Building Relationships Q&A and Videos

I’m an E5 iOS engineer at a Big Tech company. An E5 Android engineer (let’s call him A) on my team is very direct & blunt in his communication style. If he doesn’t like something, he’ll definitely let you know. An E5 backend engineer (let’s call him B) on my team is the complete opposite in his communication style. A and I collaborated on an official spec that we shared with our entire team to align everyone. B deviated from this spec in his RFC, but had tagged A and me on his proposed name change in the sample json response in his backend RFC. A called B “sloppy” for embedding the source of truth in the backend RFC’s sample json response instead of using the official spec as the source of truth. This offended B, who viewed it as “finger pointing”. From B’s perspective, it was an innocent misunderstanding that’s easily resolved since it’s so early in the project that not much code has been written. It’s a single string that can be easily changed on both the mobile and backend sides. B thinks that A is making a mountain out of a molehill. I worked closely with B last quarter and really enjoyed it. He’s extremely kind, easy-going, encouraging, and puts you at ease. If you make a mistake, he would never call it out explicitly. A seems to be the complete opposite of all those things, but I haven’t worked much with A yet. Both A and B vented to me privately for support. A thinks that B is “sloppy” for burying the changes in the backend RFC instead of updating the official spec. B thinks that A is “difficult to work with” and “points fingers” over something that can be easily resolved. We’re still in the early stages of this project, and B doesn’t know how he can work with A if A keeps finger pointing. When I suggested that A sugarcoat the “sloppy” comment, A told me that’s already the sugarcoated version. B’s planning to escalate this to our EM, since he suspects that A will as well, so he needs to “defend himself”. Any advice on how I can improve the situation? Sadly, I feel that most engineers at this company use A's "direct" approach. I personally get along fine with both of these individuals (so far, at least), so they both confided in me. I think that A is “right” that the source of truth should be in the official document, but the manner that he communicated it could have been improved (not that I’m an expert at this skill either!). Are there concrete actions that I can coach A on to make him a better teammate to work with? When another teammate (E6) previously berated B in front of the entire team, I escalated it to my EM on B's behalf and my EM had intervened. Should I just escalate this to my EM as well? There are some strong personalities on this team that are going to make this project challenging. Sigh.

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.

I'm ambivalent about attending Taro Networking events. On the one hand, the people I meet there are so talented and nice! On the other hand, what am I really getting by meeting them? Now, I know I just said something extremely transactional. That I don't seem to "get" anything from meeting people. But let's continue this line of thinking for a bit. In my mind, going to a networking event can get you 3 things: potential job referrals potential partners for side-projects and maybe even a startup (which can be considered a kind of job referral) friends/social-contact Let's assume that I'm not looking for friends, so only the first 2 are in play. What should I be doing while networking? What happens is I tell them about what I do - my role, company, stack - they do the same, we'll talk about the industry for a bit, and that's that. It seems to me like I'm not getting much out of it, probably because I'm doing it all wrong. Here's an excerpt from an email from a Data influencer I follow who makes a similar point: > Traditional networking is like a relic of the past for back when we didn't rely on the internet. > > Back then, people only recommended and worked with those they'd met in person. > > But in our digital age? > > We can instantly find and judge coders, designers, data experts, and marketers online based on their LinkedIn & portfolio sites. > > So, here's an alternative to traditional networking... > **Build things that matter. > > For example, let's say you wanted to break into genAI, or land an e-commerce job at Amazon, or work in ad-tech at Facebook or Google. > > To impress hiring managers and recruiters at these FAANG companies, you could build an AI tool for generating custom product images to help retailers advertise more efficiently. So his point is to build stuff and use that as the fodder for networking. I'm inclined to agree, since personally, my side-project cupboard is bare. I could be falling into the trap of thinking that I can/should only network once I've reached a threshold of building however. So to sum this up, how do you balance networking vs. building and can you expand on the relationship between them? Thanks!

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 know Alex has talked about his experience mentoring 10-20 folks at once and handing out work to people as he went. Videos have talked about "decentralized power" where you figure out how to do something really well and then hand it off to someone else so they grow AND you grow by managing it. I'd love to hear more folks' experience about how this has gone! I imagine there are some stories where this has been an easier process than others. For instance how have you handled a scenario where you hand someone something and then they dropped the ball because they were too busy? Or what about a scenario where you had a clear vision but early on during handoffs you didn't have a system in place to communicate all the details that you knew but they didn't - how did you fix this? I'll also share my two cents on this one - hope to discuss more in the comments!

I am working on building a framework and often I need help from a IC XFN partner to keep making progress in the project. However, many times they would not respond back or give vague responses on chat threads. When I set up meeting with them, they would not be quick to respond to meetings. I once asked them that I had certain questions that I documented after going through their codebase and need answers from them, however they would not take me seriously. How do I handle this in a positive way, keep making progress and unblocking myself? I want to building meaningful relationships with XFN partners and would like them to respect me however, it seems they are not reciprocating the same

Hello. For anonymity, my name is John, and my coworker is Bob. Bob is relatively new, so I help Bob out when he's blocked on a JIRA ticket. I don't mind helping, but Bob only mentions my name during standup when he's unsure of something (e.g., John and I worked on this ticket, and we think this might be the issue). During the times my name was mentioned, I probably did think that was the issue, but these are incomplete thoughts + theories that I'd rather not be publicized if I am wrong (I don't mind being wrong in public, but I'd rather be wrong on my terms). I don't think Bob is doing the above on purpose, but it does bother me. Here are some possible solutions I've considered: (a) After sharing a theory, tell Bob that he doesn't have to mention this theory and/or my name during standup (b) Only share theories with Bob that I can 100% back up (c) Say something to Bob about their past behavioral patterns I think (c) is too confrontational, and given that I don't think that Bob is doing it on purpose, I can probably skip this. I want to stick with only (b), but I want the option to share an incomplete theory as it may indirectly help Bob to a solution or teach them something new. What do you all think?

I'm an E5 at a Big Tech company. My EM's pushing me to lead projects on our team so I can work on getting to E6. This is challenging when the E6 on my team tries to micromanage everything. How do I lead when I keep getting overruled? The E6 usually makes good decisions, but oftentimes struggles to articulate his rationale / justification.

During my recent job search process, I couldnt time my interviews well, so i ended up securing offers at different times. My first offer was from a high speed startup and they offered me a very good pay. The recruiter was very pushy though. She gave me a weekend to decide whether to accept the offer or not. She got to know about my last working day in my current org and pushed me to join a day after that. She also said i should not interview at any other companies if i sign this offer. She insisted i meet with my potential boss at the office and do so only if i am 100% sure of accepting the offer. She was not just pushy, she was disrespectful and crossed a lot of boundaries. It was my first job offer and i couldnt give a definite yes. Also i felt really uncomfortable with how pushy she was and rejected the offer. I thought i couldnt focus on other interviews with this guilt and fear hanging over me if i accepted the offer without being 100% sure. Before deciding to say no i also looked up culture reviews about this company and it scared me about how poor the work life balance is. I made a snap decision cos i was afraid for my health having worked at a startup before. But now i know that most reviews online are negative and ist so for every single company out there. Plus i am actually ok with such a high speed environment especially for high pay and good work. So i no longer care for these reasons. Its been a week since then and i think i should have played this a bit more smartly. I should have said yes and continued to interview. Am i right in thinking this way ? Is there any other way to approach this sort of a situation ?

I was wondering how would one handle situations where a manager makes up a feedback based of half information (or their perception) or even misinformation from others. There are also no actions attributed to this feedback. for eg. Person X have to learn how to manage up or navigate office politics or learn how to work well with other. But how? And who are these others? When asked an example of why this feedback was given, they don't have any good example of what happened ,who said what and why was the feedback not given in the first place. I know this is not something I can control, and in their mind of course they are giving actionable feedback. The other part of it when you are surprised by the feedback even after asking for it in every 1:1 before (in my situation my manager was out for most of the time). It just feels that why did I even work so hard in the first place and a little demotivated.

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.

I am an L4 engineer with decent knowledge of my team's stack. What are some actions I can take to meet expectations in my current role for the next few years, while minimizing the amount of time I spend on work? Given that I'm not shooting for a promotion, does that change how I should approach relationship building with senior folks on the team? There is a lot of advice on Taro about relationship building, but it appears to be aimed at folks who wish to promote quickly.

Everyone on my team is significantly more experienced than me. I feel a bit intimidated criticizing the decisions that engineers far more senior than me are making. How can I start contributing?

Hey, I am 8 months in, and there are only two staff engineers on the team.They are pretty demeaning (I find it almost racial, and sexist) and always try and create a bad perspective of me to management. My manager had no clue what I was working on, and she asked me if I consider myself a senior engineer? (I have been a senior for half my career) Only after I was removed from that toxic person's project, I grew and management trusts me now. I am not a newbie, I have 11 years of work ex and previously worked at a FAANG, where I got exceptional reviews. I am now in a tier 2 company now, and literally anything I suggest to them is po-pooed. Something as simple as a suggestion to maintain a on-call log as we are ramping up on releasing a new feature, was vetoed against by these two. Our on-call is dumpster fire, with no one knows what is going on expect these two. Since these two know the technology well, they can get away with any behavior as managers is under pressure and just want this damn feature to launch. Our team is filled with junior engineers and contractors barring a few Senior engineers and these two. Every task while planning for JIRA starts with "oh this is verrrryyy easy". But it turns out they don't know sh*t and their estimates and providing context is setting me up for failure. I quickly got hang of it, and figured out how to reach my target in-spite of their mis-doings. They are rude, degrading (only towards me, I find) and are each other's allies. How do I bring it up to a manager without complaining or sounding emotional (I am a women, so its easy to say, I am overreacting by these two, I DO NOT trust them). I don't want to run away, but stay strong and prove to them and management my caliber. But this also makes it harder to grow on this team.

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!