Working With Your Manager Q&A and Videos

I’ll be finishing my internship pretty soon and I think I feel like I’ve done a good job. I checked in with my manager every 2 weeks (didn’t check in with them for the past 3 weeks expecting this final conversation). Wondering what I should bring up with them in my last conversation with them? I am interested in a return offer (RO). What should I ask them about?

I have been working on a sister team project for a while which is lead by my skip manager. My manager told me that once I am done with the work in my sister team's project, I could reach out to him for future projects. I want to talk to my skip regarding the same and tell him that I would like to move out of this project as I am done with my work. How do I approach him? Could you please let me know?

Hi guys, I am struggling with frequent EM changes in my current team. I understand the company also struggling to find the right person, however, there would 4th an EM in our team for the last year. With every change, it was a bit stressful for me because I could not make a good relationship with not all of them, how to deal with this kind of situations?

in my feelings, I am changing my company when every new manager joins the team.

I've been at my job for a year now as a junior software developer and I'd like to take more ownership and more responsibilities in my team as a step in my growth/promotion. How do I best approach this and how can I frame this conversation with my manager?

Context

I work in a startup-like company. I'd like to own a small part of the high-impact project I'm currently on (I work with 2-3 senior engineers) and/or own another future project. My manager agrees that the next step in my growth is to own a project but she's looking for something that fits my skillset.

At this, I'm left wondering if there's something I can do on my end to help make it easier for her or signal that I am ready to own a project. My manager has said I am trending well and doesn't seem to have any concerns with my performance. In my next 1-1, I'm going to ask for any feedback, as well as discuss my 2025 growth plan.

Since the work I'm now doing is more fullstack backend-oriented and I was previously mainly fullstack frontend-oriented, I am also actively practicing to become more familiar with our backend technologies/repos via pairing, code reviews, etc.

Since I'm a junior, I know I'm judged on code impact so I focus on code quality (writing thorough test plans, code reviews) and code velocity and I have received positive feedback on these things. Also, there have been a couple of promotions in our team this year, so that might have an effect on the scope of projects as my manager likely prioritized their promotion plans.

Thank you!

My new manager, my old manager, and the broader team have been managing the on-call rotation for the platform of my company's flagship product, which we launched two years ago. Initially, the rotation included just 3 engineers, but after discussions with my directors and acknowledgment from the rest of the organization, we increased it to 8 engineers to form a healthier on-call rotation.

Despite having 8 engineers, I've noticed that many team members, including our principal and staff engineers, are still not familiar with the on-call procedures. I have compiled a support run-book log documenting the steps for handling each issue/alert, so the on-call team understands the severity and business impact of different issues. The issues can range from low priority to business-critical.

However, the support run-book documentation is not entirely reliable as the ultimate source of truth because our production system support behaves more like triage than a debug system.

Additionally, the nature of the on-call rotation can vary from simply acknowledging alerts and following documented steps to collaborating with business owners. Sometimes, issues are caused by other teams or third-party vendors, making them unsolvable by the on-call engineer alone. I noticed that Production Issue happened almost daily, and the on-call issues have impacts to company's revenues and customer facing experience..

I am interested in learning more about how others view a healthy on-call rotation.

What are the key factors to consider when forming a healthy on-call rotation?

For the past few months, I've been experiencing worsening mental health issues for a variety of (mostly) external reasons.

I've been heavily debating how to approach this and am considering mental health leave, or at least starting a dialogue with my manager.

However, I have no rapport with my current manager and am unsure if I feel comfortable discussing these issues with them.

How would you approach this?

I received an offer, but they have asked for a reference from my ex-manager who I've worked with in the past 5 years.

The challenge is I did not have a good relationship with my ex-manager. The relationship was the reason I left. The environment in my ex company was also pretty toxic so I would ideally not want to provide reference of anyone in the senior leadership.

How do I deal with the situation?

I (also my team) am having some tough time with my manager. I am listing some of the things to certain extent here in terms of what I see as a problem. I have provided some of the feedbacks directly to him, though he/she received it well, I don't see the improvements happening with him/her. Even after the people on the team having couple of conversations with skip level regarding this, we still don’t see an improvement. Looking for some advice on what I can try differently here.

• Lack of transparency and visibility: I see a lack of transparency from him/her regarding what he/she is learning from leadership about company priorities. This leaves me unclear on broader opportunities our team could focus on.
• Team Manager vs Leadership: Team meetings feel more like status updates rather than opportunities for her/him to share and set the team vision, mission, or direction, which could help boost morale and engagement. The focus is often on operational details like Jira updates, OKR updates, timelines etc instead of inspiring leadership.
• Contradictions in Expectations: She/he expects us to push product teams for alignment, even when their decisions depend on senior leadership and out of our control or pay level where things becomes hard to influence. However, when I asked about our team’s 2024 focus, he deferred, citing the same dependency on leadership alignment. This feels inconsistent.
• Difficult to Disagree: While she/he says she/he’s open to disagreement, in practice, she/he often asks follow-ups or challenges until her/his view prevails, making it hard to have meaningful discussions.
• Learning: I feel I’m not learning unique leadership skills from him/her compared to what I gain from other collaborators within the company or my previous job.
• Manager as Stakeholder vs Advocate: Double work if we involve him/her into conversation around what is going on in the project  I’ve started handling stakeholder communication independently to avoid doubling work when aligning with her/him afterward.

I'm currently working closer to the product side (i.e. consumer-facing) on my team. However, I want to move deeper into the infra layer, more into the back-end and away from the front-end, as that's what I'm more passionate about and this area should be more technically complex.

I've brought this up with my manager a couple times, but they said that since I'm already doing great in my current role, they would prefer for me to stay here. How can I navigate this conversation and convince them of this move?

There is a clear lack of trust and dislike towards me coming from my manager. I haven't received any negative feedback directly, but this is a clear sense that I'm getting. I work in a relatively small quant trading firm, and I don't think regular advice like managing up and being vulnerable in 1:1s applies here. There are also no promotions here and you just increase your bonus comp over time based on your impact.

I've tried confronting the manager and they didn't acknowledge a problem, mostly saying that I'm doing great. And me constantly asking what's wrong only makes me less trustworthy and makes them want to further avoid me. And I don't think I can hold them accountable to anything, there is a great relationship between my manager and the founder, and it's not clear what manager is incentivised to do with regards to the team. They can just avoid me and I can't do much about it.

I think in the big picture my performance is great, but there are some smaller things that I might be doing that make me not very likeable and/or trustworthy to management. Here are some of these things that could be the reason:

1. Being anxious - comes from my nature and makes me look less trustworthy.
2. Further from my anxiety can come increased emotionality, talking a bit loudly, being a bit negative.
3. Talking a bit too much, being self-absorbed, not being a good listener,etc.

From here, besides obviously doing less of the above, I see two options: try to improve relationship with manager that doesn't like me, or try to avoid them, which to your possible surprise, might be a solid option, because the organisation is flat and small, and I can try building relationships with other leaders and stakeholders, and provide value that is seen by founder and others.

What do you think? Should I try to improve the relationship? If so, how? This is my first job out of college so I'm a bit clueless. Any advice or insights from your stories would be very much appreciated!

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 completed an internship at a bank last summer. During the internship's end, I received positive feedback from my manager and had expressed a clear interest towards returning.

The recruiter informed us that headcount will not be finalized until January. She said we can contact her after then regarding return offers. In the past year, all the interns received return offers after the new year.

My question is: in January, how should I best approach the recruiter and my internship manager regarding return offers?

I am thinking of writing something along the following lines to my manager, but I am not sure if this is appropriate:

Dear [Internship Manager's Name],

I hope you are doing well! Thank you so much for the opportunity to intern with [Company X] last summer. It was a truly rewarding experience, and I learned so much during my time there.

I genuinely enjoyed working with the team and contributing to [internship project]. Given how much I valued my time at [Company X], I am very interested in exploring the possibility of returning for a full-time role.

Could you let me know the best way to discuss the possibility of returning to [Company X]? I’d be happy to provide any additional information you might need.

Big thanks for reading through all of this - I know it is a very long post and I really appreciate your time!

I'm a senior software engineer in big tech and onboarded into my company and role as a team lead for the past 6 months.

The project is almost complete, but work is not technically interesting and does not fit into my long term career goals.

My manager is getting promoted as director to another org, and I wish to join him. He said he fought hard to bring me along with him, but my current director would not allow it due to product/engineering resourcing requirements.

I expressed to my manager this was extremely disappointing news, and it's hard to see a future on this project/org. He said to talk to my director and we can follow up afterwards, because he didn't know just how much I wanted out.

I can't leave the company due to the current job market, my short tenure and golden handcuffs. But I'm afraid if I keep chugging along, I'm just going to burn out.

Any advice is much deeply appreciated.

First, I would really like to thank Alex for taking the time to record the video series regarding the .

I just watched the section regarding working with my intern manager. I understand that it is important to have a weekly 1:1 with my IM. I am wondering if it is necessary to also have a weekly meeting with the engineering manager as well. If so, what would be some good topics to bring up during the meeting?

Topics I am thinking of include: project updates, feedback, career advice/planning. I would love to hear any thoughts on this.

I am currently interning at a mid-sized tech company for the winter season. At the beginning of the internship, I was informed by the recruiter that the manager will assign the intern project at around week 2-3 of the program.

During the third week, I politely approached my manager regarding the intern project. The manager replied that the details of the project are still being finalized, as it involves a lot of dependencies across teams.

As of now (fifth week), the project has not yet been assigned. In the meantime, he has advised me to continue working on Jira tickets in my team's codebase.

I really enjoy my assigned tasks and definitely appreciate this opportunity to make contributions to a large codebase. However, I am a little concerned that I will not have sufficient time to finish the project or that my project's impact may not be significant enough. If I understand correctly, the project impact as well as timely completion are pretty significant factors towards intern return offer.

My question is: should I let my manager know about my concerns regarding the project, or would it be a better idea to wait until the manager assigns me the project?

Big thanks for reading through all of this - I know it is a very long post and I really appreciate your time!

In the by Ethan Evans, there's a mention of an app that can show personality & communication style results of a manager. What's the name of this app?

I need advice on how to handle a challenging situation at my job. 6 months ago, my team underwent a consolidation, and a new manager joined, bringing along three engineers and 100 pipelines from his previous department. The first task he was assigned was to migrate those pipelines to our team’s tech stack.

The problem is that the migration has been significantly delayed. My skip-manager got involved and asked my manager about the value of these pipelines and why all of them need to be migrated. However, my manager insists that all pipelines must be migrated but hasn’t provided clear reasons for their business value.

To address this, an architect was brought in as a neutral party to gather requirements. They discovered that the pipelines lack documentation, which further complicates the migration process. Now my skip-manager has asked me to step in and lead the migration as a high-priority project.

This puts me in a tough position:

1. I may need to read the code and start migrating pipelines without understanding their business impact.
2. I’ve suggested to my skip-manager that we first evaluate the business impact of the pipelines, but my manager remains uncooperative and refuses to share useful information.
3. There’s potential for conflict with my manager, who seems resistant to transparency, while my skip-manager is relying on me to resolve the issue.

I’m unsure how to proceed under these circumstances, especially with the lack of cooperation and documentation. Should I push back and insist on understanding the business value before proceeding? Or should I move forward with the migration despite the risks of misprioritizing pipelines?

Any suggestions or strategies for navigating this situation would be greatly appreciated.