Senior Engineering Traits: Come with solutions not problems!
Why being a complainer at work; does not really work in your favor; especially when communicating to leadership.
We have all been there, something is not working.
You are not happy.
You want to put it out in the world and your manager/skip seems to be an empathetic ear around.
You decide to vent and rant. It feels great at the moment, but was it effective in actually solving the problem and what could be unintentional side effects? Let’s break it down a bit.
Complaints, galore!
It could be any of the below situations
A project timeline is too aggressive and impractical to deliver
A cross functional partner is too demanding.
Another team is not prioritising your dependency and giving an impractical timeline to deliver a work that you need to move forward
A difficult co-worker is not working well or withholding information from you
A piece of software or infra is badly designed and the accrued tech debt is slowing you down
A system you depend on is heavily undocumented with no usage/API information
A team member is not pulling their weight
So on and so forth.
Ouch! These all seem like pretty gnarly problems.
Some of them may look like problems that your manager should pitch in and solve for you.
They also may look like great topics to discuss in your 1:1’s with your manager or skip level.
You may decide to vent and rant in front of your manager for 40-45 mins, thinking now you and your leaders are on the same page.
You may also feel more relaxed after venting on a topic.
But, then what?
What your leader may hear?
Did you pay any attention to how the person on the other side of the table may perceive these?
Disclaimer: This is just one of the many possibilities of how your leaders may read this situation. These intentionally adopt a devil’s advocate mindset.
Remember your leader is also human and each one of us have their own set of beliefs and preconceived biases.
It may also go in one of the below directions as well.
A cross functional partner is too demanding
[Leader] maybe, this person is not able to work with challenging situations and their negotiation and conflict resolution skills needs improvement
Another team is not prioritising your dependency and giving an impractical timeline
[Leader] Did they communicate in the right way? could their collaboration and trust building skills improve?
A difficult co-worker is not working well or withholding information from you
[Leader] Are they not able to work well with others? What else have they tried to smoothen the collaboration?
A project timeline is too aggressive and impractical to deliver
[Leader] As an experienced engineer, why are they not able to push back in the right way with data? Should I trust them with more responsibility?
A piece of software or infra is badly designed and the accrued tech debt is slowing you down
[Leader] Okay, but what can they do to solve this or improve the status quo? Did they research the problem space? Is there a design doc already?
A team member is not pulling their weight
[Leader] What have they tried already with the person? Did they dive deeper to figure out the root cause?
Get it?
After reading the possible inner monologues, you may be thinking, hold on now, the manager here is very skeptical and does not have a lot of trust in their engineer, does it?
Your leader may not necessarily think the exact same things.
They may be supportive and non judgemental and work with you to dig deeper into the problem. You’ll never know how they took it for sure but may get signals (verbal or non verbal). 🤔