Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 526: Why can't I get promoted so quickly after my last promotion and I got hired as a software engineer but ended up doing ops

Episode Date: August 17, 2026

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hi Dave & Jamison! I’ve been listening for almost a year now and have worked through nearly your entire back catalog in reverse. The podcast has genuinely helped me become a better engineer, so thank you! I’m two years into my software engineer career at a large infrastructure company. I was promoted to SWE II last year, and this year my manager told me she felt my work was promotion-worthy, but because I’d just been promoted and she had others on the team to consider, she wants to target me for next year’s cycle instead. She gave me a spot bonus and said she’d try to make up for it in my raise. I understand and appreciate the honesty, but I’m also a little disappointed because I’ve worked hard to hit every milestone on the roadmap she gave me, and career progression does matter to me. My question is: How should I navigate the next year? What should I focus my 1:1s on? Should I push for a mid-year promotion if that’s an option, or instead focus on building an undeniable case for next year? How would you approach this if you were in my shoes? Hey Dave and Jamison, Long time listener. First time question asker :). I recently joined a major tech company. Before this, I worked at a mid-sized company with about 200 engineers. In my old role, I built customer-facing products. The work was challenging and exciting, and I genuinely enjoyed it. I ended up moving to a new city to be closer to family and started looking for a job. The job search was brutal. Honestly, by the end of it, I would have accepted just about anything. Luckily, a major tech company extended an offer. The money was great, and I thought it would be a huge plus to have a major tech name on my resume. It is a fully remote role, but they did mention that they could go hybrid in the future. I knew ahead of time that the team built internal tools instead of customer-facing products. But after joining, I realized most of what we do is closer to operations than actual software engineering. I know I should have screened the team better. I was just so relieved to get a good offer from a top company that I accepted without thinking twice. I am not enjoying the work at all. I am not planning to quit immediately. However, I want to be ready to leave in about a year or earlier if they decide to lay us all off. I want to make sure I utilize my time here as best as possible. Do you have any suggestions on how I can best position myself for an internal transfer or an eventual external move? Also, I have been in this role for close to 2 months now. I did a 1-1 with the manager in my first week, but after that, have not had any 1-1s. He has not scheduled anything. I was thinking of scheduling it myself but not sure if that can be seen as too forward. Btw this is outside US, if that matters :) Thanks again for your advice and laughs.

it takes more than creating a zero-day exploit to hack your sandbox and cheat on an ai benchmark to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 526 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host james and dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software engineers about all the non-technical stuff that go into defeating benchmarking tools i'm astonished how much this is playing out like all the people who said beware of ai taking over the world thought it would play out i have long dismissed them and maybe when i'm like in the paperclip processing plant getting my body reduced to component atoms i'll say you know what you guys were kind of right my bad you know i've spent my entire life watching sci-fi movies and then seeing them never come to

pass yeah yeah exactly especially the ones that have an actual timeline on them like back to the future that's probably the most famous one where it's like hoverboards and flying cars by 2015 which is now 11 years ago but then you know skynet i'm like yeah actually plausible here we are yep yep it's actually making me i'm kind of having this what's the word when you deny i guess i'm in denial about reality yeah this can't be real because the history of sci-fi has taught me that none of it comes true yeah no we're so far away from the world of neuromancer or snow crash or whatever other random sci-fi book you've read except for the ai bits those seem one of my favorite sci-fi authors is this guy named peter watts who talks a lot about

ai is a strong background player in his novels and it's all feels pretty real in that it's not these like conscious humane entities they're just these mysterious inscrutable no human understands them yeah they they're just kind of floating around in the ether in the ai cloud running the whole world we're getting there yeah uh that's not what this show's about it's about the room noise on my mic and whether ai is briefly good enough to fix all the room noise because of my crappy microphone but not good enough to destroy the earth yes yeah that's what That's the sweet spot. The butter's up.

Find that out. Yep. Do you want me to thank our patrons? Let's do it. Okay. Thank you to these folks that contribute at the level where we shout them out every single week. Thank you to Tomfoolery, Frivolity, and Shenaniganery. Control H, Control H, Control H, Control H's shall commence.

Okay. I think that's how you pronounce that? All right. Yeah. Will had a rap battle with Space Soft Skills Engineering Podcast, Seth, Jenny Kim, the Stochastic Parrot. Oh, wow. how much code could a code load code toad load if a code toad could load code that's great who even knows what their actual names are my actual name on linkedin is yami debugging the dark canny

token limit reached nice jacob shambling a tingle frozen barrel bees etymology comes from the ancient greek edemon what is true and logia the study of not to be confused with boolean algebra okay i think this might be in reference to the entomology versus etymology yeah and i still said it wrong not to be confused with boolean algebra that is awesome what a sweet little twist at the end there yeah the move over will angel we're doing space names now nick molyneux javier gonzalez space chewy open paren salted fries semicolon lost episode 100 oh yeah jameson's nordic country corner iceland is the one with the volcanoes won't angel stand from drone deploy deploy never is not just to create our mars flamingo emoji i like chicken i like liver me i make

please deliver i can see dodds kyle boss the person hearing this is awesome can't see dodds techno techno nice i knew exactly how to pronounce that yeah uh jenny kim the stochastic parrot ira chan jonathan king's nice beautiful functional user documentation adrian at kappa.ai angelica Cathor. Will Angel saw the space comet and has now relapsed into playing Factorio. Please advise on how to play Space Age. Nice. Ragnar, Brayden Canes, John Grant,

Brittany Alec, close parenthesis followed by a literal closed parenthesis, close parenthesis, and then a single closing parenthesis. The most adversarial Patreon name. That last one. Yep. We love it. Wouldn't have it any other way. Thank you, thank you. If you want to join this group, you can go to softskills.audio, click support us on Patreon, where

any amount will get you an invite to our Slack thing. and enough of an amount will get you a regular shout-out on the show. Yeah, and I just want to call out the Jameson's Nordic Country Corner. Needs an update. Needs a refresh. We're ready for a new country. Oh, there's a listener comment, too. Can I read this one?

Yeah, go for it. Then I will. This is from Benji Hingston, who said, not a question, but a comment on the latest episode, which I think actually is the latest episode. Yeah, that's right. Nice. The stars aligned.

Love the show. I've been listening for a few years, and I am knocking down the latest archives backward into the 190s while staying up to date with the latest. Just listened to episode 525, and now I'm questioning my soul. You mentioned you'd be surprised if someone was at the same job since 2019.

I've been at the same job since 2017 in my first career job. I've been a senior software developer for the last four years. I did nearly triple my entry-level salary, but maybe that is typical. I went to university later, five years than my peers. My firstborn was born the same week I landed this job. Oh,

wow. That's a big day. This job has been extremely stable and very flexible when it comes to family. I've been on seven teams and nearly most areas of our product, including two task force teams, spun up. Hopefully my CV, if I do look for the next company, doesn't get passed on because of it. I do at times feel I missed out on some of the lifestyle job hunting could have provided with higher salaries, but I'm thankful for the low stress, fun atmosphere and good peers to work with including flexibility when it comes with family again love the show oh great comment yeah as all comments we make on the show i am immediately ready to completely disavow them anytime anyone has a single counterexample so whatever we said that was that was the old us

yeah we're wiser doesn't apply anymore i mean tripling your salary that sounds pretty great i think that's a yeah if i think about like u.s software salaries i feel like that's a pretty reasonable trajectory for this amount of time if you're job hopping even. So staying at a company and doing it, that's great. Yeah. That means you have a great company that takes care of its people's pay because seven years to triple your salary is pretty amazing. Pretty out of the ordinary. Yeah. Yeah. You do typically have to move jobs to do that. So if you don't and you're having a great experience, that sounds great. Yeah. I think you'll be fine. Yeah. The only reason I said I was surprised if people didn't job hop in that timeframe was because salaries

were going up so high so if your salary already went up that high and you stayed at the same company i think you beat the game yeah yeah you did yeah there's uh you've maybe there's some theoretical world where you optimize slightly more but i think you're should be pretty happy with how it's gone totally all right i'm gonna read our first question dave let's do it uh this comes from an anonymous listener who says hi dave and jameson i've been listening for almost a year now and have worked through nearly your entire back catalog in reverse wow how how do you experience the world going backwards it's like ai goes away we get either dumber or smarter i don't know which one is better covid is no longer a thing yeah yeah the world heals completely from

covid and forgets about it yeah it would be very weird to experience this podcast backwards but it's like the king arthur mode for experiencing this podcast all right uh let's keep reading the podcast has genuinely helped me become a better engineer so thank you that's very nice all right on to the question it says i'm two years into my software engineer career at a large infrastructure company i was promoted to software engineer two last year and this year my manager told me she felt my work was promotion worthy but because i'd just been promoted and she had others on the team to consider, she wants to target me for next year's cycle instead. She gave me a spot bonus and said she'd try to make up for it in my race. I understand and appreciate the

honesty, but I'm also a little disappointed because I've worked hard to hit every milestone on the roadmap she gave me, and career progression does matter to me. My question is, how should I navigate the next year? What should I focus my one-on-ones on? Should I push for a mid-year promotion if that's an option, or instead focus on building an undeniable case for next year? how would you approach this if you were in my shoes two years into your career promoted to SWE2 yeah I mean it sounds like you're on a great path just not as great as the path you would like to be on I feel your manager working at a big company there was a pretty strict not directly spoken quota and trajectory for promotions and part of the manager's job is distribute that over the team

and there are definitely times where you might feel like the the manager might feel like all things being equal this person deserves a promotion but there are three slots and five people and i need to allocate them between these five people yeah and yeah i can see well you just got promoted as a thing it definitely was harder to get promoted at the mega corp i worked at if you had just been promoted there was sort of a a uh i don't know a cool down period of like okay it's been a year or two now now now it can become a thing unless you have some outrageous life-changing circumstance happen yeah so it doesn't really tell you what to do but like yeah this is this is certainly a thing well and the great news is your manager is telling you i'm gonna put you up

for promotion next year. And I got to say two years in to get your first promotion to level two. I don't know how your level system works, but I'm just going to assume that's, you know, like not a tiny move, but a reasonably big move. And then two more years to go to the next level. Sounds great. When it comes to big companies, like what Jameson said is hugely important. You have to understand what progress looks like, not in absolute terms based on what you want, but in relative terms based on what's normal yeah i like that what's what's normal like the big company process is sort of geared towards smoothing out exceptions yeah because everyone thinks well yeah you have your promo process but i'm an exception i deserve way more i deserve to

get paid the top end of the the band i get i deserve to get promoted more and and so they just exert this general downward pressure of like and nope i know everybody thinks that so nope, the default answer is no. Yeah, that's exactly right. And when I say you need to know what's normal, I don't mean to say so that you can then conform to normal. It's so that you can understand how far away from normal you're trying to be. Because the farther away from normal you are, the more painful and more effort it's going to take for your manager to get it done. And so you need to know what you're asking for. Yeah, it does turn into sort of a, it rhymes with salary negotiation where the more leverage you have, the easier it is. And a compelling alternative

offer to go work somewhere else. I have seen work as a promotion strategy where it just wasn't in the cards. And then the alternative to the company was, well, this person will quit and go work somewhere else. And then suddenly it was. It doesn't always work. Sometimes that can backfire. But that is one example of forcing it through is, well, this company will pay me a bunch more and you want to keep me yeah yeah if you're on some incredibly visible project that just succeeds wildly and and somebody high up in the org says your name a lot like that's that's a thing that can move stuff around but just i did a good job on the work my manager told me to do especially when i was promoted last year doesn't scream well you're we will make an exception for you

yep it doesn't scream that to me either and so i think what you need to do if you really want to be successful, and you asked what should I focus my one-on-ones on, you need to figure out what's in it for your manager to get you promoted. And in some companies, the answer is not a lot. Like some managers have pressure to prevent promotions because promotions mean higher costs on headcount and everyone's trying to keep costs down right now. But at some companies, promotions actually make your manager look really good, especially getting promoted into higher levels. And I don't know if level three, which I'm assuming is the next level for you, is considered a high level. At some companies it is, but every company has a different leveling system. And so you're either

doing your manager a favor by being an excellent contributor and being someone who's easy to promote and someone that your manager can look good by promoting, or you're going to make your manager stick her neck out on the line for you and maybe take some reputational damage or burn a little bit of political capital as she's trying to seek this exception. And so if you can understand which of those scenarios is happening for your manager, you can help position things well so that it's a win for you and a win for your manager. And that's something that I would talk about in my one-on-ones, is try to get a sense for what's normal, what the process looks like, how you can help make that really easy for your manager, and then you can build a plan

together for how you get there. But I wouldn't just jump in and say, well, let's do a mid-year promotion. Start with understanding what your manager gets out of this so that you can make it really great for her. Yeah. I mean, you could say, well, how important is this to me? And going and getting other job offers is a lot of work, especially now. I mean, it's a rough market out there. I think if I were in your shoes, I am generally lazy and stagnant in some ways. So i would probably say great uh it's not going to happen this year next year sounds good next year sounds great let's let's talk about it every week and make sure we are on track for making this awesome next year and and have now two years of track record to point to that all says this person

is perfect for promotion i really don't like talking about promotions every week feels so tedious yeah yeah it's like nothing changes week to week that's true yeah exactly maybe monthly maybe quarterly like i just so it can be really painful yeah i'm also reminded of this amazing interview that jameson and i have referenced now like four times between this amazon vp who's retired and some random podcaster who i've never heard of since or before but the amazon vp was stuck in a situation where he wasn't getting the promotion he wanted this is it must have been pre vp status for this guy but he said to his manager look i really care about my career and my career progressing at Amazon. I want to know how much does Amazon care about my career? And that was

just some of the most magic laden verbiage I've ever seen for talking to your manager about a promotion. And if it's really important to you, that's the kind of language you can deploy so that you're not just coming right out and saying, I'm going to leave if you don't take this promotion seriously, but you are saying that without saying it. It's that polite fiction thing. And personally, I suck at deploying language like that. Most people I know suck at deploying language like that. But if you can come up with a way to describe your desire in such a way that your needs are clearly articulated and the burden of delivering on those needs is clearly placed on the company, then you might be able to accelerate this thing for yourself.

I assume in that case, this person had a ton of leverage though. I'm sure they were running a a bunch of important projects and teams and like uh i don't think the words magically work and i believe that you can do this and i'm i'm somehow leaving some opportunities on the table but it just feels bad to me so i want to convince myself that it's wrong in some way you know like it's not because i i am unskilled at this it's actually it's a moral stance actually too good to do this i don't know i need to think about this more about why it feels icky icky to push it so hard yeah i i i think my ideal is we talk about it yeah every every few months and there's some vague understanding of here's what jameson would like to do and then i do a

really good job and they say hey great news the opportunity opened up and if i get antsy then i say hey i'm getting a little antsy and does the timeline still work and i don't know like there's I feel like there's ways to talk about it that would be less effective and also make me feel better. I think one way that would make you feel better if the context were such that you're actually checking all the boxes already. And the only thing stopping them from giving you the promotion is some stupidly applied company policy. And you'd be like, hey, look, this just doesn't make sense to make me wait. I think in that situation, you'd probably feel morally better about it. Yeah, I got to arrange that then. I must arrange the circumstances so I can

train myself to jump through the right hoops. Yeah. Also, let's be careful to not read too much into what this person's manager said. So this person was promoted to Software Engineer 2 last year. And this year, his manager told him that his work was promotion worthy. Does that mean necessarily that you are owed a promotion now? Or does it mean the kind of work you're doing is the kind of work that will get you promoted when delivered successfully over the course of a year or two? Because that's how I read that. Just because you're working on promotion scope of work now doesn't mean you have built up enough of a track record to be ready to be promoted. And that was definitely the case at my big mega co that I worked at, where they were like, hey,

yes. In fact, I okay, I'll admit that I was a bad guy here. But I was in charge of approving or denying a couple of promotions. And there was a couple cases where I saw people who were doing promotion worthy work, but they had only done it for like three months. And it was one project. And I'm saying, look, that's great that you completed that project. And yes, that project was at the next level in terms of scope and complexity and ambiguity and all the other criteria but you just did it one you did it one time you know that doesn't mean that you are necessarily permanently operating at that next level it's kind of like uh i was thinking like a sports metaphor you know when these these golfers when they do these tournaments i didn't

realize this but they play for days in a row when they do these tournaments yeah and they don't just play 18 holes of golf i don't know how many they play but it's way more than 18 so you might have a couple of good shots you know where you're like wow i birdied that hole it's amazing you know but that you don't win the tournament because of that you have to play consistently over time and then at the end of the tournament they award the winner to the person who actually did the best over like six rounds of golf or whatever it is and that's that's how promotions work too like prove to me that you are permanently at the next level and it doesn't have to be 10 years of track record but it does have to be more than a few months and maybe even more than six months like

I'd probably say once you've been performing there for at least six months, then I'm, I'm like, okay, you're probably at that level. Let's promote you. Yeah. I like that. That makes sense. Well, have we answered the question? I think so. Good luck. Let us know how it goes over the next year. All right. I will read our next question. This is from an anonymous listener who says, Hey, Dave and Jameson, long time listener, first time question asker. I recently joined a major tech company. Before this, I worked at a midsize company with about 200 engineers. In my old role, I built customer-facing products. The work was challenging and exciting, and I genuinely enjoyed it. I ended up moving to a new city to be closer to family and started looking for a job. The job

search was brutal. Honestly, by the end of it, I would have accepted just about anything. Luckily, a major tech company extended an offer. The money was great, and I thought it would be a huge plus to have a major tech name on my resume. It is a fully remote role, but they did mention that they could go hybrid in the future. I knew ahead of time that the team built internal tools instead of customer-facing products, but after joining, I realized most of what we do is closer to operations rather than actual software engineering. I know I should have screened the team better. I was just so relieved to get a good offer from a top company that I accepted without thinking twice. I'm not enjoying the work at all. I am not planning to quit immediately. However, I want to be ready to

leave in about a year or earlier if they decide to lay us all off. I want to make sure I utilize my time here as best as possible. Do you have any suggestions on how I can best position myself for an internal transfer or even an external move also i've been in this role for close to two months now i did a one-on-one with my manager in my first week but after that have not had any one-on-ones he has not scheduled anything i am thinking of scheduling it myself but not sure if that would be seen as too forward by the way this is outside the u.s if that matters thanks again for your advice and laugh uh-huh or laughs you said laughs i said laugh instead we're trying to mix it up on we've delivered one laugh one laugh oh man this you know this question made me reflect on how

life is so so full of situations where you think you're getting one thing but you're actually getting something else you know like have you ever you ever bought a ticket to a an event and you're like man i got a great deal on this ticket then you get there and realize it's an obstructed view seat or something there's some yeah something like oh i didn't get a great deal i paid for exactly what i got or you know like when you visit someplace for the first time and you plan it all out and then after you leave you're like man i would have done things i would have done three different things if i had ever been here before but i had never been here before so i didn't know what i was looking at yeah that just happens all the time and i think

at work it happens a lot and it's very high stakes it is it's so much of it is just random it's just luck of circumstances. And it's so hard. It's so hard to figure out. I mean, I'll tell you, I don't know if I should tell this story, but this happened to me in a big way when I joined a big tech company. I was leery of this and I wanted to know going in what I was getting into because I knew it was a big company and I didn't want to end up on the sidelines or doing like operations or something like that, just like this question asker. And so I went into the interview, I met with the team manager and I asked the manager point blank, like, okay, I know the rough area of where we work or where this team works in the overall product. You know, it's a

big, big system, thousands of engineers working on it, but I want to make sure I understand this is the core team working on this part of the product, right? Manager's like, absolutely. Yes, it is. I'm like, okay, you promised me like it's the core, core team. Yes. The manager says, so anyway a few weeks go by and I actually show up at work and I start working on it I go to my first stand-up meeting and there's a few issues raised and and I'm hearing I'm just watching the other engineers and I'm realizing during stand-up that all the issues that are coming in are just being routed to other teams because this team doesn't actually own the code where the issues result reside and it wasn't because the issues were like in a completely different area of the

product it was our area but the issues were going deeper and they were going to a team called the core team and i was like what team am i on we call your team the throwaway team yes so i talked to the team that is the core team and i'm like okay but you guys are actually the core team right and they were like well sort of we're like the we're like the java layer but we just pass requests on through to the the machine learning models that are actually developed by machine learning scientists and we don't do that so i realized i was on a service team they were on a core team i think they called themselves the engine team and they were just passing stuff on down to another team that was actually producing

models and that those models came from scientists who were produced and i realized wow i am three layers away from this core this the actual core i was very disappointed in myself and that's when I realized that in a big enough org, even the managers that you ask don't know where they are. Is your interpretation, the manager believed that they were being truthful to you? Yes. They weren't trying to mislead you? No. They just thought they were the core team, but were not.

I think this particular manager either didn't fully understand what I was asking or really didn't know where he was oriented in the overall organization. i mean he knew here's the thing there were other teams that were adjacent to us that were even less core than we were yeah so by some by some measure you could say we're more core than some teams so yes but core is a spectrum doesn't hit as as hard when you're trying to sell a candidate we all exist along a spectrum of core to non-core oh my goodness oh wow yeah no i don't think he was trying to mislead me he was a really great person and uh and i enjoyed working with him but i just don't think he fully oriented himself

within the whole organization yeah and i really just wondered like how deep does this rabbit hole go i i felt like neo and when he's being presented with the pill you know you take the blue pill you wake up take the red pill you find out how deep this rabbit hole goes it took me months to figure out how deep the rabbit hole went yeah you go to the ml team and and they're like well we're just like the data engineers and we make the pipelines and we don't we don't actually yes we don't do the math no legitimately there were pipeline teams that were literally just moving model artifacts around and running tests on them yeah you know they were delivering to this engine team that i thought was the core team and anyway oh my goodness it was it was wild but you want to

know how i handled that how after about a year i switched teams and i am so glad that i did yeah because it it led me and then my whole thing was i said look i want to be customer facing i want to build product that actual people use and interact with and that's what i did i found a team in my building that was doing that and i found that by just going to different social events and different mechanisms that were organized like we had a building wide design review it's kind of an office hours thing where you could sign up and if you were an engineering team and you wanted to get some input from some principal engineers, you could go to that. And I would just go to that, even though I didn't have something to be reviewed and I would just be

an audience member. And pretty soon I found myself on the team that was doing the reviewing of other people's stuff, which is actually super cool. It was so fun to see what everybody was working on. And I didn't always have great answers, but just getting all that exposure. And then one of those teams got to know me and actually approached me and said, Hey, would you like to join our team? And we're doing this customer facing product stuff. And I'm like, yes let's do it so i did it's perfect yeah it worked out great well just do that yeah i'm sure it applies to your situation exactly listen not having a job is bad going through a horrible job search is bad and it it could be worse i think it is reasonable one of the i mean

you already identified this that you could move to another team inside the company i think that could be much easier than just going off and getting a totally different job it probably won't happen without you doing something though i liked i liked your story for many reasons dave you're just an admirable fellow so i like listening to you name all the reasons if you really liked it i will name one of them and the rest are dlc that you can unlock by what does dlc mean downloadable content you gotta buy them separately yeah it's like a skin you have to purchase yeah yeah this is your horse armor you did stuff right you you learned some things about your situation and then started reaching out and i think at a big company there are always places

you can reach out to there's oh yeah yeah there's there's always something it looks different at different companies but you can always get in there's some slack channel you can join there's some events, if they're in-person things, there's ways to develop your network outside of your individual team. And that's now your second job if you want to switch teams. That's right. And so the way I see it, you basically have three options. You can change jobs completely. You can switch teams or, and this is something we haven't talked about, but you can find ways to morph your team and your job into a software developing organization. Now that is probably the hardest of the three options, but there are ways to do this, I think. And you just have to be vigilant

to watch for opportunities where things appear that need to get done. And you're like, we could build something for that and volunteer, you know, instead of, well, I guess I'm just the on-call engineer this week. And my job is to move tickets around between queues. Or you could say, I'm going to build something. I'm going to automate something. I'm going, I see a team that has a problem. My team is in a position to help them. I'm going to build a tool to solve it for them. Yeah, I think if you are passionate about building stuff for end users, it might be tricky to move your operations team into that mode. But you could still have users, they are likely just employees of the company. And there's always manual labor and human centered processes that you could turn into some type of platform or product. and yeah i feel like people love that kind of thing at big companies and sometimes it happens too much so yeah true there might be some uh there might be some defense mechanisms against

it to make sure okay is this really do we really need a platform for like submitting two jira tickets at once instead of one or whatever but there are plenty of problems that can be solved reasonably by automating them and making them easier and it i think that generally scales pretty well if you can demonstrate the pain involved in it yeah and it's fun you know it's building yeah yeah oh there is one other question here should i schedule a one-on-one absolutely yes the bigger the company the more they expect you to do this outside the u.s if that matters yeah i i don't know if it matters i suppose it could but ask your co-workers how often they meet with your manager yeah there were i'm trying to think i think i mostly scheduled one-on-ones with

my uh with my reports but i would be pumped if someone said hey i want to meet more often and then had interesting things to discuss if it was just i would like you to see my face more then that was less interesting but you're very new to the team you're very new to the company it's a great time to ask for more context and learn more about the direction of the team and the problems of the team i think you have a lot of motivation or a lot of a lot of justification for why it is a good use of your manager's time to talk with you for an hour once a week or whatever amount of time it is.

Yeah. It'll make them look good. That's the ultimate carrot. And your team will be so much better because you'll be able to perform better because you'll have more context, be able to do better work. Yep.

Well, have we answered this question? I think so. Good luck. Good luck. Yeah. Good luck. What can people do if they want their own questions answered?

If you would like us to answer your question, go to softskills.audio and click the ask a question button where you can fill out our little form that's also the place where we would love to hear your feedback and comments if you absolutely what's the word not reject not revolt loathe no oh boy i'm losing my words at the end of this episode if you object to any of our answers this is where we'd love to hear it also if you have a follow-up to a story or maybe some advice we offered which as we said, changes from week to week based on any counter example. We'd love to hear your

situation and what changed, what didn't. In fact, we had a few of these this week. I was really happy. We could only read one of them, but we'll read more of those. Thank you for sending those in. We'd love to hear about them and we'll read them in future shows. Yeah. All right. Thank you for listening. We'll catch you next week.