#97 “Being new in the company and on H1B, I somehow made peace with it by telling myself that that is just the way he is and does not personally hold anything against me.”

“I joined a tech company in San Francisco a few years back . My team was small with only a few engineers and a manager. Apart from the manager and one other engineer, everyone else in the team was relatively new. As a few days went by, I realized that my manager was a helpful guy but was pretty much in meetings and even though he gets back to me, he might not be able to reply in a timely manner. So in order to avoid just waiting on response from him I turned towards a team member who was part of the team for sometime now.

Soon I realized that this engineer generally does not reply to Slack messages well and is probably not good at communication. I tried going to his desk and talking to him a few times but mostly I did not get straight answers. Initially I felt odd, as in my last role none of my team members behaved this way. After sometime I decided not to bother him anymore and started to find alternatives for help. But soon after I joined, there was a reorg in the company and my manager joined another team and no new manager was assigned to our team for the interim. I had no other option but to work with this engineer, who had now become a team lead.

It became harder and harder to work with him as he started responding to my messages in a very rude and abstract way. Being new in the company and on H1B, I somehow made peace with it by telling myself that that is just the way he is and does not personally hold anything against me.

A few months passed and I started facing more issues at work as I became more reserved in asking questions from him. I started missing deadlines because of staying blocked on getting answers to my questions. While I was going through this, a few more people joined the team. I started observing how this guy treats other people differently. With the new recruits he was talking nicely, answering their questions and having discussions. I felt odd and started thinking that it might be something that I am doing which is causing him to behave differently with me.

I felt sad about this and started doubting myself. My self-confidence took a nose-dive. But just after a few days I spoke with another new recruit, a female engineer who felt that he was condescending towards her as well. As we both discussed this amongst ourselves and with few other male team members of the team, we realized that that guy treats male engineers preferentially. I never found him to be rude with other male engineers in team meetings while he was not hesitant to pass rude comments towards female engineers.

He is a good engineer and I am not sure if he is doing this knowingly but he definitely has a bias against female engineers. I believe that he feels that by being more aggressive with female engineers he can get things done his way. He doesn’t usually value their inputs and frequently cuts their remarks.

After I could not bear this behavior anymore, the other female engineer on my team and I went to our manager and mentioned the issue. We did not mention anything about his behavior specifically towards women as I wasn’t sure if that could impact my growth in the company.

Our manager listened to all of our concerns. Initially he tried to shrug it off by saying that different countries have different culture, and this was just the way he is. But when I pointed out specific incidents and shared his messages, he took us more seriously. Finally, we started seeing some positive changes in that person’s behavior, but it was usually short-lived.

One thing which I did not like was that even after the leadership was aware of his behavior with the teammates he constantly got promotions in the team. Whereas I believe that because of delays caused in my deliverables due to his non-responsiveness, my growth in the company got negatively impacted.”