Building Relationships Q&A and Videos

How can I map out what to do in the first 90 days in a new role (staff and senior staff) and a new job (given factors like new codebase, new processes, people, and work ethics), especially when the domain and coding language are also new?

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 , 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!

With all the remote work, more people are opting to not use cameras in meetings. On one hand that means you can not have to worry about looking put together, but on the other hand it makes remote work more painful

Questions for the community:

• do you prefer cameras on or off?
• if your team is primarily a camera off, do you think its worth it to ask for camera on?
• Do you find meetings more effective with cameras on?
• How does this change if you are fully remote vs. hybrid/in person

When I say meetings, I am referring to small huddles/quick zoom call with your coworker(s) to help or ask for help on some bug or brainstorm stuff. By large no one really pays a ton of attention in large more formal meetings anyways

I am a senior on my team of 6 engineers. There is one more senior on the team apart from a tech lead who leads the technical projects in the team. I have been on this team and company for a year now, and i am generally a very driven person. I started noticing that this other senior engineer competes with me for everything, he has also been rude to me on occasions (on a private call when no one else could listen) and generally plays politics like leaving me out of important discussions, trying to one-up on me over every little thing. I have tried quite a bit to ignore him but he doesn't let up. It's triggering my survival instincts and I am more stressed than usual nowadays.

Does anyone have any advice? Basically i want to be the high performer that i am without worrying about someone who is trying to sabotage me.

Opinions welcome, thanks in advance!

Hello everyone,

I'm reaching out to this community seeking advice and insights as I consider a significant career transition. Currently, I am working in software engineering, but I've recently completed my master's degree with a core focus on Reinforcement Learning and Artificial Intelligence.

Throughout my academic journey, I've developed a strong passion for AI/ML, and now, I'm eager to pivot my career in this direction. While I've gained substantial experience in software development, I believe that transitioning to a team more aligned with AI/ML will allow me to fully utilize my skills and contribute more meaningfully to the field.

I understand that networking plays a crucial role in such transitions. However, I'm looking for guidance on the best practices for connecting with AI/ML engineering managers. I am particularly interested in learning about:

1. Effective ways to initiate conversations with AI/ML leaders, especially when coming from a different technical background.
2. Strategies to demonstrate my competence and enthusiasm for AI/ML, despite my primary experience being in software engineering.
3. Insights into the challenges and expectations specific to AI/ML teams that I might not be aware of coming from a different specialization.

Additionally, I'd love to hear any personal stories or experiences about making a similar transition. What were your challenges, and how did you overcome them? How did you leverage your previous experience during this shift?

I appreciate any advice or connections you might offer. Please feel free to reach out to me directly if you're open to a conversation.

Thank you for your time and support!

Best regards

When I joined the startup, I was the most experienced engineer and I had two junior engineers working with me. At that point, I had the choice to make architecture decisions and the CTO would work with me to design new systems. The systems I created have worked well, it has been 1 year now and there are no issues with them.

The company has grown and we have hired a lot of seniors now. I have not been included in any new discussions like hiring, the product roadmap. Even on a project where I had taken the lead on it from a very long time (I was not assigned to it, I just assumed the ownership) now the CTO wants the opinion of another senior engineer.

I'm good at infra work and have setup infra when the senior engineers are not able to do it. I'm not sure about my level either as during the 1:1s I was level as an upper mid level while my colleagues believe I'm senior. It shouldn't really matter as I want to just write code and help others, but with a proper title, I think people might take me more seriously.

When speaking to the CTO about my performance, they believe that I'm doing good and probably I'm being too hard on myself. I do know I have dropped the ball at times as I have too much on my plate at times.

I'm just scared that I'm becoming becoming less relevant in the company & really want to increase my influence.

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.

• What do you do to find someone to mentor?
  • Anything that's worked really well?
  • Anything that's not worked well?
• What do you do to qualify a potential mentee to make sure both you and they will be successful?

I recently saw a talk by someone L8 at my company. They believe everyone should mentor someone. It's not only a great way to improve at growing others, but also a great way to grow yourself.

So I'd like to try it out but am not entirely sure how to get started.

P.S. Yes, I've Googled this already. Asking a more vague question here because I've found all you tend to give really good insights that I'd never think of even asking for.

Hi Team,

My team currently consists of 2 Pods, for one of which I'm a Pod Leader for and a good friend of mine being a Pod lead for other. I've been helping the other lead consistently in making better design decisions and providing right set of resources to help aid in making right decisions. I also consistently review their documents pre-design reviews, and have contributed to close to 50% of design decisions taken. However, I have lately been feeling this consistent help from my end would end up affecting my promo path (Due to team needing only 1 SE3 at the moment), I do not get any open credits for this except random one off instances where my friend mentions that he discussed xyz with me.

My current scenario is that If i stop helping abruptly it might seem odd, and can affect overall team's health, but at same time i feel a bit demotivated with the lack of credit as this takes decent amount of bandwidth (5-6Hrs a week).

How can I best navigate this situation where I can help as well as get credited for the help I provide?

I work in a team of 10-12 application scientists. Our skip was the CTO of the company until a month ago. There has been a temporary reorg recently and our new skip is the SVP of product. I am assuming he is not aware of all the things we are working on (or particularly I am doing) except may be a few selected team highlights. I want to introduce myself and build a rapport for more fruitful interactions with the skip and the bigger product team in near future. Since everyone in our team (including our manager, CTO, new skip and most of the company) are all remote, I feel developing and cultivating such relationships requires extra effort.

And, in general, how would you start a conversation and build a relationship with engineers/scientists/executives in other teams with whom you might not have worked with yet but want to be in their network?

Hi all, I need an advice on quite a random thing. I recently changed teams at Amazon. Since I shared a close bond with my previous team members, I continue to hang out with them sometimes and my ex-manager is quite aware of it. (He was new, and has worked with the team for less than an year)

Is it fine if I continue engaging with old friends, or does it make me look bad from professional aspect?

Hey folks have started out on my first full-time job as an Early Career SWE at a Big Tech Company. Wanted to ask what is the ideal line of progress in terms of as months pass by.

For example in 3 months at least I should be capable of doing XYZ things.. in 6 months XYZ things... and within a year's time XYZ things independently.

I ask this question mainly since it's going to be close to 5 months of joining and I do require handholding with other peers on the team my aim is to operate as independently as possible. One of the feedbacks in the first quarterly check-in was to go in full depth for the debugging and independently create test plans for the work assigned before asking questions.

As for the creation of test plans yes since the codebase is too large I do tend to ask other team members if there is an existing functionality that can be leveraged or in case I get stuck as to what to do ahead or when I don't understand something.

The good feedback was the questions I asked were formed and detailed.

From the feedback, I am kind of at a crossroads in understanding whether I should ask questions or not ask questions and also crippled with self-doubt

Another pointer was how to be assertive in the sense I tend to be scared to share my ideology or idea about how we can potentially do something. Communicating with peers also seems intimidating especially Senior or Lead members or Manager too.

Is there a more proper way to communicate/send messages? The primary mode of communication is Slack and at times threads get bulky.

Any tips to understand the feedback properly and improve on the above pointers or in general are highly appreciated. I hope to get better at being a good SWE.

Well, I've read the choosing the right team blog here on Taro and I've a more extended question to it.

The team I'm working with is not focused in communicating in a high quality level or a thought process. Probably the leadership is fearing job security and impostor syndrome such that there is no process or documentation followed. Even the way the normal communication is happening is very weak.
Though everyone is well-paid the direction is not clear enough.

The other day I was learning GMAT syllabus especially the verbal section and I can see the difference in the lingo and effective communication.

Please share your thoughts.

My current conversations look like:

• Conversation about our current roles/background/goals
• Learning about each other

However, I feel like a lot of conversation tends to be more surface-level and conversation tends to die down in the later half of the meeting. I'm not sure about how to

1. have deeper conversations

2. what kinds of questions I should be thinking about, and

3. what mindset should I keep to have deeper/meaningful conversations

Some hurdles I find:

• There might be a big difference in our roles (for eg. system eng and product manager)
• There might be differences in seniority where I feel like I feel like I'm not able to provide enough value to my match (I might not be able to provide any value/insight into any challenges/goals of my match)

Question was inspired by . In it, he talked about how he was able to get his role at Course Hero because it was a scrappy startup when he joined, and was willing to take bets.

Do you have advice on how to find similar startups? And also connect with startup founders (and not get ghosted)?

Some consequent questions:

1. How do you know if a startup is scrappy or if it is shady/dysfunctional?
2. Are there any resources on Taro to connect with founders?

Thanks for any advice or help!

I am a mid-level developer. I am attending a tech event for the first time. Could you provide some tips on how to network effectively in the event? I feel like I don't have anything to talk about. Mostly my mind goes blank.

I've recently joined a medical robotics startup as an Embedded Software Engineer after working for four years in large organizations in the wireless and semiconductor domain. I'm grateful for the full-time role and have already started contributing positively.

I have taken the initiative in documenting processes and setting standards, which my manager appreciates. However, my curiosity about the business side led me to arrange brief interviews with all employees, including the CEO. This was well-received by the engineering team, but caused concerns with the non-engineering staff, leading to a reprimand for inappropriate conduct.

Previously, I endured a difficult experience as a contractor with non-technical managers who were dissatisfied with my work despite my hard efforts, failing to convert me to full-time. I now find myself in a better situation but am still haunted by past experiences and need guidance to navigate this new environment.

Could you provide advice on how to integrate into the startup culture and reconcile my curiosity for learning with appropriate professional conduct? How can I heal from past trauma while embracing new challenges and opportunities in my current role?

I live in orange county, CA. I have about 30 years of tech experience where I was a software engineer for most of these 30 years. I also had couple of jobs as manager leading a team of software engineers. For last 5 years, I have been working as a senior software support engineer for a local company here in Orange County, CA.

So I would rather be software engineer than be in a support role where I just do mindless support of enterprise software. And its not very challenging either. So when I started working for this company, 5 years ago, I started to teach myself angular and typescript. Worked on a project and deployed it live on the website and learnt a lot. And really enjoyed programming.

But then 1 year ago, I started applying for actual jobs in angular programming and got zero response. Zero emails from the companies. Zero interviews from the companies. That was very scary. So a friend who works at Microsoft, advised to prepare and apply for SWE job at Microsoft. She mentioned that MS would not care about lack of my latest/greatest experience. If I pass the coding interview, I have a good chance event to get an entry level SWE job which is better than what I am doing these days.

Another reason I would like to work at MS, is that all my 30 years I have worked for midsize companies. I would like to work at MS because I will be surrounded by really smart engineers and people.

I am lucky to have a job, Pay the bills and have health insurance for me and my family. A year ago I started the interview prep, leet code, algoexpert etc. But then for some reason for last 4 months, its really hard for me to study. May be its my age. May be I get very tired after all day of work, and just watch mindless TV and eat sugary snacks and waste my time and health away.

When I used to work on my angular skill sets I was really energized. I had small tasks already in my queue. I could easily get in the flow when programming.

But My highest priority right now is to get a job at Microsoft as a SWE so that I have job part taken care of. Then after that I could work on side projects so that is why I am focused on interview prep but that is not dopaminergic for me. If I work on interview Prep and work on a side project, that could be distracting and not very focused effort (I think)

I feel depressed about my career. Some of my friends are directors, VPs, CIOs for medium to large companies. Here I am still angling for mediocre DEV jobs.

Any how, here at Taro, I would like to meet, interact with engineers, and really find my passion back.

I would really like to join a mastermind here at Taro, where I could hangout with engineers where we could have a conference all once or twice a month, motivate each other, etc.

Thanks for reading..

I have realized that my current role is not aligning with my interests due to various reasons, including unsupportive teammates and limited learning opportunities. I am waiting for the right opportunity to transition to a different team and take on a completely new role. In the meantime, I’m working on building side projects with respect to my new role. This transition might take around 6 months to 1 year.

While I am here with my current team, I am trying to fulfill the minimum job requirements. My question is whether I should maintain a decent rapport with my current teammates during this time, such as having 1:1 meetings.

Additionally, I would like to know what kind of teammates are worth connecting with, and how much time and effort should be invested in maintaining those connections when I know this is not the right place for me.