Working With Your Manager Q&A and Videos

Hello. I have a busy senior/manager. We used to have 1-1s twice a week, and now I'm lucky if I even get a single 1-1 every other week. I understand that it's because he has a lot of responsibilities (e.g., coding, managing, scrum'ing) and end-of-year deadlines. Here are some things I've done to make up for the lack of 1-1's: I over-communicate via IMs (even if he doesn't respond) to let him know how I'm progressing so he can "smoke test" my theories if I'm heading the wrong way. I present high-level overviews of the code (<15 bullet points) I'm working on to avoid doing deep dives into the implementation. I deliver short standup updates with easy-to-remember keywords that my manager has mentioned before. I try to offload some of his managerial tasks (e.g., onboarding new engineers) to free up some of his time. Does anyone else have a busy senior? Should I be doing anything else? Thanks!

Hello Taro community, I hope you're all doing well. I have a question and would greatly appreciate your insights and guidance. Background: I joined the company last year (ex-FAANG) as an L5 level and have been actively involved in developing internal tooling for a new product. Recently, while exploring our growth and levels documents, I came across our internal rubrics that outline the expectations at each level. Situation: After identifying a gap between my current level and the staff level, I expressed my interest to my manager. As a result, I am now leading a team of five individuals in the endeavor of implementing automation tooling from scratch. This effort encompasses setting up everything related to automation. Additional Information: While my background is primarily in development, I possess knowledge and experience in quality as well. Given the broad impact automation can have across the company, I am eager to leverage my expertise and make a significant contribution. However, I am uncertain if my focus on quality within a developer role might put me at a disadvantage when aiming for a staff position as a developer. I am seeking guidance on how to navigate the path towards a staff role, either by leading projects to completion (quality) within my team (& across) or by continuing to work on internal tooling rather than customer-facing products. Or should I pivot to product development tasks - How do I navigate this conversation with my manager about this dilemma? Lastly, how can I show metrics and impact?

I joined about 6 months ago and my manager is absolutely great. I don’t have anything where I think they can be better at at this stage. At the current stage, I feel like I have a lot of self improvement to do before expecting anything more from them. What do I say in the critical feedback section for my manager?

Hi everyone! I want to understand what are some most effective ways to articulate your person goals and growth areas to your manager. What are some questions to consider? How do I measure success? I want to maximize 1-1s as much as possible and I think this is a good starting point to laydown the roadmap.

I have great relationship with my manager. In order to grow within company I feel like increased visibility is required. Any tips on how to do it? We both are remote.

I'm about to be officially promoted to Senior Engineer in a couple of days. At the same time, I've also been been presented with an opportunity to move to a different organization in Amazon that's doing some rather exciting work. This is an opportunity I'm likely to accept. I deeply value my current manager's support, because he was critical in helping me secure my promotion despite some very tricky circumstances. I'm aware that promotions are just meant to recognize past work, but leaving virtually immediately after a promotion still feels rather unpleasant. Leaving now will also have a bigger impact on my team since we've shrunk quite a bit recently. What are some tips for structuring and framing the inevitable conversations I will be having with my manager(s)?

My manager is relatively inexperienced (<1 year as a manager, and only a few more years of overall work experience than me). While they have a lot of expertise as a developer in the domain that we work on, when coming them to my previous manager, I don’t think that they have a ton of experience in growing and promoting people, esp. in a deliberate or structured way. How do I make sure that I continue growing, and receive the right growth opportunities and constructive feedback?

Hi Everyone, I am a senior software engineer in my company. We are an R&D company who work for the retail industry. I work in the Computer Vision and systems area. I joined this company as a senior software engineer. Initially, the project that I was hired for had C++ work but that project was scrapped and we worked on a new product where everything was Python and lots of DevOps tools. Now the problem that I am facing is all my colleagues who are software engineers know a lot about Python and these tools. I have never used them so far. For me, it was exciting that I was using these new tools which were very necessary in the current industry but I was anyways slow and my code quality and the way I designed things never matched the team's ways of things. I know everybody says that the fundamental principles are the same but I found there are some pythonic ways which are way better than a person who is learning it. Additionally, I was a Senior Engineer, so the manager and lead always came to me and said that they expected more from me. I was not contributing enough. I feel it is normal to expect things from me as I am a senior. The main problem that I face is I don't feel myself important to the team. Most of the development or coding is done by the rest of the team. I even see they are given more design and senior role work too. I am given very small things. Honestly, even I don't know if I will be able to work on designing systems using these technologies. It affects my confidence and so I am never confident in my work, I have a constant fear that I can lose my job anytime. I don't feel proud of my work anymore now. I have learnt the new tools from last 1 year but I am unable to lead the team in any direction. There are some new concepts in Computer Vision world now like Embeddings which is completely new to me I am struggling to catch up on anything. Our product is going live very soon, so the issues and pressure have started to grow. I am not even able to build any relationships with the real stakeholders in the team. They all love my other teammates and thus keep giving them work. Whenever I try to talk to them about any issues I do not get any encouraging reply, it feels like I am giving very basic suggestions. Can anyone advise me on how to handle and perform well in the team and above all feel recognized in the team and organization? I am pretty sure many people here would have changed technology and should have faced similar situations , many would have recovered from this situation. I always have very high standards for myself and have always been recognized as so in my previous companies. Lately, I feel I am not feeling very proud about my work, and I feel that is the main issue. I need some advice to improve in my field and in a consistent way.

I joined a company 6 months back and from start I am noticing that some of the engineers in the team are constantly underperforming and I can hardly see them working on any task. This puts additional pressure on other teammates to perform as we set team sprint goals considering availability of all engineers and we find the team always lag behind the deadlines. I am wondering what should be the right way to discuss this with my manager during 1:1’s. I don’t want to sound like I am pointing fingers on others.

I'm a tech lead on a long-running project that has gathered momentum over the last couple of months after being in a slow death phase for a many months. Recently, a couple of senior engineers joined the team and we've gotten rid of a lot of things that were slowing down the project. We've managed to hit many awesome milestones on time as a consequence. The project is nearing it's endgame phase but we've unfortunately hit a snag in this last leg due to which it seems that we'll be missing the last couple of deadlines by a decent margin. Due to the expectations that we've set by consistently delivering on time for all the previous milestones, our manager has suggested "pushing" to meet the last couple of deadlines. I don't want to ask my team to work overtime or on the weekend to meet these deadlines (especially since we've been doing a great job of turning the project around and delivering on time). How can I push back against it in a manner that does not impact my currently ongoing or future performance reviews?

Do you have to have 1:1 with intern manager weekly or is it okay to just send them an email talking about what you accomplished during the week provided you meet with mentor daily.

Hi Taro, I'm cross posting this from the premium slack because it was raised that the answers might help the broader community. I work for a small company - the engineering org is approximately 60-70 people all told. The company is about a decade old, but has grown more recently, and I joined the small SRE/Developer Tooling team within the last year. Historically, the company has operated at a relatively slow pace, and followed practices that are, politely, out of date. Just to give an example of the kind approach the company takes: We operate out of a single AWS Region, with no DR or failover capabilities infrastructure was provisioned ad-hoc and manually, with effectively no Infrastructure as code Developers would typically bypass deployment pipelines to manually update files or run commands, even for production systems QA is primarily manually performed for our SaaS application. There is some automation, but this is something that QA runs and checks the output, instead of automatically tracking the output in some way. In my role, I've been pushing for change where possible, trying to evangelize the better ways of working, such as Infrastructure as Code, logs sent to a centralized location like Splunk, and deploying to other AWS regions to assist in both regional lag and general DR/failover concerns. Thankfully, there's definitely some purchase there by leadership, at least on a high level, as they're generally receptive to these changes and recognize that they cannot continue with the same old practices. However, this mentality doesn't appear to be flowing through to the rest of the engineering organisation. My team and I are repeatedly asked to revert changes we've made, often because developers are merely used to the way things used to be, or because PMs/teams want to stick to a schedule or speed that was only possible via shortcuts (such as manually provisioned infrastructure). All of this has happened despite repeated public comments by some in leadership against those requests specifically. What can I do to push for these kinds of changes, when I'm not in any kind of official management or leadership position? I have no official power beyond a general remit by my manager to uphold certain standards for my team.

For context, I work in a tech lead role where I am often making recommendation to my manager regarding the projects coming down the line. The EM has the final say on this, but they respect my opinion on this matter so I don't want to mess this up. I also have 1:1s with my teammates whom I am responsible for about their career growth goals. My teammates are all the same eng level, but have different levels of competence and desire to learn. Additionally, I also know it's important for me to leave some room/ambiguity in project investigation stages to allow folks the space to grow, while it's also important for me to take on some challenging work and help our team deliver more quickly. I guess my question is really 2 parts: How do I choose what to delegate? How do I choose who to delegate the work to?

I'm an E5 at a big tech company. I've been on multiple projects where stakeholders waited until the very end of the projects to say, "That's not what I wanted." What can I do to prevent this from happening? I got feedback that I "need to navigate ambiguity". Does "navigating ambiguity" mean somehow predicting that stakeholders want something besides what they sign off on? If so, how do I develop this skill? This seems to only happen on projects led by E6+ engineers or an M2. I have not had this experience when working with other E5's or more junior engineers. Examples: Misaligned OKRs: At the beginning of the quarter, my M2 told me that it was okay to have a multi-quarter effort, so I planned to do an analysis and roadmap in the first quarter, then execute on improving metrics in subsequent quarters. My M2 signed off on my OKRs for the first quarter. When I provided my deliverables at the end of the quarter, the M2 said, "That's not what I wanted." Then he told me that he wanted metrics moved, even though my OKRs clearly said it was just an analysis & roadmap. I asked 2 mentors (a Director & an M2 - both not in my management chain) for a 3rd party opinion and they both agreed that there was no way to read my OKRs as moving any metrics. I'm confused why the M2 signed off on it and didn't say anything about it in our team's weekly OKR review meetings if that's not what he wanted. He gave me feedback that I need to "navigate ambiguity." When I asked him for concrete, actionable steps to navigate ambiguity, he said, "If you need to ask that, then clearly you don't know how to navigate ambiguity." I'm so confused! Please help! Low-level design missing on a cross-functional project: The DRI (an E6 backend engineer on a different team) kept talking in circles & refused to answer questions whenever the other mobile engineer and I asked about the low-level design for our project. The other mobile engineer tried escalating to our EM, but our EM did not help us. As a last resort, the other mobile engineer and I aligned on the mobile implementations and built that. During end-to-end testing, the DRI said, "That's not what I wanted." He did the same thing to the data scientist. The project was initially scoped for 6 weeks, but ended up taking 2.5 quarters due to all the churn around "late findings". My EM gave me feedback that I need to have a low-level design before starting implementation. Wrong requirements on a cross-functional project: The DRI (E8 web on a different team) provided a requirements doc that was confusing, meandering/disorganized, and hard to follow/understand. An E7 mobile engineer flagged that the doc is not a proper requirements doc at a TSG (Tech Steering Group), but the DRI ignored him and forced me to implement it. I asked for requirements clarification, acceptance criteria, and end-to-end test cases, but he refused to provide any of them. He told me that the requirements doc was all I needed. I escalated this to 3 EMs (my EM, the project's EM, and the DRI's EM) due to my bad experience from the previous project, but none of them helped me. When I asked my EM point-blank how to avoid building the wrong thing, he told me to just make sure I get sign-off on the low-level design in my mobile RFC. I made sure to get sign-off from the DRI before implementation. I also provided TestFlights every 2 weeks for the duration of the project. On the final day that I was allocated to the project, the DRI asked what happens in an error scenario. I said, "Exactly what was documented and signed off in the low-level design of the mobile RFC. Why would it be any different?" Sure enough, he said, "Oh, that's not what I wanted." When I asked why he signed off on the low-level design, he said he missed the flowchart that described the error handling. This happened even though I explicitly tagged him on that flowchart in the Google Doc. So the overall mobile design was about 80% wrong. Turns out his requirements doc said the opposite of what he wanted and that's why the wrong thing got built. The TestFlights had the wrong behavior starting with the initial build, but he missed this as well. His feedback for me: "needs to make sure we build the right thing". How do I avoid this in the future? My EM was unable to provide any advice on how to avoid this in the future. All 3 EMs resigned towards the end of the project.

I recently had a conversation with my manager regarding my work commits every week. It seems like he always downplay me in every one to meet showing me in bad picture. As compared to other folks , I have shown more progress with respect to code commits and tasks completion. He ignore other developers mistakes or issues softly. How to deal with this scenario?

I had a feedback session with my manager, and they gave me feedback that I was doing well overall but they would like to see me become more familiar with Meta's experimentation tools. They mentioned that this wasn't bad feedback as this unfamiliarity is expected with relatively new Meta engineers like myself. That being said, I'm unsure how to process it: Should I process it urgently and if so, how do I become familiar with Meta's gigantic experimentation infrastructure?

I have joined this new company for little less than a year. I had interviewed for a different role but due to certain hiring constraints joined in a different team and role. The team I am in is not very technical, there's a lot of process and grind work that's part of the role. It is rather different from what I have been doing which was essentially automation of manual processes and deployment pipelines using tools and coding. I had one review till now where I got an average rating, to me it seemed sub optimal given I put in a lot of effort to add value to the team. Some of the comments I received included that I should come up with my own ideas (this was with respect to a manual process that I automated which was lying in the backlog for over two years) and also related to some of the choices I made (manager asked if I want project A or B and I said I'm definitely interested in A). To be honest, I feel my manager is nit picking and he also trivialized my work by making comments like anyone can code, ideas are important, etc even when no one from the team actively owned to execute the ideas. I feel my manager doesn't particularly like me due to the above behaviors. In this situation how do I set myself up for a good performance review the next time. I would have considered quitting but I like the vibe of the company and some of the other teams are doing phenomenal work. It was hard for me to get in so even if I quit I don't want to quit without trying first. In most of my previously held roles I became a go to person pretty quickly and got good visibility. How do I do this here?

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.

Context: I work as a Entry Level SWE at Series B Startup with 25 people; the SWE team is 7 people total. I am the only person currently under my manager & my coworkers are fairly clear about what I am building & why. Also, the SWE team morale is strong and productivity seems to be at a sustainable rate. During our mentor-mentee meeting last week, my manager & I agreed to give each other specific feedback each week (and also agreed for our 1:1 meetings to be used for awkward, personal stuff as Alex & Rahul recommended). In general, I think he is an incredible manager; he’s personable, highly knowledgable, is available to answer my questions, & answers all my noobie questions but I do think there are some shortcomings as he is not used to being a mentor or a manager. I don’t want to just say “Great job!“ as that is an easy default to fall into week-after-week. So how do I evaluate my manager? Is there a set of questions somewhere? A framework of some kind?

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.

What concrete things do I say, in a conversation with my manager to "set expectations"? Do I say something like "I would like to ____ expectations this quarter, is it sufficient to complete project A & project B?" What if I am new to the company, and unable to contribute meaningfully to a significant project, or there is downtime when no projects are available? Can I say I'll fix some unknown volume of bugs this quarter?

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?