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By Shine Garg

Staff+ Career Coach | Former Staff Engineer

[This edition also includes a meaningful update from my world: a previous edition of this newsletter was selected for Hacker News’ Second Chance Pool and went on to receive 41 points.]

A long time ago, a very senior engineer I saw as a mentor encouraged me to talk to someone about a topic I did not understand well.

I resisted immediately.

If I asked, then that person would learn that I did not know that topic.

My mentor looked at me and said,

That line stayed with me. Over time, it changed something in how I thought about reaching out to people.

But the resistance did not disappear entirely. Even up through my Staff role, I sometimes noticed myself hesitating to reach out to certain directors or VPs because I did not quite know what to say.

That hesitation is part of why this topic is relevant.

At that point in my career, much of my success had already depended on relationships. On the platform team, shipping engineering-wide initiatives required strategic context beyond my own team: what other teams cared about, where resistance might come from, and what would make adoption easier. Relationships were part of how work got done.

In the last edition, I wrote about why career growth is more social than many engineers realize. Relationships expand your context, increase trust, and improve feedback loops. They also make it easier for your work, judgment, and strengths to be understood beyond the people closest to you.

So if relationships matter this much, why do so many strong engineers still avoid building them?

Underneath the surface, I often see three forms of resistance: exposure, politics, and penalty.

Exposure

For many engineers, relationship-building feels exposing.

Sometimes that exposure is about knowledge. Asking a question can feel like lowering your status. Reaching out can feel like admitting you do not understand something yet. Curiosity becomes harder when it feels like it comes with reputational cost.

Sometimes protection takes the form of superiority. A person walks into the conversation assuming no one has anything meaningful to teach them. That can look like confidence on the surface, but it can also be a way of protecting themselves from the possibility that someone else may know more or see more clearly, which would challenge how they see themselves.

Sometimes it is the risk of losing your footing. You may understand the topic well enough and still hesitate because you do not know how to begin the interaction. You do not feel naturally placed in the conversation, so you are not sure how you will come across.

Sometimes the hesitation is wrapped up in identity. People can hold so tightly to being “an introvert” that reaching out starts to feel like violating who they are. The fear is not only that the interaction will feel awkward, but that building relationships may pull them into a version of themselves they do not want to become.

And sometimes it is about worth or legitimacy. One prospect told me that if she reached out to people, she’d be wasting their time. That line said much more than she may have intended. It suggested that before the conversation could even happen, she felt she had to justify her right to take up someone else’s attention.

This is part of why relationship-building can feel heavier than it looks from the outside.

It can feel exposing because people may see you before you feel fully ready, grounded, or worthy of being there. Sometimes what feels most threatening is not looking less capable, but having your self-image disturbed by what the interaction might reveal.

Politics

For some engineers, the resistance has less to do with exposure and more to do with what relationship-building seems to mean about them.

One client once told me that she did not want to build relationships in ways that would further her career because that felt transactional. She was fine having the interactions required by the work; those did not feel transactional to her. But the moment the relationship became intentional in service of her growth, it started to feel fake.

Many engineers feel some version of this.

They do not want to schmooze or “network,” and they do not want to become the kind of person who builds relationships strategically. They want merit and the work itself to matter, and they want human connection to stay human.

This instinct is understandable, but it also hides an important confusion: Intentionality is not the same as manipulation.

Building a relationship because you want to understand someone’s world better, learn from them, or make future collaboration easier does not automatically make the relationship fake.

But when an engineer experiences this kind of effort as politics, they often opt out entirely. They stay inside the interactions the work forces them to have and wait for stronger relationships to form on their own.

Sometimes they do. Often they do not.

Penalty

Then there is the risk of paying a penalty later.

For some people, the hesitation comes from caution built through experience.

One client had been hurt by past promotion dynamics and felt misled by his manager. Over time, that changed how he communicated. The question was no longer whether speaking up would help; openness itself no longer felt safe.

If honesty has not been handled well before, it makes sense to become more guarded. You start giving polished updates instead of real ones. You share conclusions instead of uncertainty, and you keep more of your actual thinking to yourself.

From the outside, this can look like someone being reserved or overly formal. But on the inside, it is often an attempt to reduce downside.

For some engineers, discomfort is only the surface. Underneath it is the possibility of social, political, or emotional cost.

What this quietly creates

There is another cost of weak relationships that is easier to miss.

A lack of relationships can quietly reduce psychological safety.

When you do not have much relational footing with the people around you, imperfect participation starts to feel more dangerous. Asking a half-formed question or testing an unpolished idea feels riskier. Reaching out before you have a fully defensible reason can feel riskier.

Strong relationships lower the perceived cost of participation. They make it more likely that if your point is incomplete, someone will help sharpen it rather than quietly downgrade you for it.

They also help you stay more accurately calibrated to yourself.

When people are isolated, the inner critic gets more room. There are fewer trusted mirrors reflecting back what is actually true about their strengths, contribution, and judgment. Self-doubt grows more easily in that kind of environment.

Over time, that can deepen imposter syndrome. The person reaches out less, participates less openly, and becomes even more cut off from the trust and perspective that would have helped them feel steadier.

The Self-Protective Siloed Engineer Spiral

This pattern is painfully human.

Many engineers are trying to protect something real: their competence, their integrity, their standing, or their sense of safety. They stay close to the work they know how to do and keep their interactions limited. They wait until they have a perfect reason to reach out, or until the work itself forces the relationship.

Over time, this self-protection can quietly harden into isolation.

The very moves meant to reduce risk can also reduce context, trust, feedback, and the chance for work to travel beyond the people closest to it. Self-doubt gets more room, participation becomes more guarded, and solo execution starts to feel even safer than before.

This is the self-protective siloed engineer spiral.

The longer-term cost

What took me a long time to understand is that by not building relationships and not cultivating the skill to have real conversations, I had quietly given up a critical lever I had to shape my work environment.

If you cannot tell people what matters to you, what is or isn’t working, what support you need, or what kind of environment helps you do your best work, you gradually lose agency. Over time, that can leave you feeling increasingly disempowered inside a system you are still trying to grow in.

I have also spoken with many prospects who have managed this dynamic for years by changing jobs. That can work for a while. But the same pattern often returns because the environment changed while the underlying way of relating to people did not.

By the time someone reaches the Staff or Principal level, switching roles becomes a more serious and expensive move, and the cost of not knowing how to shape the environment around you becomes much harder to ignore. That is one reason this pattern can feel especially suffocating at senior levels.

And yet, the way out often begins with a much smaller move than people expect.

Start one conversation with genuine curiosity.

Put This Into Action

As you think about your own work, ask yourself which of these is most active for you right now:

• Exposure: I do not want to be seen before I feel fully ready.
• Politics: I resist intentional relationship-building because it feels fake or transactional.
• Penalty: I hold back because openness feels risky.

Then ask yourself one more question:

What is one conversation I have been postponing, and which of these is underneath it?

Identifying the real resistance is often the first step toward interrupting it.

For engineering leaders: If a high-performing engineer on your team seems resistant to talking to others or building relationships beyond their immediate team, consider which of these factors might be underneath that resistance.

If this resonated, feel free to reply. I’d be interested to hear which form of resistance feels more true in your own work right now: exposure, politics, or penalty.

A Meaningful Update from My World

A reader submitted a previous edition of this newsletter, Why Problem Statements Aren’t Enough, to Hacker News without telling me, and I woke up the next morning to find that it had been selected for the Second Chance Pool by HN’s human moderators.

That landed differently for me than it might for some people. For most of my engineering career, YC and the startup world felt like something built for someone else. Growing up in India and then spending a long time navigating the US immigration system made that world feel distant, inaccessible, and not really mine.

The article went on to receive 41 points, while the median across HN submissions is around 1–2. It was encouraging to see a reflective piece on building engineering judgment resonate in that space.

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.