1 meetings and I felt isolated from support and the 1-0n-1s are draining & not progressing. I've experienced area leads taking my credit and the line manager enabling such behaviors. When questioned, I was told "I know the area lead from years, I will not support you on this matter" Right after 3 months, on the TELL day, I was moved to a different organization (thanks to my mentor for picking me up from the outlist). On the last handover day, toxic line manager told me "that the same thing would happen to me again and to any employee, the most important thing is the relationship with the line manager and I didn't had a good relationship with him since the beginning. He also told me that I might be technically best but he doesn't like my behaviors and tone. He just showed what he can do as a line manager and I will not let you grow." Coming from an over-protective background and with a good girl complex, I usually minded my business at work and stayed out of politics, just giving my 101% to my area and helping others naturally. I was moved out of the area where I created a lot of impact in just 2 years despite the lack of support from my line manager. I wonder how a person's subjective evaluation and lack of integrity can ruin a person's career and well-being. I go to work to do some useful work for the company but not build relationships with managers or others. Meaningful connections can be byproducts but they are not the key goals in my opinion. I wonder why he has chosen this gaslighting behavior over me and what might have done to prevent such situations in the future. Can anyone suggest how I should move on and how to grow from this scenario? I really don't need sympathy guys but I need tools and skillset to handle such people.

I recently was told to remove languages on my LinkedIn to avoid lowballing third-party recruiters are even internal recruiters from contacting me to apply for jobs at their respective companies. At least the pay is higher now than low level jobs, but they are not in my tech stack -- I do everything but Java and Android, and I’m highly specialized in iOS development and AI/ML for a good number of years. What should I do? it looks like some recruiters just don’t read your profile well enough, but will direct message you. Or maybe I’m just not explicit enough. People will just send you a bunch of crap anyway it’s just a lot of noise to filter and I’ve had friends from MIT told me that they actively choose not to use Linkedin because it ends up being just a spam box for everything. Thoughts?

I love our Slack channel. I also joined quite a few others helping SWEs get hired into tech, and byfar, Taro is one of the most superior ones due to the quality of its founders both on the forum itself as a product, courses (a wealth of information) and very supportive Slack channel. How much is Taro investing monthly on supporting paid members through Slack? In general it seems Taro is investing in what it builds for members quite well, and it is no question why they are a YC-backed company. I was shocked to find out another platform spent $100K on their members to keep it free, but the quality of everything they provided was completely lackluster, with many people complaining asking to be removed from their channel. I found this quite alarming and decided no longer to participate there as I think the founders don't really know how to run a business, treat highly technical people with the services they were providing, and don't know how to do the basics of online community management.

Hi everyone, for next 6 months, I will most probably be working on projects which are C/C heavy. For example, project may involve discussing things with A and B teams, finding an engineering design from the abstractions the teams are using and execute it. There might not be much complex items from code perspective and execution may look simple. While projects like these would give me good credits in terms of cross-team collaboration and communication, I want to be technically competent. Looking back after next 6 months, I don't want to feel bad that from code/eng perspective, I didn't do anything complex. I understand that probably I should ask my manager for complex/craft heavy item, probably at least once per half but I see some engineers in queue for promotion so there is no guarantee for that. Any suggestion from the community would help a lot. Thanks!

I already have great working relationships with several staff engineers in my org, but I'd like to take it a step further and enter a formal mentorship with them. How can I go about this in a natural way?

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!

In your experience, what methods worked best to motivate engineers that don't report to you or work on a daily basis? As a Staff engineer, I need to advocate and motivate engineers in my span to adopt new tools or processes. The main challenge is around building rapport with the remote team that are mostly new hires or I didn't interact a whole lot earlier. While this questions, majorly sounds how to influence without authority. I am looking for more concrete steps for a quick win while I work on the culture part as a whole.

My company has a structure where new hires with limited experience are assigned both a manager and a mentor. While the mentor doesn't manage you directly, they help onboard, provide business context, and often review your work. It's a formal arrangement that's hard to change. Nine months into my job, I’m not a fan of my mentor. While competent, he’s rude, especially in technical discussions. When he disagrees with something, he aggressively asks "why would you do it that way?" instead of giving constructive feedback. This often turns discussions into confrontations rather than collaborative problem-solving. He’s helpful with business context, but he speeds through unfamiliar topics and reacts with scorn if I ask for clarification. He’s also prescriptive with how tasks should be done, even when I ask general questions, which adds to the complexity. Moreover, I don’t find him useful as a mentor. While he's better with business context and attention to detail, I don't find his communication skills or career progression worth emulating. He's pretty much just a shitty extra layer of management. I’m considering a few ways to address this: Directly communicating my frustrations to him. This is possible, but I doubt he’d take it well and might turn it back on me for cases where I had bad ideas or made mistakes. Talking to my manager. He is far more approachable and supportive than my mentor, and I'd be comfortable talking to him about this (of course, with less charged language than I use here). But my manager and mentor don’t have a good relationship (as the mentor drunkenly admitted to me once during a team event), so I’m unsure how this would play out. I'd be concerned the net result is that my mentor would just get more frustrated and aggressive. Also, I'd be slightly concerned somehow this feedback could hurt my mentor's career or performance eval, and even though I don't like working with him, I don't actively want to cause harm to him. Switching teams, which I’ve been considering for unrelated reasons about not thinking the team's work is a good fit. I've talked to my manager about this possibility and he supports me doing so next year if I still find the team a bad fit. This will get me away from the mentor, but I’d lose an amazing manager, and could have bad teammates on the next team. Curious to hear others' perspectives. Thanks!

I am new, what are the most effective ways to meet and build relationships with people across different teams in a large company? Any tips or experiences on navigating cross-functional interactions and expanding your internal network?

They say that you should add value to people in your network before asking them for a favour. I have networked aggressively past 6 months over coffee chats, meetups, training programs and conferences. The only value I have been able to add is exchange my ideas and thoughts. I have 2 questions: What other type of value can I add in this market when people are not really looking to hire? At what point do I ask for a favour which is a referral to a job position?

We are a small team of engineers under a tech lead. This tech lead has other small teams under him in addition to ours. The techlead is extremely knowledgeable and is a 10x engineer pushing code everyday. The problem is he does not share his knowledge nor is he approachable. Whenever we try to ask him a question, we get a question back in return which is extremely domain specific and would require his level of expertise to answer in the first place. The morale in the team is low to the point where everyone just avoids asking him any questions until the very end. How does one approach and succeed in this situation?

If someone makes an introduction to someone who is in another country, how do you then nurture that virtual connection if you dont have direct opportunities to work with that person?

It's easy building relationships within your own team but how do you build relationships across other teams whom you do not work with on a daily basis?

Suppose I am an intern on the team. If someone in my team helps me out, should I thank them directly, or would it be better to show the appreciation in a team meeting/team slack?