Communication Q&A and Videos

My friend just introduced me to his friend who works at this big tech company that I would love to join. I'll meet this friend in a couple of days, and I wonder how I can make the best use of this opportunity. How would I handle this in the best way possible?

(I'm a software engineer with 2 years of experience and a computer science degree)

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 am working in 3 XFN projects (Say Projects A, B ,C) at the same time. Manager wants success in Project A for sure . But he doesn't allow me to be fully dedicated to Project A. He also wants me to come with suggestions to make project A successful. The thing is Projects B & C are huge time consumers and I am left with very little time for Project A. How should I approach my manager to assign me fully to Project A. I have successfully deliver projects in past when I was assigned to a single project only . I am bad at multi-tasking. Project A's success will definitely increase chances of my promo.

I am working on a project with sister team under my skip level manager. My manager does not manage that project. How do I approach him to ask that I want to work on a task with end-to-end ownership?

Whenever I make a mistake that really upsets me, I send an email to myself about the mistake. By default, the email sits in my inbox for a week, after which I can archive it, but depending on how upset I am about the mistake, I might include in the subject "(2 weeks)", "(1 month)", "(3 months)". The whole point of this is because I don't like having emails in my inbox, I'm continually reminded of my mistake and will hopefully not repeat this in future.

A few people close to me have told me this seems like an unhealthy habit of negativity and that I am beating myself up too much.

For context, almost all the emails I send to myself involve chastizing myself for being too passive, e.g. "next time introduce myself to that exec/important person/girl at the gym, etc." I am naturally not assertive and would like to be a lot more confident and assertive, but am not sure if this is a system for getting there.

On the one hand, it is similar to journalling which is generally considered good. On the other hand, it works off of negative reinforcement. One idea is to just have all my mistakes in a separate doc, but I'm not forced to look at that doc the same way I am forced to look at my inbox. I guess I could have a habit of looking at that doc once a week. That might be the best solution.

Happy to hear anyone's thoughts.

What would you recommend if you run into a problem where you do lay out a high-level implementation and approach, but once you're in the code writing phase, you either come up with new edge cases or possibilities and then end up second-guessing yourself and going down a rabbit hole? The same question can also be extended to mistakes. Given how competitive the market still is for software engineers, it feels like the margin for error is lower than ever. Before, you could be more collaborative with the interviewer, but nowadays, it feels more of a lone-wolf activity, and sometimes even adversarial based on the general pressure to find that unicorn engineer.

This was a question I wanted to ask Edbert, but I had an obligation that took me away from his talk.

I've recently joined a medical robotics startup as an Embedded Software Engineer after working for four years in large organizations in the wireless and semiconductor domain. I'm grateful for the full-time role and have already started contributing positively.

I have taken the initiative in documenting processes and setting standards, which my manager appreciates. However, my curiosity about the business side led me to arrange brief interviews with all employees, including the CEO. This was well-received by the engineering team, but caused concerns with the non-engineering staff, leading to a reprimand for inappropriate conduct.

Previously, I endured a difficult experience as a contractor with non-technical managers who were dissatisfied with my work despite my hard efforts, failing to convert me to full-time. I now find myself in a better situation but am still haunted by past experiences and need guidance to navigate this new environment.

Could you provide advice on how to integrate into the startup culture and reconcile my curiosity for learning with appropriate professional conduct? How can I heal from past trauma while embracing new challenges and opportunities in my current role?

I work as a mid-level software engineer. We have team channels where people can reach us on. But for some reason people always message me in a private message or they visit my office for team related tasks or product owner tasks. I keep telling them to ask the person in charge or communicate through our team channel, but they don't.

I don't want to be rude to them, yet I find my frustration growing. Sometimes I feel like they can't bother to formalise their requests, so they go to me to quickly mention whatever is bothering them, so they later can refer to our "discussion" if the issue is brought up again.

What should I do?

Sometimes I sit in meetings that I feel aren't really necessary. How can I better identify whether these meetings are necessary and propose a better asynchronous form of communication (slack post, quip doc, etc) if they aren't?

Some of these meetings include status update meetings (besides standup), and meetings where people are there just to absorb knowledge. Is it a general rule of thumb to have meetings primarily to get alignment on decisions? Are there cases where we can get alignment asynchronously as well via commenting on a slack post/quip doc, etc.

Hi! I have trouble what to do if I am in a team with detecting how to tell if the person is genuinely helping and not trying to babysit? To me it is hard to tell the difference, once in my previous company I assumed they helped me, so i always ask for help, but in the end my manager and my team member default reaction is to not letting me to work alone, this is so frustrating and it is hard for me to get into senior position and proud of my work. Now I am in my current company I strived for independence but my manager end up give me feedback that I should collaborate enough, but sometimes I feel that he never let me to work alone.

I read one of your article and I know that we suppose to collaborate and discuss, and I did discussion with some engineers and I can solve the problem, but my manager still says that. I have trouble to see what is the cause, in the end I want to be the person that is great to work with but not spoiled (babysitted everytime). If there are people who tried to babysit you, can you give suggestions on how to react politely, as I don't want to block collaboration and block myself at the same time? Thank you!

If you have a new manager joining to manage your team, how can you ramp them up quickly on all the work you have done before them, the impact you have generated, your role in the team.

At my startup I was asked to deliver feature after feature + bug fixes by PMs as fast as possible without much time for proper refactoring work or engineering initiatives. Also it was pretty individualistic where you get assigned a task and only work with other engineers during a tech spec review meeting, code review, and syncing with a backend engineer (as an Android dev).

From Alex’s video on getting promoted to tech lead, I saw how you can 1) drive projects as an L5 engineer (vs a PM putting that together with designers) 2) Not have to know how to implement everything yourself for a project, but work with many others and facilitate the team. This sounds 100x more engineering driven and collaborative than at my start up with few developers. Is this common to many people’s experience of the norm in FAANG?

What I liked about Alex's story is also how he had the time and space to do things like document the differences between iOS and Android, as well as go all the way through to making a data analytics plan for monitoring it himself. Seems like a lot of freedom and ownership which I didn't feel I always had the time for personally. Being able to not have to spend 80% of your time coding but rather doing deep work thinking, planing, designing holistically sounds extremely satisfying and rewarding as an engineer. Maybe this also comes with experience at startups as well?

I want to figure out how to draw explanations in Google Docs efficiently:

• I only find these resources if there is a mock interview recording.
• But is there a standard way to communicate with the interviewer?
• I struggle a lot in this area - Even though I know the solution, I get stuck

We are building a separate product with in a product based company most of the features are crafted just to impress the managers.

During the demo hacks are used to adjust the situation. Though I've recently realised even the API design and system design is not scalable. They are just build so that the current UX is displayed, too much hard coupling and meaningless design.

The HTTP response is dynamic as the demos were build on web and the back -end developers are not understanding that it is difficult to handle in a strictly typed languages.

I get by saying today, I'll write clean code and do my work neatly no matter what others are doing. Though I want to know how do I communicate well with them and build solid products, so that we make something re-suable and independent and sell it not just part of the current product but in terms of public APIs like Twitter, Reddit.

Lately I feel like simply discussing in these lines creates friction, but I have to speak in gentler way to get the job done effectively :)

A new CTO was assigned in our organisation. If I get the chance to have a sync, what are the things I can and should discuss about ?

Recently I completed my first-ever proof of concept (POC). I got positive feedback, but I think it's because the manager understands that I am doing this independently for the first time. After giving credit for my work, one senior member broke down the task into smaller pieces with step-by-step technical sources (from blogs), which made my life much easier. Now when I am re-evaluating this now, I observe the following:

• I tried not to bother senior/TL for help since I didn't want to interrupt their sprint commitment. Even though they are supportive, I couldn't help but feel nervous because I am the engineer with the least experience (i.e., others are either senior or principal level or the same level but have a much broader knowledge domain).
• After receiving the breakdown plan with the easy-to-follow resources, I am much more comfortable tackling the tasks. If possible, I very much want to be able to break down a bigger POC into smaller pieces and tackle each in order.

Since it's likely to have more POC shortly, and I am sure I will face this situation, I want to overcome the nerve and ask the right amount of questions (not too much, but good enough to unblock me) during growth along the POC task.

Thanks ahead for your sharing!

How can I prevent myself from putting myself in a job where I have to recode an entire code base after a long amount of time on a product?

More specifically, how do I identify good teams that have working styles where you aren't having to refactor an entire codebase and have a frustrating work environment? In the past, I've heard that at companies like Netflix that people can just code in whatever language they want, then when folks sometimes regroup/resync with a larger product team, one team in a particular language will win, leading to large parts of other specific devs on the team to hate it because they have to refactor their code.

How does one come up with certain criteria (and follow through with it) as they interview for jobs and specific companies about working styles on preferences of code base, tools, frameworks?

What other core principles and criteria folks consider as they're interviewing other people (not just the company interviewing for a role) that they should consider as a part of the dev culture, structure when it comes to these types of things so I don't make the same type of mistake?

And yes, I know people refactor code bases (ex. legacy projects, cleaning out whatever tech debt folks have), which people tend to hate because it's a lot of work--and that it's still bound to happen and unavoidable, but how can we eliminate cultures we dislike that are refactoring code bases as a result of a dysfunctional tech team? I want to avoid having terrible experiences at a future company I work (similar to an hackathon experience I had recently working on a small MVP can be frustrating when folks are not aligned / on the same page for things that might take to long to complete or have to refactor completely if they are not communicating well or upfront from the beginning).

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

I am looking for a new role since layoffs last week and have applied for internal transfers for roles outside my skill set like Ruby on Rails work. Since I have no experience with the tech stack behind these roles, how to I put it in convincing words that:

• I can adapt to the new languages and frameworks to succeed in their role
• I compensate for this lack of technical knowledge with me already being similar with platform and tools used at this company

I want to network with more senior engineers, especially those in the Taro community and within the companies I intern at, but I am scared to approach them.

I ask myself "what would make it interesting/fun/educational for someone to talk to me or mentor me?" (Rahul's advice ), but I can't really think of a reason why someone would want to talk to a college student like me. I don't want a coffee chat to feel like I'm just bombarding them with questions, but I also find it difficult to bring anything valuable to the table.

How can I effectively network with others with limited experience as a college student? What would make an engineer want to chat with and/or mentor a college student?

Whenever I talk to people (outside of my team) they call me humble but then also mention that I might be bragging by sharing my experiences. Even though I don't mean to. I feel like there's a perception improvement by not bragging but also still being able to talk about your accomplishments.

My experiences could be work related or outside of work like Travel, Adventures I've tried lately, etc

I'm an sde 1 at Amazon and been working there for 2 years. I have changed multiple teams during that time unfortunately. In every team, I have struggled with getting noticed by the team.

I have observed that the best performers talk about active tickets even when they are not on call. How do I balance between my task and working on extra tickets to get noticed?

What else can I do to get noticed apart from my own task and high sev tickets?

Data engineer here. Manager is the leading a project which is severely mismanaged and he just demands results. He doesn't plan at all. There is no proper project planning and it is XFN project. If I do project management tasks it saps my energy due to numerous meetings in order to do that. Project has been going on for 8 months. Everyone working knows it is not going anywhere. Just that manager wants us to keep working on it. Even our org doesn't recognize it as a critical project. Problem is continuing to work on it takes time away from other interesting work which has more impact.

What do you suggest? How do you suggest I approach this?