How to Understand Unwritten Rules at Work 💼

You read the onboarding wiki. You join your first few meetings. You nod along, follow the process — and still feel like you’re missing something. Everyone else seems to know how things really work, but no one’s said it out loud. Sound familiar?

Every tech company has two sets of rules: the ones on the wiki, and the unwritten ones that govern day-to-day life 🤷

Back when I was at Amazon, everyone lived and breathed their Leadership Principles. But even with a heavily documented culture like that, you still have to read the room to figure out how those written principles translate into everyday decisions.

The unwritten rules are the true operating system of your company.

If you don’t learn them, you’ll feel like you’re constantly pushing a boulder uphill. So how do you figure them out?

So let’s break it down 👇

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Watch who is winning (and why) 👀

Don’t just look at the org chart. Look at who gets praised in all-hands meetings and project retrospectives. What behaviors are actually being rewarded?

• Is it the engineer who ships fast and fixes bugs later?

• Or is it the person who writes airtight, heavily researched design docs before writing a single line of code?

➡️ Figure out what kind of work is being rewarded.

Are they rewarding people to go deep into their role and be the go to person for X thing? Or do they want you to be flexible and be willing to help out — essentially be a generalist?

There are long terms impacts of growing as a generalist vs a specialist but you need to figure out which your company needs from you.

📝 HQ Tip: A company’s true values are defined by who they promote. Pay special attention to the traits of the people moving up.

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Decode the communication hierarchy 📃

The fastest way to look out of touch is to use the wrong medium for the wrong message. You need to figure out the team’s communication heartbeat.

• Where do decisions happen? Do they happen in formal meetings, asynchronously on Jira/GitHub, or in a casual Slack thread?

• The meeting before the meeting: Often, the big meeting is just a formality. The actual alignment happens in 1:1s beforehand. Watch how senior team members prep for major reviews or design discussions.

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Find a translator 🗣️

You can’t figure this all out alone. This is exactly why connecting with a mentor is so critical early in your career. You need someone who has been around long enough to translate the corporate speak into reality.

Find someone one or two levels ahead of you — ideally someone who isn’t in your direct reporting chain — and take them to coffee. Introduce yourself and be genuinely curious about them before diving into questions.

Ask them direct questions: “If you were starting on this team today, what’s one thing you’d do differently?” or “What’s the best way to get a proposal approved around here?”

If you’re looking for help with finding a mentor, send me your details here, and I’ll be happy to help.

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Notice how failure is handled ⚠️

This is the ultimate litmus test of a team’s culture.

When a deployment breaks or a launch misses its target, what happens next? Does the team rally to write a blameless post-mortem, or is there a frantic scramble to point fingers?

Knowing the team’s risk tolerance will dictate how aggressively you should pitch a new ideas or push code.

➡️ If they scramble to blame someone, you know you need to heavily research, triple-check, and document everything you do to protect yourself.

➡️ If they encourage blameless learning, you have the psychological safety to move faster and innovate without fear.

Don’t wait until you’re the one who caused the outage to find out which type of team you joined. Watch how they treat others first.

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What’s in it for you?

Mastering these unwritten rules isn’t “playing office politics.” It’s career leverage.

The faster you understand the true operating system of your team, the faster you build trust, ship real impact, and ultimately, grow your compensation and career.

Quiet rules are at play, 🏈

Find your way to stay 🥅

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That’s it for today! Reach out by replying to this email or dropping a comment.

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Let’s grow this community together 🙏

I wish you a great week!

Until next time,

Sonika