Radical Accountability vs Blame Culture - Principal Software Engineering Manager AMA

just waiting on Instagram because it's always the last thing to actually work and there we go it is good to go awesome uh yeah folks if you're joining uh say hi in the chat let me know it's working it's always helpful and uh we'll get started here so if you're new to the live streams the live streams that I do at this time uh which used to be at 900 p.m. PST I'm trying to do them at 700 p.m. PST these are based on newsletter articles that I put out and then I like to chat through them and get people's perspective and kind of uh elaborate on them a little bit further so we will be going over my last newsletter article I'll put that into the chat this one is called uh radical accountability versus blame culture so I'll put that into here if you have not read it yet just so you can check it out if you are interested in general about the the topics that come up in the live streams these uh these live streams are almost always based on my newsletter article so you're welcome to check those out if not you can just tune in when I do them live and that's cool too but if you are sort of catching this at an off time uh don't worry because uh they're all recorded they're available on YouTube you can watch these on any platform you want but uh yeah they're available on YouTube if you want to check them out after so again just for folks as you're joining uh let me know if you're in the chat let me know what's working uh I do appreciate that and I'm just going to refresh chat as well on my side um hey there on Instagram uh I am at Microsoft yes I am a principal engineering manager on the uh Office 365 side of Microsoft so the team that I work on is uh the one of the teams that's kind of responsible for doing routing sorry there's a huge dog hair on my microphone um so we are responsible for uh essentially making sure requests go between services and that anyone making requests from the outside of Microsoft into the Office 365 Services as routed to the proper service that's running so that's the team that I am currently on at Microsoft prior to that I worked on uh the deployment team and uh so I managed part of the deployment team because there's a bunch of stuff there and we were responsible for deploying the hundreds of services that make up office 3 65 to the machines around the planet so that's uh a bit about me but yes uh I'm at Microsoft um this conversation is going to be about radical accountability and blame culture and I wanted to start off by kind of uh saying thanks to someone that reached out to me on social media and they were they were talking to me about this uh basically this feeling of blame that was happening at at their workplace and and they were were curious if this was like a normal thing or my perspective on it and I guess the reality is like I want to say unfortunately it's probably more normal than it should be this idea of having like a blame culture and I I think and I hope that a lot of places are moving away from this because it's pretty terrible overall um blame doesn't really get you very far and I think some people use it in terms of fear like basically if we can make sure that people are kept in order through fear then you know then they'll do they'll do the right things but it almost always backfires it creates a pretty terrible working environment so um they had reached out to me and they were asking about this and I said hey you know what like um this is probably something I can write about and then I can stream about it as well so um you know no idea if the individual will be able to make it for the live that's totally cool if they can't uh they know it's recorded as well so uh this is one of those things where I'm like I know it will help at least one person so I'm very happy to do it and I'm hopeful that if other people are going through this kind of thing where they're experiencing a culture of blame at work that they have some ideas for how to navigate that um and for other folks maybe you are someone who has a you know a bit of say and a bit of authority and how things are kind of going at the workplace and I just want this to be a reminder for those individuals too that there are there are significantly better ways to approach thing other to approach things other than than blame culture so I figured this time um usually I don't do this but I when I wrote my article I actually wrote like a bit of a wrote a story and it's just to to provide some framing if you're not used to this kind of thing I wanted to provide some framing so that we could go through that um then when we go to talk about what blame culture is and what I've kind of coined as radical accountability I have no idea if I made that up I know there's radical cander I kind of stole the radical part from radical cander but I haven't heard anyone else say radical accountability so I figured I would i' put that together and um if it sticks for people and they like it that's great if not at least you'll know what I'm talking about so with that said before I switch over and start kind of sharing my screen and reading the first part of the story here I just wanted to remind folks that please use the chat if you have questions about literally anything no math questions please I'm pretty bad at math um but I'm happy to answer questions in chat uh I always let people know on the streams like my goal is to engage and Converse with you so if there's stuff I can answer I would rather be doing that than than just kind of I don't know like talking at you if I I I always say if I wanted to do that I could just make my Youtube videos instead but this is an opportunity where we can kind of chat back and forth so um with that said let me flip this over to full screen mode um for folks on Instagram I apologize because it might not fit um it'll probably clip off the edges so I'm really sorry but this is kind of what I got to work with so um I'm going to read it out and uh we'll see how it goes so this uh this article was Radical accountability versus blame culture and the the story is kind of under this section called it's your fault so you've been working on a feature now for 3 weeks and you've finally gotten the necessary sign off on your PR to get things pushed to production I think probably uh a bunch of us have felt this way you're working on something for a while and you finally have sign off um Instagram handle is I'll put it in the chat dev. leer uh that is Instagram so this feature has been challenging because you had to make sure you could work with the product owner to understand the requirements more clearly they seemed quite ambiguous to start with again pretty typical thing right so you're starting a project you're kind of not really sure what to do I got to block this uh person in the chat for doing whatever they're doing and so you know you're starting to work on something and immediately you're like hey I'm not really familiar with this but like that's cool like you know it's going to happen so you're taking the necessary steps to go talk with the product owner and I've kind of uh alluded to the fact that at the current state you know we're fast forward in a little bit but it's taken a few weeks to kind of get to the point of sign off so um things became more challenging when the two senior Engineers on the team had a originally or originally had some conflicting advice for you during some of the early design phase so you done your best to get a quick design dock together to outline how you plan to integrate the feature into the existing code and you even had the product owner check out the dock before you got technical feedback so the picture that I'm trying to paint here is that you know you as the person in this story you are taking what I would probably call like some good steps to make sure that you could get some feature integrated right clarifying requirements you're putting a brief design dock together uh whatever that happens to look like where you're working at you're getting the product owner to go yep that makes sense to me like I agree with that and then you're actually going to go work with more senior Engineers to make sure that they understand what's going on in the design dock so after settling on the right approach with the more senior Engineers you worked on coding up your solution and so you're going through this process whatever that looks like whatever you're building but you're putting it together and then you showed a working version of the feature in the product to the product owner and they agreed it looked good to go so again you're throughout this process you are working with your product owner um depending where you're working this might be uh maybe you have QA or you have testers uh I'm just using product owner as a generalization here as someone that can sort of help direct you on what the expectation is and then also give you some of that feedback that from their perspective this is solving what the the requirement is okay so they're they're agreeing it's good to go and you also had the the engineers sign off on things but um you know the poll request is going to be a bit of a pain in the butt because you need to get the senior Engineers to sign off right so after a few days of making adjustments based on their their feedback it's time to merge the pull request into deploy a great way to finish a Monday so so far in this story we've gone through the process again I think all of all good steps and trying to make sure you have alignment getting other people involved especially if you have more senior Engineers to work with and they can give you some guidance you can make adjustments based on their feedback all I think great steps so that's wrapping up on a Monday and then I leave a couple of days in between I say Wednesday morning you log and to continue working through the requirements of the next feature but your messenger dings as soon as you're online and of course it's your manager this is exactly what you want to have first thing in the morning someone like me coming to bother you right um and the message says hey we need you to get on this incident Bridge right now workflows for users are completely broken and we've traced it back to your change that's an exciting message right everyone loves receiving something like that when they're getting online in the morning so I said not a great way to start a Wednesday damn it so you get onto this bridge and for people not familiar with the terminology just a like a group call um might have different connotation depending on where you're working at but it's just people on a you know collaborative call trying to diagnose and mitigate what's going on so on the bridge one of the senior Engineers from your team explains that they've already rolled back your change to mitigate the customer issues so uh basically you're kind of tuning into this a little bit late not necessarily your fault but like hey you're on there now and you've been told look was your problem we already got it rolled back okay then they ask you and this is on a group call with other people so not just the senior Engineers it's going to have your manager you other stakeholders that were involved and they say why didn't you flight this change out didn't you think about the fact that you could break our product for all these users okay so you have this senior engineer one of the people that worked on your code riew and they looked at your design doc and they're basically calling out in front of the whole group like he didn't flight this thing and for folks that are not familiar with the terminology of flighting because I realize depending on the audience I have flighting is just the ability to have a controlled way to turn on feature sets for a different scope of users so you could flight things out and have it off by default and this could go everywhere and no one will see it and then you could turn on the flight and you could say literally for like one user over here or you might have heard of like AB testing where you could turn it on for like 50% of a particular population of users that kind of thing there's ring based flighting where you roll out to larger and larger Scopes all sorts of things but the idea with flighting is that it's a control way that you can turn on your feature and that way if something goes wrong you can turn the flight off I mean sometimes not quite that easy but that's the idea behind what flighting is so then your manager adds in Not only was this blocking their workflows this is obviously a contrived example by the way what are the workflows we don't really know but but we've had several customers contacting support that this feature doesn't make any sense this needs a complete redesign because it's confusing and conflicts with how they're trying to use the product we'll go over this in the PO incident review okay so you've been on this call probably not for too long and you've not only had a senior engineer basically call you out and saying like hey man why didn't you go flight this thing like that's a huge Miss on your part and then you have your manager telling you again in front of this group of people like this feature doesn't even make sense kind of like how could you even deliver this it's not even a good feature so the senior engineer was right that it should have been flighted how did that get missed right like they they make a good point right I mean it sucks how they delivered it and it would be really crappy to hear that in front of a group of people probably pretty embarrassing kind of singling you out but they are right if you didn't flight out the change it's probably something that should have happened so you could have them control it more easily so how did that get missed and the customers find this confusing like that really sucks right but the product owner worked on this too so kind of interesting the product owner at multiple points along the way they clarified the expectations they looked at the design Dock and they saw it working in the product before you even had it committed okay so but a post instant review should help everyone understand where the problems occurred so everyone can get better for next time wrong okay so we're about to go into the PO incident review for folks that aren't familiar with this concept a PO incident review uh frequently called a postmortem uh a post incident review is an opportunity generally this is done in a blameless way because otherwise we'll see exactly what that looks like but you do this in a way where you can have conversations to figure out the root cause and the whole goal of a postmortem or post incident review is to understand the root cause of whatever happened for any scenario where there was an issue and generally going through the root cause there's a practice called five Y where you can keep asking why and digging into something and then trying to understand what the root cause is now you might not always get to the root cause but going through the exercise will at least give you a bunch of different ideas for things that you can improve upon and then given those ideas that means you could have something like work items or repair items to go make improvements for next time so by going through this what should be happening is that the entire group gets to learn from a mistake an error whatever happened and they say great we can try to make this better for next time by doing these things so there is a review there's an analysis and then there's some work that gets scheduled to make things better that's the idea so Friday's post incident review starts off with your manager giving a speech about how the team will start a zero tolerance policy around non-lighted features your change was the catalyst so you can imagine how that speech might feel when uh you're basically being singled out as the one person that messed everything up for everyone else right and now the spotlight is on you so tell us how did you manage to ruin the experience for so many of our users with just this single change that great Monday that you had seems like it was an eternity ago you feel like closing your laptop lid and curling up under your desk so would be curious and you don't have to answer if you don't want to I totally get it but would be curious how many people have kind of lived through an experience like this right where you're basically being blamed you're being put on the spot right all these things that don't feel so great but they're happening to you and it's in response to something that you you know you had a role in this and in this particular example one might argue maybe you had the biggest role in this right perhaps but I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to go through and we'll talk more about blame culture and what's going on here so uh some I'm going to switch back to the article in a moment but not quite yet so I'm just going to talk through you know some of the things that someone like this might be experiencing as they went through this process right so um I wanted to call out that yeah I realize this example might seem exaggerated for sure especially if you've never been in something like this I've been pretty fortunate in my career in terms of blame culture it's been quite minimized I've almost always worked in environments that were very much supportive but I have heard some pretty crappy stories about people that had gone through things so uh it might seem exaggerated but maybe some people have been through even worse with respect to blame culture so um I wanted to call out a bunch of different feelings and things that you might be experiencing as you're going through this and part of this is to understand again like you might be someone that has gone through this and if you're someone in a position that is having influence over this kind of stuff like something to think about in terms of how effective the blame culture is okay so said probably some feeling of embarrassment right so when you're getting singled out in groups of people and people are kind of questioning you like why did you do this or calling out mistakes you made like you're probably going to feel pretty embarrassed it's not a really good feeling uh you're also going to feel like you're not supported because the people that you were working with on this stuff are now also kind of like stepping back and being like like this example was the senior engineer saying like hey why didn't you flight this you had the product owner being like hey what's up like um you know they're not really getting involved and you have your manager saying like how could you deliver this thing like no one likes it so you're not going to feel very supported you're going to have this feeling of isolation right again it's a combination of being embarrassed and unsupported is probably a little bit of isolation uh for a lot of people going through something like this you might have uh you know your impostor syndrome flare up and I like talking about impostor syndrome a lot because I think it's important uh by the way hi to Ali on YouTube good to see you thanks for joining um impostor syndrome uh is not uh it's not when you literally don't have the skills when you don't have any of the skills or experiences you may actually be an impostor however imposter syndrome is when you do actually legitimately have the skills and experiences and in this particular case we hadn't you know I didn't clarify it for the story this individual might actually have the skills and experiences and now they're questioning like everything right they're like oh am I even worthy of my job position like maybe I'm stupid like you have all these things that start to go through your head when you're experiencing imposter syndrome and then a couple of other emotions I listed out were like frustration anger sadness depending on who you are and how you react to these types of things I think it would be totally understandable if at the end of that kind of conversation you were like just feeling a whole bunch of different crappy feelings so um I just wrote In My article like I think that there's a lot of missed opportunities when a culture is centered around blame um and the reason that I I call that out is that like I think that the when you're doing this blame culture thing it's almost like one person might learn from it in a really crappy way like it's not very motivating but they might go hey I never want that to happen again so like I'm going to learn my lesson and I'm going to talk about this briefly in a second but the what's not happening is that other people and maybe they are maybe you're making other people fearful and they want to avoid that too so they might learn their lesson but again the motivation is kind of the wrong thing it's like it's making people fearful and when people become fearful what happens is like this avoidance thing so instead of being empowered to make positive changes they're now avoiding almost doing anything that's going to put them at risk of being being in this position so sometimes you might think well hey it's going to make people um they're going to be more careful Ro roll changes up more slowly like we want them you know to be very cautious and like yeah you do and that makes sense but like do you want people to be afraid because there's a difference between being cautious and being afraid because when you're afraid you don't even want to get the work done because now you're nervous at anything you do is going to mess up instead if you're empowered you can be cautious and empowered and try to drive positive change um oh cool hey thanks Ali I do appreciate that um yeah it's uh currently don't have any positions for mentorship so I'm so sorry I'm just super busy with a lot of other things going on but I do appreciate you being here so thanks very much um but yeah the mentorship stuff is really challenging right now uh Hey to Zod on Kick good to see you okay so I want to go into now who's actually at fault in this example and I did write this story on purpose like I spent time trying to figure out how I could frame a bunch of stuff up so that this part of the article would feel almost like comically exaggerated okay because clearly in the example I gave and again if you're tuning in just now I gave an example like a contrived story about basically someone delivering a change that was busted and there were some missed opportunities along the way and then everyone blamed them for it but uh you might think okay yes this one person is the responsible party member for this issue and you're not wrong that they are a responsible party member but there's a lot of other people that I purposefully included in that story to paint this picture so let's jump back over to the full screen mode here again sorry Instagram folks um I do apologize that um it's probably going to be trimmed for you but let me go through it so I said who was actually at fault and I said the confusing answer is nobody and everybody is at fault and I just said it's a kind of a trick question or a weird way to ask it because I think the word fault has um a lot of connotation or meaning that can be attached to it right so um instead of talking about fault because fault starts to assume some level of blame I want to avoid blame altogether okay so we're going to avoid blame altogether we're going to be talking about responsibility and accountability so if we use these two words instead instead of who is at fault and say who has responsibility and who has accountability I think we can get some very interesting answers here okay so I said the project was carried out by the individual developers so okay they play a role and this is the obvious one right the person who did the design dock they got the clarification they wrote the code they pushed the changes like they played a role in this obviously okay so the project requirements were clarified by the product owner right so I said that right at the beginning the person who was doing the work had to get clarification so now the product owner has also played a role there was a design document by the individual developer and they chose who to share with it share it with sorry so they again played a role so if they didn't do a design dog and they didn't include anyone else that could have been a missed opportunity but they did play a role and they chose to include other people on that so that's like a positive role they played I I would say then I said the product owner reviewed the design document so again they played a role there were two senior Engineers who reviewed the document and had feedback they needed to a line on so now we've added two more Engineers that have played a role in this story right so we're up to four people now the individual developer coded up this solution so again that's you know an initial role they played the individual developer demonstrated the working feature to the product owner they again this is a positive role they're playing so now the product owner and the developer both played an additional role the individual developer put up the code for review so some places reviews are not enforced I realize that many places there's poor requests and like an official sign off Pro assess so you might say that one's cheating but like it is technically a responsibility they had to do so they played a role the two senior Engineers reviewed the code with feedback they both played another role here so we're still up to four people okay but they're playing more and more of a role in this change going out the individual developer corrected the changes they played another role the senior Engineers approved the poll request they also played an additional role we're going to keep going cuz it keeps going the individual developers submitted the poll request to be built and deployed they played an additional role so again we are up to four people now that have played roles in this part and we're going to go on to the next part so I'm going to read some uh questions in the chat and I do see that it says it's probably off topic so uh let me let me see if I I'll read through it and then uh we can probably pause and then we'll do the question here and then I'll go back to the the article so let me let me switch gears because I I do like making sure I can answer stuff as we go it's probably a good stopping point for me to stop rambling about the article but um so my friend basically got into Google and I see the method step approach is basically have experience make a good resume and then uh data structures and algorithms but the topics you go over specifically real legitimate engineering principles and software engineering design is not shown anywhere in big Tech so my question is now there a new grad what do I focus on um everything that I talk about is stuff that you're going to be using in real life and I I I'll I'm going to share a couple links in the chat after it uh I'm laughing at that because um I think there's there's a very big difference in how you approach number one getting recognized for getting interviews so like resume writing and like applications and stuff like that so sort of a phase uh the second part is like now that you have the interviews how are you interviewing that's another phase and then the third phase which is generally the longest phase is what you're actually doing in your career which is a lot of the stuff that I talk about which is like it's the real world stuff after um you've gotten the job so um I really want to get into big Tech but also prefer legitimate software engineering rather than DSA uh data structur and algorithms um so is my job big Tech going to be surrounding more engineering when I get in and then I'll enjoy it more than DSA grind or big techn focus on these software design practices okay so no the the reality is um like a lot of software engineering is not hyperfocused on data structures and algorithms um now someone is probably listening to that and saying oh no that's bull crap I mean like you code is algorithmic okay so you're going to be writing algorithms if you need logic to flow through things but I mean like you're not going to be doing like Island problems and reversing link list and you're not doing this kind of stuff it just if you had to be doing this kind of stuff in your job no one would get anything done like this stuff is already implemented we're not doing it um I'm going to talk about an exception in just a moment but the the reality is like a lot of software engineering is like stitching things together understanding requirements and you're building things versus like working through kind of trick scenarios there are exceptions to this okay and to give you an example um it's kind of it's It's a it's a weird thing to explain I think when we think about sometimes like data structures and algorithms data structures in particular like a pretty lowlevel concept right so for example you literally and I mean this seriously and I can speak confidently when I say this because I know people that are like this you can absolutely use a dictionary or a hash set and have absolutely no idea how it works internally zero you can absolutely use it okay so and I know people that are coding up solutions they have they literally have software contracts where they're building products and I can guarantee you if I called him right now and I said tell me how a dictionary Works he would say I have no idea what you even mean by that but he knows how to use it okay so when we go through these data structure questions and a lot of the time it's this explanation about how they work like is that helpful sure extra information's helpful understanding how things work is helpful I'm not saying it's not but it's not a requirement to get your job done just as an example right like so when you're going through interviews especially in big Tech a lot of this kind of stuff comes up where it's like understanding the details about things and I would say a lot of the time like and I can't speak for everyone in their job position cuz it only takes one person to say like no like uh not for me and like I can't use the words always or never because it it just doesn't work that way there's always exceptions I would say a lot of people that are building software do not have to know the very specific details off the top of their head about different data structures and algorithms Basics yes right like arrays are generally fix size collections if you need something that's not then you would use something like a list structure you know you want to understand the characteristics about dictionaries and things like that but the nitty-gritty details about how all of them work not extremely beneficial in day-to-day the exception I wanted to talk about is when we think about things like big Tech and it doesn't have to be big Tech just consider things at large scales I was saying that data structures often feel like they were a low-level concept right so if you were working on an embedded device like you might find yourself making your own list structure or something like that perhaps and that's going to feel like it's low level you have to understand the details but the context there makes sense now when we talk about things at incredible scale and I mean like hundreds of thousands millions billions of trillions all of a sudden if you had an example of a data structure taking an extra 10 bytes okay 10 bytes of memory and all of a sudden like per entry or something and now you have to hold uh you know a billion of them how much extra memory is that like Suddenly at that scale you end up having this like like huge amplification of the systems you're working on so now you might say hey look yeah there is of course this language has a built-in dictionary data structure it works for 99.99% of everything we have to do but now we have this really bizarre case where we need like a more memory optimized dictionary so we need to custom build a dictionary that will will do that for us and that's where you're going to have stuff that yeah like understanding data structures and ALG RMS more will help um but I think the my experience has been the amount of emphasis on data structures and algorithms in interviews is pretty crappy and I think what makes it significantly worse is that a lot of the questions are like Elite code style which means that a lot of the time they're set up like a trick question and then like what the hell are you testing someone on that they're good at finding tricks or they're good at programming I don't know so I don't really like a lot of big Tech style interviews that Focus especially on lead code I think that it's garbage um I think there's better ways to test but Ali to your point if you are interested in trying to interview for big Tech you're going to have to know data structures and algorithms pretty well it's just what you probably need to expect in terms of interviewing but in terms of what's happening on the job I would say like generally know and it's not something that you can't like figure out with some guidance I would say um but that's been my experience for context I've been at Microsoft for four years I've been in industry for 14 years so I've seen some things but you know your your experience might be different and I'm not trying to tell you that it can't be a certain way but what I wanted to do is I had a couple of um live streams I want to try and find sorry for for jumping around here but I wanted to try and find um I did a couple of live streams where I talked about sort of these different phases um so I'm just scrolling through my stuff here so I apologize oh so this one okay so I'm going to put in three Three Links here okay so this is one this is two coming in and then this is three and these are like I said these are three phases sorry if you're on a platform you can't see the stuff coming through the chat too bad um no I'm just kidding but you can check them out on YouTube if you go to my live videos um these ones are about the different um sort of the three different phases I talk about so how you can apply to jobs how you can interview and then what to do once you've started your job so hopefully that's helpful um I man the chat sucks uh it says LinkedIn user I apologize let me see who said it on LinkedIn though I'm gonna refresh because LinkedIn will tell me who said it Glenn Watson awesome okay um so Glenn said one of the worst experiences I had with blame culture when I was was at Microsoft as an FTE to be honest the division wasn't doing well over hired getting pressure from exec on the top was around 2013 to 2015 yeah it's interesting I've heard um oh and and Glenn's is on YouTube okay that's funny uh between two different chats but yeah I think um I wasn't at Microsoft that early and I I've heard that um you know different uh different points in time it's been kind of challenging at Microsoft with kind of a crappier culture so uh feel like fortunately that's not how it is now at least in my experience uh Miguel uh on Tik Tok hi I'm from Columbia what do you think about Learning Net in 2024 I think it's an awesome technology to pick up I think it's one of the best times to jump into net there is a ton of stuff uh there's still like a lot of people are like oh net Microsoft we can't trust Microsoft we hate Microsoft uh we don't want to run on Windows platforms it runs on Linux it's run on Linux for a long time there's a lot of good performance benchmarks that show it's very fast uh you can make web applications desktop applications mobile applications embedded applications you can use it for basically anything it's pretty good all around um is it going to be you know faster than rust in you know every single use case like no it it has a garbage collector it's probably not going to be faster than rust in most use cases can it be faster in some use cases for sure but I don't know like depends what you want to do if you want to go spend time building stuff in rust or if you want to be able to probably build and iterate on things faster in net there's tradeoffs to make but I think yeah it's a great time to learn net I'm obviously biased I'm a net developer not professionally anymore but um I'm a hobby. net developer now that I don't code at work but I think it's a great Tech to use so cool okay um I don't see any other questions right now I'm going to jump back to the article but folks of course please if you if you're just joining I'm happy to to pause when I'm doing and answer questions for you okay so jumping back into this whole list of everyone who had some amount of accountability right we were up to four different people the developer that coded the change the product owner and then two more senior Engineers that have signed off on things now I said it's not about tallying up who had the biggest role right because you might go through that list and say well that individual developer had more steps along the way where they had responsibility therefore it's their fault we're not talking fault we're talking about respons responsibility and accountability okay so um so it's a list of roles it's pretty big that we went through but there's more so let's keep going so the senior Engineers approved the poll request for the more Junior individual developer they didn't check or ask about flighting so they played a role in that case right they're the more experienced ones on the team if they're signing off on it and they don't have evidence of how these things are going to be carried out they should be asking questions about this as an example neither did the individual developer nor the product owner did any followup with the feature once it was deployed now I didn't mention it explicitly in my story that I wrote but I omitted it and we can assume it didn't happen so so again that's a role that both of these individuals played by like either forgetting or not having enough awareness to go check that it's working it was like it's submitted it's good to go okay so then I wrote the individual developer didn't write any coded test for their feature okay the senior developers never even checked or asked about this it's a missed opportunity so all of them played a role it's not just the individual developer that didn't write the test and we go oh look it's your fault you missed the test like why did the senior Engineers approve it okay so they have some responsibility in that um and then uh little hint it's probably more obvious if uh if you were you know reading my article on the site but or an email but said notice that the first time the word test is even shown up in the article and it is if you were to do a keyword search it doesn't show up anywhere else until this point so the team doesn't have any automatic gates in place for new code getting some degree of testing right because this guy was able this guy or girl was able to go push this code through people signed off on it no tests so why does a team have a culture of that so said the team in particular the manager has a role to play here so now we've explicitly added in the manager for helping being able to shape and drive the culture of the team right and whoever else is on the team because that's a team thing if you're in a position where your team is not doing these types of things it's something that the team is either not valuing or there hasn't been time made for it maybe people do value it but clearly the value is not recognized if it hasn't been put in place other things are taking priority so with that last line the team doesn't have any automatic gates in place for new code getting some degree of testing so now the team and the manager are also added in for responsibility here so you just added on a pile of people okay so it's it's clearly not just the one person who developed the thing broke stuff we don't just point pointed them and say your fault because everyone along the way had some amount of accountability so I wrote now the scope of responsibility is getting wider and wider so I said we could keep doing this right we keep trying to call out where there's missed opportunities and who else from the team could have been chiming in and adding their perspective and stuff but like um I just wanted to say like the way this uh the way this was conducted is not creating a positive feedback loop so having that lame situation where someone was brought onto a bridge they were basically put on the spot and then in the post incident review they were put on the spot I think that this kind of thing development grinds to a halt over time because of fear right people are not empowered they are fearful so I said a continued decline in morale and then a shrinking team and it's a shrinking team because some people will realize that they don't want to put up with this and they won't and they will leave they'll switch teams they'll switch away from places that are toxic like this when they feel that they have an opportunity they can go do and I realize some people listening or watching might say well not with this job market and I hear you but like people will go looking and if they try they will go get jobs in other places because people won't stick around for this kind of thing okay so now is this topic of radical accountability you can probably guess where this is going let me switch back so I can talk more with my hands because that's what I like to do um but I had mentioned at the beginning of this uh presentation that like is a presentation this live stream presentation sounds too formal I don't know let's let's not say that again the beginning of this stream it's a lot more casual that way um I had mentioned that I I got the idea for radical accountability at least the naming from radical cander if you have not read about radical cander um I think it's really cool it's a it's a great read but it's this idea around it's a good way to explain it it's like you need to have a high degree of trust and respect with people and then you can essentially be brutally honest with them because they know that you're trying to help okay so if you imagine your best friend right when people say like you know a real friend is going to tell you not what you want to hear but what you need to hear that's radical cander so um I liked how radical cander sound and I said I want I want a phrase and I'm going to copy radical cander so I said radical accountability so um the way that I summarized radical accountability was it's nobody's fault but it's everybody's responsibility to improve it so everyone should be accountable for making sure that going forward things are in an improved State regardless of whatever situation occurred and if you take this mindset okay of instead of going that's not really my problem that was that was Joe like Joe totally pushed that code up and and Steve and Sally reviewed it like man they're in trouble like sucks to be them like instead of doing this thing where we blame and then we push responsibility onto others if we all do the exact opposite and we find ways that we can help and it's a mutual thing because if only one person does this you would say well it's not really fair to that one person because everyone else is going like yeah you take the work I don't want to do that and this person's like okay I'll try my best to help yeah that's a crappy situation too but if everyone is trying to contribute everyone's trying to be accountable and making things better because they want the entire team to get better I think that's where I'm going with radical accountability so I said when the entire team can help own and drive improvements everyone wins instead of that one person losing right so we have blame culture one person's clearly losing doesn't feel so great but instead with radical accountability the entire team team is in a winning position everyone can feel safer they'll knowing they'll be supported if they fail so instead of this fear culture right so instead of being fearful that something bad's going to happen to you you literally get the exact opposite where you're like I'm not afraid because I know that we're all doing everything we can to make sure this will succeed and I know I will be supported so and then I said everyone can help build confidence instead of one person being torn down um and Johnny on Tik Tok thanks for stopping in a team like that is a sinking ship absolutely so growth mindset all the way yeah growth mindset is a huge thing at Microsoft and I hope a lot more places uh think this way right but the the blame thing yeah I think it's a great way to put it it's a sinking for sure because uh once people realize and like part of why I wanted to make this for folks that are joining a little later the I had someone on on social media that had reached out and they were explaining a scenario where they were basic being blamed and they were saying is this normal so I I wanted to be able to talk about this because that tells me there are people out there that think it is normal and I don't think that's okay not not saying like hey this person they don't know anything like I mean it's not okay that there are places that are making people think that this is normal it probably doesn't feel normal right it doesn't feel good you would hope that's not a normal thing but unfortunately it happens at a lot of places I wanted to talk about this so that people that are going through it realize like no like that's not a good way to set up a team and if it feels really crappy that's because it is and it does not have to be that way so um the the way that I finish this off was essentially saying I think really the only way that you have like only one person that that's responsible is if you're literally like a oneperson company so if you are a solar preneur right and you are building software and you are you are the everything in that company cuz you're the only person yeah odds are it's probably all on you I mean it's also the whole team but you are the whole team so in general I want to encourage people that um you know if if people speak up you can have influence over things so I know that can be kind of scary but I think it's important and you know if you are the kind of person if you're watching this listening to this and and you're going like some of the things I was saying about you know blaming if you're like no that's what works for us like we want to make sure people understand the um severity of things going wrong the importance of doing things right and that's why we make sure that we can make um I don't know what's the the right phrase for it like make a not make a point kind of like make a we want to use set use make an example of someone right sorry my words aren't working today my words barely work most days but if you want to make an example of someone and we find that works well I just wanted to say that it actually doesn't work well or at least not as well as it could work so if you think it's working well it's not sustainable it's just not people will not stick around for that kind of thing it's just how it is so if you are the kind of person doing this and it feels like hey when we make an example of people we get the results we want you very well might get those results temporarily and it will completely erode your team and it's just not going to get better the culture needs to shift so that was what I wanted to share with folks um I got through that pretty quick most times it's a little bit over an hour um but uh I will kind of I'll stop there and kind of say if you're in the chat and you have questions about anything happy to answer so usually at this point what I'll do is a little bit of an advertisement if you don't mind um SK have you heard of revature I have not and I don't know if I should search that certainly not on the shared screen rure company better way to build a skill-based technology and then the top thing on Reddit is is the company revature a scam or questionable so I have no idea I've never heard of revature unfortunately and then top answer sorry I don't know anything about this company just reading it top answer it's a joke of a company pretty much what others said um and thanks Johnny so Johnny's question or comments on Tik Tok aren't going to the shared chat just because of how the platform works but thanks for sharing love the idea of radical accountability love radical cander yes awesome well thanks Johnny no I appreciate you being here thanks for for tuning in and yeah radical cander for folks again if you if you haven't read radical cander it's a it's a great read they talk about some other quadrants of like how people try to help and how they lead and stuff and there's like ruinous empathy is one where you have say like people that are trying to be helpful but like they're too empathetic so they're just like oh no it's okay and like they're not actually giving people like the difficult feedback they need to hear like that's one of the worst things you can do for people it's not mean right it doesn't have to be like oh you're a piece of crap and you're like yelling at people but ruinous empathy which is part of this radical cander topic ruinous empathy can be very dangerous because it's almost like easy to do you just be like extremely nice to people and never really give them what they need to hear and then they never really improve from it so it's kind of interesting oh interesting so SK saying they basically train people with no experience in Tech and then then contract them out to companies like infosis yet um yeah I'm not I haven't heard of them sorry revature is a brand new thing for me uh Johnny do you stream on Twitch too yep so I stream on every platform um it's funny Tik Tok doesn't get a lot of traction so super cool that you stopped in from Tik Tok but twitch Youtube kick uh most people right now are on Twitter watching this uh YouTube is next um LinkedIn used to be when I first started streaming LinkedIn was I basically had all of my views coming from LinkedIn like an order of magnitude more people coming from LinkedIn and I think that like LinkedIn is really dumb and how they do a lot of their um their Impressions so I'm got to rant about this for just a moment because it's frustrating but LinkedIn social media platforms when you put links to places they will penalize the number of Impressions okay and they do that because they want to keep people on the platform not going away totally makes sense so you got to be kind of tricky with how you're doing stuff on LinkedIn for putting uh links and stuff in places but you would think if one were to host a LinkedIn event that would literally bring users to stick on the platform you would think that they would promote that more right like hey look I'm trying to get people on to LinkedIn you should come here to LinkedIn you would think that they would give it higher Impressions but they don't when I post a LinkedIn live it's arguably the worst performing type of post I can ever have it's insane oh and then Glenn was saying I was on LinkedIn but the video was jittering a lot compared to YouTube that's weird um I wonder if this uh this platform is experiencing a an issue with LinkedIn it's so for folks that are if you're watching this just to explain how this setup works is I stream out of one source Tik Tok is the only exception um but I stream off of my computer it goes to restream.io and then they send that out to all the platforms so um very interesting that I wonder if it's not even restream it might just be LinkedIn that's having a problem so sorry about that but thanks for letting me know one thing I found isn't auss working in the US is we're we are blatant with feedback how have you found working with different cultures with feedback that's a great question Glenn um I I I think in my personal experience I haven't had too many like very big discrepancies and I think there's been sometimes almost maybe like almost from uh it's I'm sure part of its culture but sometimes just language so uh when English is not a first language and then people are communicating thoughts I think sometimes it comes out um it can be more critical or sound more harsh because there's less extra words to like soften things up so in my experience when that's happened it's felt more like a language Thing versus a cultural thing now it could literally as I said said it could be both it could very well be both and they were like I know that I could go soften this with other words but I'm choosing not to but I feel like it I'm I'm speculating but it's felt more like language to me than than different cultures now with that said I have heard um I have observed other people uh from different cultures like not the same background as me and I've observed people from different different cultures that are exchanging feedback and and I've been uncomfortable watching it happen and I I've talked about this before but like for me um like I get secondhand embarrassment very easy and I'm not talking about people being embarrassed in this situation but I kind of like when PE when I observe someone else having a strong emotion to something like I go like oh I'm feeling that too and it's like embarrassment is really bad cuz for that reason I don't want to I don't want to feel super embarrassed when I'm watching something happen CU who wants to feel embarrassed but this a similar thing happens if I'm watching an exchange of words or people are interacting and I'm going oh like this person is not receiving that well like I kind of go like ah like I feel that um and then the flip side is that like the person giving or like communicating at the other person I'm like I want to help I want to help I can see what's happening here I want to make it better so um yeah Glenn I have seen again not for myself so much as observing others uh of different cultural backgrounds and and that being kind of tricky now because in these situations it's something I've observed uh I've been able to step in especially as a manager and kind of Coach around that and and it's on both sides too so on receiving it because I always say like and I think I feel like this is a fact but like communication is at least two ways right if you have two people communicating communication has there's some responsibility on both ends of the communication one especially for the person trying to communicate ideas or thoughts most of the responsibility is on this person right but I would say if the person receiving the communication right you're hearing something from someone else they're giving you information I think there is still some responsibility on you and Tik Tok is doing this thing where it says I'm not active every time I am here hear me roar um I think there's this responsibility or an opportunity for some accountability uh on the receiving end of communication so what I mean by this is let's let's start with the receiving side if I've talked to someone and they've Express that they've had um like a bad interaction or bad feedback or something like that um especially if I've observed the interaction or I'm very familiar with the individual and who's giving the feedback or on the other end of the interaction There's an opportunity where I can coach this person and say hey like let's I'm not trying to defend the other person but we can only like you can only control yourself you can't control other people so when this is happening like you know that this other person is like they're not trying to they're not trying to attack you right like you know that they want good things for you right and they're like yes like I believe that so I said okay if we go into this giving this person the benefit of the doubt and we start hearing things in a way that makes it seem otherwise I would say it's a good opportunity to pause and like again doesn't give them free reign to say mean stuff to you but like is there an opportunity to pause and say is there a different way to interpret this or am I jumping straight to this person's mean so some coaching around that can look very different in different situations and then especially on the giving side when it comes to you know feedback criticism different interactions uh a really big opportunity there to say hey like by the way like when this person was receiving what you said um like did you notice and I might call out some examples and I've absolutely had people go yeah like it was really weird like I told person X this thing and I could I could sense ra away they were like not okay with it and I didn't understand why and I'm like okay cool like first of all at least this individual has some awareness that when they're communicating something they can they can sense or see or they have some feedback that's like hm like this person's reacting in a way that I don't expect so I think that's a really good thing but what's challenging beyond that is like is trying to understand why so hey I you know I said something to someone I could be like I ask them a question because I've seen this come up too I asked someone a question about what was going on with something and I could immediately see that they didn't like that so okay interesting why didn't they like it and then I did know why so we just kept talking through but it felt like the rest of the conversation was really crappy after that point okay so maybe it's something to do with how you ask the question and again it might not be something that you would ever think of because it's just not part of how you communicate right you have to think this other person might be interpreting things a different way and some of the it's like not the certainly not the easiest I think the most simple advice doesn't make it the most easy but I think some of the most simple advice in that situation is like hey look like you had the awareness to know that someone seemed to to feel off about something right okay so really simple not easy but really simple is literally just to ask them about it is to have a conversation about acknowledge and say hey like Sorry by the way I realize I I feel like I might have uh upset you or might have caused some confusion or respond to whatever emotion you seem to be observing from them and just take the opportunity to try and clear the air with them you're not trying to escalate things so you're not trying to say like hey man like I didn't tell you something mean or like like I I didn't try to hurt your feelings like it's not not about that you're trying to say like you're just trying to improve the status of things so trying to understand why people feel a certain way and then understand what you can do to try and work around that uh and again I've seen this happen especially with uh with different language barriers where people say they're using English as the common language and two people don't have that as their first language that um that mixed with different cultural backgrounds can lead to some of this confusion so Glenn saying yeah I definitely had to learn about the other party and use a lot more filler words with feedback I appreciate that this has taken as long but this might not be the right approach yeah and honestly like um especially more recently on LinkedIn we were talking about um talking about code reviews so on Twitter and Linkedin and threads I had some good good responses about code reviews and giving feedback and I had some people legitimately some people were saying like no there's no place for like softening things and there's no place for softening things because it's not personal and I think the problem that I have with this is that like first of all I do agree I agree it's not supposed to be personal but the problem is that you can't command that expectation of people it's not supposed to be personal yes we all know that the problem is you cannot ex uh command that expectation so you can't just snap your fingers and say therefore no one will take it personally because guess what they will and they do so given that you know they will and they do you can continue to try and coach people around not taking it personally but until you've established the report with people to build up that trust and respect I can basically assure you there are going to be people that read your feedback and they're going man this person's being a jerk and now are these individuals telling me like well now it's this other person's fault for interpreting it that way yeah kind of but like you can also just not do that like two people can own some of the responsibility here so anyway I thought that was kind of fascinating but I do think uh it's important to try as much as possible when you're communicating like if you're on the giving side or the receiving side trying to take some accountability and you can you can literally just work on improving communication by working together instead of being automatically defensive instead of like saying it's got to be this other person's fault you know back to the blame thing instead of blaming other people what can we do instead so thanks Glenn for sharing that I thought it was a good question so thanks for asking as well um so oh sorry SK I saw the rest of your question just wondering if I should just start that now and then if I find a better opportunity jump ship pay will be low um yeah I can't I unfortunately I can't advise um I feel like that's outside of my I don't know my my my responsibility my my uh my abilities I don't feel comfortable advising on that um what I can do is sort of offer some general guidance and I would say like look if you've been looking for a while and you need money and you're comfortable and you understand that you want to continue to progressing right and you're like hey like I could go do this for now and I'm still going to invest time into trying to interview and trying to level up in different ways and I see this as a stepping stone that could be cool um if you think that maybe a lot of the stuff you're reading is um perhaps untrue like I can't make that decision for you right so if you're like hey like I want to see for myself and um I feel comfortable at least that I could go do this like I think these are all questions you have to ask yourself right and unfortunately I cannot do that for you but um it sounds like it's an option the very minimum right so something that you could could consider okay um I'll still take more questions until then uh just jumping over to stuff by the way I do flashbang warning sorry I do have a podcast if you guys want to check that out um it's on Spotify Apple music all the podcast places so you can watch these on YouTube as well um so basically I sit down with people if I scroll through there's uh you know other software Engineers that I sit down with and chat with and just kind of get their career experiences this one here was with uh Ethan Evans who was a VP at Amazon I got to talk with Scott Hanselman uh if you're familiar with Scott especially if you're in the net world uh he's uh probably the the big celebrity that I've had on the podcast which was super cool so I really enjoyed that um I have another YouTube channel it's called code commute if you want to check this out I basically uh drive to and from work and when I'm stuck in traffic I talk to you guys so it's uh recorded it's not live but that's an opportunity and then the final plug I have is that I do have a bunch of courses on dome train if you are interested in checking it out um oh interesting thanks Justin Bentley for the heads up on seems like a browser issue kind of interesting but I do have a bunch of courses available on D train if you want to check these out um just for a little bit of extra context Dome train has historically it's by Nick chaps it's historically been CP and. net content because that's a lot of the programming material I put out so I have a bunch of csharp courses but Ryan Murphy and I are starting the section on dome train that's about Career Development so we have our first course which is nailing the behavioral interview so that has launched we have another one launching in a couple of weeks that will career based and then we got a lot more queued up to do after that they will all be in the career category so um if you enjoy how I try to teach things Ryan's also a great Creator uh he's got a huge LinkedIn following and he's an engineering manager at Yelp Ryan's great so um if you like this style um maybe you will find that one of these courses is beneficial but I do always say and I mean it honestly I try to put out as much free content as I physically can because I want to be able to do that I want to be able to help and I feel good if it's helping people but I do recognize that some people um they find that if they are paying for something then they are more accountable to it so courses can be a great option for people but my goal is never to try and like trick you into buying things so like I said I going to keep pumping out free content and I will keep doing that but if there's courses that make sense for you then uh you know would be great if you find them valuable and I I you know would love that opportunity to be able to help you out so I don't see any other questions that have rolled in so I will probably call it there folks um again sorry for folks on LinkedIn that we're having some browser issues uh it's kind of crappy but um yeah hopefully everyone else on the other platforms things were pretty smooth and yeah I appreciate the time tomorrow morning uh so 7 a.m. PST I will be doing live coding it's going to be a continuation of the last live stream which is going to be trying to get my WordPress blog moved over to Blazer um the author of the Blazer uh blog project I'm going to be using I think his last name is uh geil so Steven Gil I I'm so sorry if I'm saying that wrong he's actually going to be in the chat and stuff so he joined last time was able to offer insights and things like that so should be pretty cool if you want to see some live coding I'm going to be focused on trying to find the right patterns to move posts over so it's not going to be like a watch me do it start to finish it's going to work perfectly because I know it's not I have to figure out how to how to migrate the format of the post properly so they're going to be HTML based with all these plugins and stuff and then they have to go to markdown and I don't want to lose all of the features and functional I had my post so should be interesting but that's going to be 7 a.m. PST tomorrow morning so thank you so much for checking this out I hope you tune in actually I'm not going to be here next week because I'm going to be in Hawaii so don't tune in next week don't do that tune in the week after that or maybe not I might not even be back don't ever tune in again it's all over um no I'll try to I'll try to post a schedule for folks but please uh be great to see you join next time that I do