Working With Your Manager Q&A and Videos

I have weekly meetings with leadership, and they consistently ask more about our timelines and engineering work, which I understand we need to provide. Having said that, what are some of the questions we engineers can ask leadership/product to hold them accountable for some of the requirements? What are some of the customer-centric questions we could ask?

I completed an internship at a bank last summer. During the internship's end, I received positive feedback from my manager and had expressed a clear interest towards returning. The recruiter informed us that headcount will not be finalized until January. She said we can contact her after then regarding return offers. In the past year, all the interns received return offers after the new year. My question is: in January, how should I best approach the recruiter and my internship manager regarding return offers? I am thinking of writing something along the following lines to my manager, but I am not sure if this is appropriate: Dear [Internship Manager's Name], I hope you are doing well! Thank you so much for the opportunity to intern with [Company X] last summer. It was a truly rewarding experience, and I learned so much during my time there. I genuinely enjoyed working with the team and contributing to [internship project]. Given how much I valued my time at [Company X], I am very interested in exploring the possibility of returning for a full-time role. Could you let me know the best way to discuss the possibility of returning to [Company X]? I’d be happy to provide any additional information you might need. Big thanks for reading through all of this - I know it is a very long post and I really appreciate your time!

First, I would really like to thank Alex for taking the time to record the video series regarding the Meta Intern Success Series. I just watched the section regarding working with my intern manager. I understand that it is important to have a weekly 1:1 with my IM. I am wondering if it is necessary to also have a weekly meeting with the engineering manager as well. If so, what would be some good topics to bring up during the meeting? Topics I am thinking of include: project updates, feedback, career advice/planning. I would love to hear any thoughts on this.

I'm a senior software engineer in big tech and onboarded into my company and role as a team lead for the past 6 months. The project is almost complete, but work is not technically interesting and does not fit into my long term career goals. My manager is getting promoted as director to another org, and I wish to join him. He said he fought hard to bring me along with him, but my current director would not allow it due to product/engineering resourcing requirements. I expressed to my manager this was extremely disappointing news, and it's hard to see a future on this project/org. He said to talk to my director and we can follow up afterwards, because he didn't know just how much I wanted out. I can't leave the company due to the current job market, my short tenure and golden handcuffs. But I'm afraid if I keep chugging along, I'm just going to burn out. Any advice is much deeply appreciated.

Our company recently got acquihired by another company as we're a team specialized in GenAI in our logistics domain which is rare. Someone who is a manager in another team approached me with interest to use my expertise with GenAI effectively which could save them 2 hours per task (50K tasks in like last 10 years) I've talked with them 2 times now and they're interested in us collaborating , me or maybe also others. Our team wants to collaborate with others and add value. How do I bring this to my current team? Especially the Head of Tech who is like my manager, he often doesn't want me to operate on my own. And am concerned that by sharing this collaboration opportunity he'll say something like he takes over from here or something. The goal is to increase collaboration between teams and also would love to add value across teams, but not sure how that works with tasks on 1 team while also having tasks at another team. I was thinking about sharing in the standup that I've met team x and they are interested in collaborating on y there will be a follow up , I'll keep you informed. And telling product owner that I would like them to be there in the conversation. I feel like the moment I start going across teams I'm acting beyond my role, taking lead and stepping on others toes and not sure who to report to anymore. Thanks in advance!

What would be the best way to answer a question "What are you hoping to get out of this internship?" during a 1:1 meeting with my manager? I heard it is common for interns to be asked this question during the Meta internship. Some ideas I can think of: To secure a return offer, as I really enjoy learning and growing from the team I would love to learn as much as I can, collaborate with talented engineers, and hopefully make an impact while I’m here. To get to a level where I can review another team member's code and approve it

In the managing up class by Ethan Evans, there's a mention of an app that can show personality & communication style results of a manager. What's the name of this app?

I am currently interning at a mid-sized tech company for the winter season. At the beginning of the internship, I was informed by the recruiter that the manager will assign the intern project at around week 2-3 of the program. During the third week, I politely approached my manager regarding the intern project. The manager replied that the details of the project are still being finalized, as it involves a lot of dependencies across teams. As of now (fifth week), the project has not yet been assigned. In the meantime, he has advised me to continue working on Jira tickets in my team's codebase. I really enjoy my assigned tasks and definitely appreciate this opportunity to make contributions to a large codebase. However, I am a little concerned that I will not have sufficient time to finish the project or that my project's impact may not be significant enough. If I understand correctly, the project impact as well as timely completion are pretty significant factors towards intern return offer. My question is: should I let my manager know about my concerns regarding the project, or would it be a better idea to wait until the manager assigns me the project? Big thanks for reading through all of this - I know it is a very long post and I really appreciate your time!

I need advice on how to handle a challenging situation at my job. 6 months ago, my team underwent a consolidation, and a new manager joined, bringing along three engineers and 100 pipelines from his previous department. The first task he was assigned was to migrate those pipelines to our team’s tech stack. The problem is that the migration has been significantly delayed. My skip-manager got involved and asked my manager about the value of these pipelines and why all of them need to be migrated. However, my manager insists that all pipelines must be migrated but hasn’t provided clear reasons for their business value. To address this, an architect was brought in as a neutral party to gather requirements. They discovered that the pipelines lack documentation, which further complicates the migration process. Now my skip-manager has asked me to step in and lead the migration as a high-priority project. This puts me in a tough position: I may need to read the code and start migrating pipelines without understanding their business impact. I’ve suggested to my skip-manager that we first evaluate the business impact of the pipelines, but my manager remains uncooperative and refuses to share useful information. There’s potential for conflict with my manager, who seems resistant to transparency, while my skip-manager is relying on me to resolve the issue. I’m unsure how to proceed under these circumstances, especially with the lack of cooperation and documentation. Should I push back and insist on understanding the business value before proceeding? Or should I move forward with the migration despite the risks of misprioritizing pipelines? Any suggestions or strategies for navigating this situation would be greatly appreciated.

I will be starting my internship at Meta next week. Is it necessary to have a one-on-one chat with everyone in the team during the first week? My thinking is there are probably 15+ people per team, and many people are probably very busy. I feel I should be prioritizing having one-on-one with the intern manager and the two other peers who are evaluating me. How would you recommend I go about this situation?