Working With Your Manager Q&A and Videos

I'm a new grad. I watched the and i understand the theory -- be vulnerable, use it as a time to grow and get feedback on improvement, keep docs and an agenda

But I've only ever had 1-on-1s in my 1 internship where every 2 weeks I'd meet with the manager and it would be 5-10 mins. When I ask how can I improve, they would say yep everything is good, your perf is good, keep doing what you're doing and I'd say ok.

If I told my manager that hey I'm not happy with the current scope and I'm not learning enough they said rn keep doing what you're doing and later in the internship I'll give you other stuff and then I never got different work

In my new different company where I'm working in an early stage startup I want to set up a strong 1-on-1 culture with the founders who I am always working/talking consistently with but I have no idea what actually to talk about?

Can someone share case studies on what your recent 1-on-1s are like? what did you talk about -- breaking down in time components (e.g. first 5 mins small talk, then next 10 mins talking about X, then 10 mins on Y). If someone could share like a blue-print/actionable framework or guide that would be really helpful

Joined Meta 2 months ago as an E4 in a completely different tech stack and domain. Recently my manager informed me in a 1:1 and subsequent email with my skip and ERBP that I’m trending BE. It has areas I’m missing the bar on and ways to improve so I’m planning to work on those but is there anything else I can do to turn this around and be successful? Is it impossible to get a CME for H1 if this signal has been documented?

A bit of context, I've read the EM videos on Taro, and I feel the one that I have is not on the same levels. They lack of many things. I fear to provide the proper feedback because my promotion and appraisal is on the line.

They got promoted from SDE 1 to EM because of the funding

1. I would recommend my manager to others?
   ~ For people management yes, for technical stuff no
2. My manager assigns stretch opportunities to help me develop in my career?
   ~ I don't really understand this question
3. My manager communicates clear goals for our team
   ~ No they don't, don't have any documentation, a system design decisions are made on ad hoc basis, team is not aware about the changes.
4. My manager consistently shows consideration for me as a person
   ~ yes people ops are good
5. My manager effectively collaborates across boundaries(eg team, org)
   ~ Nope, there are certain teams expecting the manager to steer the ship but since there is no planning many of the things are pending
6. My manager gives me actionable feedback on a regular basis
   ~ Nope 1-1 is there is no feedback for me
7. My manager has had a meaningful discussion with me about my career development in the past six months
   ~ Yep promotion and appraisal talks as I'm identified as top IC + team lead who is proactive
8. My manager has the technical expertise required to effectively manage me.
   ~ Nope, they lack
9. My manager keeps the team focused on priorities, even when its difficult
   ~ This they do but always the output has no value only there is a hype and fear to get things done, no business value is generated
10. My manager makes tough decisions effectively
    ~ They reorg the team only thinking them as a resource rather than how much context and individual has made in the project
11. My manager provides the autonomy I need to do my job
    ~ They do and then I plan it accordingly but when a junior goes to manager he changes the scope and context
12. What would you have your manager change?
13. What would you recommend your manager keep doing?

But, overall I fear to write what I wish to communicate to the leadership.

He keeps assigning me projects where the visibility is low and it has made me immensely frustrated. I'm looking for a new job but in the interim any suggestions how to deal with my manager? This has been happening for quite sometime now. I talked to him about it last year and then he moved me to a development project which I did pretty well but after it was over he again assigned me low priority projects/tasks which are very tedious to do and not so rewarding.

I'm not sure talking to him will help me in anyway because he is aware of my interests but he keeps doing this and acts like this is the best he can do.

I read and implemented a lot of the advice from Taro on building my relationship with my manager. I also worked closely with him for a year to position myself for the promotion to Senior. Every two weeks, I would meticulously document senior behavior in my "brag document" that I shared with him through Microsoft OneNote. Every month during our 1:1, I would ask him for feedback on what I needed to continue doing or change to reach Senior. During performance review each quarter, I used all of this to officially document my growth, and secured 3 Exceeds with 1 Meets. By the end of Q4, he was primed to go to bat for me.

Then he suddenly got laid off a month or two before names are submitted up the chain of command for promotion. I imagine others might have or will encounter a similar situation. In addition to layoffs, company reorganization or your manager jumping into another opportunity might have similar effects.

It feels like so much of my effort over the past year was futile. What makes this sting even more is that I'm fully aware of my company's promotion cycle, which is once a year in March/April. Promotions rarely happen outside this cycle.

What are some tactics to navigate this current situation and a strategy to avoid this single point of failure in the future?

Here's what I've done so far

• Reached out to manager on LinkedIn to console him on layoffs. Fortunately he brought up the topic of my promotion and advised me to pass along a message to my next manager that we were working together on my promotion.
• My company is still undergoing reorg, and I don't have an official manager yet, so reached out to his manager, which is the Director. The "brag document" in OneNote came in handy since I shared it with him and passed along the message from my manager
• Started looking at other companies for senior roles. It's difficult to bear the thought of starting over from square one with a new manager within my current company and waiting a whole other year.

Here's my thoughts around strategy moving forward

• Maybe work with manager's manager, in addition to the direct manager, for promotions. Would work more closely with direct manager, but at least touch base with manager's manager once a quarter regarding the promo.

I'm at a company where we are migrating from AWS to Snowflake due to Snowflake's simplicity and cost savings.

The Team responsible for the migration and in charge of Snowflake is led by a guy who is difficult to work with. He's not unpleasant, but if he gets you on the phone, he loves to talk and take up a ton of time. I was literally on a call with him for 2 hours yesterday because he goes off on tangents and likes to hear himself talk. He also has a bit of an accent which makes it harder to understand him.

So he's a Director and leader of that team and I'm a Data Engineer on an adjacent team. As part of the migration to Snowflake, he had the company agree to license a piece of 3rd party software to move data into Snowflake. This piece of software is one that none of the Engineers in the department want to use: it's old, closed-source, no one knows it and is a dead-end on a resume. On top of that, I'm pretty sure it's completely unnecessary! I think Snowflake provides a way of getting data into it that works as well. The biggest thing is the cost! It's a whopping percentage of our cloud spend!

This director had a good relationship with the VP of my department (my former skip) who was the one who signed off on the 3rd-party software but recently left. I was discussing the situation with a colleague today and realized that since my former skip is no longer around, I could potentially make the case to my new skip, which could earn my plaudits. It's an easy way to save the company a pile of money every year (multiples of my salary).

So I'm thinking of doing a POC of how I can replace the 3rd-party. I mentioned this to my manager today, and he said we already have a 3 year contract with the vendor. I think he's resigned to the idea that we're locked in for 3 years.

If I can reproduce the functionality of the 3rd party software (just bringing in data into Snowflake), should I make the case to my new skip (who doesn't know me yet)? I'm assuming I should go through my manager first.

Should I try and share the credit with my coworkers who also don't want to use the 3rd party and would probably back me up?

Thanks!

I want to highlight the good work a coworker has done for me by helping me out a lot and being really attentive and on top of things.

Per , I want to let their manager know. We don't have ThanksBot, so I'll be thanking via email.

Do I CC my peer, or just my own manager in my email to my peer's manager? Or do I address the email to my peer and CC their manager and my manager?

Thanks!

I am a senior on my team of 6 engineers. There is one more senior on the team apart from a tech lead who leads the technical projects in the team. I have been on this team and company for a year now, and i am generally a very driven person. I started noticing that this other senior engineer competes with me for everything, he has also been rude to me on occasions (on a private call when no one else could listen) and generally plays politics like leaving me out of important discussions, trying to one-up on me over every little thing. I have tried quite a bit to ignore him but he doesn't let up. It's triggering my survival instincts and I am more stressed than usual nowadays.

Does anyone have any advice? Basically i want to be the high performer that i am without worrying about someone who is trying to sabotage me.

Opinions welcome, thanks in advance!

It's performance review time, and I want a nice raise and bonus just as much as anyone else.

Standard procedure for getting a raise seems to be making the case for yourself: keep track of all your accomplishments during the year so you can present them to your boss when asking for a raise/bonus. Simple enough. I'm prepping that list of things right now.

It's also been the case that this past year I turned down 3 offers that each would have paid me more than my current gig - between 20% and 40%. Now, even though I'm underpaid at my current gig, it's also the case that I'm compensated for that by it being super chill - no deadlines, lots of latitude on what to work on, a nice WFH arrangement (1 day in office a week), and pleasant coworkers.

My question is, do I mention that I got the offers in addition to mentioning the things I'd accomplished over the year? There's an element of "hardball" in that, but maybe it's not a bad move. I guess the phrasing of it is the key. So instead of saying "I've got other offers, give me more money or I leave", it's "I really like working here and with you. So much so that I turned down other companies that were offering decently more. Can you see what can be done to raise my compensation?"

Finally, I'm aware that the best way to ask for a raise is :
"I really enjoy working on this team. I want to do more to increase my impact and empower my teammates - What are the steps I need to take to get to that next level?"

My manager gave his 2 week notice today for personal reasons. The company is working on backfilling his role which in the meantime will be handled by his manager. I recently started this job a few months ago, so while I have worked closely with my manager, I haven't yet worked with his manager or other managers in the org yet.

Here are my questions around making this transition smooth:

• What can I do in the next 2 weeks to ensure that the work I've done with my manager is captured well for other people in the org to notice?
• How do I best approach the last one-on-one with my manager?
• And how can I make a good impression with my new interim manager?

1. When to start this conversation with my manager knowing org transfer is frozen till March? It might affect psc ratings.

2. Should I start talking to new managers or inform my current manager first?

3. Not sure if I will have enough impact created for mid year signal/ratings if I start looking out for new teams in March and may be join by April?

4. Will there be more jobs posted in March?

5. Please suggest some general guidance for switching teams.

tldr; I am a Tech Lead working in of the big tech giants, getting burnt out due to office politics and ignorant managers.

I am one of the few people (~20) who accidentally was made remote, this was the result of one of the irresponsible move from one of the tech giant.

Anyways, I was part of a team for almost more than a year and the company culture was a bit shocking to me as my manager refused to do 1:1, lack of quality work and ignorance because of me being the remote was evident.

Six months before I, including my team, was transferred to another team with a greenfield project (with little or no prior info), we worked really hard but after 3-4months, another reshuffling happened and most of the team was moved to other projects/team. After couple of months the team was finally dismantled, I thought we will go back to our original team but to my surprise, instead of retaining me, they hired two new lead engineers in their location. In between all of this I was surprised to know that my manager (previous) didn't fill my annual review, when I tried to contact him I didn't get any response. I also scheduled a meeting with him but he didn't show up.

Few weeks before, I was moved to another team, which I found was in the mid of big release. The Principal engineer who was responsible for the design and architecture of the system was moved out before I joined so there was no knowledge sharing per se. I tried to contact him but he is too busy to entertain me now. During the first couple of days, my new manager briefed me that I am the owner of this new project and I have to look after each and everything. The project in itself is very huge: It was in design phase since last 1 year, and it depends on 2-3 teams. Everyday I am pulled into random meetings where there is a lot of alignment going on with some crucial decision making as the project is going to be live in new few months. In the daily sprint the manager wants to make sure I have enough work assigned to me as well. In two weeks I am almost burnt out as I have little or no time left after hours of meeting and going through the random documents.

Recently I came to know that there will a week long in-person workshop to get an alignment on the various decisions on the current project and I am not invited, I pinged my manager for the same but there is a long silence.

As of now, I have little or no breathing space to prepare for the interviews and almost on the verge of burnout.

Few important points:

• To my surprise my official manager is still the same manager (first team) and he has still not filled up my performance review.
• I moved countries because of personal issues so leaving the company may not be easy as of now. I have a lot of financial responsibilities, plus the current market and immigration condition has made the condition worse.

In my organization, there are SDE roles till level 4, and then on top of that, you become an EM. Many times, an SDE 3/4 (who is considered a technical lead) gives tasks or creates the sprint. But then when the junior engineer goes to an EM to show their work, the EM changes the entire approach or assigns vague tasks.

This impacts the velocity of the sprint. I do want to understand: How do I put it out to the upper management such that this doesn't happen? Also, should an EM make technical decisions in this way?

Hi Everyone,

I am a senior software engineer in my company. We are an R&D company who work for the retail industry. I work in the Computer Vision and systems area.

I joined this company as a senior software engineer. Initially, the project that I was hired for had C++ work but that project was scrapped and we worked on a new product where everything was Python and lots of DevOps tools.

Now the problem that I am facing is all my colleagues who are software engineers know a lot about Python and these tools. I have never used them so far. For me, it was exciting that I was using these new tools which were very necessary in the current industry but I was anyways slow and my code quality and the way I designed things never matched the team's ways of things. I know everybody says that the fundamental principles are the same but I found there are some pythonic ways which are way better than a person who is learning it. Additionally, I was a Senior Engineer, so the manager and lead always came to me and said that they expected more from me. I was not contributing enough.

I feel it is normal to expect things from me as I am a senior. The main problem that I face is I don't feel myself important to the team. Most of the development or coding is done by the rest of the team. I even see they are given more design and senior role work too. I am given very small things. Honestly, even I don't know if I will be able to work on designing systems using these technologies. It affects my confidence and so I am never confident in my work, I have a constant fear that I can lose my job anytime. I don't feel proud of my work anymore now. I have learnt the new tools from last 1 year but I am unable to lead the team in any direction. There are some new concepts in Computer Vision world now like Embeddings which is completely new to me I am struggling to catch up on anything.

Our product is going live very soon, so the issues and pressure have started to grow. I am not even able to build any relationships with the real stakeholders in the team. They all love my other teammates and thus keep giving them work. Whenever I try to talk to them about any issues I do not get any encouraging reply, it feels like I am giving very basic suggestions.

Can anyone advise me on how to handle and perform well in the team and above all feel recognized in the team and organization? I am pretty sure many people here would have changed technology and should have faced similar situations , many would have recovered from this situation.

I always have very high standards for myself and have always been recognized as so in my previous companies. Lately, I feel I am not feeling very proud about my work, and I feel that is the main issue. I need some advice to improve in my field and in a consistent way.

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,

I was put on PIP today. The PIP period is from 01/2024 till end of 01/2024. He said unsatisfactory performance & had to do this to be fair to others in the team. I think I was being benchmarked against others who work on weekends as outlined in my previous question: .

Yesterday I asked my manager for a 1-week remote and 3 weeks PTO (the company has unlimited PTO) from end of January to 3rd week of February. Do you think this was one of the reasons leading to me being PIP during the month of January?

What should I do now? Should I strive to overcome the PIP or should I find a new job? Anyone successfully overcame the PIP? How do I balance PIP and finding new job?

For more information, my 1st-year stock won't be vested till 06/2024 (so 25% of my RSUs won't be vested till end of the 1st year working for them). I think I'm out looking for a new job, but don't want to lose the RSUs.

For the sake of extreme ownership what could I have done better? If you need more info from me I can definitely provide in the threads below.

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!

I work in a team of 10-12 application scientists. Our skip was the CTO of the company until a month ago. There has been a temporary reorg recently and our new skip is the SVP of product. I am assuming he is not aware of all the things we are working on (or particularly I am doing) except may be a few selected team highlights. I want to introduce myself and build a rapport for more fruitful interactions with the skip and the bigger product team in near future. Since everyone in our team (including our manager, CTO, new skip and most of the company) are all remote, I feel developing and cultivating such relationships requires extra effort.

And, in general, how would you start a conversation and build a relationship with engineers/scientists/executives in other teams with whom you might not have worked with yet but want to be in their network?

I am very much aligned and aware with needing to show impact or been seen as an SME to have visibility to move up to a staff level.

My question is one of logistics. How is this possible when you have more work to do than fits in 40 hours, let alone finding extra time to do these other things? For example if you have at least 30 hours of coding, 5 hours of code reviews or scoping documentation, 5 hours of meetings, an additional 5 hours of random things (CI broken, helping colleagues, ad hoc issues etc), where do you even begin to find time for these extra things? Especially when all of the above is barely considered meeting expectations?

I will also clarify that I don't want “get better at coding” as a valid answer. No matter how good you are, you still need to understand the many systems involved which can take a while and if you constantly have to tackle new areas, there's always discovery.

My question is more around how do you ask or “show” you should have time to work on other things. Whenever I would approach my manager with well thought out proposals, buy in, and even timelines the answer was always later.

Hi Taro,

I'm cross posting this from the premium slack because it was raised that the answers might help the broader community.

I work for a small company - the engineering org is approximately 60-70 people all told. The company is about a decade old, but has grown more recently, and I joined the small SRE/Developer Tooling team within the last year. Historically, the company has operated at a relatively slow pace, and followed practices that are, politely, out of date. Just to give an example of the kind approach the company takes:

• We operate out of a single AWS Region, with no DR or failover capabilities
• infrastructure was provisioned ad-hoc and manually, with effectively no Infrastructure as code
• Developers would typically bypass deployment pipelines to manually update files or run commands, even for production systems
• QA is primarily manually performed for our SaaS application. There is some automation, but this is something that QA runs and checks the output, instead of automatically tracking the output in some way.

In my role, I've been pushing for change where possible, trying to evangelize the better ways of working, such as Infrastructure as Code, logs sent to a centralized location like Splunk, and deploying to other AWS regions to assist in both regional lag and general DR/failover concerns.

Thankfully, there's definitely some purchase there by leadership, at least on a high level, as they're generally receptive to these changes and recognize that they cannot continue with the same old practices. However, this mentality doesn't appear to be flowing through to the rest of the engineering organisation. My team and I are repeatedly asked to revert changes we've made, often because developers are merely used to the way things used to be, or because PMs/teams want to stick to a schedule or speed that was only possible via shortcuts (such as manually provisioned infrastructure). All of this has happened despite repeated public comments by some in leadership against those requests specifically.

What can I do to push for these kinds of changes, when I'm not in any kind of official management or leadership position? I have no official power beyond a general remit by my manager to uphold certain standards for my team.

Hey all, I'm a new grad Data Scientist and I've been working for my current employer for about 6 months now. It's a mid-sized company so I didn't get the chance to pick the team when I first joined. I realized not that long into the job that I don't want to stay on this team for the long term, and today I just heard the news about another team actively hiring for Data Scientists. But I'm not sure if I should pursue this opportunity for a few reasons:

1. I've only been at this company for 6 months and haven't gone through a formal perf cycle yet. This means that I would be evaluated on a "case-by-case basis" and would need approval from the HRBP and my manager.
2. They are hiring for one level above my current role, although someone on that team told me it's flexible.
3. My current team is understaffed and is currently hiring as well, so there is a risk of my manager not approving this transfer. This also means I won't have enough time to prepare for the interview.
4. This is not currently listed on the internal job board (although supposedly this position was only released externally today so the internal job board might have been updated yet)

Here are a few reasons why I want to transfer to the new team:

1. Due to the scope of the work on my current team, I feel that I'm not learning as much as I'd like to. It's not very technical and relies heavily on specific business contexts. I'm more interested in improving my technical ability in writing code and building products over learning business contexts, at least for now.
2. A lot of my current work involves writing ad-hoc SQL queries to support other functions. I don't find a lot of value in this kind of work and want to invest my time in building stuff from which I can learn new skills.
3. I interned on the team I want to transfer to and really enjoyed it. I keep good relationships with many of the team members and am familiar with their work. Also, I genuinely think the work they are doing on that team is very interesting.
4. I don't see a clear way of progression on my current team. My current team was only established two months before I joined due to a reorg. Every IC on my team is brand new and my manager is brand new to being a manager as well. There are no senior engineers to learn from and I can't see what senior engineer scope looks like on our team.
5. Our team supports the sales team in client communications, which means we have very unpredictable workloads and deadlines. Sometimes I have to work very long hours and take on-call requests which can be very stressful.

I really want to switch to a new environment but I feel like my chances aren't great. It would be great if folks could share their thoughts on:

1. Should I reach out to the prospective team's manager to express my interest in this role right now?
2. Since manager approval is required before starting the interview process, it's possible that I would have to stay on my current team with my manager knowing I want to transfer out. I think it is a situation I want to avoid but also don't want to miss the opportunity because of this.
3. In general, what would be a good approach to this? And is there any specific advice?

Thanks in advance!

Hi All,

I have a situation, can you help me on how you'd navigate it?

I have a potential project idea that has staff level scope.

There's a pain point across our company and this project would help the entire company.

I want to lead this project because it'd be a tremendous opportunity for my growth.

Given that I'm mid-level and lack of experience leading projects, I fear ownership of the project will be given to someone else to lead if I speak on it. This project shouldn’t be done in silo, this project needs to be part of the engineering priority because it will span across multiple teams.

Can you help me navigate how to maintain ownership/lead this project?

Background : I'm a new-grad junior engineer, recently joined the company around 3 months ago, so still pretty early in my career. I'm currently working on an assigned project which I own and believe it has impact.

Details : My manager recently recommended I take on a quarter-long project in parallel to my current project (as we're short on bandwidth), which I don't feel very passionate about and don't see much impact in it. My understanding is that the work for that project will be on & off while my main focus will still be on my original project

Question : It is good to take on additional responsibility, as long as I have the bandwidth for it, I agree. I'm just not sure if this new project would be beneficial or is the best thing to work on.

How can I handle this situation ? Should I be concerned too much about the project's impact (as opposed to taking more responsibility), especially since I'm still early on in my role / career ?