Rising Team | Senior Software Engineer | Remote (US, Pacific Time adjacent) | Full-time
At Rising Team we are transforming how the world's leading organizations develop high-performing managers and teams. Our mission is that everyone in the workplace feels understood, supported, and empowered.
If building with AI tools like Claude Code excites you and you find yourself thinking a lot about what great, high quality AI-powered engineering looks like, please apply! It's certainly something I've been thinking about a lot.
I mentioned this in a sibling comment, but one idea I have is instead of doing this extra work which is unrecognized, you spend your extra time on gaming the presentation and appearances aspect of it. Which you might not be good at at first but would be practice and probably have compounding gains in your career. And to add an extra interesting challenge is how can you game it with high integrity.
In an attempt to have a positive framing around this, with the disclaimer that I haven't actually fully tried this, one idea might be to spend the extra time on all the politics stuff and marketing yourself and figuring out how to get in good with your manager and get promoted. And that stuff is not easy and you might not be good at it, but spending time on it is good practice and will slow you down in the areas you are good at so there's nothing to hide.
Rising Team | Software Engineer (3+ years of experience) | Remote (USA, Pacific Time Zone) | Full time
Our mission is that everyone in the workplace feels deeply understood, supported, and empowered to reach their goals. Join our team where your dedication to excellence, continuous improvement, and desire to make a meaningful impact will be celebrated and nurtured. Help us build a future where everyone can thrive in their professional journey.
Rising Team | Software Engineer (3+ years of experience) | Remote (USA) | Full time
Want to work at a place where you are understood, supported, and empowered to reach your goals?
We envision a world where everyone works at such a place. Our product helps teams bond together over shared experiences, practicing key leadership skills together that help teams work more effectively. We believe in empowering and supporting our employees and are looking for people who want to grow and be their best.
I've also been doing chats with engineers and engineering managers who feel stuck or uninspired. It's an area I'm interested in helping if I can as I've had a career with various ups and downs and times when I felt stuck. Feel free to reach out if you'd like to chat.
Basically absolute freedom means less freedom overall because the strongest take over. Limiting freedom (eg you can't kill others) can mean more freedom overall as more of the population are able to exercise their (limited) freedoms.
Rising Team | Senior and/or Lead Software Engineer | Remote (USA) | Full time
Want to work at a place where you are understood, supported, and empowered to reach your goals?
We envision a world where everyone works at such a place. Our product helps teams bond together over our shared experiences. Team members walk away feeling more connected to each other while practicing key leadership skills that help you work more effectively. We believe in empowering and supporting our employees and are looking for people who want to grow and be their best.
I've also been doing chats with engineers and engineering managers who feel stuck or uninspired. It's an area I'm interested in helping if I can as I've had a career with various ups and downs and times when I felt stuck. Feel free to reach out if you'd like to chat.
Additional thoughts:
1. Can you ask to chat informally with the person leaving and see if there's a reason they all left? Might be interesting to know. Is this only on the one team or across the company?
2. Do you know if it's the type of culture that would punish you for holding the bag if things go south or one that would reward you? If the former, I would definitely change teams/companies. If the latter, it sounds like a great opportunity. If you aren't sure, maybe chat with other people to find out.
3. As mentioned, this could be a big opportunity. You could for example say that you'd be happy to run the team if they give you 2 engineers (or whatever you think you need). I wouldn't ask for a raise/promotion in the first conversation, but it's definitely something you want to discuss fairly early.
4. Definitely set up time with your higher level manager and see what their thoughts are. I would just be really up front with them, tell them how this definitely a unique situation, find out what their plans are, and let them know what you want to do. The worst thing is if they are hand wavy and give you a vague deadline for resolving things. Try to get to specifics, and even if they don't know, they should be able to give you a plan and a rough timeline for figuring out the resolution.
Also want to mention that I'm hiring, feel free to reach out to me if you're interested (see my profile).
Rising Team | Senior and/or Lead Software Engineer | Remote (USA) | Full time
Want to work at a place where you are understood, supported, and empowered to reach your goals?
We envision a world where everyone works at such a place. If that sounds awesome and if you believe we can successfully help managers do this, it follows that we'd be a great place to work for you.
Our product helps managers with team development by giving them team building sessions in a box that grow deeper connections and improve team effectiveness based on leadership principles such as psychological safety, setting clear expectations, appreciation, and more.
Women and underrepresented groups are strongly encouraged to apply.
We use Python and React, but you don't need those on your resume if you feel comfortable picking up new languages.
Also, as an experiment, I've been doing career chats and they have been quite rewarding so far. Feel free to reach out if you feel stuck or something's not working for you at work.
Yeah, you're right, I did get a bit dramatic there. This was helpful, I understand your comment now, thanks!
I want to note that like you I did say that the majority at FB don't care. I also didn't care when I started and that's why it was such a surprise that people actually did care and that it wasn't shut down by leadership. I think that is compounded by the fact that certain teams are more like that than others and I was at a stage in my life where I was ready to be influenced by that, and so I agree that I have a rosier view than is probably accurate.
Seriously, have you ever worked at a place where people (outside of leadership) care strongly about making sure the company does the right thing rather than just accepting the status quo? That's pretty rare I would say and it was very surprising to me.
I'm not saying that Facebook is good. I'm just saying that people paint it like everyone who works at Facebook made a decision to support an evil empire, which does a disservice to all the people there who are working really hard to do the right thing.
I used to work at Facebook. I understand the vitriol. It's very easy to paint that picture. It's a very one-sided picture though.
Hands down, of all the companies I've worked for, I've never met so many rank and file people who cared about doing the right thing so much. Most jobs are just jobs. People do their jobs and they get money and sometimes they try to do a good job. And there are plenty of people like that at Facebook, the majority of people are like that.
But, nowhere have I seen such a large percentage of people who actually care and who care strongly. It is honestly shocking, coming from jobs where people just do their job and avoid stirring up trouble. These people do stir up trouble. And it's hard work to fight the inertia. Sometimes they fail and become bitter and burnt out. Sometimes they succeed. And when they do they are rewarded.
So that's what I wanted to say. Facebook is a big place but people do care about doing the right thing and doing the right thing is rewarded.
I'm obviously biased, but my company, Rising Team, is a great place to work.
Our product helps managers understand and care about their team members. We envision a world where everyone in the workforce is deeply understood, supported, and empowered to reach their goals. We live this vision and of course we eat our own dogfood.
Personally, I believe in the power of transparency and honesty. If something is off, even just a little bit, we should discuss it. If we're not both winning, something is not working and we need to work to fix it.
I'm nowhere near perfect and I've messed up before as a manager and I will continue to mess up. But in the end even my messups work out, sometimes even better actually, because we communicate with each other and we care about each other.
I used to run support groups to tackle the rampant helplessness I saw around me.
The way it worked is that the person would describe their situation and then everyone else would ask questions.
The format was:
1. understand the facts, and understand if they are actually true
2. explore options, even crazy ones
3. pick an action to take and commit to it
For the questioners, the most important rule was you can't give advice. The person who is asking for help needs own it. They provide all the answers and decide on their own action. That action could be anything from talking to your manager, to setting boundaries, to looking for another job.
It worked amazingly well, many people who started off feeling stuck realized they had the ability to find a better path. Even just making a conscious decision to do nothing and being okay with the consequences of that is empowering and insightful.
I used to be completely helpless, learned from childhood. I finally realized that I'm not a child anymore and I have so many more options as an adult.
Happy to chat with you if you're feeling stuck, feel free to email me (see my profile).
Shameless plug: I stopped this to work on a related area - empowering people through team-building. The first session is free, you could do it in place of your next virtual happy hour! Check it out at https://risingteam.com.
Rising Team | Senior Software Engineer | Remote (USA) | Full time
Ever feel mistreated at work? Did you feel comfortable bringing it up?
Looking for a place where everyone understands, trusts, and empowers each other?
At Rising Team we not only believe this is the way to work, we build a product that does this: help teams become happy and successful, and a great place to work. We envision a world where everyone in the workforce is deeply understood, supported, and empowered to reach their goals.
Women and underrepresented groups are strongly encouraged to apply.
Yes it's okay to say you're happy. And yes, you need to help your team members learn and grow.
If there are no opportunities to learn and grow, you're going to get bored and leave. And most people will not let you know ahead of time, they will just leave. Even if they tell you, by the time they realize they're bored, you've already done them a disservice by not helping them earlier.
For someone who is happy, I think setting targets is overkill. They don't need to aggressively climb the ladder, but you do want to brainstorm with them opportunities to learn things they want to learn. Note this doesn't have to match with what the company "thinks" they should learn but it does have to intersect with actual business needs. Keep it lightweight but always have something they can work towards.
If they don't seem to be working towards it, debug what's stopping them.
1. Don't know how to start? Too hard? Help them get started. Break it down into easier goals/steps.
2. Current work is too much? Lighten their load or change the goal to help them learn how to do the current work better. Be more efficient, prioritize better, etc.
3. They aren't interested? Find a different goal that they actually want to achieve.
The thing with Emacs is that sort-lines is a string you can copy and paste into a buffer, whereas in Visual Studio it's a command that you have to execute.
Disclaimer: I don't know Visual Studio that well. Still, I suspect what I'm writing is true.
I use both Visual Studio and Emacs. In general Visual Studio does a pretty good job and it is my day to day editor. But there are some things that it's simply not worth bothering with in Visual Studio.
The problem with most editors is that every buffer and every command is different. Code is different than the terminal which is different than your source control. Sorting text is different than copying text is different than formatting text. That means every new thing you want to do, even if it's small, requires you to learn how to do it the way that tool wants you to do it.
In Emacs, every buffer is the same. Which means I can do all sorts of mini workflows without learning anything new. I can navigate the buffer the same way and I can copy text the same way. I can run arbitrary linux commands from my scratch buffer on buffers on multiple machines and massage the output and put it in my code buffers. I can run a macro to repeat that 1000x. Then I can tweak it slightly and run it another 1000x. I don't need to learn anything specific to my editor. I can whip this up in a minute then move on with my day because it's a one off.
Yes, sort lines is available in all editors. What if you wanted to sort all the import statements in every file? In Emacs you can do a quick macro to do that. It would take you a couple of minutes MAX. You wouldn't have to even think. All because sort-lines is text that you can copy and paste. In Visual Studio... I don't even know what I would do... probably find a plugin or write a program. Imagine you found a plugin. Then imagine you didn't want to sort ALL imports, there's one import you always want at the top. Trivial to change in Emacs, not so trivial for a plugin.
It seems like you feel that you being open and friendly has hurt your chances at promotions/raises and then when you try to correct for that it also hurts your chances.
Instead of guessing if acting a certain way will get you a promotion, what you need to do is work with your manager to come up with a concrete plan with concrete steps to get promoted. Figure out exactly what criteria your manager is looking for and make sure you are learning how to do that, and whenever you make progress make sure your manager agrees with your own assessment of your progress. And if they don't agree, learn exactly why. Get it so clear that there is no hand waving or hiding behind excuses.
I am extremely open and friendly and I have had no problems getting promoted. On the other hand, at the beginning of my career I never got promoted despite being the best performer on every team I was on. Then one manager who noticed me started talking to me about what I needed to do to get promoted. Spoiler: It's not just technical skill. All of a sudden, my career took off like a rocket ship. Ever since then I've been the one who started the career conversations with my manager because I realized that I am the one in charge of my career and I don't want to rely on the competence of whomever I work for. I definitely wish I learned this lesson earlier, but I'm also happy that I learned it at all.
To add to what you wrote. If someone doesn't respect themselves and their own boundaries, then it's going to be harder for others to respect them. And they are putting the onus of figuring out exactly where those boundaries lie on their manager/peers. Which you could argue is part of a manager's job, but it's a risky strategy to rely on your manager to do that job, especially given that many if not most managers don't consider that part of their job. Also, everyone has different boundaries, and it's not easy to figure out what those are.
Also, setting boundaries forces the people to face reality. If every time there's a problem someone takes care of it, people won't notice that there's a problem.
That being said, setting boundaries is hard and I think everyone struggles with it sometimes. I know I do.
At Rising Team we are transforming how the world's leading organizations develop high-performing managers and teams. Our mission is that everyone in the workplace feels understood, supported, and empowered.
If building with AI tools like Claude Code excites you and you find yourself thinking a lot about what great, high quality AI-powered engineering looks like, please apply! It's certainly something I've been thinking about a lot.
Job post: https://risingteam.com/careers-openings?bzid=2a63ef877906