How to effectively communicate and navigate office politics?
As a lowly SWE 2, I struggle with ambiguous tasks and lack of background information/context. I am given the runaround (x tells me to go ask y, y tells me to go ask z, etc) when I ask for help, or directed to some long wiki documentations that I cannot even make sense of without prerequisite context. I feel very discouraged from the lack of camaraderie and the safeguarding of knowledge. I feel like nobody really wants to lend a helping hand and I am drowning. Do I have to say a magic password to get into the club or something? Do I need some kind of corporate political currency? Like some kind of quid pro quo of exchanging knowledge? I don’t have anything of value to them to exchange though… I just wish everyone would be more team oriented. How common is this and what tips do you have to be better at disseminating long documentations and/or navigating the corporate politics/communication to get the help I need? #software #engineering #workplaceproblems #communications #politics
Would it be any different if I transferred to another team? Another employer?
One tip: the higher ups do not necessarily have more information than you, they are just able to project confidence better than you. Working with unknowns is an essential skill. You must get over that as soon as possible.
Hey OP, I'm in the same struggle as you, also a SWE 2, at first I was thinking maybe I'm struggling with these ambiguous tasks cause I don't have enough experience or knowledge, but lately I've come to the conclusion that it's less about my experience and more about companies not following good engineering practices, some of the things I see are limited or outdated documentation, very few code comments that explain the intention behind some fields or methods etc., And people writing bad Jira tickets, with missing details of what needs to be implemented or even incorrect assumptions. A lot of time my PM does a cursory read of a ticket, assigns a few points, and rough timeline based on a surface level understanding of it, and then I have to go through the codebase and figure out the actual complexity of the work, talk to multiple people from different teams and build the full context of the task and then explain it back to him, when he asks why it's taking longer during stand-ups. I think working with ambiguity is just the nature of this profession, cause I can't remember ever having a job where I didn't need to do a lot of communication and legwork just to figure out what I need to do.
Is the SWE track different from the IC track?
I meant SWE as a generic abbreviation for software engineer, not specific to Oracle. But yes, I am IC2
Oh. Well you'll be happy to know you're not alone. It could be that there are office politics involved and it could all be that everyone is just unfathomably busy. Or maybe no one actually knows how to do it. If your team has a group chat I would tag people in that group chat while asking your question so that it has more visibility