Senior Developer Means Coding... Less?! - Engineering Manager AMA

okay folks we're getting set up here I think I think the stream is going to work this time a little better than last time maybe we'll see if the chat actually functions um CU last time last time it didn't and that wasn't good um apparently Instagram's not not working so that's cool um I think substack substack will work now when I start it so if you're joining in the chat nice okay the chat is working this is good thanks Alan broke it for letting me know last time was a nightmare um and I actually had a a big thing going with restream I reached out to their support and uh they had some reasons for some things and other things uh not so much and I was pretty disappointed um so for example like today the same thing is happening with Instagram when I try to stream to Instagram it's like NOP just not just not working uh and I'm going to try again and we'll see if it works but uh the chat was the most annoying part and um and I am Derek thanks for for joining from Twitter and letting me know because last time I went a few minutes in and uh I was like there's there's no one in the chat there's no one in the chat this is so weird there were people in the chat it just wasn't coming through so I actually turned on the chat uh I'm pointing to my other screen um but I turned on the chat and I could see it like in the Stream but the window that I have to actually be able to engage in the chat wasn't showing anything and so their tech support was like yep we don't know what that is like there's no sign of any um I don't know anything going wrong and I'm like well you can literally watch the video CU it's recorded and you can see it uh so anyway I think we're doing better this time um and it looks like yeah looks like everything's going so thanks for joining me um for folks that are new to these live streams uh I generally go through my newsletter topic I'm going to link it in the chat um it's just at weekly. deev leer.com for everyone I'm not don't subscribe to it if you don't want to read it that's totally cool um it's just that that's the topic that I usually use for my live streams so if you're ever curious about what it's going to be it's just at weekly. deev leader.com topic is going to be um but the other thing that I'll mention is that um while that's a proposed topic for the live stream the chat's there for a reason I would honestly much rather spend the entire time answering questions in chat um I I mentioned to people before like I make a lot of YouTube videos right so instead I could be recording a YouTube video that's all you know prescripted and whatever but I would much rather just like take the time to answer questions and have engaging conversations so as I'm going through the content for today if you're like I got a question related to software engineering and it has literally nothing to do with what's being talked about just ask like it's totally cool um i' like I said I'd much rather do that so uh you'll also notice I ramble a lot so welcome uh happy that you're here and maybe let's kick things off so for folks uh if you are in the chat come say hi uh you know I know there's people that drop in weekly which is super cool um and otherwise I'm going to jump into the topic for today so the topic is called senior developer means coding less and it's a question right so this question uh is something that I covered on my other YouTube channel called code commute I will talk a little bit about that later hello uh your username is just headphones from Twitter uh good to see you here uh will call you headphones but um yeah I I talked about this on code commute last week and it was the uh usually I pick the most like I don't know the video that was either watched the most or had the most sort of conversation around it seemed like it gained the most interest and this time around it was about this topic of senior developers coding less and kind of what expectations might look like for people doing that hello Cecil how's it going congrats on the Dome train course thank you so much uh it's going I don't know I would say right now it's pretty rough um to be honest if you uh I realized that this comes through a lot more on my code commute videos because I it's a vlog right and sometimes I do four of them in a day and I I've had to catch myself where I go to record and I'm like by the way I'm in a pretty terrible mood so I did the same thing when I was leaving work today I started recording a vlog entry and I was like I got about an hour to get home which is ample time usually and uh I just I realized so as I was starting to record I had to say it in the video like I'm in a I'm in a bad mood like probably one of the worst moods I've been in in a while hopefully it's not coming through I don't want to get too ranty or anything like that hello Hammer 88 um but yeah this topic senior developer means coding less was something that I talked about on code commute and I think it's because it came up on Reddit so on code commute generally what I'll do is I will oh uh BJ on Tik Tok saying I listen to C commute while I commute almost every day that's so cool thank you so much um sometimes people will uh say like they either watch it on their commu or like while they're cleaning their house and stuff so uh I started uploading all those videos to Spotify I think I'm 30 videos into 170 so I got a lot more to go um D Man terrible mood too down to argue if you want no I don't I don't want to argue man it's no energy for it but um yeah usually on code commute what I will do is people will either submit questions or they'll write them in the comments related to software engineering career growth stuff like that um the traffic noises are sometimes confusing is what BJ's saying on Tik Tok the Tik Tok chat doesn't get shared by the way so um I'm just kind of reading it out yeah traffic yeah it's uh or I'll be shouting at traffic and stuff um but if if people if I don't have like active comments um that I haven't responded to or messages I haven't responded to I will go to Reddit and pick a topic generally so usually I'll I'll check out like experienced devs the subreddit um sometimes I'll Venture just to software engineering or CS career questions but CS career questions on Reddit is kind of just like everyone freaking out about AI um and I'm like I'm I don't know how many videos I I can make on it uh without going nuts myself so um generally I go to experienced EVs and this is one of the topics that came up where someone would was saying hey look like I feel like as a senior developer I might be stagnating I was like okay this is interesting where is this going right so they were saying that they find uh they had a really interesting way to frame it they said I find I'm spending more time oh I'm going to forget how they said it um almost like being like find I spending more time being like a representative for my team right like I am kind of like pitching what my team does to other people not quite like a salesperson but kind of like you know the person who is the face of the team to other teams or other stakeholders having to talk about the importance or significance of their team what the team's work is and they were saying like I do a lot of this stuff and they were mentioning some other things and they're saying but like I feel like I'm coding less and I was like okay this is probably an interesting topic to go into because this is probably something that a lot of people are going to experience and one day would love to say this is sponsored by Pepsi but it's not I'm just thirsty I've been talking a lot today so um coordinator yeah coordinator might be a good word for that they had a really good they had a good Ambassador I think Ambassador was the word they used so said I feel like I'm my team's Ambassador and I'm spending more time doing that so I figured okay this might be good to to write about and to chat through because I think a lot of people will go through this and it's part of career growth as a software engineer where there's going to be different things that come up that aren't just coding now um something that's important to kind of talk through like I'm going to give you some perspective on things from my experience and if you've watched my videos and stuff before um evangelizing is another good word so Allan broke it um is kind of hinting at what the at what the the majority of my talk is going to be about right but uh I always try to make this kind of stuff clear that the reality is that depending on where you're working right depending where you're working uh things are going to look different so I might be talking about things from my experience my perspective and you will say like hey like I am a senior developer and literally what you're saying is completely different than what I've experienced so when I talk through this kind of stuff and generally in in all of my videos I'm trying to give you some perspective but I'm not here to tell you like this is the only way kind of thing because I don't think that that's a good way to approach anything so it's kind I hope it's like implicit when I'm talking but I try to add the disclaimer in because I think it's important to to call out so Allan in the chat is saying the more senior the role the more team management and evangelizing you have to do and the more more time you wind up working with spreadsheets yeah Excel is the way of the future yeah but the reality is that okay what's a good way to frame this so it's not that it's not that your technical skills stop mattering it's not that you stop coding the more and more senior you get nothing like that but there starts to be other sets of expectations and responsibilities that you're going to be doing the more senior you become and just to give you like a very brief example right and this doesn't happen like late in your career but the first time that you are responsible for leading a project okay and this could look different depending where you are the project that you're leading all this kind of stuff but let's say that even the first project you lead maybe it's very small but you're responsible for it and maybe you have to you're partnering up with someone else on it right but the expectations of responsibility fall on you and maybe you get this even as a junior developer uh or you know Junior to mid-level you're not not a senior engineer you're not principle you're certainly not like responsible for managing teams and the first project you get like this automatically there's going to be some new interesting responsibilities that you probably have to do that aren't just coding that you didn't have to do before and one such thing is just like who are the stakeholders for your project and what what kind of status are you going to be providing them right so even right there with the most simple example is just like there starts to be other stuff that you end up doing that isn't just coding now if we keep going down this path and the more senior you're becoming and this is where really the newsletter content comes into play I tried to just write out a bunch of different examples for things that you'll be spending time doing that aren't just writing code and I figured um because it's a live stream uh if folks want to write in the chat as we're going through this like you know if you either are more senior or you're kind of speculating about stuff that's going on uh for people that are at senior levels and such like I want to talk through different things that you end up having to do that aren't just you know putting your headphones on and writing code now before I get into those things I I just want to be very clear that yes you will be writing code as a senior developer like I said that doesn't just go away there is an expectation that your technical skills continue to grow there's going to very likely I can't see this going a different way right now there's very likely going to be an expectation that you're still contributing to the code base in a significant way right sometimes this might change for people like in an architect position where they're actually spending a little bit less time actually writing code but as a senior developer certainly you will be spending time writing code the point of all of this and this is really the meta point and the takeaway of the whole live stream so if you want to hang up after I say this I get it um but the idea is that there's going to be other responsibilities you have and it's not like you were given more time so the other responsibilities you have will start to take away from some of the time that you have to code so that's The Meta principle um if I check in the chat Hammer 88 says I think I spend a lot of time correcting Junior work okay um now what are things that you could be doing to help the Juniors so that you don't have to be correcting their work right um this is something that I would say you should be you know investing time into helping and uh you know one of my things in my newsletter is going to be around mentorship so maybe we can start with that um in all of my experiences I found that um and I'm saying my experiences I'm sure there are other places that might weigh these things differently but in all of my experiences there's an expectation of more more senior developers mentoring more Junior ones and this can happen early on right so even even at a junior level you might have the opportunity where there's someone new on boarding uh and you are helping them you're giving them some mentorship you could be mid level and there could be a senior that joins the team and you're helping them on board and stuff like there's no um there's no like limit to where you're able to try and help mentor and help others um it's not restricted to just titles or levels or something like that but the reality is that as you become more senior in every place I've ever seen the expectation goes up around your ability to Mentor others that are more Junior than you okay and like I said some places they will weigh this more and they'll say hey like you know part of demonstrating that you are becoming senior like we need to see more of that from you so if you're just trying to like avoid this and you know kind of just Silo yourself to being able to get your head down and work on things like at some point that will stop Flying at some places and in other places they'll say hey you know what um you know most of the people on the team are are doing that uh in terms of helping and mentoring and if like not spending as much time doing that that's okay um I just feel like that's a rare thing that I've seen kind of come up it's almost like the exception to it so primarily expectation the more senior the more opportunity you have to be mentoring others that are more Junior now mentoring means that you're going to be spending time doing that where does that time come from probably the time that you had set aside previously to be coding things right so um this is one example where yes there's going to be less time coding because part of that time is carved out for mentoring um for folks that are in the chat um you know maybe a question to you is like what are your experiences like mentoring others right do you find that this is something that you enjoy because I think people are divided on this some people I've talked to are like hey you know any opportunity I can it feels good to be able to help other people um some folks will say it's distracting right like I just and I'm not saying this is right or wrong like it's a feeling that you're allowed to feel whatever you'd like but some people will say they feel that um they don't get enough Focus time right like I would love to be able to focus more on on coding for my own deliverables but it feels very distracting or it feels like it's a lot of effort to have to mentor and help others so i' be curious in the chat if you have different experiences around this um because that's something that we could try and talk through um and like I said there's not like there's a wrong answer um I've heard a bunch of different things my phone is saying my internet connection is unstable so hopefully it's not everything else seems to be coming through pretty clear I'm I'm literally streaming myself and it seems to be okay um just not the audio so yeah if you're in the chat would love to hear if you have different experiences with mentoring people how that looks for you um I know that early on in my career and I like I was not it's a little bit weird for me um early on in my career I became a manager so I was not it's not like I was a senior engineer or something right when I uh started working but a few months into working I was managing a growing team at a startup and um so mentoring became part of what I was doing and I can say with confidence that like I recall that feeling very taxing I remember thinking like I don't have time to do anything I can remember thinking and it was a startup and I was younger and I didn't have other responsibilities it got to the point where I was trying to you know in my mind I was mentoring or helping others but the way that I had to get my work done was I would start work early and um and then I would you know work during the day which was just helping people all day and then I would work late and that was the only way that I felt I could get my work done so to me it felt like a very much like a um like a pain in the ass to be honest it was like I understand I got to help people and it's important but I'm like when do I get my stuff done um I'm just going to read the chat before I kind of go back to this thought though so a mentorship is like investing in long-term growth I usually see it as an opportunity to be a multiplier this is from Allan um it's just another example of scaling yes exactly um and Vengeance Hi how are you uh pretty stressed out but we're here doing this so this is It's a good spot to be um but yeah I think Allan's spot on right so if I take the example I had where I was saying um it felt frustrating right it felt frustrating to help other people I can't get my own stuff done I'm falling behind I'm working more I realized because I'm using the word Mentor here and that's not what I was doing and in fact uh it wasn't even helping other people solve problems what I was doing was giving people answers and this is not a scalable thing in fact the the video I filmed today for code commute on the way to work spoiler alert because it's not posted yet but that video I talked about this being a problem and I've talked about this in other videos too um I was talking about the idea that in terms of building um respect and trust and accountability and things like that that when you become an sort of like an expert in an area or someone that people come to for help and questions like that's that's a good thing right that's there's nothing wrong with that that can be a great spot to be in because it's demonstrating that you have uh some expertise in an area that people uh they do trust and they do respect your opinion those are good things but I was saying that depending on how you navigate that kind of stuff you can become the limiting factor and what I meant when I recorded that today was that if how you're approaching that is people come to you with questions and you basically solve the problem for them then you become the limiting factor because your ability to to have impact is just your time right so one person comes to you okay that's consuming your time when you're basically doing the work for them to give them the answer now you have two people that come to you and now your time is you know taken up more and more until you have enough people that come to you and this is what happened to me where you don't have any other time for work so what Allan was saying in the chat is like it's just an example of scaling and he's right because what I wasn't doing was helping scale I was just giving answers and I can remember people be like hey can help me with this and I would walk over to their desk this is when we weren't working remotely um and it's like hey like let me slide into the keyboard here's how you do it no here's how you don't do it um what I highly recommend and I you know for this is recorded as well so if you're not in the chat to talk about it for people that are watching this or listening right now it's like if you find that you're in this kind of position where you're trying to be helpful but it feels like you're constantly like like the person trying to give help and you're C like it's just it starts to be kind of taxing it starts to get annoying and you're like why does it keep happening like you might be the problem even though you're the one trying to help so I would change it a little bit right you can help people by not just giving them answers in fact it's more helpful it doesn't feel like it in the short term but it's more helpful if you teach them right explain to them so if if you're a you're the expert in debugging something right every time there's an issue in this part of the code or this class of issue people come to you and they're like Allan is the expert on this we know if we go talk to Allan about this like we got it covered he's so good at it so we're going to go to Allan and then Allan goes no problem I am the expert on this this is literally what I do all day because people come to me asking questions and then Allan disappears for a second then comes back and says aha here is the answer for you and we all cheer and we go thank you so much Alan you saved us woo and then 5 minutes later the next person goes we need Allan to debug this instead of Allan constantly hello Aaron um instead of Allan constantly being in this position where he's just giving answers what actually helps Allan's scale here and this is the recommendation is like you teach other people how they can do that for themselves so the next person to go to to Allan instead of saying let me go away and come back and give you the answer if instead Allan said hey look these are the tools that I use so make sure you have access to them and here's you know maybe a Wiki page or some other documentation uh and then here's a direction right here's a direction that you could start to look in it might not be in the short term what feels like the most effective thing because maybe they come back to you and they still need help but if you start teaching other people the things that you're doing this is how you scale you don't become the single point of failure anymore the the amount of impact you have is not limited to just purely how much time you are dedicating to that one thing you're helping others become better because you're teaching them how to do it right you're not just giving them answers so um this is you know one part of help it's not the whole story for mentoring but this is a recommendation I have in terms of like helping yourself scale uh Beyond just you know providing help and stuff when it comes to mentoring there's a lot more uh I would say like one of the big things that I would recommend to people is like making space to listen I think that especially as software developers we have in our mind like I don't blame people for this but it's like we we love to solve problems I've joked about this on stream so I'll I'll kind of tell the story um but you know we love to solve problems when people tell us about problems I got to be careful cuz this is about my wife my door is closed so don't tell her she doesn't watch my videos but um my wife uh has a background in Psychology and she works as a therapist so she knows what's up um much better than I do and there are times where she'll be uh I don't know if I'd call it venting maybe maybe venting is too strong where she's telling me about something and I'm listening and so what I'm hearing her describe to me is like it's a problem or there's a situation that could have a resolution so she starts talking to me about it and instantly my head's like okay and then I'm waiting for a moment and then she stops talking and I blurred out and I'm like hey have you considered that you could try doing X Y or Z and she's looking at me like what and then she'll keep talking and then I'll do the same thing where I jump in and I try to give her a solution and then she'll end up saying like look stop like I'm not talking to you because I want solutions to these things right I'm just I'm talking because I'm trying to express like my my frustration about something or um you know I'm just trying to get something off my chest or whatever it happens to be but my point is that I find that as software developers because we're always focused on solving problems always that when it comes to mentoring others we often as people are explaining a situation we we're instantly like how do I solve this how do I solve this and then there's an opportunity to speak and we're like okay here's what you do here's the solution to your problem here's how you go solve it instead when it comes to mentoring and this kind of thing um listen more and ask more questions because it's a similar type of things there's going to be some situations where you can jump in and you know give a recommendation to really unstick someone but um I find and there's like a lot of uh I don't know I feel like there's a lot of I don't want to say evidence a lot of theory on on coaching and effective Behavior patterns where when you ask people questions you can almost let them arrive at their own conclusions it's kind of like rubber duck debugging almost but like you get them to you can guide them with your question so you listen to what they're saying you ask them some questions about it and then they can start to move things in the right direction C right you're if we're people watching this software developers or adjacent to software development probably very very smart people you can solve problems very well most likely so U and the people that you're you're mentoring can solve problems very well most likely so when you get people uh you're asking them questions they can end up kind of navigating these things and come up with a pretty good idea of what to go try right you're kind of facilitating their their uh their thinking so uh I would recommend that kind of thing when it comes to mentoring um and the other point I mentioned about you know teaching people to solve their problems I'm going to jump over to chat though because there's a bunch of messages um Aaron 1206 yo what's up my question is what are three things you want to see on an entry portfolio site working on yours right now awesome okay um talk talking about listening but my question is off in the dust have a good night bro see you okay oh you're still here what dude it's a I have to finish my train of thought do you want me to answer it or no the most disrespectful thing I've ever heard uh let me read the other question before coming back to you I'm going to read what Allan had to say it's better to be a catalyst of growth than a bottleneck it's just harder and more expensive in the short term yeah that's right um it it feels like a in the short term it's pretty painful so you have to use judgment about how how much mentorship you can do given the context yeah this is the other thing right you don't want to um you don't want to be in a position where you're giving up like your other deliverables and expectations right um and T man says he probably has an answer in one of his videos yes there's 170 videos alone on code commute and um this comes up there's also a resume review uh play list on dev leader and I might as well just try to pull that up and I'll link it in the chat um do the chat messages go to they do go to Twitch one sec um where's a good spot for this I'll pull it up so I'm just going to get the resume review playlist because when I talk through this um the question is about on a portfolio site okay so the other thing that's important here is that uh when you're thinking about a portfolio site this is the same kind of stuff you might want to call out on on a resume which is why I'm going to link the resume playlist here so let's get that boom there you go um so you can check out that playlist for some ideas and so three things on a entry portfolio site okay so the consideration when we talk about portfolio sites in general um people have different perspectives on this I think some people look at as it like a look at it as a showcase so um you only want to show your best ever most completed most successful work that has millions of users and stuff um and I kind of think that's a kind of a unrealistic expectation and to be honest like I don't I don't care um I think for me on either a resume or a portfolio site generally what I'm after because I'm not hiring someone because they built a product and I want their product or I want their users right like that that doesn't that doesn't help me um what I'm looking for when people have this kind of stuff on their resume like their side projects or their portfolio site it's like I'm mostly interested in seeing that people are trying to build things you're trying to learn things you're trying to practice building software because when you're hired you're going to be building software it's not just that you copy the tutorial right like it's I I want to be able to see that you're taking things you're trying to challenge yourself you're trying to get better at doing them so when it comes to what do you put onto a portfolio site I would love to hear like um you know uh you picked um I don't know you let's pick anything right you wanted to do a a mobile application because you were interested in building something for IOS and Android and you wanted to challenge yourself and do something crossplatform so you know you have this portfolio site that shows you can download this app and you have some explanation on there about the technology you use us why you picked it and it's not like I'm not going to go through that and be like oh that's right or wrong I'm going through that to be like hey why did you go pick that what did you learn from doing this because if I'm going to interview you and I have some context around hey you built this thing I would love to chat through and hear why you picked uh postgress as your database why did you pick that language why did you pick whatever right like I just want to understand your thought process and I love to see that people are trying to challenge themselves and learn now if you have a lot of experience because the question was about entry level if you have a lot of experience you're probably not just going to be showcasing stuff that like is a project you just started and didn't really finish like you probably have some things you've been working on for a while and they are a little bit more polished right but what some of the most interesting things in software where it's not just did I build something from scratch in like a week and like here we go like it's a you know it's a shiny new thing some of the most interesting things are like hey I've been I've been running this site for a while or it's a project I've been building for a while and then you're able to explain and talk through how it's evolved and how you've had to change the design of what's going on how did you refactor rewrite these parts because all of those things are real things happen in software the reality is when you're up you know getting a job somewhere it's very unlikely that you get hired on and they go great you're going to start this new project from scratch I mean it happens in some places it's pretty unlikely you're probably going to here's the code base it's probably as old as you are have fun right like having to go work in something and modify it and extend it um so being able I think being able to demonstrate that you have been building on things can be really helpful um Luke Skinner says my in my opinion portfolio sites are not to show a static thing but they can undertake the process of learning to build something yes uh I fully agree with that the Luke says my best portfolio sites were things I built then rebuilt then rebuilt again in a different stack can talk about the things I learned choices I made why I made those choices what I do differently I simply cannot agree more with this I think that is again from my perspective I am not every recruiter I'm not every hiring manager but from my perspective that is 100% what I want to go see um I've shared before that um my first internship I ever got I went to the University of water we had six internships in our program and the first one and like it's so weird how they do this because uh we would do four months of school and then a four-month internship so in your first couple of weeks they're like get your resume ready and you're like for what because I don't have anything to put on it like I I don't have any school done I haven't worked anywhere before I worked at a grocery store for a little bit like what am I going to put on my resume here like this is nuts and so you're like okay I have no idea what I'm doing so you start applying to these jobs uh because they have uh because it's a Co-op program they have a portal and stuff where you can apply to these jobs and I remember applying to one and it said bring something for showand tell and I was like I I don't is that normal I have no idea I've never done this before but I remember thinking like I've been working on this game it's a and I one of the live streams I I showed some uh I don't know if I showed the video of I think I shared a screenshot of it it's bad um like it does not look good but was spending so much time building this game engine for this role playing game it kind of looks like Pokemon um but I was spending so much time building it and the guy said bring something for show and tell and I was like hell yeah I got this thing for show and tell and I at the time I don't remember thinking like oh this is going to be embarrassing it was like no man like I've been like I code this thing every day for years it's like 20 years old now um I haven't worked on it a little bit but uh I just remember thinking like okay and then brought this thing for show and tell in the interview and the I know we're talking I'm talking about an interview right now not like a not like a portfolio site but the concept applies right so in the interview the the owner of this company was interviewing me and he was like okay so it's a it's a role playing game you can kill enemies you can pick up items there's an inventory system there's a skill system so I remember he was asking me he's like okay like um you know how do you how do you save the game like how what does that look like so I I was like oh well I'm using like a like an XML file so I'm writing you know all of the game data back out into this XML like hierarchical format and I remember saying to him but like I don't know if that's actually the right thing to do I actually think that I want to maybe go towards a database but I'm still trying to figure out how I can properly represent the hierarchical data and I'm like I'm I'm you know I've never worked at a a software company before so at this point in time I have lots of ideas in my head on how to do that but at that time I'm like I don't know and we had this really cool conversation where he's like hey no I think you're actually using a you know a format that's working well for you like I don't see an you know is there a performance reason why you would need to shift to that so we had this really good conversation and basically what he was doing was getting me to explain my thought process and problem solving why was I going in these different directions because this is the kind of thing when we're building software together this is exactly what we're going to be doing right what should we do in this case let's go analyze these different paths talk about them weigh the pros and cons and then go forward with something so when we talk about portfolio sites and projects um personally that's what I would uh I would recommend is is exactly what Luke said in the chat my best portfolio sites were things that I built then rebuilt then rebuilt again you can talk about the things that you learned the choices you made and why you made those choices what you do differently you can write up about that stuff you could do a little mini blog entry right on your portfolio site so that's that's my recommendation uh so Aaron sorry that it took a couple of minutes to get there thank you for being so patient and so gracious um yeah let's get back to the the article um so we had talked about mentorship that was one of the things um something else I think there's two other things that I called it there's a whole bunch I haven't seen other people mention any in the chat by the way so if you still want to talk about some stuff that you have to do as a senior engineer that is not just writing code feel free to jump in with your ideas um but the next one that I had written down here was design reviews so probably not something you're doing as a junior engineer or much of you might be doing them um but odds are you're probably working on pieces of and this depends where you're working right you're probably dealing with work that is mostly well understood not overly complex right a lot of uh junior roles are sort of you're getting momentum built so people aren't trying to put things in front of you where they're like this is really going to screw this person up like they're they're trying to give you some things that you can start getting that momentum understanding how you can build some autonomy for yourself problem solve on your own right and then from there once that's established they can start giving you more complex things because now you know how to navigate the code base now you know how to navigate the the build system and some of the infr structure I I was talking about this in code commute on the way home and I said there's an analogy that comes to mind but it feels kind of offensive and the analogy is like training wheels and I feel like saying training wheels is almost like an insult to to like to the junior developers but the the reason that analogy comes to mind is like they're giving you a support system right so as a junior engineer your team is giving you a support system because they want you to have some like success right they want you to build momentum getting through work items and being able to commit things to the code base so training wheels feels like a crappy analogy but that's what comes to mind but when you're doing that kind of stuff odds are you probably don't have to write out design specs and odds are if there's design reviews going on maybe you're invited to them but you're like I don't really know how to you know the more senior engineer on the team put a design dog together we're doing a review together but like I don't I don't really know what to do here as a junior which is fine um it's it's going to take learning but as you as a more senior engineer you will be spending more time doing this right because part of going forward with larger scope projects is going to mean that you need to have other Engineers bought Into Your solution you need to be soliciting feedback about your solution or getting input so that you can have other people you know help you design the solution have their proposals put in there this can look all sorts of different ways but the point is that that's more time spent not coding still very technical John Simpson says as a senior you need to know when to stand your ground and when to collaborate and grow don't give anyone push to lower standards for any reason yeah so like these are these are things that when you're putting design reviews and stuff together the whole point is that you know you need to be trying to to arrive at uh well let's say the best solution and that's a pretty General thing to say the best solution is not necessarily the solution that you came up with which is an important distinction when you're doing design reviews it's not I'm here to prove that I am right at all costs the point of a design review is we are coming up with the best solution and you're starting with probably some ideas that you've put together that you think are the best based on your analysis but that's why you're getting them reviewed it's not so that you can go steamroll everyone else and say aha this is my Forum where I tell you that I am the best and you must bow down to me no it's a forum where you can get the feedback about things that you might have missed maybe there's entirely different approaches right it's not just about you being right it's about coming up with the best solution now when we talk about best solution there's going to be other constraints right sometimes there is a time constraint and it means that you need a solution that will work in a given period of time and maybe that means that something else has to come later we need a stepping stone it's impossible for me to generalize this whole thing in a couple of sentences right but uh the goal of your design reviews is that you're coming up with the best solution not just to be right but this is effectively going to be something that takes time you will spend time you know researching options you'll spend time collecting data you'll spend time putting the actual document together if it's a design doc you'll spend time doing reviews maybe that's asynchronously you might not be the person putting the doc together you're reviewing someone else's then there's going to be uh often meetings where people come together to discuss these things everything that I just said had nothing to do specifically with writing code that's going to be something that you're doing maybe not every day maybe not every single week but something you're going to be doing so you know going back to the original Point like are you coding less by definition if you have to be doing some stuff like this it's going to com out of your your time and your day unless you're working more hours um and the last one that I wrote down in general uh just a super high level one is just project status meetings right everyone loves meetings uh depending where you work the amount of meetings you have will look different um some company cultures will push back on meetings others are meeting heavy I think based on everything I see online almost everyone falls into the camp where it's it's over over indexed on meetings uh which you know is unfortunate I understand that can be frustrating um but uh some of the reality is even if we're not talking about a meeting where you're getting onto a call right so let's if we're imagining this right now was a project status meeting I'm just kidding please don't all hang up on me but I don't just mean getting on to a call when we have projects that we're working on uh when you are more senior there's likely going to be more collaboration either with your teammates and or other teams right it means there's other stakeholders involved it means other stakeholders involved it means more coordination right it's more coordination with the other developers you're working with it might mean that you have uh project managers being involved maybe you haven't even been working with project managers for some of the stuff that you've been on before um again this is could look different at different companies the point is there's going to be other stakeholders coming into these types of things because the scale and the scope of what you're doing is greater now it would be amazing if automatically every time we were working on something everyone just was automatically aligned had full transparency on everything that was going on it just doesn't work that way so either you have you know some type of sync meeting at some Cadence maybe there is something that's done asynchronously and people share out updates maybe there's a hybrid the point is that there's going to be some amount of time spent in synchronizing so could look very different for everyone but given that you're going to be working on larger projects often you're going to be finding yourself leading projects right not just being a participant but you might be the person who's leading it and if that's the case you you're going to have some ownership and some accountability where you need to understand the status of other people however that looks that might be something that takes you time you might be the person responsible for reporting out the progress to other stakeholders that's going to take time there's going to be things where you're uh coordinating with other teams and there's things that come up that you don't agree on now that has to get sorted out and maybe it's not just code related right so it could be uh you know technical limitations and now some of the uh the deadlines and deliverables for your dependencies are being pushed around okay like we have to have a conversation to sort that out whe whether you do that on your like over chat over email or on a call or in person it's time spent doing that kind of thing uh Allan says in the chat being more senior just means you've made more mistakes and I've learned how to how to pause and think and say well maybe yeah um yeah it's I think that's a really good point right it's um there's likely there's likely going to be more opport I'm trying to be careful how I say this there's a lot of stuff floating around where people are talking about like years of experience not being um it's not like a good measure and I was like I don't know if what I'm going to say is like G to make some people mad or something but um uh being more senior just means you've made more mistakes yeah so it's it's very likely that you'll have more experiences to to draw upon but it doesn't mean that all of those experiences are necessarily equivalent or relevant but you know you can draw upon those at least to say okay is this similar enough are there learnings to apply um John Simpson says sounds like you are replying to EMS uh what have you been doing yeah uh I mean just depends on the stakeholders right it's a I I can't generalize for everything um but the reality is that when you're working with multiple people in general and there's other stakeholders involved there's going to be some amount of status that needs to be communicated if you can find tools that help you do that more automatic then excellent um but the reality is that people they need to understand where things are at depending on what their role is and if you have different ways to accomplish that that's excellent especially if it doesn't take more time and effort or minimal time and effort but uh the reality is that there's going to be some time pulled from just writing code so those are the three major things that I wrote down just as examples but obviously there's many more so again they were mentoring others uh being able to spend time doing design reviews project status in whatever format that looks like um I I thought you guys were going to be all over the chat with like oh I have to do this um I have a couple more that come to mind um you know something like depending where you're working maybe you have on call duties um and sure on call might not be reserved only for Engineers but uh if you happen to be the subject matter expert in an area because you are more senior sometimes even when you're not on call you get pulled into the on call stuff so there's one example where you might be spending more time doing other things um helping people debug stuff um so there's there's plenty of examples where your responsibilities for your title are going to require you to do things that aren't coding but to Circle back to the beginning of this conversation that doesn't mean that coding is no longer important for you at senior it absolutely remains a critical thing that you're able to do effectively and that's a key word to use here because sure if you're finding that you're spending other time sorry spending more time doing other things it's been a long day um if you're finding that you're spending more time doing other things um then the reality is that you might just have to become more and more effective at at your ability to code um and then John says my previous comment didn't go through oh uh build utils that speed up your own processes yeah exactly um I think for sure right so that's it's a really good point because and people I think some people don't focus on this enough and they get frustrated where it's like I have to do this thing and like it's it's not effective and but I'm forced to do it and it's like yeah but like why aren't we having conversations about like how to make these things more effective for us we have to step back and look at like the example that I kind of discussing back and forth here with John in the chat is like being able to relay status right the overall goal that I was describing there was that people are interested in the status of something because they need it to be able to do their part of their role effectively high level right I'm not prescribing how it's done that's just the outcome that needs to happen someone needs to leverage the status to do the role effectively how does that get done there's a million ways that we could do it someone might say I'm just going to make this up someone might say I need it written down in an email and then we have to have a meeting about it and then make sure your jira items are updated so that everything is accurate across all these three things and like that's one way to convey the status and I'm sure some people that are watching this are like I have literally seen that and I hate it and I hate everything about it so it's one way to do it it doesn't mean it's effective but in in situations like that we need to be able to step back and say like what's the goal of what we're trying to do here and if you have I recommend people try to create environments like this where we can question this kind of thing and say like hey look like this feels like it's a bit of a pain in the ass maybe you find better language to use and like so what's the goal that we're trying to accomplish okay I understand you need status okay what type of resolution do you need on this how frequently and can we can we have a discussion around like how we make this a little bit better for both of us I want to understand what you need and then we can balance that with sort of my my ability to commit to that on different Cadence or time intervals right because if it's going to be a pain in the butt for you you're probably not going to do it effectively don't trigger me bro just we're going to FOC up for that nightmare did I did I say the the jro word and that's uh that's triggering I'm sorry I you know it's a PTSD for some people funny enough though I I I will say this and I know that as an engineering manager people are going to be like it's you're the problem um I actually really liked using jira but when I've talked about this before I liked using jira because it was just the central spot where like if we had an idea I knew it was in jira if we've thought about solving a problem before we had an idea for new feature it doesn't matter what it is it's like it just we just it was into jira it didn't mean that it went into the backlog for the next Sprint every time or into the current Sprint although being on a startup at the time definitely saw that a lot unfortunately um but I I actually really I liked jira as a tool because I found it intuitive maybe that's just me but uh because it was a central store of like everything that we were thinking about it was super helpful I worked at Microsoft now and specifically in Office 365 like in substrate so all the infrastructure and um it's an extremely email heavy culture as you might imagine because exchange so email is the central source of Truth for knowledge and for me like that's not how my brain works like I'm not a I'm not heavy on email so not having a central store like that that I don't know like even if we were using meure devops in the same way uh I think that would have been maybe a little better but I've noticed that people really gravitate towards email different tools but I don't hate jira um jir for the win also spend time creating your own utilities that allow you to work faster and smarter instead of harder yes absolutely uh scrum Master wanted one field explaining what to be done in English sorry in English I know 20 comp languages and can't explain to to teis yes but John you know that this is a critical skill right um it's a I know that that can be frustrating depending on other people's levels of uh uh other people's technical abilities but yeah of course it's a it goes a really long way to be able to communicate things effectively and I I'm sure John is actually very good at it but I can understand why sometimes that feels taxing I don't I don't blame you uh Allan says I don't mind jir but it can encourage over management yeah for sure and I I understand why when people get triggered when they hear jir and like and talking about that kind of stuff like I said I liked it just because it was like I knew that I knew how to pull information out of it because I knew we had put information in it's just like a second brain um Devin Devon good to see you I didn't realize that you dropped into the live streams um what are you saying that having ideas scattered across teams as your devops Tas SharePoint email and random files on people's local disc might not be effective yeah apparently it's not um yeah it's uh shocking I know uh yes simple asky says of course of course um no that's awesome uh folks we're coming up on the hour here and I'm going to sign off um so I'm just going to do the thing I always do where I kind of go through um different stuff to offer people so hopefully this works I'm going to go full screen it did work you can see me so um this is where my newsletter is where like I said if you want to join next week and see like if you enjoyed being on the live stream by the way for folks on substack I know you can't see my screen that I'm sharing uh so I apologize it would be great if substack actually offered streaming as a first class thing uh but I have to do it for my phone um so I'm talking about the newsletter now if you're on substack you're literally where the newsletter is um so for other folks this is like I said at the beginning of the Stream don't subscribe to um you know the newsletter if you're like I don't want to get emails and stuff that's totally cool if you liked the stream and you want to join next week or some other Monday in the future uh Dev weekly. deev leader.com out on uh on Saturday Dev says I always notice the notifications late so I'm here late you gota put it in your calendar man come on but yeah uh you can check that out so you can see on my screen sorry if you're on substack but uh this article here senior Engineers code less is the topic from today if I click into it you'll see that uh generally the sort of content strategy that I've been using is that I take a video from my code commute channel uh like I said at the beginning of this one of the ones that had the either the most engagement like conversations reviews like it seemed to to get the most interest I'll generally write my newsletter on that and then I make the live stream about the same topic generally so that's the first part um I also want to mention this is the sales pitch part of the live stream right go to got to do it at some point uh but on dome train I have a bunch of courses and if I refresh this aha the new one is out um so Ryan Murphy and I just launched another course together on dome train it's called Career management for software Engineers so I will also put this one into the chat if you want to check that out so the courses that I have on dome train are either going to be C related um because I program in C H or they're going to be sort of uh career related for software Engineers so uh I realize not everyone's a net developer you know not everyone's perfect it's okay just kidding um but if you're interested in like the career side of things and you know we have nailing the behavioral interview getting promoted the the career management one there's a soft skills one down here as well um so Ryan is a engineering manager at Yelp as well so uh I'm from Microsoft he's from Yelp so we come together and we film half and half on these courses so uh I would recommend them personally so if you like how I if you watch my other videos my tutorial style if you like how I teach it's the same kind of style in those videos as well otherwise depending where you're joining from um my main channel is called Dev leader on YouTube and this is the one where the live stream is going to right now for YouTube If I have a quick look across the top uh you you'll notice that my resume review series is uh sort of my most recent videos but uh my videos on dev leader are edited either tutorials or they're say a topic like this but edited down so it's not just me blabbing for an hour so to check out if you haven't already checked out my main Channel boom there we go and then the other one is my other channel which is called code commute this one is so much fun um it's kind of funny because if I just jump back for a second if I go to so it says there's 743 videos on this channel but I think that's because it includes shorts if I just go to videos there should be like 350 or something I don't know where the count is but anyway um Dev leader is a lot of work to make videos for um especially for like programming tutorials I have to come up with the topic I have to create the code I walk through the code um don't get me wrong I don't I don't like dislike doing it but like it's a lot of work then I have an editor edit it I don't edit my own videos anymore so it costs me money right so I lose hundreds of dollars every month basically trying to make helpful videos for people uh and code commute is a little bit of a different story so I started doing code commute because um on the new team that I'm on at Microsoft it's not mandatory by any means but I go into the office twice a week now and there's like one Highway mostly between my home and the office and I absolutely hate commuting if you watch code commute you might know um but I don't like commuting at all and I kind of kind of got it do it so I I said hey if I'm going to be stuck in a car I might as well make content so I made code commute as a bit of a a side project and it's really enjoyable for me so um on some days like if I go to CrossFit in the morning and then I go to work I'll have like four Vlog entries so I've been doing this since the end of last summer kind of picked it up more in the fall and there's already like 176 videos that are just Vlog entries um so it's a lot of fun for me to make if I just go pick a let's go pick a random one these 360 ones are super cool so on SEC that's literally outside my house but you can see how I can look around so like uh it it has a a seam and it didn't show the room that I'm sitting in right now but like you can literally go on YouTube and just like look around like you might not be able to tell but my my cursor is is actually moving around in the 360 video so it's a lot of fun um but these conversations are uh the ones I mentioned at the beginning that are either um submitted questions in the comments or I go to Reddit to go through topics I77 here is a death trap of aggro drivers yep um so yeah this Channel's a lot of fun uh I know I've been talking on this channel a lot about being burnt out and stuff recently um and I had people saying like hey take it easy like you know you don't have to uh to post so many videos and stuff but I was telling people like I actually enjoy making the videos on code commute like it's not really what I would call work um so I'm going to keep doing them it's a lot of fun and the last thing sorry something fell in my house and distracted me last thing I'll jump to is called brand ghost so brand ghost is the SAS that I am building on the side if you depending on how you got to this live stream you might see that I post a lot of stuff on social media uh brand ghost is what I use to post everything on social media when I started taking content creation more seriously at the start of 2023 uh I had a goal I said I'm going to post three videos to YouTube every single week and I've almost done that every single week um and then more recently because I have these two channels I actually Post 10 to 15 videos a week on YouTube but that's just YouTube I post to every single social media platform multiple times per day every single day and I've been doing that for a couple years now the only way that that's possible for me is because I built brand ghost to help me do it so the content that you see me posting is my content I wrote it or I made the pictures or made the videos or whatever made the blog entries but the way that it gets posted is throughand ghost so it will cross post everywhere for me um and if I didn't have brand ghost and didn't put it together then I wouldn't be able to make content the way that I do so um this has been something uh started a bit of a passion project so that I could enable my content creation and then I said like wait a second I think there's something here because um the way that I was doing this before I started coding it in brand ghost was costing me about $1,200 a year to be able to everywhere the way that I needed to do it so I built brand ghost um to be able to accommodate that and sort of our goal with brand ghost is that we want to be able to help content creators that are getting started so if you're like hey I'd be interested in making content but like posting it is a pain in the butt like I don't know anything about like you know what even is blue sky like do I have to go make another account and I have to go post it to there now too and um the the idea is that we give you free scheduling and crossposting across all these platforms we just added Reddit Pinterest is coming uh imminently I have substack working on a private branch that I can use um we'll do masted on shortly I have a prototype for posting to Discord channels um so the whole idea is that you can make your content and then the post you don't have to worry about the free version lets you schedule and cross post and um in the paid for versions you get more features like what I use for recurring content so to explain what I mean by that is I post a lot of Evergreen content and the concept behind that if I scroll down a little bit we use these things called topic streams so because I try to make as much educational content as I can if I were to make a c tutorial on how dictionaries work in C sharp that tutorial will make sense today it will make sense a week from now it will probably make the same amount of sense in 5 years from now so because I focus on writing content that isn't really timely it's sort of timeless it means that it can be reposted in the future which means that every time I create a piece of content it's an investment for myself as a content creator so I have enough content in some of my topic streams I have like 20s something topic streams I have enough content in some of them that I could are you our new Creator uh oh I'll send that to someone are you are where does it say that is it in a picture even worse even worse if it's in a picture thanks I'll have someone look at that though um the idea is that I have enough content in some of these topic streams that if I'm having a period as a content creator where I don't have enough capacity to be creating new content then I can take a break so the example that I always love to go back to is last October I think I took a vacation with my wife to Hawaii and I had thanks John I will make sure that I check that out in fact I'll have someone else check that out because they do the work on the site and I'll say it was so embarrassing on stream everyone was laughing at you um but I took a vacation with my wife last October we went to Hawaii and I had brand ghost running and I had over 150 social media posts that went out for the week all content that I had written I did not manually schedule a single one of those posts I also got very lucky that week and I had my most viral post ever I think I had like over two million impressions on LinkedIn or something a meme that went out so it was pretty cool but all of that was hands off right I spent the time creating the content brand ghost posted it for me so if you are interested in starting to get uh going with content creation you can try brand ghost totally for free I will put it into the chat um and if you're taking content creation more seriously like I said this is what I built to enable myself to create content the way that I do and hello Maria good to see you it's been a while um I hope you're doing very well I'm sorry that I'm literally about to wrap up the stream um so I appreciate you dropping in though I know it's been a little while since we've chatted though so um oh look trying to block whoever that is oop out of my chat um cool okay so thanks so much for for being here folks um sorry Maria for ending as soon as you joined um but uh if you are interested in joining next week same time next week on Monday so 700 p.m. Pacific is when I start go for about an hour um when I am the stream will likely go a little bit longer when I'm sort of out of this bit of burnout phase and some of the stuff that I'm doing for work um so thanks for for being patient with that as I as I make progress on that and otherwise during the week make sure to check out code commute that's where you'll see all of my my fun stuff going on for the week I didn't put a link to that did I I didn't put a link to code commute here you go coming in the chat boom okay again thanks folks for being here sorry for everyone on substack that can't see my screen or see the links and stuff I'm sharing I know it's it's a pain in the ass but I'm sure substack will catch on soon and and do this properly so thank you everyone I'll see you next time take care