Building Relationships Q&A and Videos

Hi all I recently joined an organization as a senior where I was made tech lead within 3 months of joining. This was somewhat related to recognition of my work among product and my peers. I advocated for good engineering practices such as automated integration testing and established projects for cross org collaborations to help deliver whats important for the organization. All of this was quickly realized as a super critical projects by the organization. I created tech specs and prototypes for these projects. However recently the organization hired a principal engineer. since he was new I volunteered to help him onboard and asked for his advice on the new super business critical project that was next in our todo team pipeline. He is an ambitious guy so he wants to create his mark in the organization. But for some reason the way he is approaching it doesn't seem right to me. He plans to create a new team taking over the business critical project while splitting the newly formed team I lead on the same project that I helped him ramp up on. I opposed to this asking for rationale for a new team. there seem to be now two impressions of my work:- 1) held by my peers, folks I lead and product manager of good business delivery and product timelines. I am respected among both. 2) the principal Engineer tries to devalue my work in front of senior engg. Leadership saying things like I am overcommitting and under delivering if I do this project with the existing members of my team in public and in front of senior engg leadership. The automated integration testing project which no one was doing before and we were starting from a basic version to iterate on. This is now communicated to engg management as every team is trying to do their own testing. My engg management for some reason is siding with him since he has 15-20 years of experience and i have 5. He also is principal and i am 2-3 levels below him. for some reason I am being micromanaged with no fault of mine. From engg management perspective I have been just told to lead the project that I am currently leading and just help the team formed by principal engg to start the project. I have communicated my expectations of being able to continue leading the project. Product is in support of that but engg managment isnt. I have also tried giving feedback to the principal engineer that his actions are disruptive to the team and becauase of what he is doing he is slowing us down and blocking us from doing critical projects. My worry is despite doing the hard work the project I have the most context on and I worked on for a while is being given to someone else and second i will not be given credit for the hard work I am doing. Should I just change teams. I dont want to leave my existing team because I do think they need me but I feel I would rather create more impact where I dont have to swim against the tide. I may also be suffering from sunken cost fallacy here where I knew I led the development of a new critical project Tia for your help.

I just started working at a new company. I am still going over the general onboarding process for all employees. How should I go about introducing myself to the team & manager? Should I ping them on chat to say Hi & asking them to add me to the meetings? My whole team has about 16 members. Thanks in advance!

I’m an E5 at a Big Tech company. My team’s E6 does not communicate or delegate effectively. He dives straight into the weeds without providing proper context, then gets frustrated and explodes when people ask questions or do the "wrong thing" because they are lost. I’ve seen him do this to multiple team members, including my EM and another E5 teammate. He always assumes that everyone has the same context that he has and is unable to tailor his communication to the appropriate audience. How can I best work effectively with someone like this? He would delegate tasks to me without providing acceptance criteria or proper context, then explode when I ask questions or do something other than exactly what he had in his mind (but never communicated properly). Is there a way to fortify my questions so he’s less likely to explode on me? My EM thinks that this E6 has a “my way or the highway” approach because he’s not used to people challenging his ideas. The E6’s feedback for me is to drive discussions more. However, I find it challenging because he leaves out critical information, then explodes and shares it only when we pull teeth about it in team discussions. I tried sharing pre-read meeting docs beforehand, but he still waits until the meeting to explode / share his feedback. Unfortunately he's a domain expert in this area, so there's no one else I can extract the context from.

I have great relationship with my manager. In order to grow within company I feel like increased visibility is required. Any tips on how to do it? We both are remote.

Been working for a while as remote, mostly with other remote folks. Now I'm remote, but rest of the team is in office. What do you think are some of the most important actions, processes or activities one should take to be effective as remote worker in this specific scenario? Things to do to build meaningful connections, be productive, build alignment and, from those things, how to know at a given time what are the most important ones. Thanks!

What are the key relationships you need to develop to increase your influence within the organization? How can you demonstrate your expertise and value to others without stepping on toes or appearing overly ambitious? What are the unmet needs or pain points within the organization that you can address to gain credibility and visibility? How can you leverage the principles of reciprocity and mutual benefit to build alliances across different teams or departments? What communication strategies can you employ to effectively share your ideas and persuade others without formal authority? ### Fitting into an Established Organization: What is the prevailing culture within the organization, and how does it manifest in day-to-day operations and decision-making? Who are the key stakeholders and decision-makers, and what are their expectations for new members of the organization? What informal networks or communication channels exist, and how can you effectively navigate them to build relationships? How can you demonstrate respect for existing norms and traditions while also introducing fresh perspectives and ideas? What initiatives or projects can you undertake that align with the organization's goals and also allow you to showcase your skills and contributions? How can you seek out mentors or advocates within the organization who can provide guidance and support as you integrate into the company?

I work as an E4/L4 equivalent Software Engineer at a fairly big tech company (5k+ employees). My org's Senior Director is interested in helping engineers in his team develop good soft skills which align with one's career aspirations. I have my 1st recurring 1:1 with him soon where we'll be brainstorming over which skills I can work on one by one. I want to go in this meeting with some ideas. Personally, at this stage of my career, I haven't thought about whether I would like to stay in IC role or get into management some years down the line. So for now, I want to work on the soft skills which would generically provide best returns in future in the tech industry. The ones which come to my mind are - - Presentation Skills - Leadership Skills - Conducting meetings well with a large audience - Decision Making Can you please share the right skills to work on from your side ? Also any pointers on action items I can take for each skill you recommend (or for above mentioned skills) will be of great help too. Thanks.

My question is when should I reach out to help someone. If someone new joins, and if it is clear that task might be difficult for person, or there is some context needed etc, and they fail to ask, should you help them? Reaching out early and helping might be hampering their own learning, also at risk of hurting someone's ego. But If I am in other person's shoes, I would appreciate all help so what is right balance here? Also, should you helping be more visible or private? If it is public, other people can add extra context as they like, but maybe in private conversations, person can ask more follow up question, assuming they are afraid to ask dumb questions. To be more specifically, by public I mean team channel in slack and private would one-one chat.

Do you have to have 1:1 with intern manager weekly or is it okay to just send them an email talking about what you accomplished during the week provided you meet with mentor daily.

I'm wondering about the dynamics (plusses and minuses) of having a personal mentor. Taro is fantastic in that it gives me access to the best software engineers to answer all the tech-related questions I can think of. Still, I'm wondering if there are advantages to having a specific mentor, someone a few years senior to me who's in the position I want to be in. The idea would be that they could show me what to focus on to develop my career in a way that is more individualized. I write this as I've just been matched with Orbiit which I'm super excited about, but not sure if that's mentorship so much as peer-to-peer. I got the mentorship idea from a company called SharpestMinds, which focuses on project-focused mentorship for career switchers for Data and SWE roles. This question isn't about them, but the idea of personal mentorship more generally. So to summarize, I have 3 questions: Why should I get a designated mentor? How do I get a personal mentor? What should I do as a mentee in a mentor-mentee relationship?

I recently had a conversation with my manager regarding my work commits every week. It seems like he always downplay me in every one to meet showing me in bad picture. As compared to other folks , I have shown more progress with respect to code commits and tasks completion. He ignore other developers mistakes or issues softly. How to deal with this scenario?

I'm new to my company, so I'm asking questions to bring myself up to speed. However, something I'm wary of is becoming a burden - I assume you don't want to ask the same person every time for help. Any tips on how to figure out who I should ask my question to minimize the chance of this happening? I want to make sure I get along well with my team.

We are 3 people in my team. I've been at the company for 2 years roughly and my team mates for 15+ years. I'm in a situation where my coworkers do stuff, but stuff that's often completely unrelated to our backlog. One of them struggles with being motivated by the job. Occasionally, a 16-hour job takes a month to complete. Maybe 2. And you never know why or when it will be done. This causes a lot of tension with the product lead. The other teammate (focused on the front end) rarely makes any PRs. I'm not sure if it's due to the fact that they have mostly done HTML/CSS and are unsure of how to navigate the frameworks we use or what it is. Our manager tends to cover for us, but obviously he's not loving this situation. It's been like this for 1–2 years. Now it has started affecting my pay raise, and I'm starting to feel tired of always playing dumb or referring to the other great work that they're doing when asked what my teammates are up to. Both seem to be struggling somewhat with stress and anxiety, so I've tried to be compassionate with them. But what do I do? I want to take ownership of the team's performance, but it's difficult to know what to do. They have the senior roles, and they have most of the ownership of the project, so I also feel weird telling them "what to do," if that makes any sense. The company size is roughly 20 engineers, FYI. Any advice on how to handle this situation nicely, i.e. making sure we're still friends afterward, would be highly appreciated.

I recently got moved to a new manager, and I've been having some trouble building back up the more fluid and quite positive relationship I had with my prior manager. In particular, I'm trying to get more signal into my feedback and how I can improve. When I go over this kind of content with my new manager, they'll say something more quick and high-level like "That makes sense", but they won't give me something more specific and concrete. How can I go deeper with these kinds of conversations while keeping our relationship healthy? I want to make sure I respect their boundaries.

I want to give feedback to my manager. This person just joined the company as my manager. So far as my manager, this person has been nothing but helpful. I only have good things to say. Is that normal ? How can I share more

I'm an E5 at a Big Tech company. My team's working on a very ambiguous project. 3 opinionated, vocal engineers (2 E6, 1 E5) tend to sidetrack our brainstorming discussions by playing devil's advocate to shoot down ideas. How do I drive these meetings forward with this dynamic? We often rehash the same discussions over and over. When we're close to reaching a decision, oftentimes someone would throw a wrench into things. Moreover, some engineers require upfront planning and want to finalize all the details before committing, while others prefer to defer the details to future milestones. Both my manager and team are getting frustrated, but are unsure how to fix this.

I'm an E5 at a Big Tech company. There are several loud, opinionated, dominant personalities on my team. Some of them are E6. They often talk over each other as well as the rest of the team, so the rest of the team rarely contribute to discussions anymore. When a teammate (E5) presented his RFC to our team today, the dominant personalities started questioning his design decisions and talked over him when he tried to defend them. My teammate looked so discouraged and beaten down at the end of that meeting. When I brought this up to my EM in a 1:1, he said it's a people problem -- people are not being respectful. I asked my EM if he could coach those people, but he said he prefers to invest in people like me who are interested in learning & growing. Is this a lost cause? Are there techniques to handle these dominant personalities skillfully? Or do my teammates & I just need to develop "thick skin"?

I'm an E5 iOS at a Big Tech company. Our team's E6 backend and E6 iOS tend to dominate our team discussions, often talking over each other. I get the impression that the E6 iOS wants to be the smartest person in the room and enjoys micromanaging all the details, but the E6 backend enjoys challenging him. When I proposed a solution to one of our project's challenges, the E6 iOS quickly shot it down but could not propose any alternatives. The E6 backend challenged the E6 iOS to explain why my idea wouldn't work, but the E6 iOS just talked in circles. It seemed like the E6 iOS just didn't like it because he didn't come up with it himself. How do I avoid making the E6 iOS feeling threatened? I'm a bit hesitant to contribute to team discussions due to this dynamic, but my EM wants me to contribute more.

I've been struggling with onboarding at my new job. I'm part of a new team; my only other teammate recently joined. Many related docs are not in English & the translation is weird & confusing often. This makes revamping up independently super hard for me. I try to find that concept in an English doc from any other team, and that's my way of understanding something. But it puts a lot of overhead because I basically now try to understand the work of a lot of related teams too. And often it is much more time for me. My manager has a lot of people report to her. I had a 1-on-1, and I explained the situation. She asked me to ping her for help. I often have stupid questions, and I feel weird asking her directly. So I asked her to assign me an onboarding buddy from the related team. But from her reply, it seemed like I should talk to everyone on the team & figure it out. I think she wants me to be more independent. Now I ping people in my team or close teams to ask for help. I have found most or nearly all people to be super-helpful, and they relate to being in the same situation once. But I feel guilty about asking people for help. I feel it doesn't do much for them. As with most, I don't have a team meeting where I could thank them & their/our manager would notice it. How should I better navigate this situation?