Working With Your Manager Q&A and Videos

I joined this new company, and since the beginning things were little off for me. i.e.

• the manager when interviewed me I got a gut feeling that he is not a nice guy, I checked with my friend and got convinced that it's okay
• While onboarding, I talked to couple of my team-mates and they were either disinterested or complete rude to me, I ignored it thinking I might be the most stupid and inefficient one..
• While getting some sessions from senior engineer, the guy always made me feel bad about myself, about how I lacked necessary knowledge and how I should just get things.. I ignored that too thinking it's just me who is not smart enough

Since last couple of days, I talked some of other engineers and found that all my team-mates are pretty toxic and, when he shared some of the past experiences, I got now convinced that it's pretty toxic environment especially for my team. Now my question is that all this time I thought I am the problem.. but it turned out that it was not me.. I am still pretty new here and I am seriously searching for another job now, but what did I miss here..? What could I have done here such that I would have known this earlier? (I know, I could have talked to the other guys earlier but I was not so sure because I had no idea how they would react to that.. I shared my concerns only when it became unavoidable)

I have been chasing the SDE-3 promotion from last one year. It was denied in the year end review cycle in December.

In this cycle (Jan - June), I have ticked almost all the checkpoints as per the firm's SDE-3 competency matrix and I have a good amount of documentation around it as well which I have submitted to my manager.

I want to let my manager and skip (Director) know that I will leave if I am not promoted in this cycle as I don't think there are any negative data points against me.

Any suggestions about how should I subtly carry out this conversation?

What’s the best way to handle a situation as a tech lead when you are under pressure to deliver your tasks and ensure that the other team members are also on track? If one developer slacks and doesn’t meet the deadline, is it automatically the lead's fault, especially if the situation was raised well in advance. If the person continues to under deliver with poorly written code, is it okay to spend time and pair program and get work done just to meet deadlines? Keep in mind that the developer is a junior engineer and requires fair bit of hand holding.

I had to approve a PR, although I was not 100% confident, it wasn’t a breaking code and it wouldn’t have caused any backward compatible issues. I received extremely harsh feedback for approving a sub standard from a peer/colleague. Had I not completed the PR, my manager would have provided feedback on the delayed project, what’s the best way to navigate between two leads or managers who are not aligned and expect different outcomes from the same situation?

Please help.

What sort of documentations should we have for our 1 on 1s? Is there a video on having a 1 on 1 doc?

My previous manager at Workday told me to discuss
Wins, What I am focusing on, Blockers, Personal Development, Action steps

and created a shared google doc for us, but it seemed kind of status-reporty. Is there another recommended format for our 1 on 1?

I want to build a stronger relationship with my manager, but I'm unsure where the boundary should be when it comes to opening up to them. For example, I have some confidence issues which affect my work performance a bit: Is that something that's okay to share with them or is it possible that they'll hold it against me? I haven't interacted too much with my manager as I'm fairly new to the team, but so far, the signal has been positive.

I am usually very competitive and while I love my friends, I have this internal push to always do better than people around me. I got promoted to SWE II within a year in 2021 and I was so proud of that. However, this year my manager changed and without really knowing or understanding me, he gave me the feedback of "didn't meet expectations" in our annual performance review in Feb. I had full plans to change my company soon since I didn't feel supported by my manager. However, my father fell incredibly ill in May (still is) which canceled all my plans as I moved back home to support my family.

I have a feeling my friend who is on a different team than I am (but reports to the same manager) might get promoted to senior. She deserves it. She got different opportunities than I did but I can't help but feel a pang of jealousy knowing that all I want this coming Feb is "meets expectation" rating while my friend might get promoted. Another friend of mine switched to a company that seems incredible but I somehow feel "behind" in my career despite knowing that I will meet the career goals I have next year. I am already a million times a better software dev than I was beginning of the year. I have close relationships with my colleagues but how do I focus on my own lane and not compare myself to others?

I joined under leveled in a company. My mgr and skip know it.

But they are assigning tasks which are L+2 level. If I am talking promotion they are turning the other way.

How to smartly communicate that I won't do such high level work unless they get serious about promotion?

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!

I joined a new team a week back and will soon have my first 1:1 with the skip-level manager.

Given that I haven't spent much time to have any feedback on my manager or the org culture and process, what should I discuss to get the most value out of the time?

P.S. I have gone through this question: , and I did found some great insights, but wanted to ask if there's anything more I can do given my position and experience is different.

Thank you

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.

My current manager comes from a very different background compared to me and my team, which has lead to some misalignment in terms of what the team should do and how it should do it. I feel like there's a fundamental difference in working styles here.

This mis-sync has shown in our 1 on 1 meetings as well. They're less about my career growth and my goals and more about them and their way of doing things.

Any ideas on how to remedy this situation?

I am a SDE II and joined my new team few months ago.

Recently my manager is leading me on a project he describes as exciting and transformative, and we started with a Spike, which means details to implement are planning in progress. It has been very challenging for me throughout this process because the approach for next steps is always changing and it looks like we frequently went out of sync. I pushed a major PR yesterday after over a month of work, and we had another 1:1 to discuss next steps, in which I have to say there are many frustrating moments after my manager explained his plan and I still want him to clarify more. "It's something small and straightforward. You know I can do this very quick, but you need to learn"(I know it could be but I have to have good understanding before I can start). "Then what's you solution?"(I don't know what the problem is, how am I going to have solution?" "I can't show you everything" (I am not asking for everything, but there should be better way to explain this) Sometimes there was long pause and dead silence, and I can feel he's getting disappointed and annoyed.

I think there are expectation issues going on between us. I feel like in our conversations, the gap between what's required to understand him now and next is always too big, there is lots of info thrown at me at once, even though some of them are not even close to work on, which overwhelmed me a lot. But he thinks I should be capable of handling all it takes to fill in the gaps of understanding, when his explanation is very high level.

I was confident that I did ask for clarification when I need to (I asked for help when I have to as it's too confusing to work on), but my manager's reaction make me feel I am not up to bar and I should find my own way to resolve my questions. For now, I will just go through the notes over and over again and hopefully come up with something. But how should we work together going forward? I feel like our trust is in danger.

In the previous cycle, I wanted to be promoted to senior, but my manager stepped in relatively late into the process to let me know that my promo packet had gaps. Because of this, I wasn't put up for promotion and I'm still at SW2.

This all caught me completely off-guard, and my goal is to make sure this doesn't happen again in the next performance review cycle. How can I make sure that my manager and I are completely aligned going into the next promotion process, and I'm not hit with any last minute surprises?

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?