Impact As A Developer: Visibility To Your Manager - Principal Software Engineering Manager AMA

all right folks I am just getting connected we'll see if the streams do the streaming I think I have everything set up I'm going to join my own event on LinkedIn because it's the the one I trust the least um seems like there's always something going wrong for LinkedIn so give me one sec let me get connected on that and and as I'm doing that if folks are joining in if you don't mind if you're in the chat and you're not shy come say hi so I know the chat's working I do appreciate it um I have shared stories before where I have done a live stream and my audio wasn't working for basically the whole thing and someone was like by the way I don't think we can hear you um and I've also had times where people were talking in the chat asking questions and I couldn't see any of it so uh those are not good times for anyone so I do appreciate it if you let me know it's working um if you're on substack welcome sorry that you're down low because substack doesn't support live streaming as a first class thing yet but um I have a topic for today and this comes from code commute so if you're not familiar I've been trying to do a lot of my live streaming content on topics that I have have a little bit more opportunity to kind of think through and I do this by uh essentially in my second YouTube channel which is called code commute I kind of do like a a vlog where I'm driving two and from work or two and from Crossfit or if I don't have much for commuting then I join and Vlog right from here and the idea is that it's sort of it's kind of like these live stream formats where I'm just kind of talking about topics but the major difference is that it's not live right and this is so those give me an opportunity to think through things get some feedback and stuff and then from there I write a newsletter article and then from there I do the live stream on that so I've had some time to kind of process this stuff um oh Tariq sorry uh yes thank you first of all thank you for for rejoining here um I'm glad the advice help I don't have a donation link specifically but I think if you're on YouTube and you have payment stuff hooked up I've seen people do like a like a tip in the chat before uh by all means like I don't expect that I'm honestly I'm just happy to help if that uh has been helpful so makes me feel good if it was of assistance to you so uh I would say if you're interested in that I think tipping in chat I've seen people do it but otherwise please don't feel pressured I you know I appreciate you letting me know that it was helpful uh Adia what is the impact in the AI with the developer job um I think this question here is about like what is the impact of AI on Developer jobs um so if you're C I'll I'll I'll give you an answer but if you're curious to I might as well kind of plug this stuff right at the beginning so that uh you folks have access to it if you give me one moment because I have too many windows open on my computer of course um one sec here I'm just going to give you a link so that you can check it out because I've I've made videos on this kind of stuff before and it might be helpful for you to kind of poke through that but if you check out this YouTube channel you're on LinkedIn um that's not going to come through but one sec let me actually say it in the YouTube sorry the LinkedIn chat so there's code commute and then my main channel is Dev leader I have answered uh these topics sorry this uh LinkedIn is is something special for sure fail to post the comment I can't even I can't even comment on LinkedIn so okay the other channel I'll put it in the chat and so it's code commute and Dev leader those are my two YouTube channels uh I've talked a lot recently about my perspective on AI and software development jobs um the there's a I I'll kind of start by sharing this especially in the past couple days people are recirculating this funny graph that's like Indeed job postings for for software engineers and it shows like over the past four years it's like this you know absolute like curve up and then it Peaks and then it just plummets down to like nothing um and it's like you know from the top we're down like 70% and it's like hold on man this is like the most misleading graph ever that's not to say that like the job Market's not tough like it absolutely is um but it's like a very in my opinion it's a extremely misleading graph so I I need to be careful about the word choice here because I've been hearing people say that uh different social media platforms are completely annihilating impressions for content if you say a particular word if you remember a few years ago the entire world went into like a lockdown kind of situation right there was something happening across the whole planet um I don't know if folks remember that from a few years ago um you might recall that if you're watching other people on social media they're having issues where they say this word and um and then this stuff gets uh you know no visibility so I'm not going to say it but if you were to look at the graph before that time basically jobs had been increasing job postings at least cuz that's what this graph shows that people are recirculating and they're increasing and then there is this lockdown situation like initial panic and then the jobs like Drop like there's a there's a dip and this graph that people are showing starts at the little dip and then it shows it climbing up astronomically you know what was happening during that time there were a lot of people that were basically hiring software developers to scale up things that were in the cloud because all of a sudden we had the entire population of the planet working from home what do you think was happening everything that was online had way more Demand right so you have this curve that goes like complete it's it's a absolute bubble up but this is a bubble it's not going to continue this way and then it starts to rapidly decline so when you see this graph I want you to think about this with a little bit more context because it's absolutely missing from the picture that's being shared but with that said yes it is a difficult time right there are layoffs happening you have um I've talked about this before where the nature of remote work is very interesting in that um I always give this like as a pretty stupid example but I hope it sticks um if imagine I am a software company right and I live in Seattle and I'm like I want to start hiring developers traditionally what would happen is I would put up a job posting and I would say hi like you want you know the senior software engineering job or whatever and like location is in Seattle so you would need to be willing to commute to where I am in seatt Seattle or you would need to be willing to relocate to Seattle right many job positions were like this there were some that were always remote but many were you got to show up so that's going to limit who can apply right it doesn't it doesn't make sense like for example I'm not personally going to apply to a job that's in New York if I have to go there like it's not going to work unless my wife was really like um I really want to go to New York and that's what's going to happen in which case my story changes but that's not what's happening so I would never do that so it doesn't matter how many job postings are in New York doesn't affect me but with remote work if there were job postings in New York and their remote all of a sudden that opens up a ton of opportunity for me and I think that overall this is a good thing like we have opportunities to be able to work remotely I think this is overall very positive posi but the side effect of this is that a job posting goes up now you have so many people that can apply to this job because we don't have a location requirement if it's remote so you have instead of getting like a hundred applicants to a job and that being a lot hey Danny good to see you Danny's a a really big YouTuber and really big on social media and he hosts really good events and Danny once allowed me to speak at one of events and I one of his events and I flew from Seattle to Dallas and talked about C which is super cool Danny's awesome um thanks for being here Danny um so yeah I think we have this situation where there's so many people that can apply to jobs now and then one of the side effects I see with that is that we have this situation where like you get like 2,000 applicants to a job and then it feels basically like a lottery to get selected so I think that what we're seeing right now is a decline from the peak when there was a ton of over hiring to scale up all of the cloud stuff right this is sort of a a reaction to everyone working remotely so I think we're seeing the decline of that I think we have things like AI we have things like people expecting that we're just going to replace all the developers with AI which uh I think is uh bull crap uh I do think that it will absolutely change the landscape of software development because it already is um and I've been hearing interestingly I've been hearing more people say this that like every time we have a big technology shift like this we see that it sort of opens up doors for more people to do this kind of thing like it actually creates more opportunity and not actually less so I'm starting to see more of that show up but um I think there's still a of people that are totally afraid um but like I shared in the chat um there's a couple of uh YouTube channels you can check out there that I have videos on this stuff Tam man what's up um you I don't know if you like because it's like a public chat I don't know if you want to go into the details of that um so I would before saying anything more recommend like sort of thought mindfulness around what what get typed next just a word of caution I'm sorry to hear that um I actually thought that you were looking for work and I didn't even realize that you were currently working so that's actually a lot of news to me but sorry to hear that ad I'm not sure if that answers your question um but I think I was on a bit of a tangent there but I do think that um AI is absolutely uh changing how software development looks looks I don't think that it's replacing developers I think by the time we have ai like literally replacing developers we have ai literally replacing basically the workforce which I don't know what that's going to look like but I don't think that's anytime soon I think it just will fundamentally change how we approach development so that's my thought um today's conversation because there's a theme to all of these is and let me just kind of switch over to this so I can show you what I'm talking about hopefully this works you're going to see my ugly face on this so unfortunately just because I'm going through a ton of burnout um and I was on call I did not get to actually writing this newsletter article um but I will put it into the chat if you want the link um I always give this disclaimer to people if you're uh new to my live streams the newsletter topic sorry the live stream topic is generally based on my newsletter now if you don't want to subscribe to a newsletter please don't I'm not trying to pressure you into that hey Albert on on substack good to see you sorry your substack stream is down here for me because substack doesn't treat it as like a first class streaming thing yet someday maybe um so the newsletter is at weekly. D.C uh it goes out on Saturday mornings it's essentially like you can read it like a Blog article there's a month before it's pay walled so like literally there's no pressure to pay for anything there's no pressure to sign up for anything if you're like hey these live streams are fun I like to show up to them I like asking questions and being part of the conversation if you want to know what's being discussed weekly. deev leader.com didn't write an article for um just like absolutely burnt out uh unfortunately and being on call I didn't have capacity to go write an article but this is something like I said I did a uh video on code commute this actually is a 360 video which I thought was super cool um it's really interesting I have the camera on the couch behind me actually you can see it that's it's back there um actually no it's not that's my that's my vlogging camera this is the 360 camera it's got two of these bad boys on it so and if you're on substack it's down here um but I put that on the top of my car and I drive around so this video that you see on my screen on YouTube you can like literally like turn the camera and stuff like on YouTube and like look around it's super cool um so I'll put that into the chat as well if you want to check that out but this is um um sort of the what's the word like the Catalyst I guess for for this conversation so basically what had happened was someone was uh asking about this scenario where they have their manager and I think in their situation their manager was like new and so they're saying okay like I have a new manager and I think in general people already kind of have some challenges with this so as I go to talk through this let me know if this sounds familiar right if you're like uh I know for promotion I need to make sure that I'm demonstrating impact and when I'm working with my manager having conversations about promotion like I'm feeling like I'm ready or I'm really trying to get promoted you might find that you're going through this like this phase of like how do I bring visibility to that the work I'm doing to the impact I'm having right like how how do I navigate that how do how do I trust that my manager actually knows what what I'm doing um and sometimes people will kind of default into this like well okay we have oneon-one so in order for my manager to know what I'm doing I will have uh 101 conversations where I'm giving a status update like hey um I got this PLL request up I you know finished testing for this feature I and it's like very like granular kind of uh stepbystep of how we're progressing things through like the software development life cycle that will look different wherever you are hey TR on YouTube thanks for being here so people kind of get into this mode and don't get me wrong like that's absolutely better than zero attempt at kind of uh conveying progress and stuff like that uh and I always like as an engineering manager I always say like I want 101's to be sort of the the topics of one-on ones I want to be the focus of what people come to me with I don't want to dictate how a oneon-one goes however I will try to steer things if people only provide status updates I will try to let them know hey by the way like we have other sync meetings I don't need for me I don't need like the granular details if you want to share that that's fine but if I notice that people aren't coming with other things or wanting to talk about career stuff forever bringing it up or like talking about how engaged they are with work I will try to like you know kind of insert some of that like hey by the way like we should have a conversation about you know progression towards Next Level what that looks like so not all managers will do this and that's kind of why I'm bringing it up so you may be in a situation where you're trying to figure out how do I demonstrate impact to my manager so there's a couple things here right one of them is am I even having impact because that's something important to understand and the second part is the visibility and we're going to talk about both of those things and it's probably easier to in my opinion to start with the impact part um we'll talk about visibility and then the other thing I want to talk about too is like it'll be maybe towards the end is like this idea of when it's time for promotions right how does that actually look from a manager's perspective whoa TR thank you so much uh I appreciate that uh that's really awesome um by the way like never an expectation for that so thanks again um the to start off when we're talking about impact because if you're not already having conversations with your manager about about impact that's the thing you need to be doing you'll hear a lot of the time when I'm talking about um career advancement and like sort of like the best tip I can provide you in career advancement is like if you are not having a conversation with your manager about aligning expectations for your career you need to start doing that like it is a foundation of like everything I kind of talk about and this is because I imagine myself as an engineering manager trying to do my job to help people in their career if I weren't having conversations with people it would be like chaos right they would show up at like rewards time or promotion time and I would be like hey by the way like it's either promo or not and it's going to be like they're going to be surprise no matter what more often than not probably let down and there's a lot of things we can be doing in between to make that not happen Dylan good to see you thanks for being back Harry welcome back okay one sec I'm going into my chat this is like the third week in a row now um I think what happens is I end up like telling myself mentally I have okay I'm gonna I'm pulling this up so that I don't lose it because for those of you that don't know I keep telling Harry this is like the third week like hey I'm going to get to your message I am there it's in another window and I can't lose it so boom okay I got it thanks Harry um good to see you back uh is it possible for an Android engineer move to principal I will try to talk about that and I'm just checking on Instagram do you think some governments have a non- remote policy because it opens door to employees from other countries or is it nonsense I think that's absolutely possible um I don't I don't I couldn't tell you which countries or governments but I think that's possible um oh area I don't have to anymore okay uh let me know if there's an update message me on Instagram CU I have the chat open um and like I said I will follow up with whatever you you put next um but to this person on Instagram uh the non- remote policy I think that's absolutely possible um you know I I work at Microsoft we have you know I work with people in China I was on a like on a meeting today with people in China even though it was a holiday for me still dialed in for that um you know I work with people in Europe so I could imagine that some companies maybe have that because of their government but uh I couldn't tell you one because I just don't know I simply don't unfortunately so the is it in the realm of possibility I think so for sure um okay and I can't remember what I was saying so um oh impact so conversation with your manager in terms of aligning expectations in terms of progressing you want to make sure that you are set up with work that is demonstrating impact now at more Junior levels this may not seem as relevant because a lot of the time like if you were brand new um this is like sort of your first position you just started in your career what actually might happen is that they're just trying to see that you can get some momentum going so the impact you're having this isn't meant to to sound minimizing so I apologize but the impact you're having is likely going to be small but they want to start showing consistency like yes you can use the tooling yes you can be effective yes you're sort of starting to operate with a little bit of Independence right like we got to get that that ball rolling we got to get the momentum building so um impact as a very Junior developer might seem like well what impact am I actually having as you become more and more senior this will become more and more important because at some point you you might be doing lots of work but if it's not impactful to the business you're going to find yourself in a situation where it's like that's not actually moving you forward so I think that's why it's extremely important to be talking about impact with your manager in terms of how it aligns with uh promotion expectations the other part that I want to just touch on here uh we got to slow down with the slow down with the the Emojis kick or the the gifs the gifs I got to keep the chat so I can read it um yeah I think if you're in a position where you're working on things and you're like I don't I don't actually understand the impact or the importance of this I always recommend to people on my team like let me know as soon as you feel that way because I can try to offer more context right I don't want people to go working on stuff and being like I don't know why I'm doing this but I was ordered to do it I guess I have to like no I like we might have things we have to focus on uh I gotta I got to block that from the chat unfortunately because I can't read it um I I don't want people to not understand the meaning or the importance or the significance of what they're doing because I think that is really critical so uh let me pause there so we're talking about impact I'm saying that out loud so I don't forget because when I try to jump to other questions sometimes I forget where I left off so um the one question is it possible for an Android engineer to move to principal uh how this will I mean completely depend on where you're working right so if you I'm imagining if you're working at a company that has a lot of mobile development I would hope that companies that you're that you're working at have an IC like individual contributor career track that allow ows you to progress higher and higher this way and so I don't know where you're working and what their their sort of structure is if they don't have it and you're saying okay well I want to be able to progress as an individual contributor to senior and Beyond to like say staff principal or whatever other naming convention that people have you need to understand the sort of the the leveling structure of the different companies right my opinion is that you know regardless of the domain companies will have you know senior and Beyond uh positions for ic's right not every company like I worked at a startup before Microsoft and we at the time like I remember being part of introducing what senior was we didn't have anything beyond that like because we were a growing company we hadn't figured it out so the short answer is yes it's possible how well when we talk about career advancement the reality is that again going back to impact your requirement for impact will be going up and up as your level is going up and up your circle of influence will grow so not only are you working on more impactful things but you are involving others right the scale of who you're working with across teams like organizational impact that becomes an expectation Beyond senior so it might be like hey okay for the product or service I'm working on like I'm doing a big feature and it might be okay I'm doing that and I'm collaborating with another team but when we're starting to go beyond senior which that's kind of like a senior expectation for me you might be leading initiatives that are across other teams not just the scope of your product or service so it's kind of difficult to put into words without more concrete things depending on where you're working so for me at Microsoft I work in the Office 365 live side of things uh we like my team works in the routing plane for Office 365 so I could say hey I'm building with my let me take the perspective of an engineer I'm building a feature for our service and it's going to help um I don't know it's going to help these types of scenarios out or I can improve some efficiency whatever that might mean some context and that's good but like if it's not going to be sort of like a impact that other teams across the organization are going to feel that that impact may not be great enough for principal that becomes the expectation and then it's not a one-time thing now the bar is set you are expected to be doing this type of work so it becomes very interesting because that bar keeps getting set higher and higher so even for myself now at principal level the expectation is not only that I'm doing impactful work that's part of the business priorities there needs to be and this is the other part that we'll be talking about today there needs to be enough visibility across the other leaders in the organization like my impact needs to be great enough that those other leaders can see the impact of my work not like I'm messaging them on teams and being like hey by the way I'm doing this stuff like now you know no like it needs to be visible in terms of that impact being significant enough so the reality is um you know to be able to go to principal level and this definition will change at different companies by the way but at least for my experience the level of impact needs to be significant enough across the organization um random Q Universe uh sir is it possible for me to become a full stack engineer since that I see myself more like a frontend engineer with JavaScript and react J yes sometimes kind of doubt myself to become full stack well what's stopping you right um and this might sound factious and I don't mean for it to sound this way uh but genuinely what's stopping you from uh even while I'm talking on this live stream what's stopping you from going and creating an app from the front end to the back end right like is it that you don't know where to start is it you don't know what to build because these are different questions to answer but like genuinely what is stopping you now if your question is more can I get employed this way I think we have to work backwards from that because the next question would be well what experience do you have working full stack that you would expect someone that says hey like we're willing to take you on as a full stack developer now for entry level full stack most people will be saying well I shouldn't have to have a lot of experience it's entry level and I agree and I get it but with so much competition and I would say if your goal is to become a full stack engineer in terms of employment I would expect because all of your competition will have this some level of experience building things full stack so the question back is and it's a genuine question like I said I'm not trying to to tease you put you down be factious be sarcastic what is stopping you from going to build something that's full stack because I'm saying that will be an expectation now we have to go kind of decompose that I don't know which language to use which Tech to use what to build we can answer those questions or you can answer those questions and if you don't know how to answer those questions you have lots of tools now that are AI based where you could say hey chat GPT I want to try building an application that's full stack here's what I have some experience with can you give me five different suggestions of very simple things to build right and it don't use it to tell you how to build it like line by line copy the code out ask it for ideas get you set in that direction but I think it's absolutely possible to do right go spend some time building things uh LinkedIn user why does why does it do this um tell me LinkedIn tell me who these people are um I'm refreshing LinkedIn on my computer so I can see Melvis um what are the topics to discuss in one-on-one with your manager so um my framing for this is I always leave it open-ended for my directs to discuss with me um I think my recommendation though is that there's a mix of things right it doesn't always like I would recommend make sure you're having career conversations but if you're having one of- ones every week and then you go to your manager okay like am I moving ahead of my career am I moving ahead of my career sometimes one week is not enough to measure anything meaningful so you do need to kind of pivot things but um I have had one ones with people where it's Mo mostly casual if it's a 30 minute one1 I've had topics where someone's just telling me about some life event right and you might say well that's weird like shouldn't it be work related yep and most of them absolutely are but there are times period I odically where we'll focus like someone's telling me an exciting story about their life and they were happy or something going on and for me if people are willing to share things like this that's good for building up trust and respect and that kind of thing it's not an expectation I have of people I don't need I'm not expecting people to tell me about their personal life by any means but um having opportunities like this where people can just talk to me and be open and have a conversation like humans can be really really good for helping people understand like I am also a person right I am just because I'm your manager doesn't mean that like I have some weird you know superpowers or control over you or anything like that I'm also just a person right um sometimes people will be going through something difficult and they'll be giving me an update and they're saying hey just like you know heads up here's what's going on so there's some 101s the like much rarer are kind of like that um most oneon-one I find people like to talk about status updates most of the time it's not my recommendation but if people don't have anything else that's pressing and they don't feel like they need like an to dive into a career conversation I have nothing wrong with the status update I don't need it that's not what I need from people but if that's what makes them feel good to be able to talk about things that's fine like it's not a problem for me beyond that career conversations are very important uh so I would say if you are not having these conversations find a way to bring it up with your manager uh part of that like in addition to Career conversations and what I mean by that is like level setting expectations for what you should be doing to get to that next level beyond that is asking for feedback and you can ask I recommend asking for specific feedback because when you say can you give me feedback on how I'm doing you'll probably most likely get something like you are doing good keep keep doing the good thing or if you're going through a challenging time your manager might say like hey like things are still things are still kind of the same like it's all it's almost like you're getting a crappy answer it's it's almost what you're expecting which it's kind of crap um so I would say ask for specific feedback say hey by the way like you know for this project I was working on or in this meeting where I was presenting on stuff how do you think I did or depending on the working relationship with your manager hey I had that code riew up or I did that design doc like how did you think that was presented or how did you think that we navigated that like do you have any specific feedback for me on what I could have done better in the design dog so I think those are good opportunities um something that I think people should do more is and I don't know if people realize this like as a as an engineering manager like I got to deal with like I say deal like that's a like it's a problem um one of my responsibilities let me say it this way is helping people with people challenges so if you are having friction with a colleague or with a different team or whatever it happens to be like I am there to support you I want to help guide you through things right I've I've literally helped two people uh on teams and I won't go into details about it but I've had people where they're having they're both having challenges with the other person and I have coached them both independently so it kind of puts me in a weird spot but I coach them independently and then they come together and they hash things out between themselves but they're using me as a sounding board right so you know I would say in my opinion the way to frame that is like I see the role of an engineering manager as a support role and how do you need support talk to your manager about that stuff so that's my advice there um you guys got a lot of questions today this is awesome um Muhammad says uh oh sorry it's not Muhammad is it mhammad I'm not sure if I I'm pronouncing that properly I apologize as an engineering manager is it a must to be involved in coding if yes how many percent this varies absolutely everywhere um my experience before Microsoft was I was what was called a technical manager at the last company I would do uh you know my time was split between coding building features and managing teams uh I would say this is not a sustainable thing if you continue to grow your teams so if you are continuing down an engineering manager path generally that involves increasing your surface area of impact through people and the more that you do that the less time you have writing code uh people can argue this all they want that's totally fine you might have different experiences as an engineering manager um but I would say that people underestimate how much time people leadership needs heavily underestimate it and if you are trying to put more and more time into coding you are either working more and more hours or you are taking more and more time away from your employees that need people leadership and even really really really good Engineers need people leadership so when I answer this question how much coding should an engineering manager do it's extremely subjective based on the scenario so I don't do any coding at work anymore for the last almost five years minimal coding but I program in C every single day I was my my day off today Us holiday I was coding brand ghost for most of the day I was building stuff in asp.net core the whole day so I still code outside of work I like remaining technical that means that if my Engineers need me to get technical with them then I can have that conversation my opinion on how technical an engineering manager needs to be is enough to be able to have meaningful conversations with the team I have absolutely had leaders that were not technical that did amazing because we could still have proper conversations and meet each other at the right level of technical depth right I could I could uplevel things to their understanding so they could get the impact of it or the challenges and they could be open with me and be like I don't get it like explain it a different way right and we could work super well together one of my best leaders I've ever had was like that ever you could be a super technical manager right like there's all these different levels but in terms of how much coding should an engineering manager do this is going to be the same answer I give all the time ask your manager what the expectations are right because if I were doing my previous role and I didn't get clarity on the expectations and I just like stopped coding my manager might be like hi uh what's going on because that would be an expectation so it will be very very specific to the um sort of the employment opportunity bra good to see you uh I feel like the back end is so mystify for front and devs it's really not that bad when you go out and build something yeah sorry I know I'm kind of going back in the chat so apologize for that I feel a similar way moving from Full stack to an AI Dev and built an AI phone agent this weekend awesome that's cool it was hard and fun great yeah but this is exactly it right so um when people are saying is it possible like can I do this like is there like this is basically people are saying this is a direction I would like to go and they're almost asking for permission to do it and um there's literally nothing stopping you from as far as I know nothing stopping you from trying to go build these things or try out technology right again if the question is how do I go from right now to being employed doing that I would say your first step is go play around with the technology and hopefully there's nothing stopping you from at least exploring chaggie says I follow your advice and was more focused to improve myself speaking English a lot and learning uh more deep in the documentation thanks a lot awesome glad to hear that thanks for being here Rax has a question I'm potentially moving into a role that doesn't sorry chat just rolled uh moving into a role that doesn't have rigid deadlines how do I gather proper expectations I would say set them um even if they're contrived or whatever like set um lines in the sand right um this I'm going to kind of share this from my experience right um I think one thing I've noticed is that there are some projects that I've worked on over the past five years at Microsoft just under five years and some things absolutely have deadlines on them like I'm working on a extremely large project right now cross team and we got deadlines and we got to meet them and it's really important but I've worked on other things where it's open-ended it's like we got to go build this and like okay like start building right make sure you're asking for clarity as we're going um and the reality is like what will happen if we don't set some type of Line in the Sand is that uh I might have this wrong I think it's called Parkinson's law someone please in the chat correct me if I'm wrong on this I think it's called Parkinson's law but the idea is like we will take whatever time we set we will fill that time trying to accomplish the work right so kind of you know contrived example here if I said hey I need you to go build this UI feature and you say how long should I take on that and I say two weeks you will take the full two weeks to go build that but if instead I said we need that UI feature done today you might go holy Nick I don't if that's possible but I would say well what can you do in a day and you would try to find a way to make that possible you might have very different solutions in the end you might have different quality you might have different architexture you might have a different look and feel like it would be completely different but the reality is we will do work that fits the time allotment so if you are in this position where you're saying there aren't really rigid deadlines what I would recommend is try to communicate some deadline so as an example we'll use the same one I just said right so if had come to me and said hey Nick I'm working on this new feature like there isn't a deadline for it though um and then you know bra maybe would say but I'm thinking that it might take me approximately two weeks to do like I feel pretty confident in two weeks and then I would say okay that sounds good what do you think that you would have done in two weeks and then we would discuss the details of that a little bit more and you might say oh well it would be the code would be done in 2 weeks I would still need to have it reviewed and then we have to do some level of testing okay so you think two weeks to get that part and then how much more time do you think on top of that oh well maybe another week of like testing it with some of the other infrastructure or whatever but basically by the third week I would feel very confident it's it's all done and and ready in production okay cool there was no deadline on it but now we're saying we got a milestone that's at 2 weeks and another Milestone at at 3 weeks from from now great now we start on that and then what I would be wanting from bra in this situation is that as we're progressing on that timeline there was no deadline right we kind of just hashed out a bit of a plan if Brax is deviating from that I'm not going to say oh you promised me two weeks no too bad or it's you know the it's now the code is done and he's testing it it's supposed to get depra by that third week and I'm like time tick in you better get it done like that's not how I would approach that it would be if Brax came to me and said hey by the way we hit a bit of a you know a bit of a an obstacle and I think it's going to push push us a couple days I would just expect that he's telling me that stuff as soon as he has awareness of it because if there aren't rigid deadlines if we started talking about some of them maybe some other projects are going to start taking dependencies on this right I would want to go communicate that other stakeholders and say by the way we're we're thinking this is going to be moved out so I do recommend trying to set some type of deadline and then basically keep things keep stakeholders up to date I think that when you don't have deadlines can be very dependent on the person but I would say for the majority of people it's too easy to kind of like I don't want to say Coast it's not the right word but you're removing a ridiculously like valuable con restraint because bra might say well I want to go build the most perfect feature there was no deadline I'm going to take six months to do it right the time constraint is a very valuable one for us to think about from an engineering perspective what are we actually trying to get done here so I do recommend leaning into that I hope that helps bra let me know if you have any other questions on it though uh Li Lino XS or linuxes um what are effective ways to tie feature development to business impact when leadership pushes for features based on intuition rather than metrics my current company kind of heading that direction oh never mind you just answer okay cool let me know if you have uh if you want that clarified in a different way um like I said I'm kind of catching up on the chat so I apologize um Harry says yeah definitely don't ask for feedback every week learn that in an internship nothing new came up but keep up the good work yeah so and then you feel like well my manager sucks like I'm not getting feedback and it's like yeah because when you go week to week it's like the that amount of time to measure is like it might be too small and for some people you might have hit a milestone right during between your 101s and you're like hey this would be a good opportunity to ask for feedback on this thing so then get some specific feedback so yeah just don't uh you know every one-on-one is not uh that opportunity so okay um bean bag welcome welcome to the live stream I think you were on code commute asking questions I think um Wilden how about CTO I'm not sure what the question was in respect to oh for coding depends on um uh life cycle in my opinion life life cycle of the company so if you're a brand new company like yeah I would expect the CTO coding um I will share from my experience that when I was at a startup it was around seven people when I started there it was around or over 250 when I left there in the eth year if the CTO was coding it was a problem and I mean this with love because both the CTO and the CEO I've said this before they will be people that I have in my life for forever always you know they change my life for forever for the better and the CTO uh I mean both of them but the CTO because we're talking about CTO here um his heart was always in the right place always and he was always uh like acting as as a user proxy like he is he was so we were doing digital forensics so he was someone that had to use this type of tooling had to to l Lally go help with these types of crimes where we were using tools like this that's why he started building it and I really feel that like anytime he was like this is something we have to go build like he it was almost always from my perspective like it wasn't going to be a Miss he was so in tune with what users needed one of the challenges was that as a company was scaling and we were no longer just a small startup where hey it's a it's a random Wednesday and we're trying to crank out features but you need us to Pivot for this other thing no problem we'll stay up till 5 in the morning building it because it's awesome and we're all just at a startup at some point it doesn't work that way and it's because there's so many other parts to the business that are moving along so no we can't just go pivot completely because now we have other stakeholders like we can't just go ship this there's got to be documentation there needs to be marketing there needs to be the sales people updated what about the trainers like there are so many other parts to the organization that get impacted from a new product so sometimes what would happen is the CTO would be like okay I get it but like I think I can build it now I will also say he and I again I mean this I I'm I could say this to his face if he were in the room with me I would say you are not the strongest developer and he would say I know but he could absolutely build and he could make it work you might say I wouldn't have written the code like that and he would say I know um but it works right and so he would sometimes go build prototypes of things right and I would say there was a point that was shortly after we started where it was like please stop coding not because we hate your code or we think you have the worst code but stop coding because that's not what we're expecting of you and you're actually creating more friction or more overhead if you need things built you have an entire engineering organization to back you up so if you find that you need to be going to build things if that's what you find that you need to be going to do I would say that you're not leveraging your engineering organization effectively fix that you think this other protot type thing is the most important or you keep having these new ideas where prototypes are the most important this is why we ended up spinning off a prototyping team that was a team that I was about to start leading before I left and my my successor is the director of that team or or was I'm not sure currently but I believe is still the director of that team which is awesome right like we solved this sort of or I want to say solved I think that was the goal is to kind of addressed this thing where we can avoid this so that's my perspective on how much uh coding CTO should do early stages for sure I would say probably a lot of coding um my thoughts on Microsoft Studio I don't even know what Microsoft Studio is what's Microsoft Studio Visual Studio I'm or because I think m moft studio is like a building so my apologies uh Romeo Sweeney I'm not sure if you were asking about visual studio if it's Visual Studio I love it uh I'm going to be super biased though because I'm a net developer I've been programming in c for uh since 2012 no 2007 yeah I graduated graduated in 2012 I started building in C in 2007 however many years that is too many years um so I got to block this person get out of here um but yeah if it's Visual Studio as a net developer like that's that's what I use um Visual Studio code I'm not a huge fan of only because I rely on visual studio so much so visual studio code feels like just a little bit unfamiliar to me so I only use Visual Studio code if I'm doing some frontend development which if you watch my other YouTube channel you would know I don't do a ton of frontend development cuz I don't like it um but yeah that's my thoughts if you're talking about Visual Studio Okay so we've been talking about impact a lot maybe let's pivot a little bit because I wanted to talk specifically about this situation that um and we're kind of I'm trying to live stream for around an hour if it goes a little over that's fine I think the other two I've done last two were almost 2 hours and I want to I'm going to cut it a little bit shorter than that the um one of the things that came up just to switch back because I see there's other viewers and stuff on here we're talking about um this it's not a newsletter article because I I didn't end up writing one this weekend but this live stream is based on this video here which is on code commute which is my Vlog Channel and basically what the person was asking was when it comes to impact and visibility talking about promotions and things like that they were saying I have a new manager so they've been on a team a new manager has come in and they're going how the heck am I supposed to be able to explain my impact when my manager is brand new to what we're doing which I think is a really interesting question um so you know if you think about a scenario where your manager is kind of like the expert in the domain they've been on the team for a long time especially compared to you let's say they probably know what's up right like they're in tune with like the business needs they're in tune with what your team's responsibilities and Charter has been like again they just know what's going on or they should because they've been in that position for a while I just need some water one sec um so what do you do if you have a new manager so I found myself in this situation before actually a couple of times in my career um early on in my career when I found myself in the situation um this is kind of like this is at the startup that I was at so I worked at Magnet forensics for eight years so when we had new management coming in over me um it is water what do you mean it's got flavor and caffeine powder in it but it's water not lying about it this this isn't water this is a seven up maybe seven up should sponsor my my Channel please so I can pay the editor um it's water though um early in my career I think I was doing so much that it would be really difficult to um to kind of not see the impact because I was just everywhere and I'm not recommending that as a strategy that's just kind of what happened like I was working many many many hours and then as a result I was sort of Reaching Across different teams I was managing my team and then I had built parts of the other Co like the codebase for the other teams so I was always kind of jumping around trying to help and as a result of that you would kind of just see me being everywhere it was almost unavoidable but that's not like like I certainly can't do that at Microsoft so like I'm not going to advise people hey if you have a new manager and you want to make sure that your impact is being visible just go do everything like that's not it's not a strategy so when I've experienced this at Microsoft because the previous team I was on when I got hired in at Microsoft my manager switched to another team around a year after maybe a little longer I can't recall now um maybe it was two years after or something but anyway he switched to another team and um that meant that I had a period where I didn't have a manager like directly my skip level was the person I started reporting to and so and for the record my manager who switched teams awesome guy great manager my skip level awesome guy great manager great skip level manager and um but I felt like during that period I lost a lot of visibility right you might think like okay well I've shortened like there's one less person in between and I get a lot of visibility to my skip level manager but I think the reality is and again I I'm not this is not me talking poorly about him I think he's a he's a great leader I think in that situation though he's already overseeing so many things and he's trying to make sure that he can get a manager to fill back in so I don't think that there was a lot of opportunity to be like hey Nick like let me talk about your career development which is fine I get it like it kind of this is one of those things where I'm like that sucks for me because I have this period of time where I don't get that kind of uh you know feedback mechanism or working relationship with a man manager so that sucked but I also completely understand why that would be the case and I don't hold it against my skip because what I could have and should have done if I really cared was gone to my Skip and tried making a case or brought visibility in everything I was doing a lot more intentionally fortunately my skip level has a very good understanding of what that domain was so would not be the same challenge as the next part which is is when my skip level did hire in an engineering manager over me now this new engineering manager that was brought in I thought she was absolutely awesome uh she asked a lot of really good questions right away like trying to learn and understand the platform that we had pardon me um but the reality is in the beginning like anyone you will not have the experience in the area and that's literally expected right if you're brand new to something especially at the scale we're at it's just going to take you time to learn and understand those things so this video that I was talking about that I did a vlog on to answer someone's question is really about well in this situation where your manager doesn't have the domain expertise they are new how do you navigate that so what I was doing was making sure that I was not only bringing visibility to my own work and in my case as a manager what the team is doing because that's another thing I should mention um again when it's a live stream I don't know the exact audience right this is also recorded I don't know who's watching this later I realize most people that are watching this are going to be software Engineers uh I think my demographics show that it's more Junior developers or aspiring developers which is great as an engineering manager for me to demonstrate impact is different than individuals because I am not coding those features right It's Kind of a Funny situation where it's like hey like here's what I was the projects I was part of and it's like okay well what lines did you code and I'm like I didn't code any of it okay so what did you actually do okay well it just looks different when I have to explain impact but what I was doing with my manager that was new was I would regularly try to make sure that she understood the areas that we were working on and then the next part which I think in my opinion is the most critical in this situation is educating but you need both together so she like I said she was really good at asking lots of questions in the beginning not afraid to be like I don't know what this is tell me about it how does this part of the system work what is our working relationship like with this other team like what parts do they own or what do we own so she did such a good job about trying to break down the system to understand like our responsibilities our surface area and our interaction so absolutely applaud her for that because it felt like she ramped up quite quickly which is great right this is this is awesome so what I was trying to do was educate her on the parts that I had knowledge on that I was responsible for and how they tied back to existing business initiatives so it's not just hey we're keeping busy doing this stuff here's my status update right like look we're busy it was no not only are we busy doing this stuff but here is why that's important to the business so as an example the team that I was responsible for had a charter for reducing sort of uh machine time that's being wasted it's like an efficiency kind of thing so there's not only efficiency in terms of just like if a if a computer is not doing valuable work then it's inefficient but also uh from the perspective of agility we need things to go faster right so the efficiency improves our ability to be agile in these processes so that's my team's Charter so I would need to explain to her here's why these things have an impact right here's this work stream we're doing here's the effect of it but that's important to the business because that's going to save us millions of dollars right so the important part to abstract from this in this conversation is like number one I think it's important to help educate your new manager if you are brand new it can be very challenging right if you're also a junior developer and your manager's new you might be like I don't even know what I'm doing how am I supposed to educate my manager uh in which case purely bringing visibility about your work I think is important but if you're someone who is more senior and does have experience you might be junior but you have some of the domain expertise from being on the team for a little bit being able to educate your manager as they're on boarding I think is helpful so that's part one part two is how you're communicating this stuff this is why if you watch some of my other content or read some of my other content you'll hear me talking about soft skills a ton and this is a great opportunity to remind people soft skills for software engineers are incredibly important if you think about some of the questions that were already asked in chat I'm going to scroll back up just do a little mini inventory on this stuff right impact of AI with Developer jobs um let me keep going Android engineer to move to principal full stack engineer we did have some that were like topics to discuss on one-on ones we had one that was how much should engineering man be coding um we talked about approaching projects and stuff we talked about deadlines okay so there's a couple that we're not just coding which I think is good um did I oh no we talked about that one briefly okay so point is I think a lot of the time we spend as software developers talking about technical things and I get it because it's a technical role but I I think we often Overlook the importance of soft skills so in this context what I'm trying to remind folks of is that in this context for being able to help educate my new manager right as she's on boarding I need her to get up to speed so she can be effective in her role because that's going to help me she can support me effectively she can also try to support me in my career growth effectively I'll touch on this in just a moment but the soft skills involved there are upleveling context right I mentioned that one of the things that I focused on as an engineering manager is I try to remain technical so that I can work more closely with my Engineers really understand what's going on then from there I take my level of understanding and I don't expect my manager to go that deep they're managing me and other teams at some point it becomes infeasible for everyone to just keep the whole code base in their head right uh and manage people it doesn't really work that well it's possible but it's rare so I need to uplevel what I'm saying so that my manager can get the best value out of that she doesn't need to understand the code she needs to understand the parts of the system and how they're tying to the business objectives that requires soft skills and communication right I need to understand my audience and communicate these things effectively if you are not thinking about your soft skills as you are trying to advance as a software engineer this is a missed opportunity you may find that as you're progressing as a software engineer if you're neglecting these types of things like not being sort of conscious that this is important to do you may find that you reach a point where you're you know you're going from mid-level to senior let's say and you're like why does this feel like it's challenging right it could be many reasons but sometimes I I find that people aren't realizing that their their soft skills their ability to collaborate with other people like these start to be the things that are holding them back so I just wanted to mention don't neglect these things now what I was just mentioning there in my little Spiel was about trying to help my manager my new manager get to a point where she understands what's going on so she can support me and then she can help me you know advance in my career as well because one of the roles as a manager should be to help their employees do their best work possible and grow in their career it's really difficult for me to expect my manager to help me grow in my career if they're still trying to figure out the impact I'm having if they don't understand it and I I say that as a manager right that's why when I'm new to a team I need to ramp up as fast as possible so I can you know take that responsibility for my team so the reason that this is even more important the more senior you are is because and I said I was going to touch on this earlier in the Stream at some point it's not just your manager that's putting you up for promotion I mean they do that they're the ones that have to do it but they don't have the final say at some point this usually it's going to be different everywhere but from how I've seen this work the more senority you have the higher your level your manager still puts you up for promotion but there's going to be other people involved in that decision-making process so could you imagine my manager knows if she wants to put me up for promotion she knows that there are going to be other people that are part of that decision making the other people aren't going to put me up for promotion she has to do it but the other people will be part of that conversation could you imagine if I was saying to my manager I think I'm ready I think I'm ready you know uh I've done really valuable work and she's if she doesn't understand the impact how the heck would I expect her to feel confident having a conversation with her peers or people that are above her peers that are going to try and sign off on my promotion she's not going to feel comfortable doing that so again this is why it's really important to be educating if they're new as well as trying to make sure that you are explaining your impact and we have to uplevel that message so that's mostly it because the visibility topic that I said I wanted to mention is essentially baked into that so um at this point in the Stream is where I sign off and do my terrible sales pitches um but with that said if folks have other questions as I'm doing that this is the perfect time to drop them in the chat so please go ahead and do that uh I will start by jumping over to this view um so this is where I was saying if you want to check out the newsletters right the newsletters are generally the topics for these live streams so if you enjoyed this and you want to come back next week or in the future at the same time if you want to know what the topic is it's generous what's going to be the most recent newsletter I'll put it back into the chat I said this at the beginning if you're like Nick I think newsletters are dumb I don't want you to email me that's totally cool you don't have to subscribe you can check it out if you go to the website you can just check out the article and see if it's interesting to you and that way you can join the live stream and know what's up so uh that's the newsletter uh there is still time for this which is a bunch of courses it's a bundle of them they're literally free I'm not selling you anything um this expires at the end of the month so I'll put this into the chat as well so there's two courses here for learning C uh I've been like I said earlier in the Stream I've been programming in c since 2007 and been trying to help other people learn CP along the way uh if you don't know who Nick chapsas is he is one of the biggest YouTubers for C developers so uh I was fortunate enough to be able to do the getting started in Deep dive courses for his platform which is super cool um and for February they're free for life so check him out it's 11 and a half hours this first one teaches you even if you have zero programming experience this first one will kind of start you off from from scratch so uh I recommend it I might be a little bit biased but it's literally free there's no strings attached to it it's not like hey it's free but we're going to charge you money sneakily no it's free um go watch it would love for you to learn C for free um and then otherwise I have two YouTube channels depending on how you got here you might know some of them uh Dev leader is my main Channel um it's been put in the chat I will drop it in again Dev leader is the channel where I have mostly C programming tutorials they are fully edited so you don't have me rambling like this but uh there's a podcast on here where I interview other software developers if you are someone who's maybe not taking a traditional path in in the terms of like going to college or university I've interviewed plenty of people who've taken many different paths um which is super cool um you'll hear different experiences this looks like it's at a date why does it say this live stream is coming up there we go that's way better um so the other thing I wanted to mention is that I've started doing resumé reviews on this channel I have a little bit of a backlog to get through if you check out the resume review videos they will tell you how to submit a resume if you want yours reviewed and I will add it to the queue there is no fee uh if this starts a create an enormous backlog I will eventually move the resum reviews to members only on YouTube now it's not like that so take advantage of it if you want your resume reviewed uh and then the other thing that I'll mention is that code commute is the other YouTube channel uh I know some people are here from code commute so thanks for joining code commute is my Vlog Channel usually you can see like I'm in the same spot um but these ones are only when I'm not doing a bunch of commuting if we scroll down a little bit lower when I'm going to to the office into CrossFit which is most of the other videos up until the past couple weeks like these ones it's uh I basically do something like this without the chat it's not a live stream but I Vlog and I talk about software engineering topics so if you have questions that you want answered um there's people that have joined this live stream that have asked questions they've either sent them into me so again depending on how you got here look for Dev leader on social media send me a message uh and I will try to make a video about your topic if you send me a message I'll keep it Anonymous if you comment on the YouTube channel it's already public so I'm not hiding you if you comment but uh yeah I make these Vlog entries and try to help people and then otherwise depending on how diverse the audience is brand ghost is the SAS that I am building on the side and so if you are coming to this live stream from my social media um everything that you see that's posted on social media is posted through brand ghost for substack people this is important for you because if you're on substack and you're an author or you want to be an author you want to create content on social media uh brand ghost is 100% free to schedule and cross poost um if you're on Instagram right now I apologize because you get a vertical video and if you're on substack you can't see anything I'm sharing but it's brand ghost. I it's 100% free to cross poost and schedule the paid for features essentially allow me to have recurring content so like I said if you're seeing any content that I have on social media I don't post it directly to social media I post it through brand ghost and then it goes out across all these platforms automatically for me um my one anecdote that I love to share is that I took a vacation with my wife to Hawaii in October of last year something like that and I had brand ghost do 150 plus social media posts for me across platforms in that week I did nothing that content is all content that I've created ahead of time so I wrote it it's me but I didn't have to schedule a single post I just created the content and brand ghost and this is in the paid for feature list brand ghost automatically will go schedule that out for me so um this is how I am able to create the content that I create without burning out from content creation I'm now able to do over 10 YouTube videos a week I'm still not writing blog articles right now because I'm spending that time coding brand ghost but um I can maintain my full-time job I can build brand ghost after hours and still create content because brand ghost posts the content for me so if you're interested in checking that out you can do so right here with this link like I said boom it be free if you want to do crossposting and scheduling but I don't see any other questions in the chat folks so I wanted to say thanks for being here um the best way to have an idea of what could be discussed um I got a too many people advertising on some of these these platforms if you have uh if you want to see what's going to be potentially discussed code commute is sort of where uh the inspiration coming from and like I said if you have questions that you want answered on that channel leave a comment on the YouTube videos um on code commute and I will try to answer them thanks for being here and I hope to see you next Monday at 7 p.m Pacific so that's the same time until then take care and