This document aims to help us collaborate better! (origin)
Hi there, nice to meet you. This is Oscar speaking, and I am really excited to be working with you.
My role
I have been working as a software engineer for almost 5 years, mainly around web backend and data processing. Backend and DevOps is my current main interests in the work.
About me
I regard myself as a life-long learner. I won’t say no to learn new knowledge as long as it aligns with my career goal. Working very very hard every day isn’t my style, and appropriate extra work time is acceptable for me. I am not a super engineer with supreme productivity yet but I will try to be one.
After work, I am proud to say that I am quite sporty. I love the feeling that I control my body to make the move. I have done many kinds of sports, including but not limited to basketball, badminton, table tennis, bouldering, and I recently start practicing boxing and tennis. I am a foodie, love cooking. If we have time, a home-made meal sounds like a good idea for me.
Operating Method
Biweekly or weekly 1:1
I like feedback. I am willing to give it and I like to receive it, particularly when it’s constructive. We’re in this to get better to grow better together.
We’ll try to keep the times consistent so you can plan. I think an effective 1:1 meeting should come with the document to track our agendas, actions, goals, and updates.
There’s no way we always work in the same company, so it’s also essential to align the normal work with our career goals.
It’s always worthwhile to write our achievement in our 1:1 doc, and teach each other how to achieve better.
As things change fast, it’s important to sync the information during the time.
Weekly team meetings, as appropriate
As a software engineer, I am comfortable with normal sprint pace, which also focuses on resolving blockers, unclear demands and new requests etc.
As long as we plan and run sprint well, weekly sync meeting sounds good to me. If there’s need (like, )
Monthly planning sessions
Speaking of 1:1, we’ll do a career session every month. As the first talk, we’ll talk about our history, how we made the choices, and our ambition for the future etc.
I believe in the two of us reviewing the top 3–5 personal goals we have each quarter or so. These are the things that we personally spend our time on, not our team plans, which I know you also spend time on. We can discuss them each quarter, then create a plan for how we can make sure you get the time, space, and support to accomplish what you need to accomplish.
Your Team
Please provide me with the documents that might be helpful for me to see as a way to understand the team and day-to-day work.
Management Style
Collaborative
I’m very collaborative, which means I like to discuss decisions and options and whiteboard big stuff in a group. Due to that I sometimes overthink, I can sometimes be slow to decide, so if you need a decision quickly, make sure I know it.
If you find me losing the focus on the project, not focusing on the most important output, please be my guest, jump out and hit my head.
I believe we both don’t like micro-management but I will raise my concern when I feel there’s need.
We can work together to make sure I understand and plan how to communicate better or right the situation. It’s fine to renegotiate deadlines, but I’ll be annoyed if it’s the day after the deadline.
I hope we all pay attention to the big picture, so it’s going to be easier to help each other from work. We can know some detail through PR review, with the picture, we both could learn from each.
Organized and accountable
I take action items really seriously, and I think we are supposed to know what our own items are and when they are due, and to get them done.
I usually don’t proactively take the position to manage the project but if there’s need, I would take it with courage.
Communication
Explain how you make decisions and give and receive feedback, context you like to get, and any principles or North Stars you reference.
I speak Chinese, English and Japanese. During the work, I will try to speak the language you are most comfortable with as long as we fully understand each other.
During work, I am most comfortable to speak in English if we’re talking about tech.
Since I don’t speak Japanese very well, there might be some kind of はいはい case happens. Please forgive me lol
There might be some cases that I just suddenly come up with video meeting with you. Please be my guest to express your feeling if this is not what you normally expect.
If something is important, timely, or super short, feel free to DM me any time. And if it’s a long topic and not time-sensitive, maybe just arrange a 1-on-1.