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- A large part of the success of an engineer is often determined by his manager, said Dave Anderson.
- Former engineering director at Amazon, Anderson said that relations with team members and supervisors are crucial.
- He told the podcast “The Pragmatic Engineer” that it would be a mistake to underestimate the influence of a supervisor.
A large part of the success of an engineer is often linked to the way they sail with their relationship with their manager, according to the former director of Amazon engineering, Dave Anderson.
“I would in fact say, as a manager, even, like 50% of this performance, frequently, your relationship with your manager and your team. How are you going to join the team, with your peers, with your manager?” He said on a recent episode of the podcast “The Pragmatic Engineer”.
The underestimation of the influence of your supervisor can be particularly important in a company like Amazon, he added. As may be the case in other companies, the decisions of a manager can definitively influence the future of their direct report, the determination of their remuneration on the scale of the career scale they can climb.
The influence that a manager may have on the trajectory of an engineer is not something to raise, said Anderson.
“I think the error that people will sometimes do is like” my manager does not influence my work much because I can work independently or, you know, I don’t need to understand this with my manager because I can, you know, work with my peers, or I have this great engineer in my team with which I can work “, said Anderson.
But if your manager does not love you, he added, you can never be able to hang a promotion.
It is also important to remember that managers are often invited to highlight a number of team members “who do not manage,” said Anderson. If you are, compared to the other members of your team, the “less effective”, he added, you could be on the cutting block-no matter how competent you are.
“If you look around the room and you think:” Yeah, I’m the worst here “- it’s not an excellent situation in which he is never. It is never sure,” said Anderson. “And at Amazon, it is certainly not sure. Some other companies where they may well make layoffs once every four years, you could have been safe for a while. But Amazon has this kind of regular cycle.”
In response to a request for comments from Business Insider, Amazon spokesperson Margaret Callahan said Anderson’s experiences were hers.
“These statements reflect the opinion of an individual who worked on Amazon years ago. They are not in fact based and are not indicative of what it was to work here or what it looks like today,” said Callahan. “We are proud to be one of the most sought after employers in the world and to have classified the first three in the best LinkedIn companies for eight years.”
Anderson said that if an engineer’s relationship with his manager is not good, there can be a kind of escape hatch: the moving of the teams before being managed.
“So many times that I had someone who was doing an incredible team in a team, they moved to the next team, and they do not manage at all, or someone who did not manage well in another team before being dismissed-and they succeed well,” he said.
If you start to hear the rumbles above the chain of command, Anderson thinks that it could be in your interest to make a change, and quickly.
“It’s like my sneaky recommendation for anyone who is like-if you start to hear the performance comments of your management chain, if you have an opportunity, get out of your team quickly,” he said.
In a follow-up email, Anderson told Business Insider that, in a “large number of situations”, he had seen the success was at least partially dependent on the team’s adjustment.
“I saw poor interpreters turn into great performers, and the great performers turn into poor performers-and the only factor has been that they were changing their teams,” he told Bi. “In particular, changing teams in a place where they did not know their manager. I do not think that people have fundamentally changed – so the only reasonable conclusion is that the adjusted team (in particular, their relationship with their manager) is the decisive factor.”
Anderson does not suggest fully disowning the negative comments you receive and bail into another section of the company on a whim. It depends, he said, about the relationship you have formed with your supervisor and if you trust their advice.
“Now, if you trust your manager, he could actually give you honest comments, that you would like to be able to receive,” he said. “But for the most part, if you have been working for someone for three years and suddenly, they are starting to give you comments on performance, it’s a very bad sign.”
“If you run for the hills fairly quickly, you may escape before you report in the system as not transferable,” added Anderson.
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