Communication Q&A and Videos

I've noticed that when recruiters reach out on LinkedIn, their main objective is to get me on a phone call to discuss the role they're looking to fill.

From my point of view, there's always 3 things I want to know before speaking with them:

1. The job description (usually provided)
2. The remote work/in-office policy (usually provided)
3. The compensation (usually not provided).

I just had a recruiter reach out looking to get me on a call, and in asking for the above 3, he provided the first 2 and not the comp. range. I messaged him back asking point-blank about comp.

My question is, should I be this direct? Or are there advantages to getting on the phone call with the recruiter first (advantages to me, that is, not to them).

Thanks!

I recently got to an onsite round of a company for a backend engineer role (I have got no front-end experience so far) and they mentioned having a product architecture round which assesses how I can articulate user stories, come up with functional requirements and how I effectively collaborate with the tech lead of the team.

Does anyone have any recommendations on how to prepare for such a round?

I found some helpful videos on YouTube and I would like to hear from the Taro community on what's the best way to prepare and approach such interviews and if you all have any personal tips/ways to structure how you tackle various things in such interviews.

Hey, I hope you all are having a good one.

I was curious how do you network on LinkedIn to find Internships/jobs.

Specifically:

1. What is a good approach to reach out to VPs/Hiring Managers recruiters in your target companies?
2. Being an Entry level/Mid-Level developer what are some ways you can provide value to them too?
3. What are some "Don'ts" of this approach

Thank you in advance.

Hey Taro members,

Since in most companies, I believe the 1:1 with Managers is biweekly or weekly I was thinking about what to communicate in every meeting. At times, I run out of things to discuss. We cover topics related to how tasks are going, feedback if any, and after that, there's not really anything else. Given the fact these meetings are recurring, I want the communication to be more natural. Any advice for that since I do realize the importance of 1:1's and would like to make the most of it?

Also, any other topics besides the ones mentioned above that should be discussed in 1:1 something I can initiate a discussion about as an Entry Level Engineer and make the most out of these 1:1s?

Thanks.

Background:

Being pressured to deliver at high speed all the time, my team doesn't seem to value wiki type documentation a lot.

When starting a project/feature, we often have a high level design doc & design meeting to talk about high level infrastructure, and we make key trade-off decisions together as a team. If we are lucky, we get another low level design doc & meeting focused on sequencing of actions & interaction between class level objects.

We rarely seem to go back to our initial design doc after initial design phase of a project to update them and explain the actual final product we built and maybe some additional design decisions we made during implementation.

As a result, documentations are kind of dead after facilitating the initial design review. For legacy projects, high quality docs are extremely hard to come by and most just rely on reading large amount of code to understand how things work (nothing wrong with this but I think high quality documentation can save lots of time here).

I understand we don't want to boil the ocean and write everything in painstaking details, but we should at least have enough to help people understand responsibility of services and contract between them.

Questions:

• Could you share your view on this topic and how you find your balance?
• Do you believe it's always worth it to go back to documenting after finishing a project/feature and update it as if you are explaining it to someone new to the team/project?
• Could you share any resources we might already have on this topic as well?

I have been at my present job for a year now and I have been doing pretty well at my work. I have never had a discussion about the next level of responsibilities with my manager due to the fact that we have never had a one-on-one before (he has around 150 reportees and is always busy).

I am very keen on moving to the next level and I have a chance to ask for it in an upcoming one-on-one. I would not want to sound demanding or cocky but at the same time I would like to show that i deserve it. Apart from talking about my work, what would be the best way to convey to him that I am ready to move to the next level or at least to ask him to keep me on the radar and to help me grow so that i can get promoted soon.

Hi All,

Would love to get some advice on how to ask highly pointed questions during a 30 minute conversation with a hiring manager to get the maximum info out of him regarding the team culture and the product.

Regarding my preferences...

I would love to stick fully on the Backend stack. I have experience working with Python, NodeJS, Typescript and a bit of Java, I have experience working with Infra and databases as well. I get excited working with data at scale but do not have stellar industry experience with it such that I can start being impactful on day 1.

Since this will be my first time at a big tech, I want to optimize for a decent to moderate enough ramp up time, good wlb and not being super heavy with oncall at least for my first team.

Once I get used to the pace, I'll jump around to start optimizing for impact, visibility and scope.

Here is what I have in mind for my Hiring Manager meetings but feel free to add/subtract from this.

1. Basics, what is the product/org
2. What is the team size and team structure (how many E5s, E4s etc) and tech stack.
3. What is the code velocity like on average for an E5.
4. Give me a brief idea about what the first project you have in mind for me, if not tell me about a project an E5 is currently working on.

I am a recent graduate who just started a new position at a small startup. Along my short journey thus far, I have connected with a few people outside my company whom I have asked for career advice and whom I think could be great mentors for me. However, I would like to formalize, or start formalizing, our premature (I have only spoken to them 1-2 times in total) relationship which currently consists solely of advice-seeking to a mentor/mentee relationship. What is the best way to approach this? It feels inappropriate and unprofessional to ask them to "be my mentor please!" Any advice is appreciated. I expect the answer here to depend on whether the mentor figure is outside or inside one's company since if they are outside (as in my case) it is much less of an expectation for them to give me their time free of charge.

I joined company A in October (prior to which I did a contract job at company C for 1 month) but I already had an offer from company B which was delayed and joining was pushed to Dec. Now, I need to inform my manager at company A that I have to leave the company. It breaks my heart because all we have been doing so far is kind of training and stuff and no active work however, I do not like the kind of work I would be doing here as it is more like a Salesforce developer/ tester with the development outsourced and they are building a team to bring development inhouse. So even though the company is quite stable and has good benefits I have decided to leave it for a better paying role that I feel will satiate my career aspirations. Here are a few questions I am seeking answers for:

1. The company has a Winter break starting Dec 22 and my manager goes on leave from 20, when should I break this news to him? (In my last company I informed my employer with a two week notice and I was given the last date to be just a week later. I am a foreign student in USA who has just started working and utilized almost half the number of unemployment days I have for this year to be precise 2 July, 2024)
2. How should I tell him about this decision without burning the bridges. Honestly, I have this feeling that I am kind of cheating my employer so I am finding it difficult to justify it in front of my manager.

Thanks in advance!

Background : I recently started my first job as a new-grad at a Big-tech company (3-months in). I was assigned a project to work on led by a senior engineer but ended up working on it independently as he was busy with another feature ramp-up, so I ended up taking all the responsibility.

Question : I've completed the design and currently a couple of months into the implementation, so there are many things that were done well so far. There are a few areas I can improve in however, and would like some thoughts there :

• The project is still in its early stages so there aren't many features. But I'd still like to keep stakeholders updated and get them excited to gain some visibility into whats being built.
• I obsess about the quality of the work / code being written that sometimes it reaches a point of decision paralysis, where I'm afraid to take action / build in new features. A lot of the uncertainty arises due to concerns about my lack of experience (which I sometimes fear could lead to sub-optimal work)
• Since I'm working on this project totally on my own, I feel things can get a little siloed (ie : I'm the only person writing code and working on this project and have just 1 person reviewing my code).

Any thoughts on how I can address some of these issues ? :)

I'm an E5 iOS at a Big Tech company reporting to an M2. I'm leading the mobile side for a multi-quarter product project that leverages work from 2 platform teams. Most of the complexity of this project will be on the mobile side. My backend lead is an E6 full-stack web engineer reporting to an M1 who reports to my M2. The M1 is on parental leave until late Dec / early Jan. This E6 has been an amazing partner and teammate.

The 2 platform teams have missed a lot of their timelines. One dependency is about a month behind schedule. They often give us deliverables that are dev-complete and not tested (e.g., compilation errors, etc.). We have sync meetings 2x/week, but 1 platform team has never attended any of these meetings. The other platform team doesn't always send the same engineers to the meeting and doesn't always know the status of their own deliverables. That platform team's EM got terminated for performance reasons before this project started, so their M2 and a TPM have been tag-teaming to fill in the gap. That means sometimes their M2 attends the sync meetings, sometimes the TPM attends, sometimes both attend, and sometimes neither attends. The TPM sends a weather report on that team's deliverables every other week, but hasn't sent one in the past month. In his last email, he listed my E6 and me as the DRIs for their team's deliverables. When I confronted him about it, he said it was a mistake and he'll fix it in future emails. How do I bring visibility into these delays to external stakeholders?

I created a shared Google Doc to track all the dependencies, including when our team needs the deliverables, the other team's ETAs, and any notes. However, it's been challenging getting ETAs from the other teams. When I tagged them in the Google doc asking for ETAs, they just ignore me.

My manager gave me feedback to "influence engineers to hold up their timeline than push for hard commitments". Do you have any concrete advice here? I'm not sure how to do this.

After I escalated the 1st platform team's unresponsiveness to their Director (3 levels up), the E6 iOS DRI became very responsive. Escalating to that E6's skip level had not been effective. Should I just keep escalating everything or is there a better approach?

I have an interview coming up that isn't DSA / System design focused, but rather a project deep dive or work experience deep dive.

If the interview is 45-60min long, how should I best describe my work experience in that given time. Also, if using STAR method to answer work experience / project related questions how many situations per bullet point on resume should be discussed?

At times, we face tight deadlines which I believe are challenging to meet. Despite my reservations about the feasibility of such timelines, my fellow engineer peers often express confidence in meeting them, though history has shown they're frequently mistaken. When I voice my concerns, the project managers claim that delivery is non-negotiable, and everyone in the room goes silent. I've suggested prioritizing essential features for the immediate deadline and planning for a subsequent delivery for the rest, but my ideas are usually ignored. Despite not being in a lead role, it's disheartening to later hear about our inconsistent delivery timelines from my manager when I receive performance feedback. How should I navigate these situations? It's frustrating to be the only one on my team who ever expresses these thoughts as I always appear as the "pessimistic" engineer. I just try to voice concerns to make more reliable deliveries. What should I do in these situations?

What would you recommend if you run into a problem where you do lay out a high-level implementation and approach, but once you're in the code writing phase, you either come up with new edge cases or possibilities and then end up second-guessing yourself and going down a rabbit hole? The same question can also be extended to mistakes. Given how competitive the market still is for software engineers, it feels like the margin for error is lower than ever. Before, you could be more collaborative with the interviewer, but nowadays, it feels more of a lone-wolf activity, and sometimes even adversarial based on the general pressure to find that unicorn engineer.

This was a question I wanted to ask Edbert, but I had an obligation that took me away from his talk.

Hi Taro Community,

I am a new hire for my company and I will have an amazing opportunity to chat with a tech lead.

I wonder from a more senior engineer perspective, what some important information or questions are essential to ask or tackle during the opportunity coffee chat?

Thanks a lot for the help :)

Hey there, for context, I completed my first year as Software Engineer.

I joined the company because I was in dire need without checking the company culture, following which I was not satisfied with the designation. I then started to look out for a job.

I got that offer after 4 months of joining with 33% increase in the salary.

When I told my EM he was willing to talk to the HR and match the salary but then the Head of the department didn't promote my role in the light that others in the team will think and ask why in 4 months I got my role upgraded.

The leadership conveyed that I might get the designation in the 6 months appraisal cycle.
In the appraisal cycle they denied my promotion saying my salary doesn't match the orgs designation and they don't know what to do.

I was not happy with the decision and since I didn't had any offers I kept working for the organisation hoping I will get it in the 1 year cycle.

Now I didn't get the review form for 1 year appraisal cycle. I think they will say in the lines of because your salary was revised at the 4 month you are not eligible for this cycle.

Though I don't feel my designation is the right one. But I have some other responsibilities as well like family, commute etc. I'm losing my motivation.

I need help in crafting effectively to EM and HR so that they consider my role and some appraisal so that they inline my career in the organisation else juniors will have a higher role in front of me.

From today I have also started looking out for other jobs, but I don't want to hurry in making decisions.

Does anyone have any tips on how to get the email address of an interviewer after an interview so we can thank them for their time? Some companies have a catch all domain so it can be hard to guess email addresses.

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.