Interpersonal Communication Q&A and Videos

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 ?

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?

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?

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 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?

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?