Building Relationships Q&A and Videos

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?

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 was wondering if you need to be part of a specific type of environment in order to make quick jumps in your career? Like to get promoted to senior level in 2 years. I was asking because from my experience, there seems to be an invisible social hierarchy in every work place. Other people in the team may not allow me to make these jumps since this kind of anomaly will break the social hierarchy: There is project specific information, in absence of really god wikis you have to rely on the peers in the team to provide you such information (like how are specific parts in a service working, or how is an obscure internal tool working etc). From what I see, often times they will provide small chunks of information, as much as you need to do your task, but small enough such that they still have the information and you depend on them (probably a measure to prevent others from replacing them). Envy might appear between other senior folks if you progress quicker than them and might start to backstab you (For example, you need some information from them about a piece of code they wrote in order to progress, but they might do the knowledge transfer in such a way that it looks like they told you what you need to know, but in reality you got nothing; or might tell you to go debug to figure out how is something working, and you can spend days debugging modules when it would've been an 1 hour stretch if they simply told you or there was any wiki). Manager might not want to give you extra money and compensate at your true value. If you work too much, or too hard there's going to be problems withe the peers, because you increase the bar and kind of force them to work harder too. I was asking these things, because I was wondering if I got anything wrong about these fast jumps or in general that I have a broken view about work. My first professional experience was an internship at a big tech and when got there the seniors told me that I have the same knowledge as a senior engineer, but best they could do was another internship next year (still in college).

What is the prevailing culture within the organization, and how does it manifest in day-to-day operations and decision-making? The prevailing culture within an organization is the shared values, beliefs, norms, and practices that shape the social and psychological environment of a business. This culture influences employee behavior, motivates management styles, and affects decision-making processes. What are those for Meta? What are the hidden things to notice and to worry about? For example: Cliques and Silos: Pay attention to the formation of exclusive groups or departments unwilling to share information. This can indicate a fragmented culture that hinders collaboration. Resistance to Change: If there is noticeable resistance to new ideas or changes in procedure, the culture may be rigid and resistant to innovation. Overwork and Burnout: A culture that consistently expects long hours and overwork may prioritize short-term gains over long-term employee well-being and sustainability. Turnover Rates: High employee turnover can be a red flag for issues within the organizational culture such as lack of growth opportunities, poor management, or a toxic work environment. Office Politics: Pay attention to how much politics influence decisions and progress. A culture heavily influenced by politics rather than merit can demotivate employees. Feedback Mechanisms: Lack of mechanisms for providing constructive feedback, or a culture where feedback is ignored, can indicate a culture not open to self-improvement or employee development. Diversity and Inclusion: Observe whether the organization actively supports diversity and inclusion, not just in policy but in practice, reflecting a culture of respect and equality.

What are the things I could do to get most out of when attending multi day Conference's for example DriodCon. Appreciate any thoughts about networking and bringing some learnings back. How to digest knowledge through the day usually its all theory heavy. What are the ways to relay and implement some learning in our projects or share with others in the team ?

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?

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.

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?

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?

A new CTO was assigned in our organisation. If I get the chance to have a sync, what are the things I can and should discuss about ?

I work as a mid-level software engineer. We have team channels where people can reach us on. But for some reason people always message me in a private message or they visit my office for team related tasks or product owner tasks. I keep telling them to ask the person in charge or communicate through our team channel, but they don't. I don't want to be rude to them, yet I find my frustration growing. Sometimes I feel like they can't bother to formalise their requests, so they go to me to quickly mention whatever is bothering them, so they later can refer to our "discussion" if the issue is brought up again. What should I do?

Hi! I'm an L5 in a big tech company, tasked with leading a big org-level project that span multiple engineering teams, with lots of cross functional collaboration w/ UX and PM as well. I'm new to my own team and I'm not the subject matter expert in the area of our work, which is around 8-ish people with about 2 other L5s. In order for me to successfully manage this project for our team, I am already involved in a lot of meetings and I have yet to set up recurring 1:1s. I believe I should set up some more of these 1:1s, but I can't imagine I would be setting one up w/ everyone I come across. Which 1-on-1s / relationship should I prioritize, how frequently should they happen, and how do I ensure these meetings are good use of both my time and the other person's time?

At my startup I was asked to deliver feature after feature + bug fixes by PMs as fast as possible without much time for proper refactoring work or engineering initiatives. Also it was pretty individualistic where you get assigned a task and only work with other engineers during a tech spec review meeting, code review, and syncing with a backend engineer (as an Android dev). From Alex’s video on getting promoted to tech lead, I saw how you can 1) drive projects as an L5 engineer (vs a PM putting that together with designers) 2) Not have to know how to implement everything yourself for a project, but work with many others and facilitate the team. This sounds 100x more engineering driven and collaborative than at my start up with few developers. Is this common to many people’s experience of the norm in FAANG? What I liked about Alex's story is also how he had the time and space to do things like document the differences between iOS and Android, as well as go all the way through to making a data analytics plan for monitoring it himself. Seems like a lot of freedom and ownership which I didn't feel I always had the time for personally. Being able to not have to spend 80% of your time coding but rather doing deep work thinking, planing, designing holistically sounds extremely satisfying and rewarding as an engineer. Maybe this also comes with experience at startups as well?

I want to network with more senior engineers, especially those in the Taro community and within the companies I intern at, but I am scared to approach them. I ask myself "what would make it interesting/fun/educational for someone to talk to me or mentor me?" (Rahul's advice here), but I can't really think of a reason why someone would want to talk to a college student like me. I don't want a coffee chat to feel like I'm just bombarding them with questions, but I also find it difficult to bring anything valuable to the table. How can I effectively network with others with limited experience as a college student? What would make an engineer want to chat with and/or mentor a college student?

Whenever I talk to people (outside of my team) they call me humble but then also mention that I might be bragging by sharing my experiences. Even though I don't mean to. I feel like there's a perception improvement by not bragging but also still being able to talk about your accomplishments. My experiences could be work related or outside of work like Travel, Adventures I've tried lately, etc