Building Relationships Q&A and Videos

DoorDash has a tradition where your manager sends a "Dashiversary" email to the entire company on your work anniversaries. The manager creates a Google doc and collects notes & photos from your colleagues and cross-functional partners, then adds his/her own note at the top of the email. Given the impact of Deep Thanks, what should I write in these notes to leverage these opportunities to build relationships?

On H1B visa. New to US. I need some information on what other H1Bs are doing related to finances, buying a house, green card etc. Unfortunately, only people I know are the ones from my office. I have tried meetup apps and still have not gotten anyone with experience in the topics that I have mentioned. I have some senior collegues who are/were on H1B. Is it okay to ask these personal questions? All we have are office team lunches. When to bring up these questions? How to keep in touch with them even after we leave the team/company?

I have been tasked to port a project of porting a ML project that has been running on someone's laptop to the cloud and make it production ready. It is very difficult for this person to give the full picture of the process.

This could be due to he is not actually remembering very well, given that the project has been actually done 1 year ago, or he doesn't like to lose the single point of failure / control situation.

I actually don't care about the reason and I want to get this project to success.

How may I deal with this situation?

Current blocker is that I am unable to properly estimate the time it may take for this project.

Hi Taro staff,

I wanted to know if there are any other study groups running? The ones I have seen with system design seemed more passive as of late and prior had some really good ones for DSA/technical interview prep. Wondering who will run the next round of events, has this just rotated with volunteer members organizing this?

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!

Our office in Bellevue, WA has a beer pub next to it, is it common for people to get team building starting after work with a pizza or a draft IPA in company like Meta?

I already have great working relationships with several staff engineers in my org, but I'd like to take it a step further and enter a formal mentorship with them. How can I go about this in a natural way?

Hi everyone, for next 6 months, I will most probably be working on projects which are C/C heavy. For example, project may involve discussing things with A and B teams, finding an engineering design from the abstractions the teams are using and execute it. There might not be much complex items from code perspective and execution may look simple.

While projects like these would give me good credits in terms of cross-team collaboration and communication, I want to be technically competent. Looking back after next 6 months, I don't want to feel bad that from code/eng perspective, I didn't do anything complex.

I understand that probably I should ask my manager for complex/craft heavy item, probably at least once per half but I see some engineers in queue for promotion so there is no guarantee for that.

Any suggestion from the community would help a lot. Thanks!

I'm exploring distance MBA courses to enhance my career as a software engineer. Could you recommend a program that offers a strong alumni network, opportunities for leadership development, and a comprehensive curriculum in engineering management? I'm particularly interested in globally recognized institutions like Indian School of Business or IIM, but I'm open to suggestions for the best fit. My goal is to improve my organizational skills, gain business acumen, and expand my network to excel in leadership roles.

I just finished my first week at my first Big Tech company. I onboarded with another engineer who I'm working closely with on a series of projects. That engineer was really helpful to me this week in getting my environment set up. He knows the tools and frameworks we'll be using a lot better than I do so I'm really grateful he's around to help me. I've thanked him a lot on Slack privately and on our video calls. I'd like to publicly thank him on the company directory. My concern is that if I do that, our manager might see me as the weaker engineer of the two (which I am right now).

Should I let that stop me from publicly thanking him?

Thanks in advance!

In your experience, what methods worked best to motivate engineers that don't report to you or work on a daily basis?

As a Staff engineer, I need to advocate and motivate engineers in my span to adopt new tools or processes. The main challenge is around building rapport with the remote team that are mostly new hires or I didn't interact a whole lot earlier.

While this questions, majorly sounds how to influence without authority. I am looking for more concrete steps for a quick win while I work on the culture part as a whole.

My company has a structure where new hires with limited experience are assigned both a manager and a mentor. While the mentor doesn't manage you directly, they help onboard, provide business context, and often review your work. It's a formal arrangement that's hard to change.

Nine months into my job, I’m not a fan of my mentor. While competent, he’s rude, especially in technical discussions. When he disagrees with something, he aggressively asks "why would you do it that way?" instead of giving constructive feedback. This often turns discussions into confrontations rather than collaborative problem-solving. He’s helpful with business context, but he speeds through unfamiliar topics and reacts with scorn if I ask for clarification. He’s also prescriptive with how tasks should be done, even when I ask general questions, which adds to the complexity.

Moreover, I don’t find him useful as a mentor. While he's better with business context and attention to detail, I don't find his communication skills or career progression worth emulating. He's pretty much just a shitty extra layer of management.

I’m considering a few ways to address this:

• Directly communicating my frustrations to him. This is possible, but I doubt he’d take it well and might turn it back on me for cases where I had bad ideas or made mistakes.
• Talking to my manager. He is far more approachable and supportive than my mentor, and I'd be comfortable talking to him about this (of course, with less charged language than I use here). But my manager and mentor don’t have a good relationship (as the mentor drunkenly admitted to me once during a team event), so I’m unsure how this would play out. I'd be concerned the net result is that my mentor would just get more frustrated and aggressive. Also, I'd be slightly concerned somehow this feedback could hurt my mentor's career or performance eval, and even though I don't like working with him, I don't actively want to cause harm to him.
• Switching teams, which I’ve been considering for unrelated reasons about not thinking the team's work is a good fit. I've talked to my manager about this possibility and he supports me doing so next year if I still find the team a bad fit. This will get me away from the mentor, but I’d lose an amazing manager, and could have bad teammates on the next team.

Curious to hear others' perspectives. Thanks!

They say that you should add value to people in your network before asking them for a favour. I have networked aggressively past 6 months over coffee chats, meetups, training programs and conferences. The only value I have been able to add is exchange my ideas and thoughts. I have 2 questions:

1. What other type of value can I add in this market when people are not really looking to hire?
2. At what point do I ask for a favour which is a referral to a job position?

I am new, what are the most effective ways to meet and build relationships with people across different teams in a large company? Any tips or experiences on navigating cross-functional interactions and expanding your internal network?

It's easy building relationships within your own team but how do you build relationships across other teams whom you do not work with on a daily basis?

If someone makes an introduction to someone who is in another country, how do you then nurture that virtual connection if you dont have direct opportunities to work with that person?