Your career questions, answered

Ever wanted to ask an engineering manager burning questions? Several of you did right before the July 4th holiday, and I'm happy to report I have (some of) your answers in this post. In addition to the text transcripts, we'll be releasing videos for most of the questions over the next few weeks. Make sure to Follow me here on LinkedIn, if you're not already, and on Twitter at @LefflerGreg.

Here's our first video and transcript, on careers:

What do software engineering managers look for/expect from college interns?

99% percent of the time the answer is don't break anything. Depending on where you're doing your internship they may have you work on meaningful projects and they may give you an opportunity to really dig into something.

But... the vast majority of college internships exist for you to learn from the company. They want you to experience what it's like working at a big company on a dedicated engineering team, having deliverables, milestones, all that sort of stuff.

So, what we generally want from college interns is for you to be curious. You should be at meetings, you should watch people do code, you should ask questions about why design decisions are being made or about why people are solving a problem in a particular way. We want you to gain from this internship knowledge about how to do this job; if you go back to your campus and you tell people, "Hey, I worked at company X and it was an awesome time..." That's what we want for our interns, we want people who learn stuff and who get excited about sharing what they learned with their peers. 

What's the best way to tell your manager that you want to be promoted?

Really, you need to have this discussion regularly. The wrong time to have this discussion is when you've gotten your annual review and your manager slides a piece of paper across the desk. At that point the decision's made – it's too late.

If you want to be promoted you need to figure out when your company's review cycles are. Then you need to talk to your manager several months in advance of that review cycle and say, "Hey, I think I'm ready for the next step. I've done projects X and Y, I've delivered on this many code reviews, I've done all of these great, wonderful things that merit me getting promoted. Do you agree or not?"

You really want to push the decision back on to the manager and say, "Hey, do you think I'm ready to be promoted?" And if they say yes, then great. You have to trust that they'll do the work to get you the promotion when they can. If they say no, then it's your job to ask your manager for a development plan: "What do I need to do to get to the next step? How quickly do you think I can do that? Who should I work with? What are some of the ways that I can solve your problems? How can I deliver more value to the business?"

Ultimately, that's what getting promoted is about. It's not about sitting in the role for a certain amount of time or for delivering a number of lines of code or number of patches or pull requests. It's about showing that you are now adding more value to the business, so you merit a raise and more responsibility, and all of the perks that come with your promotion.

My manager is pretty soft spoken and quiet and it's difficult to get honest feedback. When I ask I normally get "You're doing great" kind of responses. How can I get better feedback?

A lot of managers don't like to give feedback because they're not sure how it will be taken. So, what I suggest is to go into the feedback meeting with an open mind and to say that you have an open mind.

One way you could do this is to say, "Hey boss. I want feedback about how I'm doing. I want to know anything that I could improve on and areas where I could be doing even better. I promise not to be judgmental about it or get defensive. I'm going to sit here and listen to what you have to say." And then sit there and listen to what they have to say.

You can't say this without really meaning it. If you go in and your body language is closed and you're scowling and you're like, "I really want to hear what you have to say," you're not going to get the right feedback. But if you go in and you're open and approachable and you say, "Hey, I really want to know how can I do this job even better? How can I go to the next level?"

You're a lot more likely to get the feedback if you show the manager that you're going to accept it and you're not going to get defensive and you're not going to say, "Well, I don't agree with that." Or if a manager gives you an example you're not going to immediately jump in with a counter example of a time you did it.

Another thing to note is that not every piece of feedback that you get is going to be formal. Your manager's not always going to pull you into a conference room and say, "I'm having a feedback conversation with you right now." You may get comments on code reviews, you may get an email or a Slack message. Things that you think are just quick little one-off comments... those are all feedback. It's all valuable information for you to have to know how your manager thinks of you, how your peers think of you.

These things are really important and so getting a quick Slack message that says, "I liked the code review that you did." That's feedback. Getting a Slack message that says, "Hey, you were a little hostile in your tone." Again, feedback. It doesn't have to come in a formal meeting for it to count.

If you want more feedback you could also try giving feedback to other people on your team. Feedback from your peers is valuable too – maybe not as valuable as feedback from your manager – but pretty valuable. Give your peers feedback about their performance and they'll start giving you feedback about yours. 

What do you think about these answers? Do they match with your experiences? Let us know in the comments to this post.