Self Assessment & Career Growth

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>> Francesca Sadikin: All right, Feedback Loops. To ensure you're still growing, it is important to create feedback loops from those around you. You cannot rely on your manager, like waiting to see if your manager just gives you feedback every so often, because sometimes your managers are not people managers who are trained in growing people.

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And other times they're just busy, right? Sometimes you're gonna have to just ask for this. You want to be aiming for weekly or bi-weekly, so every two weeks, feedback sessions, and you're aiming for timely feedback. So that you can address it early and often preventing these issues from snowballing into really big problems.

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I find that just asking your manager, how am I doing? Do you have feedback from me is not helpful? They have a very hard time answering that. So I recommend asking very specific questions. For example, is there something I could have done for this task better? What areas do you think I could have improved upon?

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When you're thinking about trying to go for promotions and stuff, you can ask, do you have any suggestions for how I can take on more responsibility or expand my role? What goals or objectives should I focus on in the upcoming months? This is just to see what do they expect from you?

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What would exceeding expectations look like for them? How do you gain visibility into my work? So this one's really, really important because you want to know how your manager is keeping track-of on you, right? Are they just using what you're saying to validate your work? Are they hearing it from another engineer?

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Or is it through the review cycles? You wanna know so that you are making sure that the correct feedback about what you're doing and its impacts is actually being delivered to your manager.
>> Francesca Sadikin: Asking for Help. So very common struggle for engineers is how to ask questions and ask for help without looking like you don't know what you're doing.

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So this is a little bit of trying to make sure we don't trigger our imposter syndrome. So I have a few tips including, Timeboxing. So this just means you you go into an agreement with your manager about how long is it okay for you to be stuck on a problem?

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Maybe that's one hour, two hours, three hours or something like that, and then after which your managers like I do not want you to keep spinning by yourself, I give you permission to go and ask for help. I want you to figure this out through help of someone else.

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So it's nice to have that in your mind so you don't feel like there's this other barrier to asking for help. When you go to this other engineer for help, it's really important to show your due diligence. So I'm assuming everybody has actually tried different things, and you don't want to go to this engineer and just say, I need help, and that's it.

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That kind of creates this narrative like did you not do anything? What did you do? Right, so you wanna go to them and say like hey, I tried this, which resulted to this. Here are the other things I tried, and then this is what happened. Now this is my hypothesis.

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But I ran out of time. What do you think about that? And now this becomes a collaborative investigation with this other engineer where you guys can figure out the problem together.
>> Francesca Sadikin: When you finally get some sort of solution or the next step, I also find it really important to clarify your assumptions.

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I think a lot of engineers, sometimes they made assumptions about what was actually happening, and they actually really didn't understand it at all. And so by restating what you think the problem was and what you're supposed to do next to the other engineer, if you had made an incorrect assumption, they can immediately figure that out and then tell you, and then steer you back onto the right course.

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So, this is just important to make sure you're not rabbit holing in the wrong direction. And then lastly, just express gratitude, thank this engineer. Hopefully this is a new working relationship that you're gonna always be building now, and so just expressing things goes a long way.