What to Expect from Your Manager
How to set expectations with your manager
I’m excited to share this guest post from , who recently joined me for a LinkedIn Live. His insights on what to expect from your manager are invaluable for software engineers at any stage in their career.
If you’ve ever worked with a great (or not-so-great) manager, you know how much they can influence your daily mindset and long-term career goals. But here’s the thing: managers aren’t mind readers. If you want their support, it’s crucial to communicate your expectations. Jim’s advice will help you navigate those conversations effectively.
Software engineering managers have many expectations regarding how their new hires will perform and conduct themselves on the team. But conversely, what expectations should an individual contributor have about their manager? Let’s explore some of the most important considerations as well as some that may not be so obvious.
Your first 1:1
First and foremost, if you’re a Software Engineer starting a new role, your manager should meet with you as soon as possible after your start date. You’ll probably have a day or two of HR onboarding and lots of documents to sign, but once that is all completed you’ll ideally receive an invite from your manager to have your first 1:1 meeting. During this first meeting, you should expect:
A warm welcome to the team and the organization! (If this doesn’t happen, this could be a warning sign of a less-than-friendly office culture or a very distracted manager)
Space for you to ask any questions that you have.
A clear plan for the first few days, backed up with a document that outlines any important dates and milestone expectations, eg “Set up your local development environment, including SSH keys to production by EOD on day two. Merge your first minor changeset to the main branch and complete a successful deploy by EOD on day three. Meet with every other developer on the team by the end of the first week.”
Clear instructions on what software you need and ideally a contact in the IT department who will be working with you to get everything configured properly.
Ideally, you will be assigned an “onboarding buddy.” If not, consider asking for one. It’ll be worth it.
Links or email attachments containing any relevant team documentation that you can read through during the first few days. Eg:
High-level overview of the codebase, including any technical diagrams that illustrate the basic architecture of the core functionality, relationships between components, and any flow to and from external SAAS providers.
A list of team norms around IDE and developer environment setup, including which tools and linters are considered a team standard.
Communication playbook explaining team norms around any on-call expectations, how to escalate a deployment error or site outage, and preferred channels for communicating eg when to use email versus Slack.
A list of names and roles of everyone on your immediate team and any stakeholders you will be working with during the first ninety days (this could be links to their profiles in whatever HR/Intranet system is used by the org)
An outline of what will be expected of you in the first few days, thirty days, and maybe some perspective on what’s expected through the first ninety days.
A summary of the overall team process: will you be employing traditional two-week agile sprints, Kanban, Lean, or something else? Does your team have a dedicated scrum master or is this the responsibility of the Engineering Manager? You may need to ask specific questions about this.
While you’re meeting 1:1 with your manager, they should give you their undivided attention. The manager should be speaking slowly and carefully and not bombarding you with too much information or using a lot of industry terms or esoteric company nicknames for processes or people that you don’t know yet. Don’t be afraid to ask them to slow down, repeat, or clarify something they’ve said if you feel like it didn’t register with you.
Other things to establish early on
Your manager should send you email invites to any meetings they need you to attend, including whatever meetings are pertinent to your onboarding, as well as longstanding team meetings that everyone attends. This should include any daily meetings, retro meetings, and roadmap or team milestone review meetings.
As a new hire, it’s important to have a sense of how you fit into the team and how your team in turn fits into the larger organization. If your manager isn’t forthcoming with this sort of perspective, don’t be too shy to ask about it. What skills and experience do your peers have? Who should you look to for mentorship or advice? What gap or niche do they hope you fill, if anything? What are the goals and KPIs of the team? How is team performance measured? What other teams does your team regularly interface or collaborate with? What is the status of your team within the company? How important is the work that your team does in the grand scheme? How much revenue is generated by your team versus other teams? This kind of information will help to contextualize the team and organization you are working for and help you understand the business and some of the politics of the company, which can become valuable social currency later in your career.
What information to share with your manager
Personal preferences
In some organizations, the manager or an HR person will send you a survey to capture your personal preferences (better than not asking) or this may be part of a conversation with your manager (best). This might include questions like:
At what time of day do you prefer to do heads-down work versus meetings? (A good manager will try to accommodate you if they can, but no guarantees, because coordinating multiple overlapping schedules is not easy.)
How do you like to receive praise, publicly or privately? What about birthday announcements and celebrations? (Some people are more private about these things, and that’s okay!)
What can your manager expect when they try to communicate with you while you are focused on work? If they slack you during the day should they expect a reply right away or do you set aside a certain time to answer? How should your manager let you know when they need an immediate response? (In other words, how can they break your flow if they really need to?)
If nobody asks you for this kind of information, I would advise bringing it up in a 1:1 with your manager and politely letting them know your preferences, with the understanding that sometimes they will be able to accommodate you and other times they may not. I would hope that they at least try to do their best, understanding that each employee is unique.
How you’ll show up
Another thing that, in my experience, typically isn’t discussed early enough, is your preference for giving feedback. Some people, usually extroverts, are most comfortable sharing their ideas, asking questions, and critiquing ideas verbally during a meeting. But other employees, sometimes introverts, prefer to stay quiet and focused during meetings and provide feedback in written form or in a 1:1 meeting later on. It’ll help your manager know what to expect in terms of how you’ll appear in meetings. This might help you both avoid uncomfortable situations like your manager putting the spotlight on you in a meeting and asking for instant feedback on something when you’d rather crawl out of your skin or become invisible at that moment.
Hopes and dreams
It may not be part of your very first conversation with your manager, but at some point early on, you should let them know what some of your long-term ambitions are. For example, you may be told that initially, you’ll be working on backend code, but you may have a strong desire to get more experience with the frontend; you might be hired as a developer but have a keen interest in DevOps; you might have your heart set on becoming a manager one day, or a coworker may be working on a project that seems really interesting, and you’d love to contribute to it if possible. It should be safe to bring these ideas up with your manager, letting them know how you see yourself growing and exploring as your confidence and experience builds.
How to get the most out of your time with your manager
Remember that this is your meeting, not your manager’s meeting. There is another time and place for basic status updates, so make this meeting count for your career.
Setting an agenda
Instead of waiting for your manager to set the agenda, bring them your own agenda, or offer to work with them to collaborate on a weekly agenda. Each time you meet there could be general topics you always check off, but there could also be ad-hoc or just-in-time topics that you talk about on an as-needed basis. For example, you may talk every week about how much you are enjoying or not enjoying the current work on your plate, but only rarely discuss where you’d like to be in your career five years from now.
Throughout the week, make sure you write down notes and questions that occur to you as you go through the motions of your work so that you’re not struggling to think of poignant things to talk about at the last minute before the 1:1 meeting starts.
Use your newbie power
When you are still new on the team, use this time to offer your unique perspective on the codebase, the team, systems, processes, and tools. Because you are new, you have the advantage of seeing things for the first time and bringing a fresh, outside perspective. This can be invaluable for your team. Be honest but respectful: it’s not about barging in and criticizing everything you see and pointing out what you think is wrong, it’s about sharing your perspective and commenting equanimously on things that seem confusing, suboptimal, or ripe for improvement. Just be sure to understand that you’re making suggestions or recommendations with no promise that any or all of them will result in action. Hopefully, you’ll score a few hits and establish yourself as someone who helps your team win through honest and relevant feedback.
Reconnaissance
Spend some amount of time learning more about your manager, particularly their motivations, preferences, and what they are accountable for. Your mission as their direct report is to help them achieve their team-oriented goals and for them to be comfortable and feel positive about working with you. Try to learn how open your manager is to feedback, questions, and how much honesty they expect or can tolerate from you. Every manager has a different temperament, and your mileage will vary depending on how well you can align with them. This is the tip of the iceberg in terms of managing up, which is a whole other topic worth exploring on its own.
Thank you to for giving us essential information to share with your manager. Check out his newsletter, , and follow him on LinkedIn.
 | A guest post by
|
There is so much we do not learn in school. How to best manage 1:1 meetings with your manager is one of them. Early in my career I would show up with the expectation that they were setting the agenda and they were telling me what I was to pursue next. It took a manager, one of the kindest ones I have ever had, to instruct me to do the opposite. Since then, I am the one that shows up with the detailed agenda and am transparent about my goals.