Leadership

Most engineers have extensive experience being on the receiving end of 1:1s. As a junior or mid-level engineer, you have them with your manager. They set the agenda. You update on your work, raise blockers, ask questions. At the staff level, a significant number of your 1:1s are ones you initiate — with peers you need to work with, with stakeholders whose teams are upstream or downstream of yours, with leadership whose support you need for technical direction you’re trying to establish. These are different from the 1:1s you were trained on. The dynamics are different, the stakes are different, and the mistakes are different. ...

Reorgs are one of the most reliably destabilizing events in an engineer’s career — not because they are usually catastrophic, but because the uncertainty they create is difficult to think clearly through. You don’t know who your manager will be. You don’t know whether your team will stay together. You don’t know whether the project you’ve been leading for six months still matters. Most engineers respond to that uncertainty by waiting for clarity. The engineers who come out of reorgs in better shape are the ones who move toward clarity rather than waiting for it to arrive. ...

Every company has two org charts. The official one lives in an HR system somewhere. It shows boxes, lines, and reporting relationships. It is neat, hierarchical, and largely fictional as a map of how decisions actually get made. The second one exists nowhere in writing. It lives in people’s heads — in the instincts of engineers who have been around long enough to know who you really need to talk to before a proposal goes anywhere. This is the shadow org chart, and understanding it is one of the more underrated career skills an engineer can develop. ...