"YOU WILL BE FIRED" - Software Eng. Manager Reacts

you can call me a gatekeeper you can get mad at me for saying that but I am right and here's why I I'm mad I'm already mad Jake Ruth I disagree I'm mad is software engineering a job that anyone can do well today I'm going to be reacting slash responding and adding commentary to a video that I saw on Tick Tock so let's jump right into it alright I have the video pulled up here from Jake Ruth official I just wanted to start by saying that any of my commentary and response here is nothing personal against uh this person Jake Ruth um this is just my opinion my perspective and I wanted to be able to voice it all right I'm going to be playing back this video from Jake Ruth official and pausing it as I go as I do that I will add in commentary and then at the end I'll add in a bit of a summary about my perspective on this topic warning this might piss you off but you can't run away from the truth we're gonna talk about how most of the population is not fit to become a software engineer or all right um first off yes I agree not everyone is cut out to be a software engineer but not everyone is cut out to do many roles let's see what he has to say but I mean I don't yeah I don't disagree with that statement I just don't think it's Unique to software engineering not everyone's fit to be a policeman or woman not everyone's fit to be a firefighter so sure ever be someone that's working out a professional job writing software full-time you can call me a gatekeeper you can get mad at me for saying that but I am right and here's why I'm mad I'm already mad Jake Ruth I disagree I'm mad no I'm just kidding um I can already see where this is going a little bit the you're already defending that you're a gatekeeper and I mean I'm interested to see why that's the case but perhaps it's just the messaging I have been a software engineer for 10 years I have worked with people who have went to school for software engineering for people that have went to boot camp for software engineering and I've seen a lot okay so good credentials yes um software engineering for 10 years okay been doing software engineering for 15 years and a software engineering manager for 10 of those 15 years as well um a chunk of that was an overlap where I was doing software engineering and Engineering Management uh very successful startup not my own but got to participate in the very early days and it grew to be wildly successful IPO actually is going back to being private which is completely Bonkers and I work for Microsoft now so those are my credentials so just to see if it helps when we're kind of looking through this number one being a software engineer is a high intensity hard job you are not chilling you're not sitting pina coladas on Google's roof you are in intense software planning meetings fixing bugs being on call for production issues and if you don't perform you will be fired okay um okay first off uh yeah um let's talk a little bit about some context here there's a lot of different roles or I guess perhaps domains that you could be working in as a software engineer if you are working on teams that have live Services then absolutely with respect to being on call like you have to think about especially at scale right you're going to have a service that is something that people are going to be using it has to be up all of the time there's expectations about this and that can be a very intense job yes now usually how this works and this isn't the same everywhere of course but in order to be able to scale and support live Services you would generally have on-call rotations and this means that not the entire team is on call all of the time 24 hours a day it's super high intensity you hate your life all the time you take turns participating in a rotation um and again this can look completely different depending on the team the organization the service the company whatever but generally you have shifts for on-call I could understand that if you were at a very small startup and you don't have the luxury of having enough other people to help support the service that sure this could look a lot more intense so I agree um with that part I just wanted to add some context because we're only like this sounds like a live service thing I've also worked on products that were desktop based applications I have worked on products that were mobile applications the difference is pretty shocking in terms of like the stress level for Live support yes you know working with a desktop platform absolutely we would have tech support people coming to the engineers and asking for help troubleshooting but it was quite rare that you would have something that had just shipped and everything was completely broken and um you know like you have this panic situation whereas with live services this is something where you could have an outage somewhere um you know that kind of thing and even if it has nothing to do with the software you have to come up with mitigation strategies to help out customers so again this can look very different right before I paused the last thing that was said by this individual was that if you don't perform you will be fired that's just like an aggressive thing to say you could generalize that I suppose to any job anywhere let me just kind of I'll say it a different way like if you don't do your job you will be fired probably right like take take any profession you're a police officer if you don't do your police officer duties you will lose your job probably yeah if you're a teacher you know if you don't do your job and teach people and show up and do that you will be fired probably like there I don't think there's really any disputing that but I think going back to the gatekeeping part and maybe I don't know maybe this video was created for a little bit of sensationalism of course like I could I could see that um you know try to bring some truth and make it a little bit polarizing you have people like me that are watching it and making comments about it now my I guess my take on this is that the phrasing of this like it's kind of setting you up to be like look look how hard it is and you got a performer you're gone you're toast now I just want to add like back to my credentials I'm an engineering manager and if I have people that do not perform for some reason my go-to is not hey person see you later you're fired like that's not it's just not it if I have people that are not performing it is a lot less black and white about like keep your job or not and certainly it would not be a you know issue where you had something come up one time and it's like hey look you're gone that's it you know um there was an incident and you didn't respond within two minutes so like you're fired absolutely not it doesn't look like that things that weren't you know being fired kind of like immediately would be pretty pretty serious probably like HR violations that kind of thing and even even then you know it could look like you know there's opportunities for coaching people through stuff like I don't even know but certainly not like you had a bug in your code you get fired you didn't respond fast enough you get fired no so like what does it look like well if you're not performing properly my my job as an engineering manager and what I would expect other engineering managers to do if they're doing a good job for my perspective would be that they're meeting with people on their team regularly your level setting expectations for what you expect of your engineers regularly there should be no surprises so if it comes time where someone is getting fired for something whatever that's generally like the last resort and it should not be a surprise to this person at that time and I should clarify that I know that this isn't the case everywhere I can't speak from a general perspective and apply this as a blanket rule across every software company in the world no but in my opinion again good engineering managers are Level setting expectations with their Engineers our go-to is not to see you get fired we don't want to get to that point it's not good ideally we've done the work up front to hire good people so if something is not going as planned whether it's skill based or something else engineering managers want to work to dig into that understand why and work with the engineer that's having the problems if it's skill based okay can we help train you up to make sure that you're getting the skills maybe there's something that's happening uh outside of work and it's just you know something personal that's going on and building that trust relationship with your engineers on your team is an opportunity to say look like okay if something's going on like cool let's make sure that we can chat through it let's make sure we have a strategy for the you know the interim and make sure that we're covered and you try to support that person through the issue not like hi you're fired um because you just didn't do good even after all of these things you're putting in the effort to make sure that you can try to level up people you would want to consider trying to move someone to another team where they may be a better fit before they're fired if you like honestly if you think about the amount of time and effort that goes into hiring good people if that person is still a good person it's not their character traits and it's not like they're just not showing up to work or something because they're trying to Coast by like if if that's not the case and something's not working out perhaps they're not actually as engaged in this areas they thought because different expectations it would be a way better opportunity to not lose a good person and try to align them to something that's a better fit again there's all these other things that we're looking at as engineering managers before you're fired I feel like this statement about like you're not performing you're fired is like just a you know sensationalize it a little bit but I can't I don't know where this guy works and can't speak for how they do things so we'll see let's keep going what a lot of people don't like to agree is not everyone was built for this for example I was not built to ever be a professional dance yeah like this is cut what I said at the beginning right like not everyone's gonna be a police officer a firefighter professional dancer sure let's keep going to see what he has to say before I add in more or basketball player no matter how hard I try to do those things it's just not going to be for me and what I I think I can agree with that yes and no I guess like he listed off a couple examples there professional basketball player probably not everyone is going to be able to do that right you have a small pool of people that are sort of like the elite that are able to do that because the pool is so finite that you can fit into it your opportunity even if you're really good like you can't control how good the other people are right so even if you're amazing and you've been training your whole life for it there's just like potentially statistically other people that have done the same thing and perhaps they just have better genetics or whatever like their training was more on point whatever it happens to be that kind of out you from having that ability to enter so yeah not everyone can be a professional basketball player I'm five foot four and I have terrible cardio and maybe if I put some effort into running it would be better but I'm probably never gonna be a great basketball player even if I train my entire life so I agree to that one professional dancer I don't know like if you trained your entire life is it is there like a limit on how many professional dancers could possibly exist I don't think so I mean not everyone's gonna like it that's a different story right it's like if you're able to versus whether or not you enjoy it enough and your passion enough passionate enough about that thing to put in the time for it so is software engineering like that well software engineering certainly not like being a professional basketball player yes there's a lot of people that want to do it but there's like a seemingly infinite amount of work that exists that needs software Engineers to help make it reality it's not the same for you know professional basketball I don't know like how professional in this example like how professional dancing fits into that but back to the gatekeeper comment like yes not everyone is going to enjoy being a software engineer especially if they don't understand some of the other things that go into it like I talk about this a lot software engineering is not just coding you're not just cranking out code at your keyboard and like headphones on and never talking to people there's a lot of other stuff going on he's mentioning some of that and I think that's right but the delivery of this again perhaps to sensationalize it the delivery of it feels like it is hey like you're not cut out for this because it's hard and it's like there's a lot of hard stuff but I mean man if you enjoy doing it then like it's not going to be as hard like you're overcoming the things that are hard because you enjoy doing it right and because it's not a limited pool of possible software Engineers I don't really agree with this uh kind of delivery so let's keep going you believe it or not it's the same for software engineering one of the biggest nuances here is some people are amazing at software engineering but they hate it I've worked with Engineers that hate their life because they go to work every day doing something they hate even though they can do it make sure that you like it it's not for everyone okay so that's the end of the video um let me kind of see like even for the end there I think we're kind of conflating a couple of things your ability to be a software engineer I think is something that is in your control I think that if you understand what goes into software engineering you can train the skills that go into it you need to be able to problem solve you need to be able to communicate and collaborate with people you're gonna need to be able to write code and understand code and all of those things that I just mentioned are skills that you can train and put time into improving but of course like what I do agree with this individual on is that not everyone is going to enjoy those things for sure so maybe how I might phrase this is like not every person who likes to program is going to be a good fit for working as a software engineer in a company what I say that not every programmer could be like do that no I wouldn't say that because I think if you understand what those requirements are to become a good software engineer and you wanted to do it then you could work at those things so the difference that I see in his messaging is like I think we're conflating do you have enough passion about what's actually involved here versus do you have the skill set to do it no not everyone is going to have this skill set to do it but those are things that you can work on so can anyone go work on those things I would say yes anyone can drive Improvement in those areas but not everyone is going to enjoy all of things that are involved in software engineering so that's my perspective again I'm an engineering manager I've been doing this for over a decade I've been in software engineering for 15 plus years my take on things from startup land and big Tech different perspectives involved there but again I said it at the beginning but I don't mean anything negative for this individual I'm glad that he's sharing content and stuff like that but I just don't agree necessarily with the messaging I think that this was probably intended to be a little bit sensationalized to get attention Hey look it's working I'm making content about it but I think that the messaging that I would try to give to people instead is not like hey this is going to be too hard for you you probably like you're not gonna make it kind of thing that's how this video feels and I would Instead try to call to attention and this is what I have been trying to do call to attention the things that you're probably going to want to focus on if you are interested in becoming a software engineer me this feels a lot more empowering like here's what you can focus on to build yourself up and a lot less like you're not going to get over this barrier so like not everyone's cut out for it too bad hopefully you enjoyed this thanks so much for watching and we'll see you next time foreign