Overcoming My Biggest Fears In My Career - Principal Software Engineering Manager AMA

form is Instagram cool I think things are going hope uh hope folks had a good long weekend if you have a long weekend where you're at I have no idea what that's going to mean for attendance either people were at home doing nothing and they said hey I'll watch this stream before I get back into work maybe I have enough International people that watch that uh there's no holiday we'll see but uh yeah hope folks had a good long weekend reminder for the folks in chat if you are watching this live if you want to do me a favor send a message in the chat and that way I could uh see if it's coming through I just saw Tik Tok was giving me some issues interesting I'll keep going though oh no it's working this Tik Tok studio is so dumb every time I go to launch this thing it's like there's a new update and then it literally just put up a big banner on my screen that's why I hesitated and it was like eror connecting it's not working and then I'm seeing everyone in another window joining so I don't trust it but looks like people are joining but yeah if you're in chat come say hello that way I know your uh messages are coming through I do like double checking that because I feel awful there's been a couple of times where I'll go on LinkedIn after and someone's like hey you didn't me you didn't answer me and then I realized like the LinkedIn messages weren't coming through so kind of silly but um yeah definitely helpful if you let me know you're on today we are going to be talking about my last newsletter issue which was my biggest fear in software engineering and I've talked about this before I'm just going to go put this link into the chat if you are uh on basically anything except Instagram and Tik Tok if you are on Tik Tok or Instagram if you just go to weekly. deev leer.com that'll be the topic for today and like I said I have talked about this before and last week I had a good reminder that I was like hey I should I should go over this again because I think it's relevant I think it's always helpful and I wanted to make sure that when I wrote about it I could have something that felt actionable uh it's it's kind of hard to like put actionable advice together in a general sense like I want to write in a way that a bunch of people can take advantage of it but when you do that it starts diluting the message sometimes I find when you're trying to give actionable steps so um hopefully it came through okay but uh that's the link in the chat if you have chat in front of you uh but it's just weekly. deev leer.com to biggest fears in my career it's not going to be spiders although spiders are uh right up there with my my normal fears so um the the reason why this is top of mind for me was because uh this this part's going to seem not relevant to software engineering but I promise you it does all tie back but my biggest fear is about being complacent that might sound kind of funny uh I I don't want to make that sound like uh you know I super like focused on everything must be ultimate productivity I try to optimize things but um when I say complacent I mean like not challenging myself like not trying to grow because uh I think the two biggest dangers with complacency are that number one you're not putting yourself in a situation where you're getting more growth so you yes you can work in an area you can focus on it you can build expertise and that's great you should do these things at different points in your career for sure that's how you get better but at some point if you're constantly focused in the same area and you don't give yourself new opport unities this is where you end up stagnating and that's the second point that I want to make is that complacency can sneak up on you and that's really like what makes this a huge fear for me is that you don't really realize it's happening until it's been going on for a while and maybe even then you don't realize but something kind of forces you out of it so complacency for me is my biggest fear career-wise because I don't want years to go past before I realize oh crap I haven't kind of moved out of my comfort zone I haven't tried something new I haven't been kind of forcing myself to learn my mouth is super dry because I've been recording course content which makes it difficult for live streaming but the the thing that was made this top of mind for me and this is the part that's going to sound not software engineering related but I'm going to I promise I'll bring it back is last week I was at so i' I've been doing CrossFit for a little bit now a couple couple weeks now been to a few few classes but I've been going to the gym for like 21 years now consistently like between like five to seven times a week for 21 years um so I've been in a gym I'm very familiar in a gym I've done uh not competitively for powerlifting but I've done powerlifting training I have been on a bodybuilding stage before I like going to the gym I like training like a bodybuilder and I like eating like a bodybuilder it's boring it's consistent works for me I'm don't know why happy to do it so I've been in a gym for a long time but I had this recent change where I kind of left the gym that I was going to I won't go into the details about that but um I switched and I had told my wife that when I was older um surprised I guess uh if you look at the white in my beard I guess that's happening right now but I told my wife when I was older I'm going to go join CrossFit and I'll do CrossFit with her and and I think from a Health and Longevity perspective that makes a lot of sense I think that that is better suited than bodybuilding bodybuilding is like it's kind of unhealthy when you start to get heavier even if it's muscle like I'm 5'4 and I weigh 180 lbs um I've been over 200 lb at 5 fo4 and like I get winded tying my shoe like that shouldn't happen and it's because I'm not focused on on other things like cardiovascular health and things like that so um I had figured like long-term CrossFit would be a good thing get get my workouts and get my heart rate up great stuff um I like uh a lot of the Olympic lifting and barbell movements so I'd get that there good so I join CrossFit and it's been kicking my butt and this was the the reminder that like I put myself into this position which is wildly uncomfortable for me not just wildly uncomfortable because I'm basically about to pass out during the workouts like physically uncomfortable but I mean uncomfortable in the sense where not that I was a professional by any means um I didn't have a pro card for bodybuilding but I've been doing it for a long time like I understand how Nutrition Works I understand how hypertrophy training Works um I have pretty good uh you know lifts for my height and my size so I've been doing this for a while and now all of a sudden I'm in a space still gym related and it's like it's like I've never been to the gym in my entire life so I've completely reset is what it feels like I'm I'm the Newbie now which is a very bizarre feeling to go from feeling like I don't want to again expert is a bit of a stretch because I know there's people far more uh you know from a bodybuilding perspective far better than I am so feeling like an expert to feeling like a complete newbie and this was the reminder so I ended up um I have a a a second YouTube channel that I started putting Vlogs on to when I'm driving I record a vlog when I'm sitting in traffic that way I can be talking and I can be getting ideas out and this was one of the Vlogs that I made and I I recorded this and this went up on on Friday I think so I put that into the newsletter so if you're checking out the newsletter there's a vlog entry there it's from code commute is the name of the channel and um I guess I can put that into the chat as well so if you want to check it out it is here this is the video and the reason that I thought this was important is again it was a good reminder that we have these opportunities for growth like very specifically when we are put into uncomfortable situations now the rest of the newsletter article in this conversation is going to be about some of my experiences having gone through that and what the growth looked like why it was uncomfortable and then there's what I'm hoping sounds like actionable advice so hopefully that sounds interesting um and of course I forgot to remind people I see more people joining the stream now but um if you have questions at any point and they're even totally unrelated to what I'm talking about please just put them into the chat uh I am watching chat across uh like four different Windows here so if you have questions about software engineering in general enal career stuff happy to try and answer give my perspective uh I try to remind people that like the live streams I would much rather spend the entire live stream answering your questions the last live stream I did was I think the most involved one I've ever had which is awesome but uh otherwise like I could just record YouTube videos right so I would rather spend the time with you answering your questions okay so I'm going to get into the next part that I was writing about and the idea is sorry I'm just trying to pull it up on my my newsletter lost the whole section oh okay so I'm G to start not from super early on but at least just for my career so like my professional career outside of University because I had internships the first part for me was was basically joining a digital forensic company so it was cool because I knew how to develop in C i' had been programming in c for a while now but I joined a company that the entire domain was digital forensics and one of the first meetings I had there was the founder asking us like you know kind of onboarding us and being like okay who knows about file systems and I just remember being like Oh no like what have I gotten myself into I have absolutely no idea what this guy is talking to but this was about to be my career this is about to be my job for the next eight years uh was digital forensics and having to understand how these things work so this was one of the first examples in my professional career where I remember going I don't know anything about this can I develop software absolutely do I know anything about digital forensics absolutely not but you know don't go to Choice accepted the job I'm starting I'm working so what I uncovered over time was that over the years and this it's hard to realize when you're going through it right but over the years I ended up becoming very well-versed in digital forensics I absolutely understood computer forensics uh recovering deleted files from computers working with internet history and things like that these all just became almost like second nature I don't want to say like a professional investigator because that wasn't my job but I was writing software that would recover these things so that did become very comfortable for me I'm going to pause for a second there's a question in the chat uh so on YouTube hello so I'm an average developer and team lead uh working with a brilliant developer who has more knowledge than most of the devs in the company recently quit um I sorry I don't know from your sorry I don't know if there's a question actually yet um and I can't tell if you recently quit or the developer recently quit but if you want to keep elaborating I'm happy to oh there we go questions are delayed coming in sorry recently has been slow on a task I'm not sure how to approach that especially because he's older and has been a lead doesn't want to how do I get him to complete the task that he has okay that's a good question um so if I put my manager hat on especially because what you're saying is you've observed uh other Behavior before where someone's been consistent with something right uh in this type of situation um you're saying brilliant developers more knowledge of most of the Des on the team but recently he's been more slow on a task so this is a behavior shift right um a lot of the times and people don't uh and sorry when I'm say people I don't mean to I'm not addressing you specifically I'm just saying in general a lot of people don't really recognize sort of behind the scenes stuff with uh with man management and dealing with people is is really the people part uh we I think as software Engineers are so focused on problem solving building software writing code um shipping things that we don't realize that there's these kinds of interactions like are being described in the chat here that as managers were're often kind of tasked with trying to navigate so when you see a shift in Behavior there could be a handful of things going on and odds are there's more than one thing kind of compounding that's making this happen it could be something as simple as something's been going on at home and they're not getting a lot of sleep and they're run down and they're a little bit uh demotivated disengaged because of something like that right it could be something as sort of innocent and unrelated as that and now you're kind of stuck there wondering like hm like what's going on it could be something more serious it could be that you know they've they they're starting to burn out they're disengaged and that needs to be addressed like it could be any number of things from something that you know truly is something you can help and you know address at work it could be something unrelated to work could be anything I think one of the challenges here is like and the reason you're asking is like how do how do you bring it up right because I don't think what you want to do is try you don't want to this might sound weird you don't want to change their behavior like and you can't uh you can't like just say hey you like go back to working hard again I know you know that I'm just saying it out loud but the idea is I guess two parts one is like you want to understand it because I think that's the first part and I think it's the most important part is understanding what's going on and to do that depending on the the situation your working relationship with the person might be kind of tricky to navigate but there are ways to to inquire without bringing it up and saying I see that you are not performing as well that's the part that ideally I would try to steer clear of that in the beginning because you don't want someone to get defensive about it if you're just trying to start figuring this out I would just engage with in conversation with them and spend some time just trying to understand like how things are going in general genuinely right because the one of the challenges here is that we can assume so much and it could be literally anything like I said so spend the time with this individual you know have chats with them understand a little bit more what's going on and see if it starts to uncover itself now the next part and ideally because you said this person is a good developer generally they're a good performer they're very smart is finding them ways to get engaged if if it's something that can be addressed that way if it's if they're sharing with you that they're having some challenges outside of work and stuff you know simply being present uh you know letting them be heard letting them know that they have a team to support them and stuff like that can help them get through a period that might be all it is however if it's more systematic for this individual and they're kind of in a bit of a rut I think that again letting them know that you're available to help things like that you want to this is my opinion by the way is like find ways to try and re-engage them which will be very situational um and find ways to let them know that their team is there to support them cuz I think something they can backfire here is if you lead with probably the obvious thing that we all want to say which is like hey you like get back to to working harder you were working harder before so my Approach in this is like I was saying is trying to understand what's going on first and then trying to let them know that they're supported because if they start knowing they're supported they might be more transparent about what's going on that way from there it becomes a little bit more obvious for how you can assist or even if there is an opportunity for you to so um I hope that helps and it wasn't too generic uh if there's other details that you want to add and I can steer it a different way let me know I'm happy to try and answer okay so as I mentioned one of the first things that I had encountered was going through this process of Lear learning digital forensics and kind of building up that expertise um something that happened to me early on at that company though is another similar type of thing and I'm going to start referring to these at least in my experience as like a forcing function um and the reason I say it's a forcing function is because sometimes there was little say sometimes no say sometimes little say and the idea and one of the sort of meta points of this whole talk is that if you're like me then you're not you're not taking risks I'm pretty conservative I don't like taking risks I will play it safe and that's again why complacency is my biggest fear so um early on I became a manager at this company and I can remember there was kind of an option kind of like kind of volen telling me kind of an option but um they were a scaling startup and they said hey you can talk to the developers so are you interested in you know I guess labeled as team lead in the beginning but I had up to like 13 direct reports with uh compensation view like very soon after so we didn't really have we didn't even have like a senior software engineer title formally until a while uh like years into it because we don't know how to label this stuff as a startup so for me this is a forcing function put me into this totally awkward situation where I'm like I have literally no idea what I'm doing this is the kind of thing that's like when people talk about impostor syndrome this wasn't impostor syndrome this was like I am an impostor I was absolutely an imposter to being a manager because I've never done it before I have no idea what I'm doing right but to like I've been managing now for 12 years so this was a pivotal part in my career a forcing function that changed my involvement with something a different skill set different type of role and ultimately I learned a lot I learned enough that I stuck around with it continue to grow and now I'm still doing that 12 years later so there is there still room to grow absolutely I'm not trying to say like I've perfected management now but my point is that this forcing function gave me this opportunity to grow so um now another example from this fic company is this scenario um this one was a little bit more of a volunteer type of thing um and uh Mars Mars on Facebook I'll answer your question uh in just a moment uh if you want to add more specificity to it like how I can answer it more particular if you just mean in general uh I can try but if you want to be more specific I can try and answer but this next experience I want to share is like again at this friendsit company uh we had a situation where we were building some uh some mobile acquisition products and the the way that the first initial project was going was uh my personal opinion was completely off the rails um I don't I think it was going to be a financial disaster and basically found myself with another call League we took it upon ourselves to go build a prototype on our own and it worked we showcased it and like self- admittedly like we had literally no idea what we were doing from a mobile acquisition perspective in digital forensics like and what what this means is like we we started to build software that uh if you gave me your phone I could take all of the data off your phone sometimes bite forbite copies of your phone iPhone or Android so did I know anything about this before absolutely not absolutely zero so that project became a forcing function that would shape the rest of my career at this forensic company because I was managing a mobile acquisition team of Engineers we also did prototyping but I basically did that team as one of my core responsibilities for the remainder of my time there so without that I would not have gained the the mobile acquisition knowledge that I have today uh how much of that do I remember not sure but it again it shaped my career gave me tons of different experiences that I never would have had before um okay there's a handful of questions in the chat now I'm going to go back to Mars marel how's the difference feel as once you were a beginner and where you are now so in some things some things I feel more confident I think is the way that I would explain it um I've probably said this online before but um I mean like these days like I'm I'm 35 now I feel pretty confident most things in my life like I don't do a lot of stuff but you know I feel like a reasonably confident person I'm not I don't the way I would frame it this is going to sound ridiculous I don't feel like a piece of crap anymore and I can remember in my early 20s in my mid 20s I had no self-esteem I I genuinely felt kind of like a piece of crap outside of work at work I felt great I felt confident at work I felt like I knew what I was doing and what would happen is when I had these opport or opportunities I guess there were opportunities these situations these scenarios that were a forcing function they took a bit of a toll every time in the beginning because it was like all of a sudden something that I was confident about no longer confident so these days in general I find that I am reasonably confident about the things that I do um I have you know I have a beautiful wife we have we don't have kids we got lots of dogs um but like I I I have self-esteem now and before I didn't so I think over time some of the things that I learned from work about having confidence of what I'm doing carried over so it's kind of the outside of work part but the other part that I want to mention is that there's still things in my career which I'll get to in a moment that are these forcing functions that make me feel like a complete newbie again the big difference is that they make me feel like a newbie specifically in a like a like a domain but I still have all of my other experiences with me right it's not like I just forget everything that I did before or I've never managed uh multiple engineering teams before that's something I've done now I'm only managing one like it's not like those experiences just go away you build on on them they're just not your core Focus maybe at this point in time and you have new things that you haven't experienced yet so uh by mixing these things in constantly you always have this beginner feeling which is uncomfortable uh okay uh all day coding uh on YouTube thank you for the the question here so um could you share your view on how you evaluate the seniority of software Engineers do you have your own scales and what you expect to see at each level um so I'm curious about both situations when evaluating colleagues you've worked with for a while and during interviews when you don't know the person that well okay um let me see how to answer this uh there's a part that I don't know if I recommend doing necessarily and so I'm going to jump around your question a little bit I want to give you as good of an answer as I can so when evaluating colleagues you've worked with for a while um if you're talking about just like understanding how well your peers perform um I would say this is probably not something you want to spend a lot of time doing unless you have a a use case or a scenario that I don't I don't understand which is entirely possible for the record it's just not something I recommend doing because I think when you attempt to do this type of thing you don't have enough context to understand them so again might be missing some details but what I've seen before is uh you know even Engineers that report to me talk about friends they have or peers and they go so and so seems to be progressing faster or why did they get promoted and I didn't and they only have a lens that's you know one part of it but there's so much more to the picture that they're not getting and generally I find this type of thing makes people worse off like they're just they're either looking for excuses or they're looking for something else and it's not really positive there are different is though when someone says wow like I see this person doing awesome I would like to compare myself to them to understand areas that I could also get better I feel like that's a positive framing for it I just don't see it often so that's why I'm kind of shying away from answering that part because I don't think that it's super beneficial but um seniority of software Engineers uh in terms of scale and stuff I I guess I have my own opinions but at Microsoft uh and a lot of big tech companies and other companies in General uh we have generally some type of shared guidance on this so at Microsoft we have career guides and I think internally in some organizations uh we refer to them as the rainbow document and the rainbow document has uh it's basically a big rubric and it talks about different criteria uh that we evaluate at each level so for example um you could have a section for customer focus you could have a a section for uh you know technical uh Excellence section for Innovation a lot of these things especially if you think about different companies not just Microsoft these will apply to key competencies or core values that that company has and they're trying to truly evaluate their Engineers across that now in our rubric and I would suspect I haven't worked at Amazon or Facebook or Google but I would expect that they have something similar not going to be the same but something similar but with this rubric when you go through these key competencies the further you move to the right hand side which is like becoming a a more senior engineer you you see kind of I've talked about this idea before too you see two Dimensions improving it's kind of like your your circle of impact so the more people and different roles you're working with like that's growing but also the the scope of your impact like the actual work you're delivering on will be bigger projects more deliverables uh potentially like team leading Tech leading different things so you see all of that kind of show up across this rubric as you get into the more senior level so I have to use this at Microsoft I think it's good by the way um especially because I agree with a lot of the stuff in it it's not like it's a tool that I fight against but I like that when we have conversations about rewards and promoting people that we're not in a situation where just to make something up like if say on my team I was like I'm going to try to get every single person promoted like just so I look good to them like to prevent that type of thing I need to be able to use this rubric this Talent guide and be able to articulate all of these things about their growth um and people will ask me like what's the biggest area that they need to improve on and I need to be able to refer to this thing so I think it's really good for being able to level set things um on the personal opinion side of this I guess like something that I really value is uh I guess like initiative and also helping level other people up and when I say initiative I also mean like accountability I guess is a big part so people taking accountability like I can trust that they're they're the things that they're saying they're going to deliver on are delivered on they're proactive about stuff and they have no issue mentoring those around them because the more senior you get uh even if you're not like formally leading people my expectation is that more senior Engineers will be leveling up those around them so fortunately a lot of that is very much in place at Microsoft in terms of expectations so um that's a good alignment for me but uh all day coding let me know if that answers your questions sorry I didn't want to answer the the one part there but I hope that makes sense and if you have an an alternative kind of angle let me know and I'm happy to try okay I got a couple more examples from where experience and then we'll move on to U maybe some more actionable types of things but the next part of my work experience is after the frit company and I've talked about both of these before uh but so they're both from Microsoft but um the first one is when I joined Microsoft and I was very transparent with the the hiring manager but I was hired into Microsoft to work and manage the part of the deployment team for it's called substrate which is the infrastructure for Office 365 so they brought me on to manage that I had zero experience working in data centers and zero experience deploying Services zero they were still interested They Knew by the like I said they knew I'm not like tricking them I didn't say ah yes I snuck into Microsoft they full-on knew and they wanted me for my other experiences so again this was forcing function now that I'm at the company I don't know anything about deployment I worked on the deployment team for three and a half years I don't I will not say that I became an expert on deployment after three and a half years there's so much to learn and do in that space But compared to when I started absolutely grew absolutely grew we had monolithic deployment systems the I got a second team in deployment that did all of the microservices that we were deploying so I had these two completely different sort of paradigms that I was dealing with and it was a tremendous learning experience so again forcing function if I wouldn't have done that I wouldn't have learned all about deployment uh Mars Mar is back on Facebook here as a 22-year-old girl as a beginner still there are Challen uh there are challenging I was stuck uh being going on or just moving on this live stream page of sharing all his best to new generations I I got so motivated I'm grateful anyway currently I'm at of school uh still searching listening to the podcast sharing by the way oh thank you um so I'm I'm glad if you're finding it helpful um yeah you know if you have any questions please just you can ask them in the chat if uh live here or send me a message on social media if you want any help with something uh I get lots of messages so it's sometimes hard to catch up on um especially on Faceook Facebook it's really difficult to to follow up there uh but yeah if you're on especially like Twitter LinkedIn that kind of thing like that's a lot more visible to me so uh I do hope that you find the content helpful though okay um the last one I'm going to talk about is like a forcing function of my career was my current team so uh this job opportunity for me was yet another one where I have zero experience in the space and again my boss and my boss's boss were both interested in me joining they were very happy with my previous experience it's just not in the same domain so the first teams that I had at Microsoft were managing deployment and this current team is a routing plane for the same part of the business so it's a routing plane uh I am responsible for uh firewall and dos protection and related Technologies but I don't have experience doing that just like I didn't have experience doing deployment at Microsoft so key thing here is that I have been able to demonstrate to individuals that I am able to learn and do a good job learning and I think that's a quality that we want in Engineers this is something I look for in Engineers is like if I don't care how much you know about something as long as you're able to learn it so this is something I been able to uh live and I guess demonstrate to people which is great but it's also something I believe in I wish I believed in it more for myself because like I said I'm very conservative and it's really difficult for me to put myself into a situation where I have a forcing function so um so far my career it's been it's been great to do this so now I want to go over to some of the more actionable advice I'm going to go do a full screen thing here so we can go through this part together let me put my face back on I got to start my virtual camera though sorry there I am um sound effects were necessary it needed a Boop if you are on uh Instagram I apologize this is going to look like garbage probably um okay so this is one action that I wanted folks to take away so uh I wanted to remind people that if you're ever in a situation that you're kind of like you feel like a newbie all over again it's okay and the idea is like remember you're not losing experience you might be in a spot where it it is all new there is a learning curve that's okay it's actually great right you're going to be growing and learning these other things it does not mean that all of your other experience just vanishes in fact you can lean on a lot of the experience you have from before and apply it into your current situation so something important to think about uh this next part um this that's highlighted so leaning to the fact you're supposed to be an office in this new domain that was sort of the the counter to the previous point is like yes you can bring along previous experiences but the the goal of that is not to to resist you don't want to be like put into a new spot and resist being new there so yes use previous experiences to accelerate but accept that you are a novice in that space like go into it with an open mind go into it accepting that you're going to be learning and it's going to be challenging but like these are good things it should be exciting it's going to be difficult because it's new but it's exciting because you're going to be growing I need more water okay um and all day coding uh just checking your message there but um cool I'm I'm glad that helped let me know if there's anything else though but I'm I'm glad at least on the surface that helped so that's good to hear okay next up is just this phrase growth mindset and for folks that haven't heard growth mindset before it's a big Microsoft um ideology like we we talk about this a lot uh but it's it's obviously talked about a lot outside of Microsoft but it's this idea that we're not just like born with a set of skills and and then you're stuck with it so like you know you've never you weren't born knowing how to code and it's like not in your genetics to be a programmer so like you're not going to be a programmer it's it's this idea that anything that we want to get good at if we put in the time and the effort and we try to learn and we repeat that we will gain skills so that we can have this growth mindset I will go apply myself I will go learn and you'll come away with these skills so this is something that again I really recommend people take that to heart when you're in these situations which is like look like it might be challenging but if you put in the time and the effort you will absolutely walk away learning a new set of skills that are going to be valuable for you okay last part is going to be about taking action uh I might unless there's a lot more questions by the way I might wrap this one up an hour in so another 20 more minutes or so um we can still jump over to Reddit and check some stuff out but I might wrap it up um because I got another busy busy period going on which I'll talk about in a moment but the last part of this article was about taking action and that's because after I talk through all this you might say well Nick those are nice stories those are some nice points that's lovely but like what the heck am I supposed to do here that's a great question because I want this to feel actionable I want you to feel like you can walk away and have something to think about here so um this part right here we can be proactive we can seek out opportunities so a lot of the examples that I can think of from my career where the biggest ones were were situations that I it was a forcing function like it was not me making the decision necessarily it was something that kind of came up I fell into it and then found myself going oh crap like I guess I guess this is happening and I guess I got to figure it out but those I've mentioned this already but those are some of the biggest learning opportunities so if we have this pattern where big shakeup can lead to Big learning opportunities like why would we not try to go find that so you might not be able to find huge ones but you can still be proactive so um I've used this with my team before at different points in time but like the example I gave here was like if your team's building full stack but you keep finding that you're gravitating towards the frontend so you're as you're building up a skill set you keep focusing in an area you keep gaining expertise it's becoming more comfortable these are all good things right the the part here about being complacent is like are you only taking them because you're avoiding the other things right if you're taking them because you're still learning you're getting effective you're getting better that's great but if you're like okay I'm just taking this because I can do it and I'm avoiding discomfort because the other things are challenging I don't know them that's a sign right that's a sign that you might go hm that over there is uncomfortable why am I avoiding it maybe it's time that I go ask to go work in that spot so this is something depending on your manager uh they might totally encourage it they might um I can say this as a manager we have to balance like your learning opportunities the criticality of a deliverable things like that so if you don't express to your manager that you have these other interests it might be difficult for them to go find that for you so at least being open and transparent and sharing can help get you that type of scenario to work on so um we did a couple of things was it last year two years ago now um so my deployment team has a lot of backend work as you might imagine for deploying hundreds of services and I had individuals on my team that were saying hey it'd be really cool if there was like something I could do that was web development related like some front-end stuff we just don't have that not in my core team but there are like immediate partner team teams uh within deployment even that have UI work so because individuals on my team let me know they helped create these opportunities for themselves because I could reach out to the other uh Tech lead and the manager and we were able to carve out some work from my employees to do so now they're finding themselves in this situation where they're going hey this is new this is uncomfortable but they were proactive in trying to get those opportunities I thought it was tremendous learning opportunities for them they really enjoyed it it was positive for the sort of the the team that was receiving the work it was good all around so I do recommend you try doing this right it's two parts one if your interests are changing and you want to go look great ask about it or if you're finding this is harder to do if you're finding that you're just getting comfortable and avoiding discomfort it might be time to go try something so keep that in mind um and that's I guess this next part right so so I said it's not always about siloing people into thing they're 100% amazing at so from a manager's perspective I like you might imagine that on paper if I just said okay who's the best at thing X let me go put the best person for thing X on that thing and then I go to thing Y and I say okay who's the best at this let me go put them there and I keep doing this for every task what happens is that people get siloed into into different things and sometimes depending on you know where they are at in their career and their level it can be good to build the expertise there like keep exposing someone to something they're building their expertise but the problem is when you do this systematically and you never give people an opportunity outside of the thing that you keep siloing them into now you have a team where the skill set is like very individual and specific cfic for different people and then there's this like no crossover so one of those people leaves the team or they're out sick they're on vacation what now no one can go do that thing that they're good at like it's not a good spot to be in so I do like making sure that I can balance learning opportunities with Effectiveness I need to be able to do that as an em so I'm just saying this out loud because if you're like oh there's no way a manager would ever let me do that yeah maybe you're manager won't and I'm sorry but like you should at least ask I think that's important um and the the reason I put this here start as small as taking on work items outside your comfort zone is because this is small you're not saying to your manager hey I want to go switch to that team because they build different stuff that might be an option for you but if you just want to start small get a little taste of what's going on that might expose you to something so that's how I would recommend doing it if you're too nervous about a big jump just to get more exposure okay and this last one I wrote here is for uh probably more senior software engineers and it's not that more Junior ones can't do this it's just that you might find it a little bit easier so when we're talking about the previous example of just trying out you know a work item outside of your comfort zone if you're more proactive you might be able to start an initiative and what I mean by that is maybe you're noticing something cross team Cross organization like the scope of what we're talking about is a little bit bigger you might realize uh inefficiency in the way that we do you have a process or something in your code that needs to be aligned but the reason that I think this one really fits well here is like if you're not used to doing this trying to get people involved from multiple teams to try and Lead an initiative even if it's not something that you're like 100% an expert in can be a ridiculously good learning opportunity and shows that you have initiative and drive so if you have a manager that will support you through this type of thing this could be awesome because now you're going to find yourself in a situation where you're like crap I don't maybe I don't know exactly what I'm doing that's okay you have support from your manager right but I think this type of thing for more senior Engineers is really valuable so uh if it feels like picking up the odd work item in a different part of the stack is like that's not really doing it for you as a more senior engineer you could try doing something like this uh from my experience at Microsoft and I know like I'm talking about just a Microsoft experience here this type of thing is what I would say is more and more expected once you're at like I'm at principal level the sort of the first level of principal at my level and Beyond this is like basically starts to become an expectation that you are finding the initiatives and leading them so I'm kind of at the part where that's not a super big Focus but I believe at my next level and Beyond that's where they're like what initiatives are you leading not just what initi what initiatives are you participating and which ones did you go identify something go drive the results for it and again if it's outside of your compy comfort zone even better for your learning opportunities so I think that's it for the newsletter and the discussion um so we'll definitely be taking more questions if you folks have them in the chat I will take this opportunity if you're still here because there is some exciting news and I'm going to switch over to this but um let me hide my chat for a second but I number one I launched a new course on dome train for reflection in.net so from Zero to Hero reflection in.net I will put that into the chat here so you can check that out but there is something even more exciting than me just promoting my own courses and that's at the top of the screen there are huge discounts right now um so not just for my courses oops I didn't mean to click that um there we go I didn't realize it was a link but yeah you can get 30% off any course not just Nick's courses although that would be cool if you'd be interested in my courses um if you get uh Dome train Pro it's 20% off so that's a subscription model to access other courses and then if you're looking for a bundle so for example uh I have a bundle on dome Train That's these two chuses together it's already discounted but you can get another 15% off so um if you're are if you are interested in courses if you enjoy the way that I teach uh about C net I would recommend jumping on to that because I think that's a pretty good deal personally um another thing that I'll jump over and oh nice infected FPS just got the 20% off annual earlier definitely going to check out the course it's awesome and infected FPS thanks for dropping in again I love seeing like when I recognize the usernames and stuff so uh means a lot that you're here to support and uh yeah uh if you have any feedback if you're checking out my courses and stuff let me know I'm always uh I'd always love feedback it's hard when it's critical feedback but it's the only way we get better right so um next thing I want to share uh podcast so I don't know if a lot of people know this but the interviews that I do sorry that's probably blinding I have everything dark mode and this is not dark mode but um I have uh all of my software engineering interviews that I put on YouTube if you want to listen to them on Spotify you can also do that Spotify Apple music all that stuff I'll put that link into the chat as well you can check that out um I realize that not everyone wants to sit around for an hour on YouTube and watch a video but if you're commuting you're going for a walk whatever maybe you want to toss one of these on um they're conversational if you haven't heard these before uh so definitely would recommend it and I just wanted to share with you that these are on on on Spotify yeah Flash SP warning please I'm so sorry uh I I think this next one's also going to be super bright by the way so apologies for that actually it's not so bad this part of the page is pretty bright though um I wanted to share it brand ghost is also a thing that I'm working on so I will put that into here if you are creating content if you see how I create content online I use brand ghost to do that um so yes I'm plugging this but this is literally the thing that I'm building and it's what I do for my own cont content so I post to about 12 social media platforms every day that link didn't go through sorry the chat system is telling me that something went wrong but I don't know it's brand ghost. a if you see how I post on Twitter LinkedIn everything it's all done through uh through brand ghost my comments and everything are me my posts are written by me I just don't schedule them every day or every weekend they're they're done ahead of time and so this is the system that I have built and what I use personally so there is that and then one more thing I just got to get another tab open because I want to pull it up on YouTube but one more thing I will try to get it here and this is what I mentioned earlier on in the Stream if you're interested in checking this out so I'll pull that up here as well this is another YouTube channel so I have one why why not make another um this is where I'm putting my commuting Vlogs so when I do my drive into the office and back home I'm going to try to make a vlog um if you see me looking at the camera like this it's just because I'm getting it set up I just talk in the car like you're sitting there with me and try to talk about software engineering Concepts career stuff kind of like this live stream but it's a like a stream of Consciousness in the car so um if you enjoy hanging out with me and you want to hang out with me a little bit more on a on a commute this is what you can check out so I'll be posting that regularly too so those are all the things sorry for blasting you with a ton of like ads and stuff but it's either stuff I'm producing for all of you or things that I'm using so uh I hope that helps uh Buren on Facebook yes the tool it is super interesting um yeah I just to kind of share on that one one opportunity that is really standing out is for especially for small businesses so obviously as like a tech content creator it's a lifesaver for me because that's what I'm doing outside of work is creating content but for small businesses where they're like hey we need more presents but like we don't have time to go posting stuff or if we do I can only post to our Facebook page or I can only post or Instagram I just say like why don't you go set up all of these accounts make your content and then we'll just keep posting it for you and then when you have time you can add some more content so that's the goal with it and that's how I do my content strategy um all day coding if possible be great if we could share a bit about your journey to becoming a principal engineer what key aspects should I focus on each level I know seniority can be relative term yeah actually you know what um I got a little bit of time if you want I can dive into that now um because my like I got to be I got to be fair right like my experience is obviously going to be different than than other people so the way that I got to where I am will look different I can almost guarantee it than uh than a majority of other people but it doesn't mean that it's wrong or there aren't meta points that can be extracted from it so I'm happy to kind of share that so the question is share a bit about your journey to becoming a principal engineer so I'll share how I got to where I am and I'll try to condense it and then I will share for sort of for others right so uh distinction that I want to call out here is um when we say principal engineer there's there's two things going on here one is a level and one is a role principal is the level engineer like software engineer is the role I am technically not a principal software engineer I am a princi princial engineering manager and I'm not saying that because engineering manager is better or something it's just a different role it's a at the same level as a principal engineer but uh my days at work now I don't write code anymore principal engineer is writing a ton of code still so um a lot of my effort is shifted into different areas which do not involve me literally writing code and committing it so I write code and commit it all the time outside of work for my own stuff but not at work so for me how did I go about going to principal I was a a job jumper um I jumped once after eight years but so the way that this looked for me was that I had basically managed teams for eight years so my entire professional career outside of my six internships which is two years of experience uh truly at like real companies but my eight years after University for me were managing teams and writing code so when I talk about this type of thing from a management perspective um and I know your questions about I think more about like the principle level kind of thing but I think this ties into it so from a management perspective I think it's people will disagree with this but um I would be happy to debate people on this uh until in BW in the face but you as an as an engineering manager there's a lot of time that's dedicated to people and I don't think people realize how much time because you can say oh I can manage teams and I can still write code and my argument is well you're probably not managing your teams as well as you think and you might say oh you're just not being effective with it and I like I've been doing it for 12 years and I have lived and breathed for eight of those years writing code and managing teams I've managed teams of over 13 people I've managed two teams totaling around 13 people and writing code at the same time the way that this worked and this was why it's tying into the principal level thing is I literally worked 60 to 80 hours a week for eight years it worked because I almost doubled my work that's how it works it's two jobs developing software writing the code is a different job than managing teams that's it end of story now can you mix those things are there hybrid scenarios 100% I just told you I lived it for eight years right it worked really well in the beginning in small teams so when I had small prototyping teams and I only had say three to five people reporting to me it made a lot of sense to be coding alongside them why well I had time to manage them really handson and work with them and that was good because there was only a few people my scope that I was focused on in terms of a manager like the product area narrow right the code was Green Field like we're building stuff from scratch so I can be there alongside the team contributing and it's a startup so we're also in this mode where everyone's wearing different hats to get stuff done all of these things made it very effective for me to be coding as an engineering manager it just simply does not scale as you try to improve as an engineering manager so all day coding your question about being principal level after my eight years of experience the company was called magnet forensics after eight years of experience there I had probably worked like closer to like 12 to 14 years uh just from the amount of work that was put in and I'm not saying that like I'm I'm not I don't mean for that to sound like I'm bragging about it because that's not a healthy thing to do I'm simply stating that that's how much work went in so when I was interviewing I had tons of different experiences and again that's not me trying to to brag about it it just meant that when I went in for like behavioral interviews and things like like that tell me about a time with a difficult teammate yep no problem tell me about a time you had to uh you know deal with an employe that was underperforming and I would say sure would you like me to tell you about times where I was able to help them make it through or times where we had to manage people out because they were not interested anymore like it was a startup that scaled from like eight people to like over 250 in the time I was there so we saw everything and I got to live through all of that so my point in my journey was that reaching principle I didn't go through Microsoft to reach principle I had all of these experiences and truly when I went to interview they were like you're at this level and I don't think it was an accident and again I'm saying these things for transparency not like a I don't want to sound cocky or that I'm bragging about it cuz it's not my it's not my intention but I don't think it was an accident that this happened at Microsoft because at Amazon I applied to Microsoft and Amazon at the exact same time I had three offers from Amazon at the same level as Microsoft so two two tech companies were able to see my background my experiences and apply that so all day coding when you're asking about this from a principal engineer perspective if we're talking about especially if your if your course of uh trajectory is at the same same company and not jumping between companies um it's it truly goes back to scope of impact and your circle of influence so being able to consistently show that you are working on projects that have large business impact that are multiple people that are difficult challenges that you need to sort of uh get other people from different teams from part of your org to work on uh the other factor that sounds kind of weird it's almost like a side effect is like if you're doing work at that level that's that impactful the engineering Managers from the other teams that you're working with like peripheral to you like maybe you're not talking with them directly but you're working with their employees like they should have a pretty good solid understanding of the of the work you're doing because it's that visible and that impactful um but it's sustained right I think some people don't realize that uh you know one and and I we're all kind of guilty of this we're looking for like tell me the thing to do so I can check the box to get the next level and once you're sort of in the senior band and principal and staff kind of level it's different names different places you really need to be able to demonstrate that like you can take on these big things without dropping the ball on the other stuff so you're still helping Mentor the people on the team you're still improving your team's processes like you have all of this stuff still going on and you are routinely demonstrating that you can deliver on these big impactful projects so again my experience I was able to show that from going through this startup I could explain basically every step of the way in this startup's uh growth like the the different areas that I had to touch and I was responsible for so that's how it worked for me and I hope my sort of more generic answer is still helpful for like a general software ing Journey if you are switching into a company so say you're not yet at principal or staff or whatever and you're like okay if I switch to a company how can I apply for that these are the types of experiences you'll want to share right you're going to want to talk about those big uh cross team efforts where you were truly leading what was going on uh describe why that was so impactful like the business impact but that's how I would suggest navigating that so let me know if that makes sense and uh that's a brief uh history of how I got to where I'm at uh okay I tried to architect this on Facebook I tried to architect a micros service two years ago and it gave me a really hard time now it's in production I've learned a lot from it but what is a pain in the pain in the butt there we go yeah the pressure and expectations were high but I think it's good to be exposed at least for some time yeah exactly right um now let's if we're not let's not focus on whether micros service or monolith is the right or wrong thing here like beside the point sounds like from this comment you did something that you were uncomfortable with right you tried to design a microservice that went into production so it's being used and you're sounds like you're new to this right so yeah that's going to be uncomfortable and yeah that might have been challenging but and I can't say this for you but I imagine that you went through that experience and you learned a ton from it I would hope you did right because now in the future you might be able to make a decision and say I mean right in the beginning should we make a microservice or did we learn enough from that it's not a good fit should it be a monolith a modular monolith however you'd like to go build them or okay no it still makes sense it's a microservice but what did we learn like what went wrong what could we do better what was really good about this that we can try to make sure we lean into so I can guarantee I think that from your experience it was uncomfortable but you probably learned a ton so I hope that's the case and thank you for for sharing that all right folks um I'm going to give a couple more seconds as I ramble here but uh there's a I don't know like a 20 second delay in the chat so if you um if you have more questions I'm happy to stay on so please feel free to ask away these are great questions so if you have more like that I'm happy if you're finding value in them like I'm happy to answer uh but otherwise uh I will I will be signing off here uh unfortunately it's another week where I don't have a a coding live stream in the morning so typical schedule for me is that I am trying to get my this stream it's at 9:00 and the evening goes usually from 9:00 to 11:00 I'm going to cut it short today and then in the morning I usually do like a 7 to 9:00 a.m. uh and that one's like Hands-On cating but got a lot of stuff going on tomorrow in the morning I have to get my uh SUV dropped off for an AC fix because it's been an absolute furnace in there so got to do that and then uh I had I had a lot of stuff and I still do have a lot of stuff launching that reflection course is a big load off of my plate which is good but I still do have another course that I am working on and this will be revealed very soon this is the course that I'm most excited for and in a direction that I'm the most excited for so uh again if you enjoy my content the way that I try to teach topics uh I think that you'll be interested in this and I will say uh if you're not even a csharper net developer this still might be a very very interesting opportunity to tune into so uh all day coding thanks a lot makes sense to me it seems at the end of the day what matters most is real experience and expertise yeah the time that you put into solving real problems and making an impact yeah and being able to articulate that in your resume into the interviewers that's really where it's going to stand out everything else will follow that's right keep going and good luck with that awesome thanks Bren okay folks I think that's it um thanks for thanks for tuning in I hope you found some this helpful again uh I try to do these 900 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. uh Pacific Time on Mondays this one's just a little bit shorter so I apologize for that uh if you want to know generally what I'm going to be talking about these live streams the newsletter is uh weekly. deev leader.com Monday night stream topics will be on the newsletter topic and then the coding stuff I have to get more creative for um it can be pretty embarrassing to code live stream uh it's a lot more fumbling than you would see in a YouTube video that's for sure but it's a lot of fun so thanks again folks I do appreciate it and I will see you next time so take