Building Relationships Q&A and Videos

I see many experienced developers finding flaws in the existing architecture and also refactoring them to make it much better. I don't think I have yet gained the ability to identify loop holes in complex projects. However, I am able to fix issues if someone else calls them out pretty quickly. How can I improve on this? What are some good resources to develop this skill?

I moved to the Bay Area to be within a denser network. However, everyone is working within their own silos, and it's hard to break them out so you can develop a deeper relationship with them. Can you recommend some good platforms to network with other engineers in the Bay Area? I would like to meet other engineers at a similar level and working within a similar space. I've already tried some basic things which I didn’t find much value from: Went to some public meetups from online sites like Meetup.com which claimed that there will be a lot of great engineers there. Once I went to these, the level of engineers didn’t match my expectations. The conversations were more generic and centered around TC. Get in touch with as many alumni from my college as possible.

Here's the experience I have so far with leadership: I schedule meetings between teammates to clarify things for everyone when people seem to be lost or start asking a lot of questions in a trend. This usually helps unblock them. Most of my success comes from cross-team communications in terms of knowing and finding the right people for local tasks. I also jump on opportunities myself which usually end with good results. But I haven't yet been able to make a significant impact within my own team. And here's more details about my current team: My team is myself, a PM, one full-time developer, and two other developers/Solution Architects that juggle other responsibilities part-time. I've had issues with a particular person who leans too aggressively sometimes questioning the impact of the work items I'm proposing. I'm able to work it out with them, but this relationship could probably be improved further.

The leadership principle is as follows: > Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting. Leaders have conviction and are tenacious. They do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly. I have a hard time with this, e.g. my team is debating between two JavaScript frameworks. How do I stay firm in the decision while keeping others positive?

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?

When I've been helpful in the past, word quickly spread and a bunch of random engineers started pinging me for help, sometimes aggressively. Sometimes people would delegate grunt work like asking me to test their PRs that do library upgrades instead of testing them themselves. Or asking me to debug their dev environments because they heard I fixed another engineer's dev environment. Sometimes it'll just be asking for expedited code reviews even though I have no domain knowledge on their PRs. We work on the same platform, but are not on the same team or often even the same org. There are only so many hours in the day and I need to get my own work done as well. How do you decide who to help and under what circumstances? Advice on how to push back without damaging the relationship? As far as I can tell, it looks like anyone from E4 through E7 are the ones making these requests.

The launch of a new AI-based hardware product, Friend, went viral yesterday on Twitter/X: Most of the reactions I saw online have been very negative. The common complaint is that Friend creates a dystopian future of companionship with intrusive technology. Would love to hear your thoughts! "Friend" is a wearable pendant around your neck that "purportedly listens to everything you say and responds to you 'conversationally' via a chat window on your phone" Friend connects to your phone via Bluetooth and tries to develop a personality based on listening to what you say and do. It costs $99 and the product is ~6 months out: pre-orders start shipping in Q1 2025. The video on Twitter has been viewed 22M times! That's good marketing. I'll share my thoughts first.