The Hidden Cost of Being the Team Hero - Engineering Manager AMA

All right, I think we're almost ready to rock and roll here. Just got to wait for the old Instagram. You can do it. Come on. There we go. It's getting a feed. I'll center my head a little bit more. Instagram lets me know. Welcome to the live stream. Um, it's been a little while. I was on vacation last week, so that means I wasn't here. It's good to be back. Got a topic for today. It's the cost of team heroes. Andreas, it's going good. Thank you for asking. I hope you're doing well. Good to see you here. Hey folks on Substack. If you're joining on Substack, just a friendly reminder, uh the YouTube channel is generally a little bit better. the Substack streaming experience is not great because I'm looking here for everyone else and for Substack. I'm looking here uh and you can't see when I'm screen sharing and stuff. So, if you're interested, you can check out Dev Leader on YouTube probably a better experience, but uh that's just until Substack is supported by Reream someday. But yeah, welcome folks. Um, if you're new to the live streams, these are intended to be very much like an AMA kind of engaging format where I want to make sure I can interact with folks. So, if you chime in in the chat and stuff, like happy to direct the conversation there. Uh, so, you know, I have a topic that we'll go through, but if you want me to answer other questions or talk about other things and just speak up in the chat and I will go over there. Um, usually what I do if you're new to the live streams, I try to focus on a topic that comes from my vlog channel which is called Code Commute. So the ideas come from Code Commute. I talk about them through the week and then at the end of the week I write a newsletter and usually I'm picking a topic that is um something that I don't know seemed to do well in code commute like people were watching it or engaging with it. I write the newsletter on that and then I do the live stream on the newsletter topics. So, hey Jonathan, good to see you back. Welcome. So, if you're interested, uh the newsletter that we'll be going over, I'll put it in the chat. There you go. If you're on Instagram, sorry uh you don't get that. It also looks like my video feed's frozen on Instagram, which is great. Sorry, Instagram. And if you want the newsletter and you're on Substack, I got great news for you. You are literally already there because that's where the newsletter goes. Peter K, welcome from New York. Thanks for joining. Appreciate you being here. Um, actually, it's crazy. YouTube has YouTube has the most I'm trying to look because the camera's blocking. I think YouTube's got the most people on the stream. Usually, it's like Twitter is dominating by far. Um, I don't know why. like I have more I have more LinkedIn followers by a long shot and there's almost no one from LinkedIn. Um, okay. Thanks, Andreas. I appreciate that. I think uh I don't know. I think it's just Instagram. Oh, yeah. So, the Okay, the person who's watching on uh Instagram, is my feed working on Instagram? I'll send you the link if you if you tell me um if the feed's working because it it's frozen on my end. But there you go. Let me know on Instagram if it's working for you. Uh you can't click the link in the Instagram chat, I don't think. So I apologize, but um if you're on the computer, it looks like you can actually. Fancy. Okay, so the topic um it is working. Awesome. Thank you. The topic is the cost of team heroes. I thought this would be a fun one to write about. I don't think I've talked too much about this. Um, this is the 96th newsletter article, so I've covered lots of topics and um, this one hasn't seemed to make it there. So, we'll go through that. Um, and yeah, just jump in in the chat if you want stuff answered. Let's get to it. So, to start off, this is probably something depending on your experience and your career, like you've probably encountered this if you've been working for a little bit. Um, but you know, most teams have you could probably think about on your team there's like a go-to person, right? You might be that go-to person, but um it seems like they're they're the one who's taking on like all the work no matter how much they got going on. They always seem to be connected to things, right? So, if you need them on Teams or Slack or anything else, like they're there like if you ever need um they're always jumping onto pull requests. Like they're they're just they're jumping into incidents. they're just always there being active. They're like, you know, the person on the team. Um, now, not every team does have this. I would say a lot of teams there's probably someone you could think about that's like this, but the whole point of this topic is that on the surface, this can seem like a really good thing, right? On the surface, they could this can seem like, hey, this is someone who's always um they're always doing the stuff that's expected on the team, right? they're if they're jumping into live site issues, they're helping the service. If they're um always taking on more work and they're, you know, able to push through code and get features done, this seems like a good quality to have. If they're, you know, jumping on to get your pull requests reviewed or they're they're able to engage on chat and stuff like at any point in time. Again, this seems like it's a helpful thing. Now, the tricky part is like those are all helpful things, right? Like nothing I said there was like innately like evil or bad or malicious or like anything like that. Those are all those are good things. So like what's up with this? But the the reality Oh, Devon just dropped in to say hi, but now I'm on vacation and watching streams isn't on the agenda. What? How dare you go on vacation? That's that's what I need to do more of. Well, thanks for dropping in, Devin. Good to see you and enjoy your vacation. So, while these things don't seem bad in isolation, um, because they're not, right? There's nothing that's uh specific to them. Uh, no, we got to block that. Okay. Sorry, engaging in the chat. The problem with this kind of thing is that it can become a scalability issue. And what I mean by that is that one person who is sort of doing all of these things, when they become the person that's doing all of these things, it seems like it's helpful, but it can sort of backfire a little bit. So, um, the next part of the newsletter is kind of saying, well, how does this even come up, right? Like, okay, it sounds like those are all good things. Now, Nick's saying like that can backfire. Like, what's up with that? How does that come to be? The reality is that I think when we have like the archetype of like a hero on a team, right, it's coming from a good place. That's why I said none of those things I said on their own are like are bad things, right? Oh, epic lifenav is now epic technav. Welcome. If you if you wouldn't have said that and I just saw epic technav, I would have assumed there wasn't even a rename that it was just you. So, I didn't I didn't even notice, but awesome. Thanks for being here. We got code commuters on the dev leader liveream. Um, awesome stuff. So, heroes kind of emerge on teams because they're trying to help. They are trying to do the right thing. They're like they don't perceive this as like a it's not a malicious thing. It's not like um it's generally not something where they're like trying to hoard all of the work and trying to be a problem or or anything like that. They're generally trying to do things because they care, which can make this kind of challenging, right? Because already said they are doing things that are helpful or intending to. They're doing it because they care. And now we're trying to put that up against like, but this can backfire or not be what you want. The challenge with this is that it creates a lot of imbalance on the team. Okay? So, it's not that those things on their own are bad. Hey, Ryan, thanks for checking in. I appreciate it. See, we got one person on LinkedIn. One. There's I think 27 or 28,000 LinkedIn followers and LinkedIn doesn't put my content anywhere. It's just just how it is. But I appreciate you, Ryan. Thank you. Um, so when we have this archetype emerging on a team to be this hero, it starts to create an imbalance and like what does that even mean or why is that a concern? What starts to happen is that and you can again I I want people to be thinking about this if this maybe is a reflection of your experience because you are the hero or you can imagine being on the team that you're on or a previous team and you're like I can I can picture who this hero was on the team. The the tricky part is that people build this dependency on this person, right? And while I am talking about an archetype of a hero as one person, this can sometimes happen with a couple depending on like sort of what the team components are. But people start to rely on this person too heavily and it creates an imbalance. Yeah. Right. So from Cali but not raising the game of the rest of the team by not transferring those knowledge bits. This this is I mean this is exactly it right. Fundamentally this is one of the challenges that happens. So you get um like I'm just going to the list that I've written down. Um the second one in the list is as was just mentioned in the chat. Others okay so growth bottlenecks others avoid owning hard problems because the hero always will. this person's trying their best to do things because they care. They're like that. I know that's a hard problem. I'll step up to the challenge. I will go solve this hard problem, right? Not because I'm trying to steal it from people, not because I'm evil, but because I care. I want to go do good work. I'm trying to help the team. Hello from Peru. Awesome. Um, thanks Enzo for being here. Enzo.NET Dev. We got theNet developers in the house. They know what's up. Um, shipwreck T. Do you still think that AI won't replace it? Uh, AI won't replace what, us or shipwreck T. Can you clarify what you mean? I don't think AI's I think the only thing AI is replacing is I don't know, people that people that aren't using AI to go augment themselves. And if it wasn't AI, it would be some other tool. Like you got to you got to use the things to augment yourself. It's a hard thing because the work has to get done and sometimes management doesn't push the other developers. Yes, this is good. Eventually the heroes will burn out and leave. Oh, us. That was the thing. Uh I don't think AI will replace us. No. Um I think by I've said this in other videos and I'll say it here. I think by the time AI is replacing us, it's replacing all of us and the world looks like a very different place. I don't have concerns about it. I use AI for a lot of things I do and I still don't have concerns. Um, so yeah, I want to get back to um, how do I pronounce this? The great wow. I don't know how that's pronounced. Sorry. But it's a hard thing because the work has to get done and sometimes a management doesn't push the other developers. Yes. So, we'll kind of I think we see this a little bit later in the article, but one of the things that comes up here is like you have this hero, this archetype that's doing the stuff and it gets perpetuated. And then depending if you don't have what I would call like I don't know, it's I don't want to say like you don't have a good manager, but when you have a manager that's not addressing this, maybe that's a better way to say it, then they're looking at this like it is an awesome thing. I have someone who's a go-to person on the team. Hell yeah. Like, isn't this a great thing? But it's not. It's great for a little bit until it's a problem. Uh, it says LinkedIn user. Who is LinkedIn user? Let me go to LinkedIn and see. I got to do a little refresh. LinkedIn as a platform with APIs is just like bad. Dev Connor says, "Heroes don't last. Does end up burning out badly? When you help people, you become a go-to person for the whole team. Yeah. So, when you help people, you become go-to person for the whole team. But it's about how you help people, right? So, um, and we'll I'm going to talk about this in a little bit, but there's some strategies you can help people and you can help everyone on the team, but you need to help them help themselves, right? It's like the whole what's the teach a man to fish and he'll have I whatever you know the you know the saying that that's the thing that applies here. So you get growth bottlenecks because you have the hero on the team kind of taking on all of the stuff again because they're trying to help. You get decision paralysis because people that are observing this constantly happen, they go, "Well, that person's going to do it." So like, I'll either let them take it or now that I'm taking something, I I better go talk to that person that's taking all the work usually. Like I mean, they're they're the person I have to go to, right? They're the one who's signing off on everything. they're in all they're you know driving all the architectural decisions like I have to go to that person right so I'm I'm now blocked on them for everything artificially because they are the go-to person and then the other part the third part was uh people have already kind of called out his burnout so I wrote the hero takes on too much too often and becomes irreplaceable so even for this individual they now have this um it's pronounced like wah thank you um for this individual it becomes a problem because they've created this like dependency on themselves. They can't step away. I mean they can and they should but they feel like they can't because now everything is dependent on them. How do you possibly step away when everyone's depending on you for everything? You feel like everything's going to fall apart because it probably will depending on how severe this has gotten. Cali says, "And the hero is a single thread and can rarely handle multiple tasks. If you have multiple issues in his wheelhouse, he blocks progress." Yeah, this is it, right? So, I'm glad like seems like people acknowledge this. This is a thing that happens unfortunately. So, these are all like we kind of went from like, hey, look, these are things that seem helpful. They come from a good place, but the reality is Yeah. Or she. That's fair. Yeah. Absolutely. Um, I've been doing my best just to say they because it seems like the the safest thing. But, um, we go from trying to be helpful to like here are some challenges that happen if you become the single point of failure for the entire team. So before I get into like um some things I wanted to talk about for like how to shift this perspective and how to move away from this um I I wanted to talk about like a personal reflection for me a little bit and there's probably new people that are on the stream and all that. So it doesn't hurt to do a little bit of reflection. Uh the great W says I was doing most of the work on my team and got laid off at the end of April. I was shocked. Yeah. Well I mean and I mean the other thing to keep in mind is like with layoffs, right? Um, it's not a I don't have the context, but like there's a lot of times you need really need to separate like the person from the actual layoff um action. So, sorry to hear that. Uh, Epic Technap says, "I found using Microsoft Loops as a tool to create a loop component with my progress tracker. My manager has all of our loop components in a page. That way, no one gets too much and works uh all in one." Cool. Yeah. So different tools, different strategies for trying to load balance and have visibility into that kind of thing, right? There's there's um I mean I'm going to say the a word that there's the whole agile thing where um depending on what you how you might be approaching it, there's different tools and uh mechanisms for trying to make sure that there's proper load balancing. Um, Andrea says, "Usually hero grows real fast, technically speaking, and they leave looking for better opportunities and more money." And I mean, like, hard to blame them, right? If they're the one person who happens to be taking on all the things, kind of carrying, you know, all of the burden. They're probably at some point, especially if they're hitting points of burnout going like I see what I'm capable of and like I don't want to be living like this like this crazy burnout. So what would make that better? Usually it's like two things. One is like do less of the stuff so that you're not burnt out. But more often it's like well if I was just paid more fairly it would probably not feel so crappy. Um so then they look for more money, right? Uh, Peter Case says, "I was the hero laid off in April also almost 12 years after almost 12 years." Yeah. So, there's, you know, two people again. Peter, sorry to hear that. Jonathan says, "You either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain." That's right. That's right. And that's exactly what it is right here. So, um, I I think that I kind of lived a little bit of this um at different points. I for context uh so give a little bit of background currently I'm an engineering manager at Microsoft um I've been at Microsoft for just under five years it'll be five years in August so coming up on five before that um Young Bird dev leader just landed an entry-le C# job hell yeah love to hear it thanks for being here thanks for letting us know and it's C young bird you got to keep coming back now that it's C# you can't leave. Um that's so cool. Thank you so much for letting us know. So before Microsoft I was at a I was at a startup. It's called Magnet Forensics and um I started there when it was under seven or eight people and kind of it grew to a point after eight years it was like 250ish or so. Um, so lot of growth, but I was there in the early days, right? Like I was there working around the clock in like typical um typical startup fashion, right? It was kind of what you might expect, right? Where stuff's got to get done. There's not a lot of people to do it and we just got to go. We got to move fast. We got to keep shipping. Uh, do we know what we're doing? Absolutely not. But we're going to figure it out. And um it was I mean I don't I don't regret kind of the the work life balance kind of thing but it it wasn't sustainable right so I didn't have other responsibilities in my life and I say that like fortunately that was it was great I didn't um not that I'm complaining now married you know that's a responsibility and um so no complaints it's just a different time in my life so fresh out of university. The like the I have almost no student debt because I went for internships, so I could pay off my student debt pretty quick. I um don't really have hobbies because I like to program so pretty limited. And then my other hobby is I like to bodybuild. So, as long as I could get my gym session in, I'm working. Like, I don't care. I don't have anything else to do. Uh and then video games. I like video games, but I'm at a computer, whatever. Right. So, um, I could just work. So, I was at this startup and just working, right? Like that's all I did. It became a problem for sure, but when I was thinking about this, it was like, we're in this startup mode, so you want to be able to try and help with anything that's coming up, right? So, I learned pretty quick um I learned pretty quick that we get into this situation where, you know, someone's like, "Oh, I'm having a problem with something." And it's like, "Oh, don't worry. Like, let me go help. Like, I want I want to help you, right?" Like, exactly as I was saying with like this this hero mentality, like I'll it's okay. Like, I'll help save the day for you. Um, and what I had to learn early on was that they made me a manager like a few months into being there. Small team, we're growing. They It was technically like a team lead position except with direct reports and full comp view, which is uh I think they call that a manager. So, um I was I was managing individuals having no idea what I was doing. Had really really really good uh HR leadership. So, I owe a lot to her. But I was in this mode where as the team is growing and they need help ramping up. Okay, I'll help ramp you up, right? Oh, well, I'm working in this part of the product. No worries. I I wrote that. Like, I'll come help you. Uh, we need to go make this change over here and like don't really know this code. Oh, don't worry. Like, I'll help you with that. Like, I know all about that. We had conversations and basically I was just constantly working and kind of unfortunately acting like the hero. When I say acting like the hero, I don't mean that I was actually saving the day. I just mean like the archetype. That's all. Um, Cali says, "So many hats to wear on small teams and small companies." Yeah. Right. And I think it's it might be kind of tricky for some people to to kind of uh to grasp, I guess, unless you've lived through it. But like if you've joined a company that's already stable and it feels pretty comfy. I don't know. Like maybe maybe that is okay. Maybe you do get a good work life balance. Maybe you are used to things just being mostly okay aside from the odd like prod issue blowing up or something. But it's like it's mostly fine. But when like I just remember this mentality of like we have to ship value because if we're not if we're not doing that we're not going to have a company to work at. And this was maybe it was a little bit artificial like we didn't have investors. We were profitable like the company was fine but it was always this mentality of like like we're the underdogs. So, for those of you that aren't into digital forensics, which I assume is um all of you. I don't know, but I assume most people just aren't. There was at the time we had two really big competitors and they had a complete monopoly over computer forensics and we were a very small company started by a police officer that was making some helpful tools. So like we are the smallest player arguably and then there's two incumbents that have a monopoly over everything. So the mentality was like were fighting to stay alive the whole time. If you fast forward those two incumbents I don't want to say they don't exist but like they I don't think they came out on top. So this attitude the entire time I feel like is like what drove a lot of success but it comes with some some of these challenges, right? So I had to learn early on and I think it was fortunate that as a manager I had to kind of figure some of this stuff out. So we're going to get into some of the the changeups that you can do to shift your thinking on this. I'm just going to catch up on the chat. Um the great W says, "I saw your vacation gym sessions." Yeah, that was uh I took two vacations in May. Uh which is super cool. So, first vacation was actually just a station. I had finished wrapping up a a five-month project and uh I hadn't had time off and stuff. So, uh I had been saying in other videos for for months I was like I am so burnt out. like I'm I'm kind of on like zombie autopilot just trying to like trying to make sure that I can keep moving forward on stuff and yeah, just pretty crazy burnout. So once the project wrapped up, I think I had a little bit more to do. Um and then like once the new week started, I just said I'm taking the full week off. I stayed mostly right here in this spot and then I was going to the gym and I do CrossFit now with my wife. She's a crossfitter. Uh I never thought that I would say that because I am a bodybuilder at heart and we don't like crossfitters. But I'm real short. I'm like 5 foot4 and when you get real heavy when you're real short, not that I'm saying I was pure muscle or anything, but when you get heavy and you're short, it's like I don't like being out of breath when I'm trying to tie my shoes even though I go to the gym every day. Like kind of reaching a point where that kind of life is not really what I want to do. It would be super cool to be big and muscular, but like I'm just never actually going to be really big and muscular. I'm not going to be a Mr. Olympia. And I'm like, "Okay, it doesn't make sense anymore, but I'm starting to value the fact that like or I want to value more like my cardiovascular health. I don't like feeling like I'm out of shape all the time." I've been very lean before and still felt like I'm out of shape because I just don't keep up with my cardio. So, switched over to CrossFit. And coincidentally, huge coincidence, that week at CrossFit, we were testing our max lifts, which I was like, "This is the best." Because it's the least CrossFitty thing we do. I'm like, "This is so cool. That's all I want to do is test my max lifts." Um, and actually, I hit some PRs, which is cool. My I got a 410 back squat in pounds, not kilograms. That would be otherworldly. I got a 486 lb deadlift. I missed the 501 unfortunately and I didn't PR on my overhead press. I tried to get 190 and it failed. I had it like I had it here over my head. I'm trying to keep my arms in the frame, but that's not how I would overhead press. But I had it like above my head and I couldn't lock out my elbows. And I watched the video and it's it's ridiculous. It's like 2 in. If I could have moved it, it would have been fine. But yeah, functionally healthy. Like I said, it's uh it doesn't make sense. I'm not going to be a professional bodybuilder. Do really like the lifestyle of doing it. I like the training. I I'm actually really boring when it comes to food. I can just eat the same thing all the time, so it's convenient. But anyway, switched to CrossFit. It was a good station. The next vacation I had, we went to Arizona. In Arizona was awesome. I'm from Canada, so I'm used to just like basically being in snow my entire life. I grew up in an igloo. Um, you know, drank maple syrup straight from the beaver. Um, had hockey stick shoes, you know, that kind of thing. So, uh, I went to Texas last summer with my wife and that was the most ridiculous heat I've ever felt, ever. And I was thinking, man, Arizona is going to be rough, too. And so we went and I didn't realize but it's like a dry heat so it was hot but it was still like it was nice. So Arizona was a good trip for a week. Um yeah I had some time off and um I can't remember why we're talking about that except I think it was just I saw your vacation gym sessions but I can't remember why. So anyway it was good to have some time off. uh got over the burnout I feel like mostly. But yeah, Epic Technav, what's the question here? Do you think AI models help or put a ceiling on us developers? Not looking for a take on replacement. Let's talk about augmenting. What does that look like from your perspective? I'm curious. Sure thing. Um I think personally my take on this is that it's all about how you use it. So again, we're not going to talk about replacement or whatever, but in terms of just using it as a tool, my my take on this is that if you are using AI tooling to basically just output code, especially as a junior, I think that that's pretty dangerous. Um, and I say dangerous as in like from a like a skill building longevity kind of perspective. I don't think it's good and I am happy to be proven wrong on that. Going back to the hero topic. No way. We got AI first and then we'll go back to the topic. Yeah, we'll get back there. I promise. Um I I'm happy to be proven wrong on the junior dev thing. Um Oh, thanks Andreas. Yeah, if you felt like the hero all the time. Okay. Oh man, what's with kick is like the worst platform for bots. Um, okay. AI. Uh, if you're a junior dev and you are just having code output, the the re I was saying I'd like to be proven wrong on this because a lot of us that have been developing for a while, we keep saying to people, we keep saying to people, you need to learn fundamentals, you need to do this, you need to do this. Um, and I I guess I would be very open to being proven wrong on this and someone, you know, if we fast forward 10, 15 years if someone's like, "Look, man, all that I did was I was basically borderline vibe coding the whole time." But the tooling got so good and I became so effective at that feedback loop and I learned enough along the way that I could be a good developer using the tools. I would I would love to be proven wrong on that and someone in 10 to 15 years is able to say that's how it work for them. That would be super cool. I I think it's unlikely, but I don't like I don't want to express an opinion and then be like because I I I hope that doesn't happen and I you know I wish them an ill fate. Like no, like if that's if they end up doing that and it works, that's super cool. I just don't think it's likely because I don't feel like there's enough of a feedback loop for the learning part when you're doing that. And the reason I say that is because you're a lot of the time you are shortcutting the opportunity for learning. You say, "I have a problem." And the AI tool goes, "No problem. Here's the answer." And you go, "Great, I have this other problem." And it's like, "Here's the answer." And it's the same thing when you're trying to teach other people how to solve their problems. If you keep if you you might have experienced this in your career or you are the person on the receiving end of this. If you keep trying to help someone, they're coming to you for help and you go, "Here's the answer." They're going to come back to you next time and you go, "Here's the answer." If you keep doing this, you just teach them that they can get answers from you. You don't teach them how to solve problems. So, I think that that's probably what's being reinforced. I don't have data to back that up. I don't have I'm not a scientist researching it, but that's my suspicion. But I do wonder like are we cutting out those problems that they're learning about? But from a endtoend like product creation perspective, they're getting a better feedback loop. I don't know. Like it's it's pretty wild. I feel like kind of kind of crazy say in that, but I wonder if there's something interesting there. On the other side of this, um I think that in terms of augmenting, I think there's absolutely ways that we can uh use AI to be generating code. I think if you're not understanding what it is, you need to be asking the tool to explain what it's doing. You need to be having conversations with it to say, suggest like other, you know, give me two other variations of this. Explain the pros and cons. Why don't you tell it the pros and cons you think are there and then ask it to test you on that, evaluate you? Like it's such a powerful tool and we end up using it for like a small subset of things which is like generate code and then you complain to it like fix the bug, fix the bug, build is still broken, add the tests, fix the tests, build is broken. Like that's kind of just like mindless slop, but we can do better with it. So, I think that there's, you know, asking it questions, um, getting it to explain topics, giving it like helping navigate analysis aside from just code generation, I think are great opportunities. There's a lot of messages in the chat. I've been slacking. Okay. Um, let me scan. I want to make sure I don't miss Andreas's question about recommending communicating to the manager. Um, Young Bird said, "For senior capstone project, I saw firsthand what happens when you rely on AI to produce all your code." Yep. getting PRs with code that would work in isolation with group members failed. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, it wouldn't even compile. Um I usually ask why questions when I get an AI answer if I don't understand it. Absolutely. Like do that. I think it helps a lot. Uh Epic Technav, I'm of the opinion that if you're only vibe coding, you're not a software engineer. Yeah, you need to use a tool with the fundamentals. I interview people. It blows my mind uh when you don't ask them. Uh lead code questions how they can answer. I interviewed for interns. Yep. Uh, oh, these are split or something. This is kind of weird. As a group member that I had, okay, group member that had to explain the basics of object-oriented programming, instantiating objects unnecessarily just to use one function that should have just been set as a static. Yeah, that's a common thing. Um, I asked them how they would rate limit a bot and 405 of them just said it's not lead code. Yeah. Uh, going all uh it's going to be all about communicating ideas. We saw no concepts and structures. Articulating will be key. Yeah, communication is always going to be a fundamental thing. Um, cool. Let me let me go back up. Yeah, I I'm and I see Andre commented again like, "Yeah, there's a lot of participation. This is super awesome." I I love when I can't keep up with the chat. Um, because it's it means people are actually chiming in. So, thanks folks. Sorry for being a mess trying to answer stuff. Um, Andre says, "For the the hero all of if I felt like a hero all the time, how would you recommend communicating that to your manager?" So, I think, let me let me say it this way. I feel like uh in my situation when I was explaining sort of my hero challenge, um I I want to be careful about how I say this because I don't want to suggest like I had crappy leadership or something like that. Um, especially like you know the the founder and so there's the CTO and the CEO. Like I feel like those are um you know two of the best people that I've I've ever worked for and probably ever will work for. I had an extreme amount of autonomy. And I don't mean that in like a oh I was neglected that's why I had autonomy. I mean like I just feel like I had a lot of autonomy. And um I had really good support from my HR director in terms of like how to how to try and lead and how to manage. I think without her I would have fumbled a lot. So in my case it wasn't about telling my manager or navigating that I'm being the hero. What happened was I reached a point where like I'm like I can't actually help people. And and I'll explain it this way because this is how it happened. I mentioned already that I was working around the clock. Not because anyone made me, but especially um especially when I was managing people, what would happen is that I would get into the office before some people to try and get some work done and then approximately from 9 to 5, I would just be walking around going from desk to desk helping people. I'm not not exaggerating and I'm not bragging about it either. It was just like be working with someone on something cool and then while I'm about to leave someone next to them would be like hey like while you're here go help them and then on my way back to the desk oh while you're here. So this would happen all the time. And what I started to realize was there was some individuals that as I was helping them helping them what I was doing was like they would say like I don't understand how this works and I would like hands on the keyboard be like oh just go here you just do boop boop they go oh thanks so much and I'm like yeah awesome we got this working cool I I'm just giving them answers. I'm not actually teaching them what's going on. So this is a thing I had to learn super early because I would do a 9 to5 of that and then once the workday was done I was like okay now I can work right so I was just working all the time and unfortunately I wasn't being smart about how I was helping people so for me it wasn't about communicating it to my manager for me it was like I had to go realize this and then start going okay I need to teach this person how it works teach this person how it works. Now, they come to me less because they're self-sufficient. And this is one of the most important things that I try to coach other people through, especially if you're junior, how to ask questions. And if you're more senior, how to give answers or guide people, as in don't give answers, guide people. Your question specifically was um like how I might go uh recommend communicating that to my manager. I think if I were in a position and I identified this and I didn't know how to go take some action, um I think it would depend on what the signal was for me. In my case, this was before I was noticing burnout. This was years before I felt burnt out. I was just like, I physically can't get stuff done. I think that's what I would say is in a one-on-one with my manager, I would say, hey, you know, I I feel like I'm helping a lot of people. I feel like we're getting a lot of stuff done. I don't feel like I'm getting my stuff done and I think I have concerns around I want to get more of my stuff done but I then feel like I'm um I don't know like dropping the ball for the team. So that's probably how I would start approaching it. I think knowing what I know now I would say like I want to start taking some more actions to be able to like I don't know like enable the team. So I might need to slow down a little bit, right? I need to slow down because I need to take more of that time to go help teach or coach people. So, you know, Jimmy on the team who I keep helping, like I keep helping Jimmy with this stuff. I'm going to sit down with Jimmy. It's going to take a little bit longer, but I'm going to teach him how he can solve this problem for himself. And it might take me a couple weeks of repetition on and off, but that's my goal with Jimmy. And then we got Sally over here. And like I help Sally all the time with like some stuff in the UI, but like it's usually the same same types of things. I want to show her my strategy for how I go navigate this stuff so that Sally doesn't come back to me. So, I would want to raise awareness to my manager and like I said, knowing what I know now, I would tell them how I I plan to go through that. If I didn't know, then I'd be asking for help on how to balance that. Um, this is a really good follow-up question. How would you make a distinction between like a senior or principal helping junior developers and not being the hero? It's all about the amount of it, I would say. And I this happens a lot. So I actually have in my experience at Microsoft in almost all of the sort of setup that I've had for teams, I get brought onto a team and the team has some people that have some tenure, right? They're principal level. Um, so they're my level or above. There's a couple seniors, let's say, and then most of the team is like relatively new and fresh. And what ends up happening a lot of the time is that the the the more senior people on the team, rightfully so, are trying their best to help. And again, if they're if they haven't received coaching like this in their career or they're out of practice with it or whatever else, they will have juniors that ideally the juniors are speaking up and asking questions, right? Ideally, they are, which is a whole other problem if they're not. It's really challenging, especially with remote work. But the juniors go to them for help. And what ends up happening is that if people aren't coaching the juniors, they're just saying, "Here's the answer. You don't know where to find it? Oh, it's over here. Oh, you need help with this code? Well, it's because this thing on line 37." Or like, "Let me let me screen share and I will show you." Right? People go into these these patterns because what they're trying to do is get the person the answer as fast as they can so they can move on. And I I don't mean that in like a negative way. I don't mean like, oh, the principles I had or the seniors I had. They were just like, I don't care about the juniors. Screw the juniors. I want to get back to my work. They're just trying to be like, I'm helping you. Your problem is, you've gotten through your problem. Excellent. Now I can get back to my work and I'll continue on. It's coming from a good place, but it's not sustainable. And they don't realize, but they are becoming the hero because now you have a whole team of more junior people that are like, "Oh, you got help from that person. I'm going to them, too, right? They know about this. They're the subject matter expert. Of course, I'm going to go there and get help." And then it perpetuates it. And then I end up having to work with the more senior or the principal people being like, it's like, "We have to unwind this, right? Right? They're like, "I don't have time to get my stuff done. I'm always helping with whatever." Okay. It's not that I want to It's It's a weird balance, right? I don't want to go, "Oh, well, sorry, Bob. Like, um, obviously you're not performing well then, and no, you shouldn't help people." The expectation is you only do your stuff and don't help people. Like, that's not it's not the case. It's more like, okay, well, what kinds of patterns are we seeing? How can we load balance? If you're at principal level, it might be a really good opportunity that I can get a more uh say someone who's senior, someone who's mid-level, I can go encourage them to help some of the really junior people, right? Let's load balance it. There's a there's so many different options here, but um that's the distinction I would make back to your question, the great W is I I think it's all about how much it's happening in isolation to have someone who's a principal level like walk through the code and give someone the answer is like not a problem, right? Like there's there's nothing fundamentally wrong with that. But when it's all of the time for all of the people and it's coming becoming a problem with getting their work done, now it's a problem. Hope that hope that helps. That's I think my answer. Um just scrolling through the chat. [Music] Uh I guess relevant question here. I'm transitioning from senior to tech lead. Any tips so I don't end up being the hero coder? Uh oh. No, don't do it. No, I'm just kidding. Um, I think it's really about I mean I won't repeat it, but the thing I just said about when you're helping people is like is teach them the teach them your patterns, right? Teach them your patterns so that they learn how you're thinking through things. It takes longer, but it's definitely worth it, right? If you're in like a team lead or tech lead kind of position, um when you're helping, if you notice other people doing that, give them praise, right? Give them praise for modeling that behavior. You need to emulate it. Um there's nothing wrong with helping. Um I think there's a really good way that this has been phrased to me and I'm trying to think of it. I like the concept. Sometimes the wording comes across kind of weird, but like f like primarily focus on the stuff that's expected of your level. And to to explain like if you are finding that you're doing small tasks and you're like at a principal level, probably need to go find a way to delegate that. If you find that you're helping the junior people all the time, like there's nothing wrong with helping people, but how do you create a system? How do you systematically help the team? At principal level, I would expect that you are systematically trying to help the team to be able to do better. At a senior level, it might be like you're trying to achieve that, but you're still having impact across the team. at mid level like being able to coach the person or like almost give answers to the person that's right below you or your peer might be acceptable but doing the expected kind of thing for your level makes a big difference. Um so and then so epic nav epic technav why you got to go switching your name up man now I got all the words mixed up. Um it says bleeding a lot of time with juniors is tough but at the same time you need to help them. Yeah. So it's all about the age-old fishing saying, which is what the great said right below. It's exactly that, right? Um, so I'm going to scroll down back in the the article because this is talking about uh the first one is literally replace rescuing with coaching. It's item number one. Um, and there's like different strategies around this too, right? goal is that you're not giving answers to people. You're you're teaching them to fish. So, how do you do that though? Right? It's easy to say that, but to put it into practice, it's actually tricky. It's especially tricky if you're already in this like hero position because as we talked about earlier, you're probably at a point where you're like borderline experiencing burnout or you're already burnt out, right? You have so many things depending on you. You're probably perpetuating this problem even more without intending to. So, someone needs help. Okay. Well, you got a million things to do. You got a lineup of people that want help. How do you get how do you give them help? As fast as you can. Then you help the next person or you're finally freed up. Now you can do your stuff. But it's not the right strategy. You have to slow down to be able to get this like on the right track. So, a really interesting, it's so hard to do. A really interesting coaching strategy is like asking questions instead. And I say that it's really hard because if you're used to trying to help people, here's what happens. Someone says, "Hey, Nick, like uh I'm trying to work on X." And like trying to figure out how to. And as people are giving you some information, what starts happening is you're already in your head going, "Okay, like I think I might want to go down this path and this one and maybe this way. And if they say this other thing, then I know we have to go down this other path." And they're still talking and you're generating solutions in your head. And you're doing that because you're trying to help. It's kind of reinforced. We're software engineers. We love solving problems. What you need to do is shut up. You need to shut up. You need to listen. And you need to turn off your brain for just a second to stop solving other people's problems. It's really hard. Once your brain is a little bit more calm and you've actually listened to what someone's saying, you want to start asking them questions. The interesting part about asking questions is that you can actually direct people down a path. So you can kind of nudge them, but they still have to do all the thinking. So, hey Nick, I'm trying to work through this thing and I'm noticing that like I'm pick like the build dependencies are broken. I don't know. I'm trying to build locally and it's not working and uh can you help me with this? And then I might say, "Okay, well, like, so, uh, you're getting some errors, right?" Okay. Like, uh, what what things have you tried so far now that you've seen some of the error messages? Okay. Well, um, no, I think I went and looked up here and then, um, I couldn't find this information. And then once they stopped talking, instead of going, well, obviously you're silly and you should go do X, Y, and Z. No, what's the next question? Like, you need to start directing people down this path. and it they're practicing solving the problem. A better example is when people are trying to design things, right? Hey Nick, I'm trying to put this thing together for feature X and like there's two ways that I can go here and like I don't really know which way to pick, so could you help me with that? What you might do as someone in hero mode trying to fight fires non-stop is you're like, well, pick option A obviously because X, Y, and Z. Go see you later. Next in line. And instead of that, pump the brakes. Okay, you have two options like, can you tell me? And then you ask them questions. Tell me about why you like what pros you think of this one or cons or like walk me through how you're thinking about this. And then say things like, what might you do next? Then, oh, I could do this, this, or this. Well, why might you want to do that? These reasons. Okay. Well, what's stopping you from doing that? Well, I wasn't sure. Okay. Well, do you think that you're, you know, do you have any other concerns with trying it out or do you think that you're ready to go do that? I think I could go do it. Okay, bye. Go do it. Like, let me know when you have some answers and come back and we can chat more. And then you repeat it. Right? So, you're just it's not giving people answers, it's guiding them through so that they can make progress. And you can do that without just saying the answer is like 42. So, um, the the great wall says, "It's tricky to make the junior developers not feel ignored or unimportant." Absolutely. Um, Epic Technav says, "I never jump on calls. This helps. I tell people to book my calendar. Underrated for yeah, for booking your time." Yep. I jump on calls for my task, but uh for help they have to book. Not me, but just to save manage time. Yeah, there's a strategy around time boxing for sure. um however you want to implement this I think there's different different approaches like uh my strategy is different like I I almost do the opposite I tell people like anytime you need me reach out and then I do the opposite where I will book if I need to get focus time I block it otherwise like if my calendar's open message whatever do I don't care but that's my approach with leading teams I'm not saying it's better. I just want to position myself. I kind It's like an anti pattern almost. I wouldn't do this all of the time, but especially when I have people on teams that I find like I want to make sure that they're comfortable, especially with more remote work and a bunch of people on the team that are more junior, I just want to make sure they know at any point if they're stuck, I need to unblock you because I have seen far too many times where especially juniors working remotely get stuck and they're like, "Guess that's it. like there's no that can't can't work and I need to make sure that I'm like no no no no if you ever feel this way reach out to me. I'm not saying I'm going to solve your problem. I might connect you with someone else but I try to make myself available but then block my calendar when I need dedicated focus time. Um okay Cali take care. Um East Coaster I remember the East Coast back back in the day from Toronto. It's not really the east coast, it's just more east. Um, epic tac nav, I let them know why I tell them to book call so they feel like I'm not brushing them off. Make sure uh during the connect I'm 100% present and can focus. Yeah. Yeah. So, you're giving them focus time versus like kind of halfassing it, I guess. But yeah, I think the the main point there is that, you know, you're you're giving yourself um like dedicated time to focus on things and dedicated time to help. Um yeah, cool. Okay. Yeah, great great conversation in the chat. Thanks for thanks for all the thoughts, guys. I appreciate it. Um the next thing in the article is pairing instead of owning things solo. So, um, when someone's asking for help, instead of being like, "Oh, let me take care of that for you and going to do it." Um, you could like the next step is to share your screen and show them. And an even better thing, this is so underrated. Screen share the other way. So, they're sharing their screen and you say, "Great, like, let me guide you through this." And let them stumble a little bit. not to set them up so that it feels embarrassing or anything like that, but they're using a new dashboard or they have to use a new tool or something and you're like, "Okay, like I'm going to need you to go you have to go compile the code now." And they might be like, "Okay." And like you didn't say press the big green button, but you're like, "You need to compile the code now." And then let them have a bit of a chance to be like, "hm, if I need to compile the code, what should I do?" Like, let them think. And then if they're like, uh, I don't really, and you notice, like guide them a little bit, right? Okay, next step. But letting them drive there. I don't know the psychology behind this or if I'm just making it up. Maybe I'm making it up. I have found that more often than not when people have the opportunity to do the driving, they learn much faster. My experience with this um has been like especially with like on call. So I have to go on call at Microsoft as an engineering manager. So it's not just for the engineers. It's not just uh like a site reliability engineer. Everyone on the team goes on call. As someone who is not actively working with some of the developer tools, there's a lot of things where like people on my team will be much better versed at it than I will because they've been using some of this stuff regularly. Whereas for me, if I have to do it when I'm on call, I'm like, "Oh, this is new." Um, I have found repeatedly that if I watch someone else do it, I'm like, "Oh, yeah, that seems obvious." As soon as I have to go do it, no idea. Brain stops working. I'm like, I just watched someone do it. How can I not? But if I practice, even if it's simple things, helps reinforce uh an incredible amount. Um, oh my god, my senior literally said on Red Hat Open Shift, I've never used it. What? Oh, what's I don't know what that means. People literally said on Red Hat open shift. I don't know. Am I Am I saying the wrong words? I don't know. You gotta You gotta help me out here. Um I think that makes sense with the UX experience testing. Yeah, there's So metapoint is just like um this is just an example of like don't do the thing for people like let people let people do the thing but guide them. Helps a lot. Um next one on the list is write down things as you go. So, um, if you I don't know if people have like documentation cultures for their team. Uh, like some teams have like no documentation. Some teams everyone talks like we really need documentation but no one wants to write it. Other teams are really good with it. Uh, some people have a bunch but it's all out of date. I feel like it's all over the place all the time. One thing that you can do is like when you're helping someone, you could be like, "hm, clearly they came to me because there wasn't a resource for this." Or or you could have directed them to the resource if they were asking for help. You could say, "Oh, it's documented here. Here you go." Right? Might feel like brushing them off a little bit, but hey, look, that's why we have the documentation. You can say, "Here's the documentation for it. If you have any challenges, let me know." Um, if that doesn't exist, you could number one, you could write it. So, help them and write it so that it's available for next time. It's like an investment for the future. Another strategy is that depending on what the task is, there's there's some pros and cons to this. You could help them and get them to document it. On the second part, one of the interesting things is that I'm thinking about from our on call experiences, there's situations where uh a subject matter expert will say, "Oh, we didn't have like a guide on that. I'll create it." So, the next person gets the help. What happens is that they create a guide that is very well suited for them. And the next time someone is on call and experiences that issue, they're like, "Oh, great. There's a guide." And then they open it and they're like, I don't know what any of this is. I can't follow the steps because I click, you know, the link it says and then the next step feels like it's 10 steps removed. So, in some cases, having someone else with less experience write a doc, like a a document or a flow for getting some help can be really valuable. Do a hybrid, right? Have them write it, you review it, or the other way around, you write it, have them try it out and give you feedback. point is write some things down so that the next person ideally does not have to bother a person unless they're getting stuck in the process. Um I wrote celebrate when others step up. So, if you're in this situation where there is a uh like a hero on the team, being able to acknowledge when other people are doing this kind of thing, like not not also just like being another hero, but I just mean demonstrating that they're taking some action and um you know, they're owning responsibilities, they're stepping up to own things. Acknowledge it because it's really hard to have an entire team of all heroes. it doesn't really make sense. So when you can get other people to start stepping up and owning things and taking action, what happens is people emulate behaviors that are getting praised, right? People will naturally usually, right, people will look up to people that are more senior on the team and they emulate that behavior because they go, "Well, this person's more senior." Like that's clearly behavior that was rewarded whatever they're doing because that's how they got to where they are. Like that's behavior I should be doing. And you can influence that more by saying it doesn't matter if this person's junior. You're like, "Hey, this person is junior and they went and um you know, they stepped up to go help one of their peers navigate something and then they wrote documentation on it." Like, "Hell yeah, awesome work so and so. Like really good." good. And then what happens is you have the other junior on the team going, "Oh, they're they're getting recognized for that. I'm making it sound a little bit more like overt than maybe what is happening, but people pick up on this kind of stuff." And you can you don't get I I actually filmed a code commute video on this today, but one of the things I was saying at the end was you don't get to dictate the culture on your team. Unfortunately, you can't just say our culture is blah and then it happens. Doesn't work that way. Culture is the observed actions of the team. You observe culture. You can influence culture. You can do things that alter behaviors, right? And like cause some ripple effects where the culture is impacted. But you don't get to assign the culture. Does not work that way. So you can influence culture on the team by praising behaviors that you want. You draw positive attention to them. I just caution people. Uh friendly reminder, not everyone likes public recognition. So be careful with that. It's pretty rare that people are not comfortable with it, but I like mentioning it because I have worked with people early on in my career. I worked with people that were like, "No, thank you. Please don't do that. Okay, you think it's being helpful because most people they're okay with it, but just be aware of that. But drawing attention to in a positive way uh to act like uh behaviors that you want emulated is a very good way. So I'll give you an example. I have um I've at least checked with one of them. I think the other one would be okay with public recognition. I feel pretty confident saying that. But total disclaimer, I have not asked one of them. One of them I have asked and he is good. Um, I have two individuals that are relatively junior on my team and especially more recently they have been absolutely crushing it with helping with uh answering questions in chat for like helping people that are operating on call uh asking good questions, following up on things, right? Like being very like rigorous with u investigations and making sure stuff's written uh written down and documented. They're doing all this stuff and like I need to publicly recognize it because it is I've had to tell them in private like awesome work. This is so good. But I also want to draw attention to it because it's like they're in my opinion they're got like kind of going above and beyond in a good way. And if everyone on the team did some of that, it would be like immensely impactful, right? Not everyone has to go to that level. If everyone did a little bit of that would be so so good. So I just want to draw attention to it so that other people emulate the behavior, right? They say, "Oh, they see this happening. They go that's that's a thing that's praised." Okay? And you have to keep repeating it. So you don't get to dictate the culture, you get to influence it through actions like that. Um, be a Gandalf. Yes. Uh, Epic Technav was saying, "Basically, my senior made me do it in front of her and one day I asked if she can show me. She explained that people have great skills but get anxiety when the senior takes over." Interesting. Yeah. And then crush the anxiety by letting you drive. That's awesome. At least. So I think it's helpful to let the other person drive. Um I the other thing is kind this is kind of like a delegation kind of thing. This is other kind of talked about this a little bit earlier with more like principal and senior level people on my team at least. But um it's okay to like say no and like that's sometimes hard for people because they're like well if I say no I mean it came up in the chat like you don't want to be brushing people off right? You don't want people to feel like they're not supported. And of course, if you say no to someone, automatically it seems like they're not being supported. But you can turn it around, right? So the like wrote down like you could say like, "I'd love to help, but I think this is a growth opportunity for you." Right? Back to doing work that's expected of you at your level. Right? Principal is like, "I know I could go crush this." Senior's like, "I know I could go crush this." Mid-level is kind of like, "I think I could do this." And the junior person is like, "Absolutely not. Okay. So, if you're helping the mid-level person out, you might say, "Hey, like, you know, I'd love to help and I actually think that you should do this and like I can support you." So, you're kind of stretching them a little bit by being like, they're uncomfortable a little bit and you give them that extra support as they need it, but they get to go through the actions of doing it. I'm talking about a very generic example, right? But it could be building a feature, fixing a bug, trying a process for the first time. Um, like so a recent example that I I can think of is I was helping someone on call on the weekend and using some tooling and they weren't familiar with the tooling. And for me, I'm very familiar with it because I use it regularly. Um, it's it's something that would have taken me like like a minute to go do. And I wanted to use the opportunity with this individual to say like, "Hey, like I don't think that you've done this yet." And not not in a condescending way. I can't remember exactly how I said it, but like, "Hey, I don't think you've been exposed to using this yet. Like, I want to let you know that like I'm available if you want to jump on a call. I will help guide you through it." So I can show them once and explain why and then they can go take care of it forever after that. It was something that I felt like was straightforward enough with a little bit of background. They'd have the the knowledge to understand why they take those steps. They can go help the next person too. So saying no in this case is not necessarily like no I'm not involved in this or no go away. It's no because this is actually something good for you to do. You can extrapolate this a little bit more. Um especially if you're more senior on the team. So I think Epic Technav you were saying going into like a tech lead kind of position, you'll have to practice saying no. You'll want to make sure that you can work with your manager or whoever else is helping prioritize things that like just because you can do stuff does not mean that you should. I feel like um let let me put it this way. I feel like if you take a pure project management perspective, and I'm not my goal of this is not to like talk down on project management. I just mean from like a a resource effectiveness perspective. You get whoever can get the the you know the work done the most effectively. You put it in front of them and you're done. You've optimized for throughput. But often with engineering managers, we have to layer on another part to that is like, yeah, we want we want effective throughput. That's part of delivering for the business. But we also need to understand that long-term, aside from just throughput of getting value delivered, we need to make sure people are engaged. We need to make sure people are growing, they're challenged, and there's throughput. So sometimes that means that from like we need to derisk how our team looks. Okay, there's like three people that are single points of failure. Guess we got to slow down. Throughput comes down a little bit. It means that we have to assign some work that's not really optimal but it's good growth opportunities. So we have to start balancing these things and that way we can do a little bit of derisking. Now instead of three single points of failure, we have six people. uh two of them each know something and there's like a at least some redundancy. Not perfect, it's better. Cool. Now, you might shift the other way and try to prioritize a little bit more through for throughput. Um I generally try to make sure we have a comfortable amount of throughput sometimes. Like I like it being comfortable because when we really got to go fast for some reason, I like making sure that the team doesn't feel like, "Hey man, we've been trying to go fast for like years. We've never taken our foot off the gas. What do you mean we have to go faster for something urgent? So, I don't like that. I like making sure that it's comfortable, maybe a little challenging. Uh I think a little healthy challenge for throughput's good, but um in terms I want engagement like I want people to be working on interesting challenges. So, that's a big part for me. Uh and then trying to find a line saying no as you move to. Yeah. So, I used to saying yes to everything, but now I physically can't. Yeah, it's like it becomes a trap, right? Um I I was on this I was joking with well my manager brought it up to me today. we were talking about like uh like sort of promotions in in careers in general and he he made the comment that um as you're growing in your career there's going to be situations where there's like a challenge that's put in front of you and like you you say yes to it even though it's a challenge and then you go do it and you basically prove to yourself hey look I I was able to accomplish this thing like it's a you know good success story and he was saying kind gets to this point where you're working through these big challenges in your career where now you have people that come to you and they're like, I know you can't say no to this because you've already proven you've already proven to all of us that you can do it. So, you can't say no because I know you can. Um, and it wasn't about a workload. It was more of like a capability kind of thing. Like, you know, you've already demonstrated that you can solve all kinds of problems. So, like you know, you can't say no to this cuz I know that you're capable. But yeah, saying no um can be on a couple of different fronts, right? One is for load balancing and the other is for growth opportunities for other people. So, okay, we're we're past 8:00 p.m. here. I'm going to wrap up. Um let me get screen sharing and jump through some stuff. Okay, I should really I keep not hooking up this thing. I have this like Elgato stream deck thing and I can press the buttons and it like I could probably turn off and on my lights and stuff. I got to hook it up because it probably helps me shift over things. So, this is my uh let me go here first. Oops, I shouldn't click that. I should click here. This is my newsletter. So, this is the article. I just put it back into the chat. There you go. Um, Substack folks, you are where the newsletter is. That copied the wrong thing. Oh, I copied the background. Sorry, that's a smart little tactic. My if you click on my picture, it brings to the the live stream. So, don't do that. The second link that I just put there is the newsletter article. So, um for folks that are interested, I'm not saying subscribe to the newsletter if you don't want email newsletters, but uh it's like a blog, right? So, if you check it out on Saturday, Sunday or Monday, you'll have a good idea what the live stream's going to be about. And that way, if you're like, "Hey, not interested this week, join anyway." But if you are interested, would love to see you back. It's just at weekly.devleer.ca. So, again, here's where it is. I got my my thumbnails going. I read the comment earlier in the chat where someone said the thumbnail was good. I think that was from uh the architect. Sorry, the architect. I didn't read your comment out, but I didn't forget it was up here. Um, so that's my weekly newsletter. It's generally uh general software engineering topics. I kind of like this one. The next thing is my YouTube channel. So, uh, if you're watching this on YouTube, I mean, you figured it out. That's awesome. Uh, so my YouTube channel is justdev leader. So, I will put that in the chat as well. Um my YouTube channel has primarily C programming tutorials. I am a net developer for life. I love working in C. I build all my stuff in C and so mostly C tutorials. There is a podcast on here as well. Uh so I interview other software engineers, get them to walk through um their career journey. Every every single person I interview, we talk about their career journey. So I think it's really important for other folks to hear it's not just you know born with a keyboard in hand started programming um before you could walk um and now you're a software engineer. I have interviewed many people who don't follow anything close to a traditional path. So recommend checking that out. Uh and then there's the the resume review. So, if you want your resume reviewed, you can see there's some videos. There's a whole playlist on it. I jump over here. Um, it's this one here, developer ré reviews. They're completely free if you want your resume reviewed. I'm not charging for them yet. I would like to keep it that way ideally. Um, we'll see. So, you can check that out if you watch the playlist or watch any video. It'll explain how um you can submit your resume. It's pretty simple. I recommend watching one all the way through at least so you can understand like kind of uh what you're getting yourself into. I don't roast resumes. I refuse to do that. Uh my goal is to help people, which means I will call out all the things that I think you're doing well from my perspective and then the things that I think you can improve. So it's not going to like I don't want to review a resume and just say great work, pat on the back. And I'm not going to roast it either. I will try to give you what I find is helpful. Um, next I have my other YouTube channel. I mentioned at the beginning of the stream. This is Code Commute. Mostly Code Commute is filmed in the car unless I'm in Arizona on vacation inside a hotel room instead of being out in the sun or uh camping out in my room last night making videos. So, or this was on Friday night, I think. Friday, Saturday, it was some night. It was over the weekend. Mostly it's in the car though. Um, so these are mostly like a user or user viewer question submissions where I answer questions on software engineering and career development topics. [Music] Um, they're pretty open-ended. If I don't have anything to go through, usually I'll jump over to Reddit and pick a topic. So, lots of interesting stuff on Reddit. But uh if you're not comfortable writing comments to submit questions, send them into to me on any social media platform. It's generally Dev Leader or Nick Cosantino on LinkedIn. Happy to try and answer. Um Code Commute also does have a podcast and like on Spotify and like Devleer does too. So, I just wanted to mention that that if you go to Spotify that you can find Code Commute, people were asking for Code Commute on Spotify because um the listening like their approach is like I just want to play it in the background, but if you don't have YouTube Premium, you're like stuck with your phone open. It's kind of like annoying. So, they said, "Hey, can you put it on Spotify?" and I said, "Sure, but I do like 12 videos a week and like it's a bit of a pain in the ass to upload. So, I'm slowly catching up. I uploaded 20 you uh 20 videos on the weekend and they're scheduled for the week. I will try to do 20 every weekend if I can to catch up, but I think we're what we're at 80 videos now on on Spotify. And if I jump back here, how many videos videos. I got 187 to go. So, um, and I filmed two more today. So, it's it's taking its time. Uh, let me bra the saint. I'll answer your question in just a moment. I got to get to courses. This is the thing that pays for my YouTube. Um, I I lose a lot of money on YouTube. I the ad revenue not so good. I shouldn't say I lose a lot of money. Video editing definitely costs more than the than the ad revenue pays for. But uh I have courses on dome train primarily they're carb based but um so if you wanted to learn about how to program in C these first two courses take you from scratch and walk you all the way through. And then I've partnered with Ryan Murphy on dome train as well for more like behavioral uh where's behavioral interviews promoting uh as a software engineer career management. There's soft skills down here. So a mix of like this kind of content and my perspective on that in a course format. So hopefully you find that helpful. Bra the saint I will answer your question before I jump over to brand ghost. Um the question is uh do busy managers prefer when the team members reach out just to chat and connect or is it preferred to be left alone? Um the okay this will be situational all the time no matter what. So I I cannot give you a universal answer. I think you probably know that. I would say if I'm if I am busy I would like there to be purpose. So there is nothing wrong with reaching out to have a conversation, but I will tell you I will tell you for me what I don't like, which is hey or just how's it going or like something that's just like when pe I can't tell if someone needs something from me. If people send me hey on anything, it does not get answered. which maybe to some people they might not like that. For other people they've heard of no hello before, but I am a no hello. And if you send me hey or or something that's just like that, I don't answer you. And it's not because I'm trying to be mean or anything like that. If you need something, you will ask and it's totally fine. Once you ask, I'm fine. So Brax is saying when your question is just to reach out to chat like um to chat and to connect totally fine. Um it's more that I I just want to make sure that you understand how I'm prioritizing time. So to give you an example like uh I'll literally just use my schedule for today and tomorrow. For today when I was at work and tomorrow when I'm at work I have to go through connect conversations. And so each one of those is an hourlong meeting that I do with my employees. And between today and tomorrow, I'm like I'm going to be staying up late to work on finishing writing connects. And by the way, I'm not complaining about this. I'm just explaining the the time crunch. I'm staying up late tonight. So I'll probably stay up till 1:00 in the morning writing connects. I will wake up at 7. I will finish writing connects and then I will log on and start having meetings the whole day to go through connects. If if someone is reaching out to have like to have small talk with me, I'm not going to be bothered by it. I just I'm not going to be answering them until I'm free. So, it's not like a I don't feel insulted. I don't feel like angry or anything like that. But if someone was like, "Hey, Nick, how's your weekend?" and like I'm in backtoback meetings and stuff. It's just not getting answered. But if someone said, "Hey, Nick, could you help me with this thing here? I need you to approve this request because it's blocking whatever. If I have a moment, I will go do that." Right? So the the one thing and architect said it exactly. Hey, and then ask the actual question three hours later. If someone says, "Hey, okay, it's I don't My wife has told me that I'm crazy for this, but I know there's no hellers out there, so I'm not the only one, but um when someone just says, "Hey, I find it like a an absurdly ineffective way to communicate asynchronously." What I mean is if we're using chat, right? Email is like a really slow way to to do asynchronous communication. Could you imagine sending an email thread and you say, hey, and you send the email and then the next person or someone on the other end of the email responds, hey, back to you. And then you get their response and you say, I'd like to ask you a question. Send it. And they respond in the email, sure, I would I would be happy to answer your question. Send it back. Like, could you imagine communicating like that? It's nuts. So, when I get a message that says, "Hey, I'm going just ask me." Like, it it it almost feels like uh I don't know, like it's a such an in it's a small thing, but when you stack it up, it's like a really ineffective use of time. So, I just like encouraging people if you want to say, "Hey, please just follow up with the thing that you want help with or that you just want to have small talk, that's totally fine, but then I will prioritize it accordingly." Um, yeah, you're not saying anything with a hey, like you're now putting it all on me. Um, which there's another funny way to frame this. It's like, um, imagine you might, okay, this might resonate with some people. You might have a friend, a friend who anytime they ask you if you're busy, it's to help them with something. And imagine someone says to you, "Hey, are you busy?" And you're like, "I don't I don't know if I'm busy." Like, I might be free, but it's because I haven't figured out what I want to do with my own time yet. So, when you say, "Are you busy?" I don't want to give you an answer yet. Like, tell me why you're asking. Are you free to help me move this weekend? Are you free because I need a ride somewhere? Are you free because I just want to talk to you because you're my friend. Like, just add some context. Um, I think for for me and probably other people that are like into the no hello thing, it's it's a little bit of anxiety because I feel like I can't make decisions properly without the right information. I don't want to jump into a conversation and dedicate full attention to it if I'm not ready to do that. So, um, that's my opinion on it, but it's not a matter of like, you know, no small talk or anything like that. If people want to connect, I really value connection. Um, I just realized I keep like sinking lower and lower into my chair and I'm like, why is my back not working? There we go. I'm not much taller when I sit up, but at least my back works. Um, okay. Jumping back to full screen. This is my final thing. Um, Brand Ghost. Brand Ghost, sorry, flashbang warning. Brand ghost is the social media and content scheduling platform that I build. So, this is what I work on in my call it free time. Um, this is built in ASP.NET Core. It has a NextJS and TypeScript front end. I don't touch that stuff. That's that's for the other people. I focus on the C stuff because it's way better. Uh but yeah, Brand Ghost is what I use for posting all of my social media content. It's been pretty cool. There's been some people that uh you know are either tuning into the live streams or uh I know them through Dev Leader or Code Commute and they're trying it out. Um I think it's great if you want to get started trying to post content online. Um, or for some people that are watching this, if you have a small business and you're like, "Okay, I want to focus on the business. I don't have time to go posting on social media." Um, we have some solutions for you. But the tool is completely free to use if you just want to crossost and schedule. So, um, if you're looking to get started with some type of content creation, even if it's like learning in public, whatever you want to do, uh, try out Brand Ghost. can send me a message. I think you know how to reach me by now. So, send me a message and say, "Hey, I'm trying it out. I want to get started. Don't know what to do." I will try my best to help you. Um, the tier that we have that's free, it's on purpose because we want people to have no barrier to entry to being able to crossost and create content. I firmly believe that like for me if I reflect on dev leader so people a lot of people don't know this I started dev leader in 2013 and when it wasn't going anywhere after a couple months I gave up and I gave up because it was a lot of work to try and post stuff and I was like no one's reading my my uh blog articles I'm like why am I doing this it's so much work I write it and then it's so much work to try sharing it and whatever. I'm like, this is it's not worth it. So, I gave up for 10 years. Could you like I I kicked my own ass over this. If I would have kept with it from 2013, who knows? Maybe maybe I would be the primigen. Maybe I would be him. Uh probably not. But anyway, uh if I had something like Brand Ghost that could have made it so that I could post content with no effort, uh might have been a different story. So that's what I'm building. Uh if you are interested in trying it, let me know. Happy to guide you through it. And the the thing that I always remind people, it's like, yes, there's other tools that do this. Yes, there's Buffer that exists. It's been around for forever. It costs more money than us. Um I rely on Brand Ghost for all of my content creation. If brand ghost went away, I would not be able to create content. So, I need it to work. So, and I need it to work well. So, I actively use it. And if you ever have questions or feedback or anything, then I'm happy to help. And yes, architect 10 years ago. So 2013 I started the reason it's called dev leader is because when I was an a newer engineering manager and starting to realize I need to actually do management type of things not just code. It was by that time it was in 2013 where I was like okay we got to do something a little bit different here. And let me go back to showing my beautiful face there. There's me. Um, I started realizing like I don't know how to be a manager. Like yes, I'm this is what I'm doing. This is my role, but like I don't know what to do. I don't know how to do this effectively. So I said I'm going to write a blog and all of the things I'm learning about engineering management and writing code at a startup in this kind of weird hybrid role, I'm going to write about it. So that's what dev leader is. I'm a developer and I have a leadership position and I want the whole slogan was like bridging the gap between uh like development and leadership. So I gave up on it because it was too much work. Kind of chasing the wrong things too. I'm like no one's, you know, it's been a few months. No one I don't have any like viral blog articles and no one's clicking my stuff like Yeah. So I said, "Okay, I just have to post content every single day." That's why if you follow me on social media, I post every single day, multiple times a day on every platform. Guess how much of that's scheduled manually. I don't post I The only posts I do manually are scheduled posts that are sponsored, which is rare. Everything else is automatically done for me. if you see it on social media. Comments are different. I write comments. The posts are my own. I write my post. I don't post them manually, though. So, that's how I use Brand Ghost. Like I said, if you're interested in trying it out, let me know. Um, if you want to try doing a little bit of content creation, if you want to learn in public or if you have a small business, one of our first users was a real estate agent, and um, I know him. I actually know him from like modified car scene and he's a really good videographer and I was talking to him about it and he was like, "Yeah, like I do real estate and I do the video like walkthroughs and stuff and they're like very cinematic. It's not just like someone with a cell phone like walking through a house and stuff. They're like they feel like little productions." So he was saying that he really understands the value of like using social media for advertising his real estate business. And so he was one of the first users because I reached out to him after and I said, "Hey, I know that you talked about this kind of thing." And I said, "If you change your what your kind of content you're posting, like you if you do more what's called like evergreen or educational content, I said if you use some of that, you can basically have it set up to be automatically posting for you." So he was one of the first users to do it with a real estate business. So, I'm just trying to give you some ideas if you're if you're on the stream or you're watching the recording and you're like, "hm, I do real estate or hm, I have this little side business." Um, you can automate a lot of that. So, happy to help if you have questions, folks. Thank you so much for watching and being here. I appreciate it. Really good discussion today. I'm always nervous. I'm like, is it going to be a quiet group today? You guys crushed it. So, thank you so much and uh I'll see you next time. Take care.