Interpersonal Communication Q&A and Videos

I got an invited to a round-table lunch where there will be execs in my field.

How do I make sure I can turn this into a fruitful and effective networking opportunity?

What kind of questions should I craft to ask at the round-table lunch?

I completed my final rounds at Meta. I heard back from the recruiter on the same day pretty quickly that they would like to set up a call and asked for Meta references. Is this a good sign? How important are the references?

I have weekly meetings with leadership, and they consistently ask more about our timelines and engineering work, which I understand we need to provide.

Having said that, what are some of the questions we engineers can ask leadership/product to hold them accountable for some of the requirements?

What are some of the customer-centric questions we could ask?

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!

The launch of a new AI-based hardware product, Friend, went viral yesterday on Twitter/X:

Most of the reactions I saw online have been very negative. The common complaint is that Friend creates a dystopian future of companionship with intrusive technology.

Would love to hear your thoughts!

• "Friend" is a wearable pendant around your neck that ""
• Friend connects to your phone via Bluetooth and tries to develop a personality based on listening to what you say and do.
• It costs $99 and the product is ~6 months out: pre-orders start shipping in Q1 2025.
• The video on Twitter has been viewed 22M times! That's good marketing.

I'll share my thoughts first.

I'm in the interview loop with few companies, while working on my current job where it's becoming difficult to manage the interview schedules. A recent recruiter scheduled rounds with 5 one-hour slots spread across 1 to 3pm on 2 consecutive days, as the interviews need to happen during working hours of interviewers. Recruiter also asked me to manage the slots provided as there are many candidates and they are looking to fill the open position soon.

While I already politely communicated to the HR that it's difficult for me to take out this amount of time from my work day and provided with alternative options for early mornings or evenings, I was wondering whether the current job market expect candidates to comply with such scheduling requests, even if it creates friction with their current job?

While leading a project/initiative, the engineer is not inclined listen to the entire context and just cares about what they need to implement, yet gives out a vibe that they are the highest contributor to the project and dismisses most things I say. Seems like they are perpetually in a rush and keep cutting me off. They are good at grasping and implementing if a very clear direction is given, although it feels like spoon feeding at times. They are very quick to re-assign the task back to me by saying "Can you do xyz?", when they were supposed to do "abc", which needs "xyz" to be figured out. As soon as they can't figure out anything very easily, they assign part task back over text! They are fairly less independent in implementing the task. Although, I am very confident that they do have the ability to be independent, they don't flex those muscles.

I don't think anyone else on the team has problem particularly, although I heard light-hearted conversations where other teammates feel like they overload them with several code reviews at once and follows up too closely by pinging them constantly if there is something they need from others. Overall, the team is very supportive and gives shout-out to them when they implement the task successfully even if that means they were being given very specific direction by for the task completion.

I am hesitant to bring up with manager, as it may be reflect that I am lacking capability to handle the situation and manager may kind of laugh it off. It's been a bit frustrating to be honest, but I want to regulate my feelings and handle this in a controlled manner.

With all the remote work, more people are opting to not use cameras in meetings. On one hand that means you can not have to worry about looking put together, but on the other hand it makes remote work more painful

Questions for the community:

• do you prefer cameras on or off?
• if your team is primarily a camera off, do you think its worth it to ask for camera on?
• Do you find meetings more effective with cameras on?
• How does this change if you are fully remote vs. hybrid/in person

When I say meetings, I am referring to small huddles/quick zoom call with your coworker(s) to help or ask for help on some bug or brainstorm stuff. By large no one really pays a ton of attention in large more formal meetings anyways

I am a middle backend engineer with 2 years of experience. I recently joined a very new startup(< 2 years) where my friend is my manager. He/she is a principal software engineer with 10+ years of experience. In the team, there are 2 other senior software engineers, each is 4 years older than me with 7-8 years of experience. When my friend invited me and interviewed me to join the company, he/she said that I might not be a senior yet, but he/she's sure that I will get to senior really soon because I have a habit of learning consistently.

Even though I only have 2 years of software engineering experience, I had previous 3 years of tech experience so I already know how to navigate company politics, communication, and have that business intuition. Also, in my previous company, I was the 1st backend engineer who had to build the codebase and infrastructure from scratch, so I am pretty confident that I am not a junior anymore. However, I understand that I still lack experience and knowledge on how to build clean code and how to build reliable and fault-tolerant system, and I feel like I could learn it from my manager, that's why I joined the current company.

The 1st senior engineer is pretty chill, he/she looks like he/she is not very ambitious to get impactful projects and looks like he/she's just happy to have a job to support his family. Besides, he/she joined the company 8 months earlier so I guess he/she already has some context. The 2nd senior engineer joined at the same time as me, and he/she looks pretty competitive. I feel like he/she's constantly sizing himself up against me and he/she's always making some little undermining comments such as "Are you used to code pairing? You look like you can't code", "Let me help you use a terminal", etc. Basically these comments are very subtle and masked as jokes or him trying to help me, but I sense that he/she's actually a bit intimidated by me.

My manager has a concept of "pairing", where he/she will split the team into 2 groups, and each group will work on a project for some time and then he/she will rotate it. In the 1st rotation, I was paired with the 1st senior and I did probably 70-80% of the project, but I was happy to do it because I learned a ton and my manager, during the 1-1 said that I was doing great and he/she told me he/she felt that the 1st senior is an underperformer. Despite this, I specifically let the 1st senior gave presentation of the project to the stakeholders because I felt that he/she helped me to onboard to the company so I'm ok with it.

The 2nd senior was paired with the manager and I felt that they did project that is much larger in scope and impact compared to me and the 1st senior. It means that now the 2nd senior has much more context than me. Right now I'm being paired with my manager, and the 2nd senior is paired with the 1st senior and I feel like I'm starting to get some context, but I'm just worried that when it comes time for me to get paired with the 2nd senior, he/she will hoard all the impactful projects and context and I will be stuck with really small scope. How to avoid the "rich gets richer, poor gets poorer" scheme? Thank you

Hey 👋

I’m joining a new company as a senior frontend engineer in about a week. I've found that people like to work with me; they say I have solid communication skills, am friendly, easygoing, etc. That's the feedback I always get from 360 reviews/1:1 with my manager.

The problem is that I struggle with making "meaningful" connections with people outside my team; I'm aiming to get promoted to Staff in the next 1-2 years or so, and for that, I know that I must connect with people outside my team (among other things). I'm also an ambivert.

I'd like to understand/get guidance about better ways to:

1. Connect with people outside my team in a more meaningful way.
2. This might sound silly, but what's the better way to "break the ice"? I can talk for hours if I know the person, but the first interaction is the hardest. I remember that in a previous job, I had to schedule meetings with other people in the org and I struggled a lot.
3. I just realized that this "but how should I break the ice / I probably don't have much to say" mentality is what makes me avoid having 1:1 in the Taro community :(

Thanks!

Update: Add another bullet point.

Context:

(1) My team owns a service for which we're rolling out a new version with a big revamp of all the public interfaces and a ton of breaking changes.

(2) This is a legacy system that is being refactored to resolve some severe issues that its consumer systems have been complaining about for a long time.

(3) This service has many consumers in our org across multiple teams that depend on it for a lot of critical functionality.

(4) We need to migrate all consumers to the new service. My team cannot parallely support both the versions and the legacy system has to be deprecated before the new service deployment.

Challenges:

(1) Originally, the plan was for my team to roll out the new service and migrate all of the consumers to the new service as well.

(2) Now, we've had a huge scope expansion in the refactoring itself due to which the project timeline has extended massively.

(3) My team feels that working on such a long timeline project is risky and prone to further scope expansion if new consumers start using the old legacy system in the meanwhile.

(4) Another challenge with this is that my team has no context or understanding of all the consumer systems.

Questions:

(1) What approach can I use to now change the plan and convince the managers/tech leads of the consumer teams to own the migration of their consumers code to the new service?

(2) In general, what approach would be ideal for such a large-scale migration - Centralized migration by the service provider team vs distributed migration by all the respective consumer teams?