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By Shine Garg

Staff+ Career Coach | Former Staff Engineer

[This edition also includes a couple of meaningful updates from my world: a client’s promotion to Staff Engineer and my upcoming talk at LeadDev’s LDX3 conference in New York.]

For a long time, I misunderstood something crucial about career growth.

I saw it as a mostly solitary activity.

I thought the path forward was clear: do strong work, deepen my technical expertise, make good decisions, and let the rest follow.

My relationships with coworkers existed mainly because we had been thrown together on the same project. I was friendly, but I was rarely intentional about getting to know people outside of what was immediately necessary to do the work.

In hindsight, that mindset limited me far more than I understood at the time.

I had little visibility into what other teams were working on and what challenges they were facing. That reduced my context and, eventually, my scope.

I also missed important feedback about how people perceived me and my work. And because fewer people knew me beyond the mechanics of our immediate collaboration, fewer thought of me when new projects were forming, broader technical conversations were happening, or someone needed another trusted engineer in the room.

Why strong work can stay too local

The people closest to your day-to-day work are often not the only people shaping your trajectory.

New projects, team formation, broader scope, invitations to strategic conversations, and promotion momentum are influenced by people beyond your immediate team.

Those people may not see your work up close.

They may not understand the judgment behind your decisions, the complexity you navigated, or the larger value your work created. They may have no clear sense of what you are especially good at or whether others trust working with you.

This is one reason engineers can be highly respected by their immediate team and still feel stuck in the larger system.

Relationships help close this gap.

They are one of the main ways your work and judgment become known, trusted, and valued beyond the people closest to them.

This is also why relationships are a key source of leverage.

How relationships create leverage

Strong relationships help your work travel beyond your immediate team through four important channels.

More context

Strategic context rarely sits in one place waiting to be discovered.

It is scattered across people, teams, priorities, incentives, risks, and evolving constraints. Engineers are usually closest to the technical context of their own work. Organizational and business context often live elsewhere.

Relationships give you access to these missing pieces.

You begin to understand what other teams are struggling with, where friction is growing, what leaders are worried about, and what cross-functional partners need before they can support or adopt a solution.

This broader context changes more than how you communicate your work later. It changes how you choose, shape, and sequence the work in the first place.

More trust

Trust changes how people hear you.

When people do not know you well, your ideas may require more validation. Your intent is easier to misread, and your nuance is easier to lose.

As trust grows, people become more willing to listen carefully, ask thoughtful questions, and consider your opinion with a more open mind.

Humans are more receptive to those they know and trust. Strong technical and business arguments can still go unheard when there is no relational footing underneath them.

More feedback

Strong relationships also create better feedback loops.

You can test ideas earlier, before they are polished or attached to a high-stakes proposal. You can learn how others are interpreting your thinking and refine your message while the cost of changing direction is still low.

Feedback protects you from operating inside your own assumptions for too long.

More sponsorship and adoption

When people understand your work, trust your judgment, and know what you are good at, they are more likely to think of you at inflection points.

They may bring you into a broader project, recommend you for an opportunity, support your proposal, or help others understand why your work matters.

The same principle applies to technical adoption. People are more willing to invest in a direction when they trust the person guiding it and feel included in how it was shaped.

Relationships also build technical judgment

Engineers sometimes treat relationship-building as separate from technical growth.

But sound technical judgment depends on understanding the full system around a decision.

Technical depth matters. So do constraints, competing priorities, downstream consequences, and the needs of the people who must operate or adopt the solution.

Much of that context lives in other people’s heads, and relationships help you uncover it. They show you which problem is real, where an elegant answer may create operational drag, and where another team sees a risk you may have missed.

This is why even the most isolated Staff+ archetype, the Solver, is still a deeply social role.

Technical judgment is built and refined through repeated exposure to different perspectives, incentives, and consequences.

How relationships made it easier for me to speak up

At one of my previous companies, we had a weekly architecture forum where engineers could bring nascent ideas and WIP designs for feedback and vetting against the company’s broader architectural direction.

Most people who shared their thoughts in that forum were Principal and above—I was one of very few Staff engineers who was a regular voice.

Sometimes people asked me how I had the courage to speak up in that high-visibility room.

A good part of it came from my experience. And a meaningful part also came from something less apparent: I had one-on-one relationships with many of the senior engineers who were active in the forum.

Because I knew them, and they knew me, the social cost of participation felt lower.

If my point was directionally right but poorly framed, I trusted that they would help sharpen it. If I was missing context, I knew I could get feedback afterward.

Many engineers imagine speaking up as an isolated act of courage or confidence. But it often rests on trust, familiarity, and the expectation that imperfect participation will be met with empathy and useful feedback rather than social penalty.

That sense of safety makes it easier to contribute before every thought is perfectly formed.

And over time, each contribution builds more context, trust, feedback, and influence.

Relationships are part of our job

Many strong engineers underinvest in relationships because they see them as time away from real work.

But relational work often prevents rework, improves alignment, strengthens decisions, and helps effort land more effectively.

A conversation with a stakeholder may reveal that you are solving the wrong problem. An early discussion with another engineer may uncover a dependency before implementation begins.

Postponing these conversations to later in the SDLC is a miscalculation of time allocation.

As your scope grows, these conversations become part of engineering at a higher level of leverage.

Career growth is social because meaningful work happens inside a system of people, information, trust, and decisions.

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[This is the first part of a two-part series on relationships. In the next edition, I’ll share why so many strong engineers still avoid building the very relationships their growth depends on.]

Put This Into Action

Choose one important piece of work on your plate and ask:

• Who holds context that I do not understand well enough yet?
• Whose trust would make this work easier to shape, socialize, or land?
• Where am I relying on the quality of my work alone while a relationship gap slows it down?

Then take one small step this week: a check-in, a follow-up, a question, or a conversation you have been postponing.

Leverage often begins with one thoughtful conversation, not a grand networking strategy.

If this made you think differently about your work, feel free to reply. I’d be interested to hear where relationships feel most underdeveloped in your current environment.

A Couple of Updates from My World

A client I worked with for ~1.5 years was recently promoted to Staff Engineer.

What stands out to me about this milestone is the deeper shift behind it. Early on, he was carrying a great deal of the day-to-day load on a team that depended heavily on his context and oversight.

Over time, he began stepping out of that pattern. He delegated more intentionally, made more room to think beyond the immediate team, and started bringing stakeholders in earlier so alignment and trust could build around the work.

Feedback that once felt like rejection gradually became something he could work with. As that shift took hold, he built stronger relationships across product, engineering, and business, and leadership came to trust him beyond his immediate org.

Staff promotions often look like a title change from the outside. From the inside, they usually reflect a much deeper change in how someone operates. Read the full reflection here.

I’m also excited to share that I’ll be speaking at LeadDev’s LDX3 conference in New York this September.

It took some time for the acceptance email to sink in. Across the last three LeadDev CFPs, more than half of my proposals reached the final round before one was finally selected.

My talk is called Legacy as Leverage: How Brownfield Work Builds Technical Judgment. The topic is deeply personal to me. Earlier in my career, I spent years maintaining systems that reliably earned revenue while more visible engineers seemed to move faster through shinier projects. At the time, that work often felt easy to overlook.

Looking back, it built much of the judgment I later relied on as a Staff Engineer: working through incomplete context, managing risk, and deciding what “good enough” really meant under constraints.

It feels validating to speak on this now. Work that once felt less important helped build the judgment that eventually carried me to a highly selective stage, with an acceptance rate under 5%. Some chapters of our career reveal their value only later.

How Can I Help?

If this edition resonated, I help engineers navigate these exact challenges through 1:1 coaching and a live course on behavioral interviews.

• If you’re interested in exploring whether structured coaching support would be a good fit, reply to this email to ask about a 60-minute Clarity & Strategy Session. I’ll follow up with next steps.
• Join the waitlist for Master the Behavioral Interview as a Senior Engineer to be notified when the next cohort opens.

If you’d like more essays like this, you can read past editions here.