Replaceable And Indispensable - Principal Software Engineering Manager AMA

one sec we will get going in just a moment doing a quick check looks like most things are going cool mute myself so I don't have a nice little Echo coming back so we are on Instagram Twitter LinkedIn I think the only place I can't go to right now is Tik Tok because I don't have enough followers so if you are on Tik Tok go follow me on Tik Tok so I can stream to Tik Tok too that would be awesome um today's live stream just like I do live streams every Monday I want to make sure that you can engage in the chat so I have a you know a uniform chat that I can watch on any platform that you're on so feel free to participate please I'd rather spend most of the time answering the questions that you have so you get the value out of this so that's the the ultimate goal and uh the topic that I want to look at today is again from newsletter article that I put out and it is titled the best Engineers or the best software Engineers are replaceable and yes it's a little bit of a clickbait title yes it is but I I thought it was a really interesting concept to write about because it is a sort of a philosophy that I've I've come to over I guess the past half of my career and uh it comes from like my management perspective so I want to be able to talk through that because I think it's a really interesting concept and I think that the way it's phrased like you know that when we think about being replaceable like that doesn't sound like a good thing but it is and I think the framing can kind of help get us there so I want to talk through that but like I said please make sure that you are asking stuff in the chat I'm just trying to pull up another screen here because I realize something's not going but we'll get there cool I want to make sure that I can watch the Youtube feed in particular because that's where this is going after so cool stuff um LinkedIn I guess LinkedIn doesn't have chat but it has comments so comment on it I don't know why they don't have a built-in chat seems kind of silly that you have to comment on stuff but oh well it is what it is and last time Twitter was not working for chat so I'm hoping it disconnected partway through something silly like that so fingers are crossed that that's going but maybe let's dive into it like I said I'll be watching for questions and stuff that roll in and uh try to get to them as I'm talking okay so the best software Engineers are replaceable where do we start with that right that sounds like a pretty loaded statement how could how could that be a good thing why do we want to strive for that so I want to start with talking about job security because I think that when people hear replaceable right like you are replaceable in your job that sounds like you don't have any job security that's a very bad thing from a job security perspective and I think one of the kind of go-to things that we hear from like a job security perspective as a software engineer right you're thinking about working in a code base um the sort of the joke is like oh if you write the most important critical code but it's contrived and no one can really you know follow along with it it's really difficult to understand like there's your job security right um that you know a company needs you you have the the critical information you understand the code that was written and there's no way that you could lose your job the company needs you that that's your job security so in that particular situation you would be you know described as someone that's not replaceable how could someone replace you if you have that core piece of knowledge that is critical for the the company to continue with their product right so I think if we latch on to that kind of thing it's easy to of frame up that kind of person someone that has this intimate knowledge that they're not sharing they're keeping it close to their their heart right like that means that they're irreplaceable and they have job security but if we think about software Engineers like that right and it this is probably very applicable outside of software engineering if we think about people like that that's not a great trait right like you probably don't want a company of people or like even a small small group of people a small team you don't want that to be emulated right someone that is keeping things close they're not letting anyone else work on stuff they're the single point of failure for something that's critical that's not something that we want to emulate right it's quite the opposite we'd rather have people that are sharing knowledge making sure that other people can work on things no single points of failure this is the kind of thing that we want to create in in team this is specifically about software engineering but I could imagine like other Industries where you have teams of people you don't want a single point of failure on the team or in the organization so seems like we have a bit of a challenge here we all want job security of course right and um I I should pause for a moment to say like I'm not trying to be ignorant of like the the tech landscape right now I get that that's very challenging so I'm not trying to make of that I just mean in general even before the current state of the tech industry now in general um this is really about you know that feeling of having job security this is independent of what companies are actually doing I don't have any kind of saying that so okay so we want job security but we also want teams where we have individuals that we want emulated we want people to be sharing knowledge not keeping secrets not making it it such that no one else can work on stuff so these seem like they're at odds with each other right so how is it possible we can kind of go forward and not have this issue okay so I think the the problem with that thought process is that it sort of suggests like a uh a causation not like a correlation so there is a correlation that if you keep you know the most intimate top secret and critical knowledge about some algorithm or some part of the code base if you keep that to yourself yes there is job security because they can't possibly let you go because it's so important but it's not like a causation relationship right so you can have other factors it's not like a one-way type of thing there are other things that could make it such that you have job security not just making it so that someone can't possibly fire you because it would make their business go under and I think that's the important thing we want to look at we want to see if there's other things we can do that make you valuable right make you valuable and still focus on what we want to get out of teams because at the end of the day when we're building software engineering teams we want to make sure we're building them with people that have behaviors and patterns that we want others to emulate and you'll hear this a lot right I'm not going to totally go into the Weeds on this but when it comes to to teams um I don't know what the exact like phrase is but it's something along the lines of like you know One Bad Apple can really uh kind of you know sour the whole team so to speak so if you bring in toxic behavior and you allow that to to remain in the team um it's the exact opposite effect of having multipliers brought in right so you can have a team of 10 people and the 10th person on that team is someone that uh impedes others they are single point of failure um whatever kind of toxic Behavior you can think about there's a a phrase like I'm not going to uh say it because I don't know if I'll get like demonetized later on YouTube but like an intelligent jerk you can use a different word for jerk but the types of people that are you know they're very intelligent but they're very hard to work with you can have these types of people on teams and they really bring down an entire team so we don't want Behavior like that on the team of course we want to make sure that we can have teams where there are behaviors that we want others to emulate and that's not to say that every single person that comes on the team is going to have all of those behaviors exactly but the more of that kind of culture we can create on the team where you do have these good behaviors being demonstrated that you want others to to model and and take on for themselves the better right we want more of that so if that's what we want when we're building software teams it's very much indicating and I mean it's probably obvious we don't want to have people on the team that are are keeping stuff to themselves that the team needs to share so there's no single point of failure just trying to connect the dots here because I want to continue on with this this is kind of the segue into the next part of my My article that I wrote which is really about like coming to this realization and hopefully as I'm saying it it sounds pretty obvious but um you know it's from a an engineering manager's perspective like a lot of my job has been has been building up teams running teams trying to get you know like the storming norming forming forming norming storming at the end yeah storming is at the end of that the point is you're building these teams so you might be hiring new people in or kind of creating a team from scratch you have to have the people working together and it's going to take a little bit of time right like it's really rare that you put a couple people together and they've never worked together before and everything's just awesome and it's totally great there's going to be a bit bit of a learning you know curve you have to learn how the people that you're working with operate how they communicate strengths and weaknesses that just takes time right you could take the same group of people put them on a new project or change the environment and things can kind of change up a bit so it's a big part of what my career has been has been getting people like that together on projects and getting them to be effective so if that's what I'm focused on you can imagine that there's patterns that I like I said I I want to make sure that I'm seeing these behaviors that we can that we can model and something that I kind of picked up on over time this is kind of like a introspection thing so this whole time I'm talking about other people on the team right I want to make sure that I'm creating these teams they can become effective but what I started to notice is that like I should be able to move away from a team and not have it fall apart so this is the interesting part right like I'm talking about this whole time like a software engineer working on something and they're not the single point of failure so I as an engineering manager once the team is like really cohesive and they're doing awesome work they shouldn't need me it sounds kind of funny they shouldn't need me at all points like I should be able to step back in my opinion if I've done a successful job and they should be able to keep running and be effective so I want to pause here for a second because it sounds a little bit weird because if I'm doing that then what the heck is the point of my job right if I can just do that you know get a team working together working in a product or project space now they're effective was I even necessary right if I can just walk away why should I even have a job doing that doesn't that sound kind of dangerous going back to the job security part I'm kind of I'm saying this live on a camera saying look I should just be able to walk away you don't need me on this team but there's a bit of nuance to this right because the point that I'm trying to to get across here is that I was very valuable in creating the team I was very valuable in trying to help form that culture whether there's different processes in place how people are approaching problem solving working together I'm trying to make sure that the team can become incredibly effective and part of being the most effective team in my opinion is also removing myself as a single point of failure so this was this kind of realization that I had that yes while I'm thinking about I don't want software Engineers to be single points of failure I don't want to be the single point of failure either because I think in order to create the best team possible I should not be that single point of failure that does not mean and this is where we're going to be heading here this that does not mean that I don't offer value it's quite the opposite if I'm being successful at creating these teams it means that I have offered tons of value right the value the most value that I could have added was getting the team to this point where they can be effective so now I want to kind of back up from that because that's the like I said that's the realization that I had from a management perspective but I want to bring this back to software Engineers because I realize that a lot of people watching this are going to be software Engineers not necessarily in a management position although if you are in a management position that there was kind of one of the key takeaways is that I don't want you to or in my opinion if you are the single point of failure on your team that's an opportunity to continue to optimize right why are you the single point of failure you know if people are looking to get priorities so they know what to work on like okay like how can you make sure that the uh the team understands common values like if if you're working with other stakeholders like a product owner product manager project manager whatever type of roles like can the team not work with those people as well right the there's just a lot of different opportunities that you can focus on to kind of build that up so that would be kind of like the Engineering Management takeaway that I would hope if that's your role or you're thinking about that kind of Direction that's that's where I'm headed with this on the software engineering side though right it's it's similar so if we go back to the original example about keeping things you know you are the only person that knows the critical part of the code base right we're saying we don't want that so you say okay Nick well if you're saying that all that I need to be doing is working in the direction where I'm no longer useful on the team that seems like that's not good for job security but the point here is that it's not that you're no longer useful on the team the point is that you didn't just have value that you added to the team that is only tangible as you're doing it if that makes sense so to give you an example if you were a very Junior software engineer working on a team and this is a generalization by the way I'm not trying to say that like juniors are going to be bad or something like that I have to start somewhere so hear me out if you're a junior software engine engineer on a team the odds are that the the work that you're doing is probably very scoped down the impact that you're having is probably scoped down again generalizations and that's because you're getting ramped up on a team you're relatively new to things right kind of feeling things out so these are all normal things but when it comes to the value that you're adding to the team the long-term effects of your value at this point in time are are not really they're not tangible yet it's going to take you time on the team to be to be doing a lot of these other things so if you think about maybe more tenur people on the team they've been with the team for a while what are some things that they've done that have contributed long-term value right so they might have helped build a lot of the culture of the team they might have helped with the software architecture that you're working on right they've the value that they've added is not like in the most recent PR their most recent PLL request or code review it's not like a one-time snapshot of value that they've added and as a more Junior software engineer in the beginning that kind of will be the thing because the value that you will have longterm needs to be built up you need more time on the team to start recognizing these opportunities that you can have to have longlasting value so the idea here is that as you're becoming more senior it's not just that you have the opportunity to work on bigger you know bigger business impact like that's great of course you might work with other teams that's awesome you might be leading projects that's awesome but some of the biggest impact that you can have is that the value that you're adding into the team the project or the product area is longer lasting even to potentially outlive your time on the team and that's where I'm going with this it's that the impact you can have can Outlast potentially your time on the team so from a like if take a software architecture perspective right that could look like that you were helping shape the architecture of what was being built such that you know if you were on the I'm just going to make up numbers just to to make the the conversation a little easier if you're on the team for five six years whatever and you're very familiar with the product the code base and you're helping shape the architecture because you're seeing the direction that things are heading in you're very in tune with what's going on barring any you know huge differences in customer requests and stuff that ultimately change everything but if you have the mindset for it and you can architect things in the right direction and get everyone moving in that direction you might in your sixth seventh year maybe you're like it's time for a change that's you know that's normal and the impact that you had on the team in terms of that architectural direction is still felt long after you were on the team that's one example right this is going back to like the value that you added is still being felt even once you are gone you've been replaced by someone else your value is still there if we're not talking about software architecture maybe we're talking about how um how the team operates right so I kind of was talking earlier about myself as an engineering manager but there's lots of different informal leadership roles on teams and it doesn't have to come from someone that's incredibly senior on the team it's more common you might have like a tech lead position some someone a lot more senior on the team but this could certainly look just like more Junior people on the team that had a big impact in like the team culture how they wanted to to approach pushing things forward you know I'm just going to make up some examples right like people really pushing for um on your team chat making sure for poll requests when they're ready like we're going to have a culture that we're trying to unblock people as much as possible or or really making sure that you're retrospectives if that's something your team's following that you are going to have difficult conversations you want to talk about the things that you can improve like this can kind of come from anyone right and the idea again is that you're offering some value that sure it's felt in the moment but that could really help shape the direction that your team is going in and that could mean that even after you leave the team hey the the way that the retrospectives are running like they might shift and alter over time but you had a really big impact that kind of shaped how the team wants to go approach things so that's what I mean about being replaceable you should be able to be replaced because the value that you've added is so great that you don't need to be there any longer it does not mean and this is the catch right it does not mean that you don't offer value that's not what I'm saying if you remain there you will continue to offer plenty of value of course but the point is that you are now able to be replaced because you've offered so much value that other people can step in and start doing similar things and the most value you could add is being able to teach other people to do the same type of thing so part of the takeaway in my newsletter here was that when it comes to being replaceable I said the best software Engineers are replaceable but they're also indispensable because to me that gets a across the point that yes you could be replaced on a team someone else could come in but the fact is that even you know if you were to remain you would be still offering so much value if you go to another team the reason that you're indispensable is because you should be able to try and repeat those same types of things have a similar type of impact whether it was architectural right whether it was helping form that team and get those um I don't want to call them habits or rituals however your team operates right like you're really getting the team on the same page to work together those are things that you could reapply on a different team so that's the idea behind being replaceable but also being indispensable so I hope that helps that's kind of what the the last newsletter topic was about I've been kind of watching the chat you guys are quiet today there's usually a whole bunch of questions that are like about trying to get careers in Tech or you you know different programming things so um that's really the the main focus that I wanted to get through so I'm I'm almost done but I wanted to see if there were folks that had questions in the chat I'm happy to answer stuff um if it's a if it's programming specific hey Fran great to see you here great are you oh you're on YouTube too awesome it's going to say the the LinkedIn crew is here so you you're here right at the time where I'm running out of things to say so I'm hoping that people have some questions that I can jump into otherwise I might just start rambling about some stuff which might be cool but I got to come up with a good topic um okay well while I'm waiting I'm watching the chat to see if you guys have questions I'll kind of shut up if uh if I see anything roll in but there's a couple things going on this week so um I have on my channel what I've been doing so when I say my channel on my YouTube channel I've been trying to incorporate some more software engineering interviews so I'm meeting with a few more people uh Francisco uh I probably need to get you on the channel That would be awesome to chat with you I know we've talked a bunch offline so that would be cool um your question is going to be about content cre I'm happy to answer content creation questions too if you want um but yeah uh franisco I'll get you on the channel I think it'd be awesome to interview you but I have a couple of those lined up I'm doing a call with someone tomorrow I wanted to mention this because I think it's incredibly important um the interview that I'm going to be doing with is actually a a former intern that I had and she is absolutely awesome it's been years since we worked together but she had an extremely powerful uh little presentation that she did for us years back and uh the context I always love telling this and it's going to come up in the in the video I'm sure when we we get to talking but the context was that as an intern um there was a sort of a women in Tech conference that was going on and she said hey like could I go attend this and I said absolutely but I have one rule and that rule is when you go to a conference you have to come back and teach us something because we need to learn too so um you know I'm kind of joking kind of not cuz like we should be able to learn something I think that would be awesome uh so she went off to this women in Tech conference and she spent time I mean at a bunch of different things but something that she took away was about impostor syndrome and like to be honest I think if it weren't for her talking about impostor syndrome I probably wouldn't talk about it as much as I do but it was it was honestly like a really powerful kind of takeaway that she came back to us with and what she had said was that there was a bunch of impostor syndrome talks at this conference but everyone that was talking about it kind of made it seem like oh like you're yeah you're a victim of impostor syndrome that's just that's just how it is and she's like I I get it but like that doesn't help like I want to I want to have something actionable like I know that I'm experiencing imposter syndrome what can we do about it so her name is Julia and when she came back to us and talked to us at the office what she had said was I basically took a whole bunch of the notes that they presented at this conference and just flipped everything around so that it felt more actionable so instead of sitting there being like Oh yes I I have impostor syndrome this sucks it was like what's going to feel better if you're experiencing something that you don't like like having some type of control back and the point is not that you oh you just cure your impostor syndrome but it's like you have some things that you can do to help kind of work through it acknowledge it make it feel a little bit better so um I'm going to be chatting with her tomorrow I'm super excited uh she she just does an awesome job kind of navigating impostor syndrome topic so that'll be up on my YouTube channel uh that will be probably it'll be next week but it'll either be on uh it's probably going to be on next Thursday as long as I stay on top of my video creation it'll be next Thursday so I'm very excited for that um there's been more comments I've been seeing online recently I posted something on LinkedIn about this yesterday someone was saying something along the lines of like um this came from Tik Tok originally that people in leadership positions and in charge are not the ones that experience impostor syndrome um and then went on to say something like you know mid-level managers are not leaders and even some CEOs aren't leaders so like I don't know necessarily what they were trying to say but the the point here is like yes absolutely leaders including CEOs can feel impostor syndrome tons of people feel impostor syndrome and uh personally I find one of the most helpful things is hearing people that are you know higher level in their career further in their career someone you look up to hearing those people say I experience impostor syndrome is one of the most helpful things because you start to go hey I'm not alone like other people that I look up to experience this okay like okay like it's not the end of the world it's not going to cure it but it helps you kind of feel better about it so I I wanted to mention that that's going to be a a call of dut tomorrow so I'm super excited so Fran um I'm planning to start audio video during Q2 nice okay I try to join everyone this doing the interview is perfect that would be awesome like I said I'd love to have you on um yeah start on any platform for sure um yeah Francisco does a lot of awesome content great newsletter so he's in the chat if you see him commenting there but uh you can definitely check him out on substack what else is going on this week I'm going to be doing a live stream uh with uh Maria also from LinkedIn so I interviewed Maria on my channel was it last last week I think it was last week um or maybe the week before and I'm losing track of time I can't believe it's already uh it's already may my goodness um but Maria she is a a language and communication coach for software engineers and if you know me I like talking about communic unication and soft skills for software engineering because I think it's critical I think it's undervalued I think people don't focus on it and that was such a cool conversation because for me like I like talking about communication why that's valuable but uh especially from her client base there are people that like English is not their first language and being able to talk about language differences uh cultural differences and how that can affect communication stuff like that was a whole other sort of level onto it that was really cool to hear about and talk through um especially at Microsoft I I've had in the four almost four years I've been at Microsoft I've had people from you know all over the world that uh that I have on my teams and you know especially say like in Mexico for example um just differences in in how they how they approach communication cultural differences it's just it's fascinating so um I just want to add in like that's a whole other level of of challenge so um I am going to be going on I think it's on Wednesday that she's doing a a live on LinkedIn so I'll be doing that so if you can make that I think that's going to be a really awesome conversation um she's very insightful with when it comes to communication and and had to it's it was really cool to hear talk about um I don't have experiences with this because I am an English native speaker so she was talking about uh individuals where even they're concerned about their accent right they're like my accent is the thing holding me back and I I thought that was fascinating because it was like I've never talked to someone as an an English native speaker going like oh like their accent that's that's not working like that's not been the case ever so when people are hyper fixated on that that was really good for me to hear to go hey like if I if I have people that I'm working with that they don't seem very confident I I wonder if there's some better questions I can ask about why so uh if you can make that I think it's going to be an awesome awesome conversation um nice okay what major did you take in college um I I took the the very traditional um kind of approach when it came to academics and stuff so I was in computer engineering um so I went to the University of waterl in 2007 that's a a Canadian University and graduated in 2012 so that was honor honors Bachelor of applied science and uh was a co-op program and I didn't realize this but a lot of people like don't say Co-op like it's like internships and co-ops but they were synonymous for me so I had a an internship program and for me going through University was 5 years um and it was 5 years straight there were the only breaks were kind of like like a week or whatever in between semesters but it was school it started off as school for four months and then after four months it was your first internship so it's kind of ridiculous um it was really cool I didn't like school at all if I'm being completely transparent but I loved internships that was the kind of the thing that reminded me that I wanted to stick through it um I I hated math I hated like all the subjects I had I'm like why am I doing this like this doesn't feel it doesn't feel like what I want to be doing and then I would you after four months and having terrible grades I would go do my internship and I was like oh yeah this is sweet I love this so um really happy with how that turned out though I have no regrets want to go in the field of AI I mean yeah that's that's good I don't know how far along you are in your journey as a as a software developer um but definitely especially if you're early I think it's a great time to to start focusing on that stuff I find this an interesting kind of area when people talk about and I'm not trying to put you on the spot you're in high school awesome I'm not trying to put you on the spot I think icon shows you're from kick here too so thank you I think you might be the first person who's watched me on Kick um when people talk about the field of AI I'm always curious if they're thinking about like from their perspective it's like I want to be working on um you know building the models or building like new AI technology that kind of powers everything else or if primarily people are saying I wanted to get into AI because I want to use the a like someone's built the the models and whatever other technology I want to go apply it like I want to take the AI and apply it to something else okay primarily data science yeah so probably on on the other side of that where you're trying to create whether it's creating models or looking at training and stuff like that so that's cool um it's it's interesting too like one of the last streams I did I was talking about math usage in in uh in programming right so this would be a complete a complete pivot to what I was saying uh because my big argument before was hey like you don't need advanced math to be a programmer like the the advanced math stuff is going to come up in the different domains that you're applying your software engineering skills to but for something like being on the uh the data science side or it's it's going to be heavy in math it's going to be a lot of theory it's going to be heavy in math um if you were on the opposite side of that so to give you an example I I build software that leverages AI I have absolutely no idea about any of the math that goes into that zero and I'm happy to keep it that way at least for what I'm doing because it would be overwhelming to try and know that at some point I'm curious I like to dig into it but it's just not necessary for trying to to leverage it so I wanted to kind of call that out you know as someone who's interested into going into AI if you heard any of my previous advice that was like oh you don't really need math for how you want to go into it you probably need tons of math so I hope you like math um but that's that's cool I I think that's going to be um obviously a huge area um I'm very interested to see how things are going to evolve over the next 5 10 years um I'm on the side of the fence that does not think software engineering is going to be obsolete I think I think it's going to change 100% it's absolutely going to change but it's not going away um I've been reading some things about people making comparisons like oh like someone said online software engineering is is absolutely going away but like accounting that's not because of regulations and I'm like if you think software engineering is going away like accounting would absolutely go away and they're going to change regulations once they find that they can trust whatever is going on with a high enough degree of confidence and they can save money on it yeah it's going away but I don't think a lot of these jobs traditionally are are disappearing right I don't think that the technology just obsoletes the job I think that it Alters it right it's like we're using AI like co-pilot in in our software development it's not like oh I never have to program again I just become way more effective at programming and I can focus on harder more challenging interesting things I think that's going to happen to a lot of roles have you ever been on a team where there was no manager before you and there's no motivation and nothing if so how do you start motivating the people thanks for the question Lucas so um feel free to offer more context as I start rambling to try and answer this but because I the more context you can offer the better I can try and answer have I been on a team where there was no manager before you um let me see how to answer this so um not as an individual contributor because I've been a an engineering manager for almost the entire uh time I've been in my professional career outside of internships so do you do you mean as a software engineering manager like I have have I been brought on to a team where was no manager before me or something or there was and there was no motivation or do you mean you are a software engineer on a team there is no manager and no one has motivation let me know if you can clarify that I'll come back and answer your question um I have some thoughts about how you can try motivating people it's not a one-size fits-all thing but let me know if you can offer more context and and I'll try my best uh Francisco that's what makes it fun I wouldn't want to be 40 years old doing the same thing yeah um my my thought process on the AI stuff is really like I don't want to sound too harsh but like if you if you feel like AI is going to replace your job then like it it probably will replace your job you know like you need to be thinking about how you're going to leverage it to replace the mundane stuff that you don't want to do so you can focus on more challenging creative things and then sure AI will probably replace that one day too and you go move on to the next thing right that's why I'm saying I don't believe personally that it completely obsoletes jobs I think that it changes them and that's okay you should be able to kind of move along with that if you're staying up with how it can be leveraged um if you're I Ed like a a manual testing example before but I we could apply it to anything right if you're not trying to take advantage of new things to save yourself time to make yourself more efficient I think that you'll fall behind and that has nothing to do with ai ai just happens to be a good example of it um yeah and then in the chat I think I AI will change everything I think it will I think it's going to have it's going to continue to have very dramatic impact so it's exciting awesome thanks Lucas I'm just going to read your your comment here out loud so yes I met a team right now without a manager I'd like to have the chance to do the job but the first thing I would have to do is build up the motivation which was destroyed the last years okay yeah this is challenging right so um couple things to Think Through are um tenure of the team right it sounds like people have been around for a while because you're saying destroyed over the last years it would be interesting to understand like what is getting people disengaged I think fundamentally that's something important to understand because it could be different things it could be I'm just going to list off a couple couple things right um there's been kind of like an air quotes death march to constantly Shi stuff and people are burnt out so they're demotivated disengaged they they feel like you know kind of the team feels destroyed um it could be that that was fine um but they're lacking product Direction they've had like failed product launches and stuff so they're feeling demotivated it could be that there's toxic people on the team and most of the team is not the toxic person so they're feeling like hey this hasn't been managed well so they're feeling destroyed so again more if you as I'm talking if you want to keep adding any more context I can keep trying to H in on it but um how to build up that motivation is ultimately going to come back to at least in my opinion understanding why it's it's torn down right um you could try doing different things but if it's not addressing the core of the problem I think that's going to it will help it's just going to take more time until we can kind of arrive at what the core problem is so um a couple things it's like one I would try to make sure that the team needs to get alignment right and that alignment if they're if the only alignment they have is that everyone's like yeah this sucks like that's not a great spot but you got to start with some alignment so getting PE starting to get people on the same page and starting to get engaged a little bit is going to take time but you have to kind of take little steps to do it so trying to think of some good examples here um it could be like you know the next time that there is a milestone that's making sure that you can kind of take the opportunity to celebrate with the team like hey like this was a really good job you guys did like starting to build some some rallying behind the positive things and building that up slowly so someone basically has to step out of the Doom Zone instead of being like all this crap sucks like everyone's upset all the time trying to latch on to some positive things and unfortunately if there aren't a lot of positive things because everyone's feeling Doom and Gloom it might take a little bit of extra effort to kind of like I don't want to say artificially find those things but start finding them you need to start being able to inject some of the positivity back into the team this is going to sound like maybe a silly example it could be a matter of like you know um whether it's uh private recognition or public recognition depending on the person hey awesome poll request it's really great that you were able to do that you had positive feedback from the more senior people on the team you could go say to the senior person hey thanks so much for guiding that person through the the poll request like the point is trying to build up from the very Basics like getting people a little bit more engaged right it's going to be tedious for sure uh yeah plus when I been in retos with there a therapy session I feel listened to by my direct manager but I know solving the root cause out of my manager's control and we'll have no change yeah like there's a lot of stuff to dig into with this kind of thing right like it's easy for me to sit back and not be part of the team and say oh it's just do this but like even as an engineering manager team culture comes from the team I'm my at least my management style is not to sit there and say hey team this is how you have to go do stuff you can imagine how well that's going to go even if people say most of the team say everyone on the team uh you know looks up to me and they believe in me it's like human nature that you don't want to do things that you're told to go do but if you can get people to come up with the idea right if they feel like they helped create the solution then there's a lot more buyin so what can work really well in retrospectives is when you have people that are like doing the therapy session kind of thing and I'm going to use a a personal experience not in detail just like kind of in General but when you have like this Doom and Gloom kind of thing you need to get to action ultimately or else what happens you spend your 30 minutes to an hour in a retro going this all sucks we hate our jobs like product sucks we hate this team whatever it is right everyone's upset and then what like you look at the your the the time and you're like hey that was that was great like let's do that again in two weeks like no like you don't want that now I don't think that it's a problem to have venting and I want to share this is the sort of the anecdote personal experience kind of thing I when I was working at a digital forensics company I managed small teams uh one of my teams in particular worked on rapid prototyping we ended up building a digital a mobile digital forensic product that competed with uh a huge tech company that had an absolute Monopoly in the market and we were and I can confidently say this we were extremely effective at how we operated as a team one of the things that we would do on our retrospectives we would get heated we would get heated about all the stuff we hated and I remember that there was one retrospective where someone that was not on our team wanted to sit in and that person ended up going and talking to my director and my director had to kind of have a little bit of an aside with me and he was like you can't like you might need to think about how you're having your Retros and I was like hold on no like I'm not I'm not changing how the team operates because someone on the outside had a different perspective because what they were missing about our Retros is that we always use that fuel like like the the fuel the fire to go drive the change cuz we would get so like I don't know frustrated about living with something that we were like we have to go make a change to this like that's how we operate it's going to look different on every team that might look like negative spiraling to people on the outside but we made tons of really awesome changes so we turned our therapy sessions into very much like tons of action out of that so I don't recommend that for everyone it just so happens that our personality styles were very much like that like very sarcastic very like worst case scenario everything about it we were aligned on and it worked well for us so Lucas in your particular casee like you got a team that's feeling kind of down um there's there there is no manager the the role of a man okay so there's a handful of things right the role of a manager is going to be a um not only like helping the team get alignment and stuff like that I'm going to come back to that in a sec there's going to be things like career growth and all of that those are things that if you are not a manager it's it's sort of not your your role to be able to help people's career progression on a um on a formal basis if that makes sense so like I spend parts of my days making sure I'm talking with career growth about people on my team like that would be something that if you're not the manager you probably shouldn't do that um you can help you know mentor and guide people but not from a like do this and you're going to get a promotion kind of thing it's not you know that's not your responsibility but there's so much informal leadership so much that if the team does it like it's great if a manager is doing it and they should but and without the manager there you can absolutely be the person that steps up and what's cool about that is when other people start to observe that behavior happening like hey look this person's not just on the Doom and Gloom wagon they see some positive stuff going on like suddenly and maybe it's not sudden but it might feel sudden to some people after some time they go hey like I'm tired of feeling like everything sucks this person's like like they know what's up they start to look up to you for that and they start to model that behavior because yeah it's easy to complain about stuff but like we want things to be better so if you can be the person leading that and people start to see things getting better people will follow they will but again more detail on like specifics about why they're they're feeling disengaged or feeling like destroyed like you said that helps to kind of shape and I can again continue to offer more perspective there yeah the dangerous thing I see about venting is that it reinforces itself absolutely and this is It's Tricky and I think that if you vent and there's no there's nothing that says okay like venting is done what do we do to fix it then venting is not great so like again like I had no problem with my team venting because at the end of it venting over what are we doing like we're going to do something to make this better and it was always about like driving change out of discomfort and I thought that was totally fine um it was never venting about here's the other important detail I want to mention it was never venting about people it was never this person on the team sucked or some other team or or even like this other whole team sucks never that it was like it's never about the people it would be like I'm so frustrated that we are pushing changes up and we haven't like um other teams are pushing changes up and our stuff is breaking this literally happened we were working uh back and forth in an area of a product and we would make changes and like basically the next Sprint we would find that all of our stuff was breaking and we were like this is so crappy and we were like tests we need tests like it's not the other people's fault it's our fault we didn't put the tests in they don't know they're breaking our Behavior so you know we Leverage The frustration to drive change something I like now is the idea of side quests if the main team goal doesn't motivate me I try to find another objective to get the same job done this is interesting for sure um I'd be in Francis be interested to hear how you balance that with what your current priorities are um so if the team has milestones and goals to hit like how far on your I love the the side quest idea how far on your side quest do you go that deviates from the main path um so from the engineering manager side of things this is really important for me when I'm talking with my team I need to manage engagement right like I know that there's business goals at have to be met of course but my I like I stand by this my perspective is that as an engineering manager people first because if I put people first and they're pointed in the right direction the business wants to be headed in they will do amazing things if I point people in the direction of the business and I don't put people first then I'm not getting the best work out of them so I always put people first and part of that is engagement part of that is this idea I love it like a side quest so as much as possible if people are not feeling engaged on the current work say they've been I've had people that have worked on projects for a very long time and I know that can be disengaging uh sometimes there's conversations about framing that up for career advancement I never like saying finish this project you get the promotion that's not how I lead I think that's wrong um because it's hard to guarantee that but I can call out hey like I know this Project's challenging but these are some awesome opportunities that align with your career progression that you get to focus on while doing that even with that said if people need to Pivot and focus on something else to get some engagement back in like like some of these side quest ideas come up for me it's really about okay is there something else that's a priority that maybe someone else on the team is more skilled at right they're busy doing something else but there might be more skilled at and I can say hey like good example one of my teams that I've had recently there was basically no front-end development work this is my deployment team at Microsoft it's a lot of backend work and some people were like yeah like you know' be cool to try this other stuff out and it's like cool like there is work that is priority one of our partner teams were basically under the whole deployment umbrella and I was like if we can have the tech lead work with you on this they're comfortable with it it's a a priority that's aligned with our business I'm happy to support that so then they would get to go on these side quests you know side quest I think it's so cool and then they could build up some of that experience and get that engagement back up so um Francisco in the chat here time blocking the calendar I try to have quotas for myself and sure I dedicate some time each week but no more than five hours on those side quests yeah um again like I think I would personally have no problem with this kind of thing as long as it felt like it was aligned with business goals and if it wasn't how much are we time boxing that right um for example at Microsoft we do get to have like what we would call hackathons and those are done uh not I don't want to say like done regularly they are done at different intervals and I feel like that's a good opportunity they in my opinion happen frequently enough that that can give people a total side quest opportunity um kind of go work on different technology go work with different people anything you want um um the challenge that I generally have is that I've seen and Francisco this is this would be kind of cool to talk about on a on a video interview because I realize I'm the one with the microphone talking you might have to type in the chat to try and get your points across so I'm not trying to not trying to gang up on you with this I wanted to kind of share this thought though one of the challenges is that if there are multiple people on the team doing side quests and there is no alignment then I start to have a problem and it's not like someone's fault I have a I shouldn't say problem I have a challenge and the challenge is that I need to do a better job at getting people aligned to business goals like as a manager that's what I want to make sure I can do because if you know if we're spending x% of the time that was unplanned for that's supposed to be planned for now I have this weird like Gap that I have to figure out so um I'm all for making sure that Engineers have time to go work on other things that looks different at different companies some companies do like 20% time right like it it can look different so I'm not saying to to prescribe to to anything specific but I think that that kind of concept is important um you know we're all human so kind of being in a position where you start to feel robotic or feeling like you're stuck on projects for a long time maybe they were interesting maybe you lost some steam on them you know it happens it's okay um I try to make sure that I'm having one-on-one conversations with people to gauge that I've told people in conversations before I'm like look like you've been on this project you're doing an awesome job but still going like you let me know if we need to find a pivot for you obviously if that person can see the project all the way through that's great but not at the expense of them being like Nick I hate waking up and going going to work like I don't want that for anyone on the team I would much rather say hey look like back to what I said in the earlier part of this stream single point of failure right you have all the knowledge about this product area that you've been working on this might be a great opportunity for you to transition that to someone else right you can go work on something else after they can get ramped up it's a win-win so it's not you know it's not kind of black and white like that but um I think having flexibility and that kind of stuff is important so thanks for sharing that Francisco I think that's cool um okay I usually plan these for about an hour there's about four minutes left anyone else got questions anything you want to dive into Devon AI taking over the world some other programming language you think is possibly better than C which it's not because C is the best some some good LinkedIn exchanges recently about people talking about JavaScript and typescript instead of saying CS not not competing at the same level but I need my my my YouTube audience to defend me on the C stuff but um cool well I mean we can wrap it up here thanks for all the the questions um like I said these live streams are are for you guys I I want to be able to have the conversations and and kind of chat through different things that you want to hear about so this is cool um I'm trying to think like I think I like doing these on Mondays having kind of like a a an AMA kind of format I do want to do a better job of uh programming live streams um it's hard because when I'm programming I want to go I don't have a ton of time on my own to go do it now with the content creat Mars Mars hi from Facebook um so yeah I it's hard because when I want to go carve out time for myself to go program it I don't want to have a camera on me because I'm like I just want to go code um but I have to do a better job of that I think it's uh I need to code more first of all um and then I'll get my my camera on and go through some of that because I think there's some cool stuff to to learn thanks again Francisco okay okay um well thanks folks I appreciate uh I appreciate all of you attending uh generally I try to do a little bit of an advertisement as well because I'm terrible at this I'm waiting for the end when people like oh he's done talking like see you later um but what I should do is share that I do have courses and stuff available if you're interested in that so if I flip my screen over hopefully this works um my mic's still going nice so I do have courses on dome train if you want to learn about C I have a getting started one so I'm assuming most people watching this are are programmers right if you are not a programmer and you want to get started from literally zero you can go ahead and watch this getting started one these are paid courses I shouldn't just say hey go watch it you have to buy them um the Deep dive one Builds on that and then there is a bundle if I go back up to Here There is a bundle that I have Zero to Hero C it's both of those courses discounted so it is1 144 bucks basically and um yeah that's uh if you want to get started I never promise people that you're going to be able to go build any application you want like you're going to be some type of pro just from watching a couple of uh it's like 11 hours of content in total you will not be a pro programmer that just takes time but I do think that it's going to be really helpful for getting you everything you need to start and start building things so uh check those out uh they go on sale like I think Dome Train's birthday which just passed and then Black Friday otherwise uh I don't really know about any sales coming up so check them out thank you so much for your support I appreciate the time and hopefully I will see you next week on the live stream so take care