Soft Skills Engineering

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I am a mid-level engineer with ~5 years of experience (1 year at my current company). My team has recently hired a new principal engineer, and I’m wondering how I can help the principal engineer. There is, as always, some organization-specific context that I am familiar with, and the principal engineer is not. As a mid-level IC, I am not used to being a repository of knowledge for engineers that many roles above me, and have only ever been on a team that hired engineers at my skill level or below. Are there general tips on how to provide help for someone who has much more experience than I do? I have been in the industry for 5.5 years and have had 5 managers. My newest one (call them “S”) has been my manager for 4 months. Our communication is terrible. We do not understand each other and I am usually left feeling like I missed something or I am not interpreting his question correctly. I literally have told him “I am not sure what you