Vibing With Your Teammates, The Hard Truth

Assalamualaikum w.b.t. and Greetings.

When I first stepped into this career, team discussions often felt like an uphill climb.

There would be meetings where everyone seemed to be on the same page — firing ideas, suggesting workarounds, even laughing over past bugs or failed rollouts.

Meanwhile, I was still stuck trying to figure out what the problem even was.

I’d nod along, silently Googling acronyms or scanning Slack messages, hoping for a clue.

And when someone asked, “What do you think?”, I’d feel that sinking moment of panic.

I wanted to say something useful.

Instead, I said something safe.

Or worse — I said nothing.

It wasn’t because I lacked intelligence or didn’t care. I did. I really, really did.

But something was missing — and it took me a while to realize what it was.

The quiet power of domain understanding

You can be a great coder and still feel lost in a team conversation.

That’s because what often holds these discussions together isn’t just the tech — it’s the domain.

It’s the shorthand and acronyms the team has developed over months, maybe years.

It’s the shared memory of failed experiments.

It’s the customer pain points that never made it to the backlog, but live rent-free in your product manager’s head.

It’s the internal logic of the business that governs what can be done, when, and by whom.

And if you don’t speak this language?

You’re always going to be a little behind.

Back when I was in Carsome, I was one of the top (self-proclaimed) coders among our team mostly because I refactored stuff, I rewrite stuff, all those things you’d expect from a junior engineer. I speak “SOLID” pattern in lunch and dinner to my colleagues.

But I swear, in every meetings, I get quiet.

“Please end faster and give me task already”.

I would never focus in any meeting, cause all that matters is the task, get things done, write code, and go back home. I would dread when I did not code in one day. That was the reason I took a bachelor degree right? To code.

It wasn’t until I wanted to get promoted, I noticed the huge gap of what I am missing and what’s expected of me.

After talking with my manager, it is clear that I am lacking in business understanding.

Carsome had 4 pillars (if you’re an ex-employee, you’d now this), and I take the initiative to master all that 4 pillars. I document, test, interview and ask around all the business process from start to finish. Literal end-to-end process. From how a customer arrive into Carsome’s system, until the last mile of how the car is sent to their home!

A-Z!

I become from a “nobody”, to a person that someone from other team would refer to anytime there’s a business domain question.

I feel purpose.

After I left Carsome to work in Germany, I’ve build a work framework to master domain understanding.

People call this “office politics”.

I call it the war game.

Because every meeting, clash, misunderstanding, and clarity is so intense it felt like a battlefield, but at the end it always led to satisfaction for everyone, as you’re solving problems.

Solving a problem is satisfying. Waiting for a task? It’s the opposite of it.

From typing faster to thinking deeper

These days, I probably spend only 20% of my time coding.

It’s the truth.

The other 80%? I spend listening, understanding, asking the right questions, and debugging not just systems — but people, priorities, and processes.

“But you’re a software engineer!”

The title “engineer” comes from a reason. I’ve tried giving domain knowledge to AI and it struggles so much. This is your key to become irreplaceable by AI tools.

It might sound less “productive” from the outside.

But I can tell you, that shift has made me 10x more useful to my team.

The code is the easy part now.

What’s harder — and far more valuable — is translating a fuzzy idea from the business side into a system that works quietly in the background, doing what it needs to do, every time.

That shift didn’t happen overnight.

But it began the moment I stopped focusing purely on what I wanted to build, and started asking:

Why does this matter? For whom? What’s the story behind it?

I transitioned from a robot in a cog waiting for a task, into a human who wants to make a genuine impact.

In my younger days, I was always bamboozled by how my manager and senior colleagues can talk for so long. And it gets more interesting in a heated conversation where each of them professionally and objectively argue something.

How fascinating.

Remind me, in all of your meeting and daily standup, how many hours were you talking about “code” and best coding practice, yada yada?

If you can guess, you’re on the right track.

We don’t talk code 24/7.
We talk business language, EVEN in your code!

Vibing with the team isn’t about being the loudest voice

It’s about being the one who understands the rhythm.

The one who knows when to speak and when to listen.

Who knows when to challenge and when to support.

Who can say: “That won’t work — not because of the code, but because that stakeholder will push back” — and be right.

Who knows what is the right question to ask.

Who also noticed the missing gap in a conversation none of the team member has spoken of yet.

And it comes from investing time in what most people ignore.

Not just learning how the system works, but why it was built that way.

Not just reading Jira tickets, but hearing how the team talks about the customer behind those tickets.

Challenge every decision and ask why certain things are build that way.

You won’t always click at the start. And that’s okay.

You’ll feel slow.

You’ll second-guess your input.

You’ll wonder why everyone else seems to “get it” so much faster.

But with time, if you stay curious and open, something changes.

You stop asking “what is this?” and start asking “how can we make it better?”

You begin to spot patterns.

You start anticipating decisions.

You say fewer things — but when you do, people stop to listen.

In the end, I found something I didn’t expect to love

I’ve grown oddly obsessed with domain mastery.

Not in a show-off, “I know more than you” kind of way, nobody knows everything — but in a quiet, satisfying way.

It gives me confidence.

It gives my work purpose.

And more than anything, it makes collaboration feel natural.

Meetings that once felt like a performance now feel like jazz.

Impromptu, imperfect — but somehow in sync.

If you’re not there yet, that’s completely fine.

You will be.

Just keep learning the language.

Until next time,

Next week I will share tips and the work framework I use to nail my probation and also general reputation in the company.

Stay tuned.

May Allah s.w.t. bless all my readers and ease all the struggles you are facing now. You are not alone.

P.S. Vibing with your team doesn’t come from forcing your way in — it comes from patiently learning the tune.

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