Working With Your Manager Q&A and Videos

I've been working at this company for almost 2 years now and we recently started doing kick-off calls for big features. Before this, management would come up with features in private meetings and assign engineers tickets. We expressed our frustration with this approach so management started doing "kick-off calls" recently but would only invite 1 engineer or 1 data scientist depending on who they think should lead the feature/project. This is a 10-person company, and it feels like I have no room to be creative/propose solutions etc. I brought this up during retro and 1:1s with my manager and the answer I always got was "we don't want it to be a democracy" or "too many people/questions would drag the meeting longer than it has to" etc I can understand this reasoning if it's a big team/company, but we're a really small team and it feels to me like they're not interested in hearing about other engineers' input, ideas etc at all. This causes me to think engineers are just here to do grunt work/grind. Am I being too cynical?

I'm at a small quant firm and I started working for a new manager a few months ago. Our relationship has had its ups and downs, but last week it suddenly got really weird. He avoided me throughout the entire week. When I'd come up to ask a question he wouldn't even look at me. Then we had our 1 on 1, he was asking me about specific results of my recent projects, which was a bit unusual. It felt like he was digging for reasons to punish me around the next performance cycle, but I can't be sure about that. He also seemed nervous at the end of it, and when I was talking during team standup too. This week, I'd say, was a bit less weird, but he ended the 1 on 1 very early. I could understand that on it's own, but combined with other things, it makes me stressed. My performance has been great so far, and it might be that he just doesn't like me and it doesn't impact my reviews that much, but I don't know if I want to keep working in such dynamic, and if I want to have a manager who is on my back waiting for me to make a mistake. In the past I tried talking to him and asking what am I doing wrong, referring to these non verbal signals. He seemed to have gotten anxious from me asking, said everything is fine and our relationship seemed to have improved after that. I'm afraid that if I ask him again because of what's happening now, he will just avoid me even more and it will make things worse. I'm just stressed out and would appreciate any advice or perspective I could get. Should I switch teams? Thanks.

I don't feel confortable working in a company anymore because of my manager and the ways he work with me and the team. Here are some examples of my manager behavior, "good" and "bad": He is a software engineer as well and is contributing to the code while acting as manager in our team. He has authority on taking decisions in the code. When some folks gave code review feedback, sometimes he replies "we won't do that" and that's it, even if it is a good feedback, the code get merges without changes Other times, he addresses the feedback We must have his approval before merging a PR He sets 1:1 meetings just to ask us what we are doing and how (even if we already did on the stand up) In the standup, sometimes it is extended to 1 hour when checking details from some folks tasks. He actively modifies open PRs from the team without any notice, and just asks the author of the PR to check if nothing is broken I have noticed that some members on my team doesn't feels confortable to ask questions to him, because I chat with them privately and I ask if they have questions or I just share the information I think they need, and they answered me grateful. When he gave feedback on PRs, use to say things like "I mentioned this one week ago that we should do this on X way" He is very good when thinking analytical and provide answers when we need. He is direct, and use to give feedback about what we could improve in our ways of communicating things. He shares the information we need in order to do our work. There are not 1:1 meetings where we check how do we feel, or personal goals, etc. More about the culture: The stability is highly valued, there is a big risk aversion, the decisions are made from up-to-down. My interpretation is: he is very good as software engineer, but I think is missing the social part. I think he would bright more as individual contributor. But for managing people, I think he is missing the communication What do you think? I am missing something on my interpretation? And more importantly, what would you do as software engineer? Considering the company is really small and I couldn't ask to change of manager.

My ex-manager used to gaslight me often and I've endured covert abuse for 2 years in his unit. I have no idea what I was going through but I thought to fix the situation by being kind and by doing all the work. I used to question certain aspects that hinder my work in my 1-on-1 meetings and I felt isolated from support and the 1-0n-1s are draining & not progressing. I've experienced area leads taking my credit and the line manager enabling such behaviors. When questioned, I was told "I know the area lead from years, I will not support you on this matter" Right after 3 months, on the TELL day, I was moved to a different organization (thanks to my mentor for picking me up from the outlist). On the last handover day, toxic line manager told me "that the same thing would happen to me again and to any employee, the most important thing is the relationship with the line manager and I didn't had a good relationship with him since the beginning. He also told me that I might be technically best but he doesn't like my behaviors and tone. He just showed what he can do as a line manager and I will not let you grow." Coming from an over-protective background and with a good girl complex, I usually minded my business at work and stayed out of politics, just giving my 101% to my area and helping others naturally. I was moved out of the area where I created a lot of impact in just 2 years despite the lack of support from my line manager. I wonder how a person's subjective evaluation and lack of integrity can ruin a person's career and well-being. I go to work to do some useful work for the company but not build relationships with managers or others. Meaningful connections can be byproducts but they are not the key goals in my opinion. I wonder why he has chosen this gaslighting behavior over me and what might have done to prevent such situations in the future. Can anyone suggest how I should move on and how to grow from this scenario? I really don't need sympathy guys but I need tools and skillset to handle such people.

I have a new manager now who is wonderful and dedicated to leveling me up. He's asked me to prepare answers for these 4 questions before our next 1-1: Goals & Expectations – What do you want to achieve? Current Skills & Experience – Where are you now? What strengths do you have? Any gaps? Challenges & Roadblocks – What’s holding you back? What’s been difficult for you? Success Metrics – How will we both measure progress? Taro has had a bit of an upgrade since I last used it and I just wanted to go through all resources to make sure I answer these questions well. So far I've collected: Courses Individual Videos I will definitely go through these as I carve my answers but also wanted to make sure I wasn't missing any other valuable videos/courses. I'd also appreciate any advice for the questions my manager has presented as well! Thanks!

Hello, need some advice here. I am a month into my new job - an AI startup, and my founder (who’s also my boss) has been scheduling 1-1s with me every other week to onboard me and give me time to ask questions. I feel like I am wasting this. I genuinely don’t have many questions to ask because I m mostly focussed on trying to complete my tickets as efficiently as possible (there is loads of work to do), and I already have been more or less briefed about the problem we are solving, KPIs and some big picture goals for the team. I have another meeting with him tomorrow. I need some help - any questions on what I should ask?

Hello I joined a new company as a senior swe earlier this month and have met everyone on my team but I'm new to big companies so not sure how to approach a skip level meeting? The reason I'm asking is I've seen a lot of people and posts talking about skip level relationships. 1. Am I supposed to set up a meeting myself or wait for them to set it up? 2. Should I tell my manager I'm talking to my skip level ie his manager?

I'm debating between two teams in bootcamp. All else assuming equal, the hiring manager (HM) of team A is higher up on the org chain (Team A HM reports to X, Team B HM reports to U who reports to W who reports to X). Should this play a factor in deciding between teams?

I am about to start a new grad job at a top tech company, but I have a little bit of negative experience from my most recent internship. I was very proactive about getting feedback from my manager, I would ask for it in every meeting and he explicitly appreciated how teachable I was and how high quality my questions were. He wanted me to return there full-time so he brought up the topic with other team members and engineering manager. In the last week of my internship I was told I did not get a full time return offer. Reason: relatively bad code quality (compared to a junior engineer bar). I was honestly surprised because I had been asking for feedback every week for the last 4 months and not once was it brought up. I think what happened was I met my manager's bar (and hence he wanted me back full time), but I did not meet the bar of another senior engineer on the team who denied the return offer. This means I have to make everyone on the team happy, not just my manager. How do I get honest feedback from everyone on the team?

Hi, I've been receiving unfair remarks and treatment from my manager. Apparently he has decided I'm "underperforming" because he noticed I show up a few minutes late to meetings and don't post enough on Slack. I've also had two of my 2 tasks delayed, missing deadlines. He has suggested "monitoring" me twice a week, as in having two 1:1 meetings with him - going through my task list on Monday and again through it on Friday. I find this suspicious because I'm already tracking everything I do within the project's task tracker together with other colleagues on this project and we have 2 weekly meetings with progress made on every task where he's also invited to attend. The overview has always been there for him and I've always documented my work. His remarks also go beyond the professional realm, calling me out as "too emotional", can I mention this to HR or is it not a good idea? This is the way he conducted the performance review as well, making statements like these that were not documented on paper. (I went to my skip manager to report him and did not believe me either that he made such remarks) Thought about going to HR and presenting my version of the story, as I find his accusation/statements of not performing ridiculous. He is producing unnecessary stress which is counterproductive to me performing the tasks efficiently. What do you think? Has this ever happened to you? What's the best way of defending yourself in this situation or how could I best protect myself? Could this get even worse?

Despite my seniority and recent promotion, I am being excluded from important meetings in favor of a younger employee who is a yes man and close to the engineering manager (EM). This employee, with less experience than me, has significant influence over the EM and is always considered first. This situation is disturbing, especially since our lean team has a Slack channel named product_name_planning_committee, which includes only the EM, tech lead, this employee, and two other product and business people, excluding me. Though I am part of a common Slack chat with the tech lead, EM, and this individual, it is mainly for update requests from the EM. I fear my role may be at risk due to my introverted nature, despite my skills. I worry that my reportees will be reassigned, and I may be laid off. I've considered quietly quitting and changing teams. I’ve requested to be included in meetings to feel part of the decision-making process directly to the EM, but he has still not called me to any of the meetings and even today did one without me. The rest of the team no longer sees me as a lead. This exclusion has left me feeling depressed and anxious about being removed from my position. While I was previously involved and got promoted, my reduced communication has led to my exclusion. I’ve decided to focus on maintaining my self-respect. I no longer work late nights and offer family health excuses when necessary. I used to handle multiple roles, including writing code for others, filling QA gaps, and developing SDKs in different languages, but I no longer feel part of the core team or the engineering leadership. Despite being fed up and feeling left out, I believe my skills are relevant and beyond what the role requires. How can I effectively navigate this situation and ensure my contributions are recognized?

I’ll be finishing my internship pretty soon and I think I feel like I’ve done a good job. I checked in with my manager every 2 weeks (didn’t check in with them for the past 3 weeks expecting this final conversation). Wondering what I should bring up with them in my last conversation with them? I am interested in a return offer (RO). What should I ask them about?

My manager has been pushing me to move fast for the past month due to my lack of progress and as a result, I haven’t been as careful with my testing and I found a major error in my code that might set me back by a week or two. My project is essentially a data generation pipeline and there’s an error with the data generation code. I was supposed to generate data to train an ML model. I started the data generation but only realized that we had an error 1/3 of the way in. We have a major deadline by early March and I’m afraid that there’s a real possibility that I can’t make that deadline. I have some ideas that may work (building a smaller scale version of my pipeline and train a small model to validate). In January he was worried with progress but a month later he seems more relieved with current progress, so breaking the news to him is worrying since I’d make him worry again. What’s the best course of action in this case? As a postmortem, what could I have done to prevent this situation from happening?

I (also my team) am having some tough time with my manager. I am listing some of the things to certain extent here in terms of what I see as a problem. I have provided some of the feedbacks directly to him, though he/she received it well, I don't see the improvements happening with him/her. Even after the people on the team having couple of conversations with skip level regarding this, we still don’t see an improvement. Looking for some advice on what I can try differently here. Lack of transparency and visibility: I see a lack of transparency from him/her regarding what he/she is learning from leadership about company priorities. This leaves me unclear on broader opportunities our team could focus on. Team Manager vs Leadership: Team meetings feel more like status updates rather than opportunities for her/him to share and set the team vision, mission, or direction, which could help boost morale and engagement. The focus is often on operational details like Jira updates, OKR updates, timelines etc instead of inspiring leadership. Contradictions in Expectations: She/he expects us to push product teams for alignment, even when their decisions depend on senior leadership and out of our control or pay level where things becomes hard to influence. However, when I asked about our team’s 2024 focus, he deferred, citing the same dependency on leadership alignment. This feels inconsistent. Difficult to Disagree: While she/he says she/he’s open to disagreement, in practice, she/he often asks follow-ups or challenges until her/his view prevails, making it hard to have meaningful discussions. Learning: I feel I’m not learning unique leadership skills from him/her compared to what I gain from other collaborators within the company or my previous job. Manager as Stakeholder vs Advocate: Double work if we involve him/her into conversation around what is going on in the project I’ve started handling stakeholder communication independently to avoid doubling work when aligning with her/him afterward.

I've been at my job for a year now as a junior software developer and I'd like to take more ownership and more responsibilities in my team as a step in my growth/promotion. How do I best approach this and how can I frame this conversation with my manager? ### Context I work in a startup-like company. I'd like to own a small part of the high-impact project I'm currently on (I work with 2-3 senior engineers) and/or own another future project. My manager agrees that the next step in my growth is to own a project but she's looking for something that fits my skillset. At this, I'm left wondering if there's something I can do on my end to help make it easier for her or signal that I am ready to own a project. My manager has said I am trending well and doesn't seem to have any concerns with my performance. In my next 1-1, I'm going to ask for any feedback, as well as discuss my 2025 growth plan. Since the work I'm now doing is more fullstack backend-oriented and I was previously mainly fullstack frontend-oriented, I am also actively practicing to become more familiar with our backend technologies/repos via pairing, code reviews, etc. Since I'm a junior, I know I'm judged on code impact so I focus on code quality (writing thorough test plans, code reviews) and code velocity and I have received positive feedback on these things. Also, there have been a couple of promotions in our team this year, so that might have an effect on the scope of projects as my manager likely prioritized their promotion plans. Thank you!

My new manager, my old manager, and the broader team have been managing the on-call rotation for the platform of my company's flagship product, which we launched two years ago. Initially, the rotation included just 3 engineers, but after discussions with my directors and acknowledgment from the rest of the organization, we increased it to 8 engineers to form a healthier on-call rotation. Despite having 8 engineers, I've noticed that many team members, including our principal and staff engineers, are still not familiar with the on-call procedures. I have compiled a support run-book log documenting the steps for handling each issue/alert, so the on-call team understands the severity and business impact of different issues. The issues can range from low priority to business-critical. However, the support run-book documentation is not entirely reliable as the ultimate source of truth because our production system support behaves more like triage than a debug system. Additionally, the nature of the on-call rotation can vary from simply acknowledging alerts and following documented steps to collaborating with business owners. Sometimes, issues are caused by other teams or third-party vendors, making them unsolvable by the on-call engineer alone. I noticed that Production Issue happened almost daily, and the on-call issues have impacts to company's revenues and customer facing experience.. I am interested in learning more about how others view a healthy on-call rotation. What are the key factors to consider when forming a healthy on-call rotation?

I want to make effective use of my time with my manager but I feel I am not. Because I mostly discuss about my tasks and progress that too not in too much detail because my manager is not too technical or doesn't actively code.

My lead is working on a project that looks to be grabbing a lot of eye balls in the team. Especially by my manager and as it is important for the team. I have not been actively involved in this project and slowly my manager wants me to get involved. Now my lead who had done some initial design work architect reviews doesn't share much information on the work being done so far and goes to meetings around this project by himself. I don't want to sabotage his work and I understand that he wants his efforts to be recognized but the problem is if I am not involved in that conversation from the get-go I miss out on some key decisions taken on why we are doing some things. Also, such meetings also prepare us to understand other systems. Which I feel like I miss out on. when the eventual implementation comes to me I wouldn't be aware of some things. What should I do in this situation? Should I try to get more involved? I have already told my lead to shadow me in some of the meetings so I am aware of the context. But he doesn't involve me. The reason I ask is these meetings help us to understand the architecture POV and get to know the system better.

For the past few months, I've been experiencing worsening mental health issues for a variety of (mostly) external reasons. I've been heavily debating how to approach this and am considering mental health leave, or at least starting a dialogue with my manager. However, I have no rapport with my current manager and am unsure if I feel comfortable discussing these issues with them. How would you approach this?

I received an offer, but they have asked for a reference from my ex-manager who I've worked with in the past 5 years. The challenge is I did not have a good relationship with my ex-manager. The relationship was the reason I left. The environment in my ex company was also pretty toxic so I would ideally not want to provide reference of anyone in the senior leadership. How do I deal with the situation?

I have been working on a sister team project for a while which is lead by my skip manager. My manager told me that once I am done with the work in my sister team's project, I could reach out to him for future projects. I want to talk to my skip regarding the same and tell him that I would like to move out of this project as I am done with my work. How do I approach him? Could you please let me know?

Hi guys, I am struggling with frequent EM changes in my current team. I understand the company also struggling to find the right person, however, there would 4th an EM in our team for the last year. With every change, it was a bit stressful for me because I could not make a good relationship with not all of them, how to deal with this kind of situations? in my feelings, I am changing my company when every new manager joins the team.

1. What can I do to best support you as your manager? 2. What should I do more or less as your manager? 3. What do you like most about our team? 4. What are opportunities for the team to do better? 5. What motivates/demotivates you? 6. What do you think the best way of recognizing people is? 7. What do you think the best way of recognizing people is? 8. Experience: What development opportunities will you pursue in your day-to-day role? - E.g. Deliver on project ... - E.g. Practice writing a technical spec - E.g. Present a topic at Town Hall 9. Exposure: How will you learn from those around you? - (This can be from within your team or outside of your team such as mentors) - E.g. Meet and collaborate with .... - E.g. Read technical spec from a mentor.. Education: What structured or formal learning will you take? - E.g. Take a bootcamp class on Java - E.g. Take a machine learning bootcamp What do you want to achieve? What is your developmental goal? What skills will help you be a tech lead? How do you want to improve collaboration / communication skills ? What is the expectation at the next level? What technologies are you interested in? What product areas are you interested in? What resources, support or training can help you get there? What can your manager do to help? When do you plan to complete this goal? What objective measures will indicate that you achieved your goal? What will be the benefits of this change for you? What are your long term ambitions (3 years)? - e.g. Get promoted to next level What are your career goals by the end of this year (1 year)? - e.g. Be a subject matter expert in some domain areas - e.g. a specific performance rating

I'm currently working closer to the product side (i.e. consumer-facing) on my team. However, I want to move deeper into the infra layer, more into the back-end and away from the front-end, as that's what I'm more passionate about and this area should be more technically complex. I've brought this up with my manager a couple times, but they said that since I'm already doing great in my current role, they would prefer for me to stay here. How can I navigate this conversation and convince them of this move?