Interpersonal Communication Q&A and Videos

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 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.

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?

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?

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 ?

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?

Recently my company has split up a core team into two teams. One team is to keep on building the core infrastructure for the product and the other team is supposed to be working in an advisory position with other web applications teams that depend on the core infrastructure. Without dwelling into more details, this core team builds, and maintains datastores, that other web applications consume. A big part of the job is to build google search type infra (on a much smaller scale of course) and data processing pipelines.

Now working with other teams is exciting. But just focusing on one task that is doing tickets/changes/investigations that help them implement some specific features w.r.t to core infra, is kinda troubling me. As it puts me in a passive position and does not clearly define metrics for success. It also puts me on the borderline as I am neither doing core infrastructure-related work nor I am completely part of the other team. The idea is to imitate how Staff engineers work across teams. But I am a Senior engineer (just recently promoted).

Though this is clearly a growth opportunity for me, I am a bit worried about falling behind and not meeting expectations. Any advice on working with cross-functional teams?

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.

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.

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?

I'm a senior product engineer at a regional sized non-tech company. I'm currently working on a project that involves spinning up a new microservice. As a result, I'm working closely on an AWS service and am taking the opportunity to learn Terraform. I'm really loving the project so far.

The problem: one of the senior engineers on the DevOps team is very difficult to work with. She's skilled technically, but is incredibly abrasive. Worst of all, she isn't flexible - it's her way or the high way. I've been in multiple meetings with her where she verbally berates people for suggesting something that isn't a "best practice" according to her. (My manager, and a staff engineer in my group agrees with this assessment)

She's interfered with delivery of my project a lot at various stages, but the main issue is that she's currently blocking a change of mine in code review.

The change is to add a perm in AWS - however, she feels it is "not needed." I've taken the time to understand her concerns, and without getting into specifics they simply don't apply here. I keep restating this along with the multiple steps I've taken to derisk things (and have said that we can revert the perm after delivery) and she won't budge at all, has simply ignored everything I've said and replies "Not needed, I won't allow this" (direct quote).

She's blocked this two line PR for 3 days, despite the fact I've escalated it to my manager who agrees with me and also asked her to allow the permissions on the Slack thread - which she ignored. Another engineer on her team has approved the change, but since she requested changes I need her to sign off on it. Not having this permission will delay delivery by ~1 week in the worst case (so I could work around it, just that things will take longer and slow down the team that depends on my new service).

What should my next steps be? I could roll over and just do what she says even though 1) it will push back delivery for a silly reason 2) I don't agree on principal. Moreover, I don't like the fact that she bullies people into doing what she wants - I've seen her do this to other colleagues, both male / female, at all seniority levels, and it slows down our product work a lot (not to mention is, IMO, very toxic).

Thank you so much for reading all the way! And apologies in advance for the wall of text.

I am about to start a new grad job at a top tech company, but I have a little bit of negative experience from my most recent internship. I was very proactive about getting feedback from my manager, I would ask for it in every meeting and he explicitly appreciated how teachable I was and how high quality my questions were. He wanted me to return there full-time so he brought up the topic with other team members and engineering manager.

In the last week of my internship I was told I did not get a full time return offer. Reason: relatively bad code quality (compared to a junior engineer bar). I was honestly surprised because I had been asking for feedback every week for the last 4 months and not once was it brought up.

I think what happened was I met my manager's bar (and hence he wanted me back full time), but I did not meet the bar of another senior engineer on the team who denied the return offer.

This means I have to make everyone on the team happy, not just my manager. How do I get honest feedback from everyone on the team?

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 a machine learning engineer (MLE) working on an e-commerce recommendation system, while our backend engineers manage the serving server. I’m facing communication challenges with the backend lead:

1. We're building an e-commerce search system, but he refuses to use a search engine due to maintenance overhead, insisting a regular database is sufficient for vector search. However, a search engine offers better algorithms, scalability, and faster improvements in click-through rates.

   • (a) Should I just acknowledge his opinion and say I'll bring it back to my team instead of debating in meetings? Because we are discussing the business requirement with PM in that meeting, not focusing on the tech stack.
   • (b) If he still refuses, should I find other collaborators or have MLEs maintain the search engine ourselves?

2. He often shares strong opinions on ML algorithms in meetings, but while 80% is correct, 20% contradicts my understanding. Our discussions are usually focused on system-level topics, if I challenge him, the meeting may go off track; if I don’t, others (PM and other engineers) might assume we agree, leading to misconceptions. How should I handle this?

Is there a leaderboard for power users who give the most referrals compared to others? I thought it might be a cool feature request to grow our community of paid users, and people who actually are active.

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?

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, along with two colleagues, completed a mid size project over the course of six months, and it successfully passed the acceptance test today with all parties. I am the stake holder of this project. Should I send an email to celebrate this? If so, what would be an appropriate way to write it? What should be care or emphasize? Like thanking all he contributors?

I had an interview with a startup which I got an offer from but I declined it. I would say I developed decent rapport with the recruiter. I have a friend who’s now applying to the same startup with slightly more YoE than me and for a different role but I don’t know if the recruiter also manages that role.

I think my friend’s background may be a good fit for the startup since the startup regularly hires out from my friend’s current company. This friend also previously interned at FAANG. The startup hires for forward deployed engineers (an uncommon position) which is what my friend currently is, but my friend is looking to transition to SWE at the startup.

I’m wondering if it’s appropriate for me to introduce my friend to the recruiter? I’m worried that if they bomb the interview it’ll reflect poorly on me and affect future job opportunities with the company.

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?