Communication Q&A and Videos

We are 3 people in my team. I've been at the company for 2 years roughly and my team mates for 15+ years. I'm in a situation where my coworkers do stuff, but stuff that's often completely unrelated to our backlog. One of them struggles with being motivated by the job. Occasionally, a 16-hour job takes a month to complete. Maybe 2. And you never know why or when it will be done. This causes a lot of tension with the product lead. The other teammate (focused on the front end) rarely makes any PRs. I'm not sure if it's due to the fact that they have mostly done HTML/CSS and are unsure of how to navigate the frameworks we use or what it is. Our manager tends to cover for us, but obviously he's not loving this situation. It's been like this for 1–2 years. Now it has started affecting my pay raise, and I'm starting to feel tired of always playing dumb or referring to the other great work that they're doing when asked what my teammates are up to. Both seem to be struggling somewhat with stress and anxiety, so I've tried to be compassionate with them. But what do I do? I want to take ownership of the team's performance, but it's difficult to know what to do. They have the senior roles, and they have most of the ownership of the project, so I also feel weird telling them "what to do," if that makes any sense. The company size is roughly 20 engineers, FYI.

Any advice on how to handle this situation nicely, i.e. making sure we're still friends afterward, would be highly appreciated.

Say you want to research on a topic for resolving an issue and want to share with the team by creating a Google Doc. How does one master the skill of creating an high quality Doc?

My Senior team member, top performer, is super solid at creating Google Docs and churns out one great doc almost every week. He said he just focuses on just dumping out the thoughts in the first go and fixes them later on. But I feel his velocity in getting that doc out or completely the research on it is very fast. So clearly there is something that I am not understanding.

So I am looking for opinions from experts on Taro :)

I recently got moved to a new manager, and I've been having some trouble building back up the more fluid and quite positive relationship I had with my prior manager. In particular, I'm trying to get more signal into my feedback and how I can improve. When I go over this kind of content with my new manager, they'll say something more quick and high-level like "That makes sense", but they won't give me something more specific and concrete. How can I go deeper with these kinds of conversations while keeping our relationship healthy? I want to make sure I respect their boundaries.

At times, we face tight deadlines which I believe are challenging to meet. Despite my reservations about the feasibility of such timelines, my fellow engineer peers often express confidence in meeting them, though history has shown they're frequently mistaken. When I voice my concerns, the project managers claim that delivery is non-negotiable, and everyone in the room goes silent. I've suggested prioritizing essential features for the immediate deadline and planning for a subsequent delivery for the rest, but my ideas are usually ignored. Despite not being in a lead role, it's disheartening to later hear about our inconsistent delivery timelines from my manager when I receive performance feedback. How should I navigate these situations? It's frustrating to be the only one on my team who ever expresses these thoughts as I always appear as the "pessimistic" engineer. I just try to voice concerns to make more reliable deliveries. What should I do in these situations?

I'm mid level, new to the company.

I got assigned a chunk of a bigger project owned by a staff level engineer, let's call him X, who has worked on the product for a long time and has a lot of context.

Things that were new to me: the language, the tool chain, product context. The codebase is several years old.

My skip level manager (1 level above my direct manager) once encouraged that I should aim to finish my work in less than 2x the amount of time it would take X to do it (but besides this I received no pressure, or reminder to push for this target from managers).

This was overly ambitious. I worked longer hours and harder than anyone around, including weekends but still could not finish it in 3x the amount of time initially estimated.

The staff engineer overestimated what I can do too. He's very willing to explain but I had a hard time mapping his high level explanation to what happens at the code level.

I could not tell if the standard here is high or the task is too hard. So I leaned towards putting in more effort rather than voicing my concern.

I also did not have a good sense of "are these unknown parts of the code base grok-able with a little bit of time or do they require a lot of time?" to estimate time spent up front.

In the end I got some barebone thing out and he took over. Still took him a couple more weeks to get the thing finished. Along the way he solved some problems I'm sure I have no chance of solving in that timespan.

With this evidence I was sure the task was legitimately too hard for me and was comfortable letting my manager know my opinion.

Back up a little bit, when I started working on the project, my manager knew I could not stick to the original timeline set by the engineer and encouraged me to take my time to learn the codebase. What is puzzling is my manager did not tell the engineer about this unrealistic estimate. The engineer reports to a different manager and has been around way longer than my manager.

Maybe there is some politics going on that I'm not aware of.

Anyway this has been a very stressful experience.

What could I do better? What should I do to mitigate any harm done through this experience?

After speaking with the recruiter for the first screen, is it good practice to send a quick follow-up email to the recruiter saying "It was great speaking with you today. Looking forward to next steps!". Does this convey enthusiasm and focus or being a over-eager and insecure?

I'm an E5 at a Big Tech company. My team's working on a very ambiguous project. 3 opinionated, vocal engineers (2 E6, 1 E5) tend to sidetrack our brainstorming discussions by playing devil's advocate to shoot down ideas. How do I drive these meetings forward with this dynamic? We often rehash the same discussions over and over. When we're close to reaching a decision, oftentimes someone would throw a wrench into things. Moreover, some engineers require upfront planning and want to finalize all the details before committing, while others prefer to defer the details to future milestones. Both my manager and team are getting frustrated, but are unsure how to fix this.

I'm an E5 at a Big Tech company. There are several loud, opinionated, dominant personalities on my team. Some of them are E6. They often talk over each other as well as the rest of the team, so the rest of the team rarely contribute to discussions anymore. When a teammate (E5) presented his RFC to our team today, the dominant personalities started questioning his design decisions and talked over him when he tried to defend them. My teammate looked so discouraged and beaten down at the end of that meeting. When I brought this up to my EM in a 1:1, he said it's a people problem -- people are not being respectful. I asked my EM if he could coach those people, but he said he prefers to invest in people like me who are interested in learning & growing.

• Is this a lost cause?
• Are there techniques to handle these dominant personalities skillfully? Or do my teammates & I just need to develop "thick skin"?

I want to give feedback to my manager.

This person just joined the company as my manager.
So far as my manager, this person has been nothing but helpful.

I only have good things to say. Is that normal ? How can I share more

I'm an E5 iOS at a Big Tech company. Our team's E6 backend and E6 iOS tend to dominate our team discussions, often talking over each other. I get the impression that the E6 iOS wants to be the smartest person in the room and enjoys micromanaging all the details, but the E6 backend enjoys challenging him. When I proposed a solution to one of our project's challenges, the E6 iOS quickly shot it down but could not propose any alternatives. The E6 backend challenged the E6 iOS to explain why my idea wouldn't work, but the E6 iOS just talked in circles. It seemed like the E6 iOS just didn't like it because he didn't come up with it himself. How do I avoid making the E6 iOS feeling threatened? I'm a bit hesitant to contribute to team discussions due to this dynamic, but my EM wants me to contribute more.

For me i am looking for promotions. I architected, led a staff level project successfully with 5 engineers working with me over a period of 5 months.

Nor one person had a bad thing to say about me or the project and everyone agrees it was a major step for our team.

To be fair, I had a troubled relationship with a principal engineer who namecalled me in a public meeting with my engineering manager in that meeting and I decided to stop talking to him (i would avoid going to meetings with him instead of confronting him)

The principal engineer gave my managers feedback that I am trying to hoard information.

Now my manager is giving me the feedback that I don't go along well with more senior engineers (which is not true, it is just 1 person). I was denied promotion even though more senior engineers than me who I led are getting promoted.

There is also some resume driven development going on at the management level and pe level which is what I was asking questions about.

This was the reason for strong resistance against me and product.

From my end I have tried to normalize my relationships. But it seems my hard work may be better rewarded elsewhere.

I don't want to say all this but am curious how would one let their managers know that they are looking outside within the company. The reason for letting them know is they will get an email when I apply internally.

Context:

• I'm working on a project that is known and understood to be at risk by most tech and other XFN stakeholders. This project has been attempted a few times in the past but didn't succeed and is being retried.
• There are a few upcoming features having tech dependencies on the delivery of this project but I feel that the stakeholders aren't confident about the success of the project.
• The project might need some support in the form of reviews, brainstorming and stewardship from the stakeholders to succeed.
• As the tech lead, I want to create and maintain stakeholders' confidence in the project so that they're enthusiastic to provide us the support we need.

Questions:

1. What can I do to understand current expectations of the stakeholders better?
2. What communication (or other) steps can I take to create and maintain stakeholders' confidence in the success of the project?
3. Apart from generating confidence, is there anything else that I could be doing to ensure stakeholders' support?

My company recently laid off 15% of its workforce. I'm currently in the process of updating my resume, and plan on prepping for interviews again (doing LC) once I come back from vacation.

After my LI announcement of the recent layoffs, recruiters had started to reach out to me. I feel flattered by the response but I don't feel that I'm ready to take on interviews yet before I do some proper preparation.

Should I ignore calendly invites and wait before aggressively reaching out (to network/connect) with recruiters when I'm in a more ready position to apply?

Is there any value in starting these conversations at all at atm? Or would it be a waste of my time -- and I should instead focus my time and attention towards prepping for interviews instead?

Currently, I'm not really looking to rush the process and I feel like recruiters can be pretty pushy sometimes in wanting to fill in roles for companies.

Any thoughts?

English is not my first language. I don't know what to write or talk in all kinds of situations. I don't know if I lack critical thinking to think about points or is it because of lack of English proficiency. I have joined Toastmasters but its not helping that much. I am looking for 1-1 coaching in English speaking, writing, public speaking. Group discussions, driving meetings especially getting alignment, breaking down points, story telling are my biggest problems. Any recommendations to fix these issues?

I am onboarding at a new company. Sometimes, I feel I am completely lost when my teammates were explaining something to me. The reasons I can find may include

1. I am lacking the understanding of the architecture or the context
2. Their explanation uses phrases I do not know what they mean or how they work

In this situation, how should I respond to my teammates? Thanks in advance!

I worked on a large org-level, cross-functional project led by a TPM and an EM. Since there were so many engineers on this massive project, we were organized into smaller pods/subteams with pod leads. The TPM had standups 2x/week, and my pod had standups the other days of the week. My pod was loaned out to help a stakeholder team from another org. The TPM only attended his own standups and sometimes missed some. The EM attended most but not all my pod's standups as well as most but not all the TPM's standups. My pod lead attended most but not all of those same standups as well. The POC from the stakeholder team was not invited to any of these standups. Since the TPM's standups had so many engineers, we only gave high-level updates in that meeting.

In such a situation, how do you keep all the stakeholders (TPM, EM, pod lead, stakeholder team's POC) aligned and up-to-date with any challenges such as scope creep, bugs, delays, etc.? There was a slack channel for the overall cross-functional project and a separate one for my pod, but none for working with the stakeholder team's POC (all such communication was via DMs). When the stakeholder team's POC dropped the ball on things, how do you escalate in such an ambiguous situation? The TPM sent weekly "Weather Reports", but those emails were very high-level.

In the middle of the hiring process I decided to review the company I had applied to in Glassdoor.

The reviews were very demotivating because they all mentioned multiple waves of layoffs in the last year.

By the time I read the company reviews in Glassdoor I had already had 3 interviews: phone screen, technical interview (leetcode) and system design interview. I performed excellently in all of them. The feedback from the interviewers and the recruiter was really good.

In my last interview with the hiring manager, everything went perfectly until it was my turn to ask questions. I could almost tell he was about to offer me the position. This was the question I asked him:

"When was the last wave of layoffs at <company>?"

He was surprised; I could tell by his facial reaction.

One week later, the recruiter sent me an email with an absurd reason for why they decided not to extend me an offer.

Do you think that the question I asked was the sole reason for my rejection?

As an E5, I'm switching to more of a tech lead role, and one of the engineers I'm leading has had consistently poor code quality despite being at Meta for a few years now.

I've asked my manager for feedback about this, and they say that we should come up with a plan to improve the situation. I've already invested time in this, and I'm not seeing results. How can I get the code quality feedback to fully land and improve this engineer's code?

I am on a tight deadline to deliver an impactful and complex feature. Whenever I send my PR out for review, my lead takes at least 2-3 days to start reviewing the code. Then, there are either a lot of non actionable comments or feedback on tests. So I started sending out a test plan in advance which also receives a lot of feedback. When I turnaround with a refined PR, the lead again takes 2-3 days for a review. I am worried that there are too many iterations for a simple PR and I am chasing the lead for reviews. When I hinted about the review taking time, I got a response that the code shouldn’t have had so many flaws to begin with. The code doesn’t have bugs, he was nit picking on unit tests that could be refactored for better maintainability. I agree, but should that be a show stopper?

I had my code reviewed by a peer and received feedback that there are no blocking changes and the code is mergeable. For a complex feature, I expected 1-2 iterations but each iteration is draining and am starting to wonder if I am really that bad an engineer. The biggest problem is that the reviews happen in person and the reviewer gets nasty and yells at times. He is extremely rude and after a few minutes he tries to explain that all the feedback is for my own good like I'm a kid. I expect some amount of professionalism but I feel disrespected because of the attitude. Is it normal for 2-3 iterations for a slightly complex PR and should I have to chase reviewers each time? Do you any tips on handling the behavioral issues?

Working hard and staying on top of my sprints, I lead a team that focuses on developing tools for customer support to onboard our new features.

Though this work is consistently given priority in team meetings, it is often sidelined or perceived as less critical compared to other product-facing features.

Despite my efforts, I feel I am not acknowledged or seen as impactful and intelligent. I suspect biases at play but cannot substantiate them concretely.

How can I change this perception and ensure that my contributions are recognized and valued within the team?

How can I turn around the situation to be perceived as important and impactful, aligning my hard work with the recognition it deserves?

I am trying to start a conversation to get across my technical proficiency so that the manager is likely to recommend me for an interview at the big tech company. The company has an engineering blog that I have read, but not sure what I should ask. This is for a mid-level (ideally senior) backend role. The manager has said that if I send them a list of questions they would be open to a call to discuss said questions.

Also the company is Uber ->

What is the prevailing culture within the organization, and how does it manifest in day-to-day operations and decision-making? The prevailing culture within an organization is the shared values, beliefs, norms, and practices that shape the social and psychological environment of a business. This culture influences employee behavior, motivates management styles, and affects decision-making processes. What are those for Meta?

What are the hidden things to notice and to worry about? For example:

1. Cliques and Silos: Pay attention to the formation of exclusive groups or departments unwilling to share information. This can indicate a fragmented culture that hinders collaboration.

2. Resistance to Change: If there is noticeable resistance to new ideas or changes in procedure, the culture may be rigid and resistant to innovation.

3. Overwork and Burnout: A culture that consistently expects long hours and overwork may prioritize short-term gains over long-term employee well-being and sustainability.

4. Turnover Rates: High employee turnover can be a red flag for issues within the organizational culture such as lack of growth opportunities, poor management, or a toxic work environment.

5. Office Politics: Pay attention to how much politics influence decisions and progress. A culture heavily influenced by politics rather than merit can demotivate employees.

6. Feedback Mechanisms: Lack of mechanisms for providing constructive feedback, or a culture where feedback is ignored, can indicate a culture not open to self-improvement or employee development.

7. Diversity and Inclusion: Observe whether the organization actively supports diversity and inclusion, not just in policy but in practice, reflecting a culture of respect and equality.

Context: Working in a small startup where there are a very small number of wiser senior engineers

Everyone in the development team contributes to code reviews

Often I’m unsure about the quality of the feedback and when to act upon it

Sometimes people even change their mind after you have acted on that feedback which is frustrating and can contribute to the delay of finishing a task

Does this also happen in big tech? How do you handle these situations ?