How To Take Ownership - Principal Software Engineering Manager AMA

[Music] all right we're kicking things off here just getting set up across the different streams hopefully this starts to go in just a sec just waiting for Instagram which is always one of the last ones to go and I think we're set um my chat is not logged in still so I need just a moment because it's really hard to do a live stream without chat give me one sec I don't know why that's not going through there it is nice nice nice okay cool if you are joining live in the chat let me know that it's working happy to hear from you um I always like double cheing because I've absolutely done live streams where people were asking stuff in the chat and then uh apparently the chat wasn't showing it so um let me know it's very helpful I appreciate it and uh yeah we'll kick things off in just a sec here so um if you're new to my live streams the approach that I like to take is that I go through a generally a newsletter article that I've done and if you are interested you can find that at weekly. deev leader.com put it in the chat because I would rather spend my time answering your questions navigating that stuff than than whatever I have prepared so feels like a better use of time to me and hopefully that feels better use of your time the mic is working well awesome stuff looks like the linked in chat is working well so good news good news thank you uh Nasser good to see you on LinkedIn thanks for being here okay so um the article that I'm going to be talking through in the whole topic is about taking ownership and I'm going to put that into the chat here so again weekly. deev leer.com commute um I am generally answering people's questions or going to Reddit for topics and then kind of like vlogging about it as I drive to and from work and um it helps me kind of think through different aspects of software engineering and it was interesting because something came up in code commute but I also realized that at work I was having some conversations like this and then I also did a reflection and I was like hey wait a second like I have some things about ownership that I should probably talk about and um I DEC decided I was going to instead of write my typical sort of style of newsletter um what I was going to do instead was share a little bit more about like I don't know uh like almost like personal stories or things like how I kind of I want to say like how I screwed up taking ownership and then how I tried to take ownership and and correct a situation so I thought that would be fun to go through uh if there's still time I will talk about a sort of anonymized real example of uh you know working with an engineer to take ownership um got to block someone in the chat already no thank you um don't need people promoting stuff anyway um yeah if there's time at the end I'll share that because I think that it's interesting but like I said because I see more people joining the chat if you got questions and stuff drop them in the chat we'll go through that as a priority um with that said let's talk about taking ownership so the reason this comes up is is often because when we're talking about uh sort of advancing as software Engineers if you're a uh if say you're someone who hasn't started your software engineering Journey or you are junior so you're just getting things kicked off um the reality is that often you're giv given tasks and things to work on that are more well understood right they're they're not nebulous people understand the scope of them uh in fact some people on the team might already know the solution for it and you're you're basically set up for Success this way because they should be achievable things for you and this is done so that you can build momentum which is great because if you're building momentum then you can take on more challenging things uh more things that are complex or have uncertainty around them so on so forth and the expectation eventually becomes especially like going from like midlevel to what I would say like senior software engineering this varies places right like um even demonstrating leadership characteristics people might want to see that earlier or later but I would say taking ownership um is something that I would highly recommend people focus on going from mid-level to senior um and uh Harry in the chat I'll get to your question just a moment thank you for putting that there so the reason that I talked about this on code commute is because I thought that it was valuable uh for people to to be thinking about like when people say taking ownership like what the heck do they even mean by that why does it matter and again it matters because it becomes more and more of an expectation for you as you're advancing in your career the highlevel reason for this is that if you are someone that takes ownership you're demonstrating accountability you're demonstrating that you I'm going to try not to curse on this I want to say get get you get stuff done uh you're the type of person who's going to get stuff done right and people can rely on you for that so you're accountable you're responsible you get stuff done why is this good well if you have a team of people that gets stuff done or at least the majority of them do that means that you have a team that's ultimately moving forward engineering managers want people like this on their team because if you have the opposite and you have a team of people that is not going to be driving to getting results done no one's taking ownership you sort of have this blame game going on where it's like hey I can't really move forward because this other team and like I guess we just have to wait or um no I couldn't make progress this month on my code because it's up for review and no one was reviewing it so I'm just waiting when you have a team of people like this it's really difficult to make progress so I'm giving you some exaggerated examples to demonstrate a point but the idea is that you want to be focused on trying to take ownership by the way folks that are on substack thanks for tuning in you are down here for me and that's kind of unfortunate because substack doesn't offer a streaming platform that I can use on the computer it's only mobile so hopefully they change that soon so I will try to monitor the chat I apologize that you are down here for me um but that's high level why ownership's important uh you come on Kick I see you hello hi thank you for being here um let's go to Harry's question before diving more into ownership though because like I said I want to prioritize questions in the chat so Harry says I'm a new grad I just bombed a coding interview with Amazon and definitely felt like I like I didn't take ownership asking clarification for this intentionally ambiguous problem I was given kind of bummed yeah so okay so good I mean not good that you bombed it I'm sorry to hear about that um but I think it's good that you did a bit of reflection on this right um generally speaking uh and not always but I would say a lot of the time for uh whether it's a coding question a lot of the time in system design questions and interviews these types of things are left open-ended and it's it's something that if you're not not aware of this like you should be asking questions so this can happen with coding questions too where someone will put something in front of you and basically if you just go directly into trying to coding a Sol like making your own solution for it you're probably making assumptions about what they're looking for so instead of making those assumptions and this is actually transferable to real life instead of making assumptions get clarity first right so just to give you an example for like a system design question someone might say hey I want you to make a system that does X Y and Z and you know that's um that's what it looks like and got to block one more sorry um okay so they set you up that way and then you're like okay and you think through the pieces and then you're like okay and you start drawing out the block diagrams and talking about how things interact but the interviewer is realizing like you didn't pause to ask about what the goals of the system even are they gave you some high level idea but did you clarify with them like what is what's the importance of latency here what is eventual consistency look like here do we have uh something to worry about with like bursts of traffic uh it doesn't even have to be system design it could be like architecture right that you're building an application um how many teams are working on this like what what does our deployment look like that you need to be asking questions to try and clarify what you should be focused on so unfortunately uh Harry uh I know you're saying you didn't do that so uh I think you know I want to say that the good thing is that you're reflecting on it and it's a great lesson to learn um you know I I feel for you because that's challenging to have had the opportunity and been like man like I didn't do it but the reality is I think a lot of the time I'm going to use I'm going to use the FW here um when we fail at things in this case it's like uh it's a stepping stone it's a learning opportunity right um I would say this is only a a big failure if you never reflect on this never try to make changes or you give up okay so um don't give up I think it's good that you're learning from this and then try to figure out how you can effectively ask more questions as you're going forward so sorry to hear that Harry um but yes I think right now by being able to reflect on this you can take ownership for the result of that and take some action and that's going to be one of the things we notice when we're talking about taking ownership is it's like it is taking action it's not being passive it's very difficult to take ownership on things that are um maybe not progressing the way that you want and being passive and then expecting that to be successful like that's not really taking ownership so with that said I'm going to dive into a couple of stories so it's going to be Story Time with Nick for most of this uh this live stream and that's why I said especially today if you have questions you want me to dive into please just put them in the chat I'm trying to watch everywhere I possibly can including you sub stack I see you um same with Tik Tok same with Instagram you're all in different chats the main chat can't see you I can see you okay so Story Time with Nick I'm G to talk about uh my first sort of example at Microsoft I've been at Microsoft now for uh just under five years been about four and a half years now and I work in the Office 365 site of Microsoft and that's uh also called substrate so substrate's like the infrastructure hello greetings from South Texas great thanks for being here I appreciate you being here so when I joined Microsoft I started on the deployment team um T man you join here every week and you say I'm not going to get a software engineering role that's not taking ownership I I absolutely believe that you'll be able to do it um but we have to address specific things don't give up people are doing it every day you can do it too I believe believe in you um the first example for me was when I was working on the substrate deployment team so I'm an engineering manager at Microsoft the first team was a deployment team for substrate services and there's hundreds of services that we have to manage the deployment for so uh it's a managed deployment infrastructure super cool uh when I joined it was like it's completely new to me I'd worked in digital forensics for eight years prior to that uh at a like a startup that grew a small company so I didn't have the experience of being in big Tech I had zero experience with deployment I had zero experience with distributed systems with data centers zero but I was hired on um because they liked my experience and they were looking for someone to lead teams and that's you know I'm going to learn the domain it's part of the job I have to do it um I can relate to the engineers because I write C code all the time but um you know lot to learn in this space so at one point I was put on a project and I'm not going to go into the details of what these projects and stuff are because number one I shouldn't be talking about work number two uh it's not actually relevant to what the project is so I'll skip over that but the idea is that there is this really big project that involved multiple teams when I say multiple teams I mean like dozens of teams so there's a lot of different teams that have to participate in this project to make it a success but that means that each team has to have at least some type of ownership over different areas to move and make progress on those areas that they're responsible for so this is a cool opportunity for me because a big project big impact this is good stuff and at the time I was uh sort of partnered up with our our project manager and so I'm pretty new to the team I think by that time I had about just over a year of experience on the team and I was partnered up with our project manager who was new to the team uh I'm giving you this for context and the the disclaimer is that I'm not trying to set this person up to to talk about them in a like a negative way it's just sort of the reality like I'm relatively new they're very new to the team and uh but they're also like at principal level so like they're a solid project manager like no concerns we worked super well together I felt we had a great working Dynamic you know we're already getting stuff done but this is a new project for both of us so um great stuff and the first part of how this is working for us is that we have to start interacting with these other teams and get on the same page for the direction we want to go forward for the part that we have to own okay so at this point because it was a lot of cross team coordination my project manager having a lot more experience with this kind of thing was like Hey like I can drive this part like I'll you know I'll kind of Corral the teams we'll make sure that we get everyone together organize the meetings I'll take the notes like this is good we'll get the engineers talking and I feel pretty confident that we'll get on the same page and we were going through meeting after meeting and it was tough um but we were making progress which is great uh finally starting to feel like we were getting alignment but it also felt like every time we were meeting like spending a lot of time trying to like rehash the same things but we're making progress we're making progress and then at some point roughly around when we're getting everyone to sort of agree on the path forward now that we've talked about all these details the scope of this Project's very big so I it did take a long time to do but it's not something that could just be like decided on like a you know a 1 hour call or something it took it took a while to get to but by the time we reach a consensus and like okay here's the plan that we're going to go forward with at that time my project manager is like hey by the way like I'm going to be moving over to this other team and I mean like good timing right because now we're at the part where we can try executing he's done a good job at getting people aligned great and I'm like yep I'm on the same page as you like thanks for all your help you know we know this was tough to get here but we're good to rock and roll now he moves on and that's fine it's okay I won't hold it against him but um we go to start moving forward on this project and we're realizing and when I say we I mean like mostly me and the people that are stakeholders are realizing like progress isn't really happening here on our side on my team side we kind of did the piece that we were like okay this is what we were expected to do and we delivered it but other teams weren't really doing anything and we started to go okay like these pieces aren't integrating like no one else is doing their part and then I realized we got a bit of a problem here and that problem is that we actually still didn't have alignment at all so we thought that we had agreed on things and we started working on our part we delivered our part and we thought we were just done and waiting but the reality is no one else was doing anything and this was kind of frustrating because again I'm in this position now where I'm like okay wait a second I just spent time working with my project manager coordinating with these other teams we thought everyone was on the same page I saw how my project manager was you know kind of running things and I'm like we we were doing things right so I'm not like blaming him for it because that would have been something I observed ear on and been like hey man like why are we doing this or why aren't we doing this so I was kind of in this position where I'm like okay we're progress isn't happening and I'm kind of like looking to blame someone I'm like why aren't these other teams doing their part like what the heck we did our part why aren't they then I'm thinking like did my project manager miss something here like I saw what he was doing and it seemed good but like did he just drop the ball on something behind the scenes like did he tell me that he was communicating these things and then didn't or that you know that he felt like we had alignment but like didn't actually believe it and I'm starting to be like man like why did all these other people potentially do something that's wrong and now I'm stuck here and now like I'm caught in the crossfire and everything sucks like man like we're we delivered our part and like what the hell like that's not fair and that feeling of like it's not fair I think was like a bit of a uh I don't know if that was the aha moment but um I think going forward I want that to be my aha moment when I'm starting to feel like man it's not fair because the reality is no one if no one else was doing their part it's still my responsibility to make sure our part the part that I own has progress on it and that's the part where ownership started to pick up so once I started realizing was happening and after I got over my little um you know I don't know feel sorry for myself kind of situation like it's not fair like we did our part why aren't they doing our part or their part why do I look bad for this like it's not progressing like people are looking at me they're looking at me because I'm supposed to own it and I'm not so this is a really good opportunity for me to try and change things around so um the way that we had to move forward on this was I started to uh again do more collabor so I was reaching out to more partner teams that were supposed to be participating and kind of getting a feel for like hey like did you guys prioritize this or like we're when's your part coming in and the more that I started to poke around we had things like people on other teams were changing there wasn't continuity for example one of the one of the teams that was participating their engineering manager didn't even know about the project so how and I'm not blaming anyone like how could that team have ever been set up for success to dedicate time and resources to this project if their engineering manager didn't even know and whose fault is that like that's my fault I didn't talk to their engineering manager and like that was a critical step for example like I had to go do that and then once their engineering manager was brought in it was like Hey look this is a really high-profile project that has really big impact like you guys need to be involved in this you are a key stakeholder and then they were like well what's the project like explain this I'm like oh my God like how did we get this far and I didn't do this um so like that was one example um with those new like I don't want to say with the new stakeholders but with better representation from those stakeholders I had to bring in other people to have more conversations we had to repeat almost every single conversation we had before that's how big of an impact that this had by me not taking ownership sooner was like all of the conversations that we thought we had Clarity on guess what time to go back to the drawing board because now we have different stakeholders coming in or what I might call like the um like the better representation from the stakeholders and go through all these conversations but what did I learned the first time those conversations are really hard we waste a lot of time going over the same stuff so we had to make adjustments I brought in one of the Architects to help facilitate right so we're going to spend less time debating on these things and we're going to get the input from the architect who happened to be a huge player in this project who has a lot of oversight into how things are shaping up across things we started to realize there's some accountability challenges or gaps in some of the things and we could report that up through the architect but I had to go take ownership in organizing these meetings I had to go take ownership in driving things to have better results we need timelines on these things we need to figure out the dependencies so these were things that I assumed were were happening or had happened and they just absolutely didn't and again I'm not blaming anyone because I sit here today going from what I observed from my project manager I thought he did great I thought that everyone was aligned but I did not take the ownership to follow through on any of those things until it reached that point and then I had to from there so that's a story I wanted to share because uh I wanted to talk about how I screwed up um I like being able to talk about like you know failure story because I think that it's important to talk about those I think that um the more examples wear about people like again I use the word fail some people don't like it because they're like oh it's too harsh and I'm like you like I I think you need to hear it being a harsh word because when I use a harsh word like fail and then I tell you how I was able to overcome that or work through it I'm doing that on purpose like I want you to realize when you feel like you totally dropped the ball and failed at something it doesn't mean that it's not recoverable okay like there's a path forward you need to learn from it you need to adapt you need to take ownership and do better uh Ryan in the chat says we can only control ourselves and what we have control over the more we try to control St outside our control Zone the worse it can make it personal two cents yeah so in this case the reality is I actually had a lot more influence and control over things that then I realized and in my situation I was just assuming like this is someone else's responsibility why aren't they doing it but I had to kind of put myself into a position where I was like no like you're not sitting back and being passive about this we have to be proactive because people are looking to me for the results so that's one story um I got another story and then like I said if there's time I have one more it's not about me but it's about chatting through some stuff with an engineer um so hopefully that was kind of cool um but we'll go into another failure story both of these by the way are in the newsletter uh so if you're joining late weekly. deev L.C no if you don't like emails or like newsletters for your email you don't have to subscribe it's totally cool I understand but uh if you treat it like a Blog if you want if you want to see the topics for the live stream check it out there um but both these stories there so the other one is more recent it's very recent actually it's almost too recent that I still feel it um but um and then yeah Ryan saying realizing where our control zone is is uh is at is crucial as well that was so hard to say and I don't know why but I I agree with that yeah 100% okay this story is very recent so um I have been put on a project at work that is pretty high impact another high impact project that Nick's going to drop the ball on um no I and this has a a happy ending so far because it's still an ongoing project so I'm just going to preface things with that because the way I'm going to talk about this I realize sometimes when I'm communicating things I've heard this feedback before sometimes it sounds like I'm being very negative or like very negative to myself and I I want to be very clear that if it sounds like I'm being negative to myself or harsh on myself like I actually like I I'm not in a spot where I'm like blaming myself or like upset with myself it might just be how I communicate it so just a heads up but this is another example of how I failed at something so let's talk about it so uh as an engineering manager um something that I try to pride myself in is that I need to be able to have good soft skills I think that is something that's important for every software engineer but especially as an engineering manager I spend a lot of time talking with people communicating things like that needs to be top for me um I still program every day outside of work I love to program but my ability to code does not need to match my ability to communicate at this point my ability to communicate clearly uh my soft skills those need to take priority over coding at this point in my career but fortunately I love to code so I'll keep up with that too so the project that I have uh is something that I'm helping coordinate it's a again pretty big for for our team it involves some partner teams as well big initiative that's going to span multiple months and so it's exciting um you know a huge thanks to my manager for giving me this opportunity I think this is something where um he has since I've been on the team like reporting to him I think he does a really good job of of of trying to put in front of me opportunities where he's like hey like if you're looking to kind of level up if you're looking for to demonstrate that you are you know sort of operating at the next level like here's an opportunity here's an opportunity um and I I really appreciate that um because otherwise like and I've seen this with other Engineers even people that report to me they're asking for those opportunities like hey like if I want to do better like what could I be doing like is there a project or something and we're trying to carve those out so you know I think it's great I can appreciate that my manager like here you go man like this one's going to be tricky did I lose connection to you guys I'm streaming to Tik Tok and it said it dropped but anyway let me know if you're still here otherwise I'm just going to keep blabbing and no one will hear me um so I appreciate that this Project's pretty big and uh coordinating it is a bit of a challenge because of the scope of it now the way that this works is that we have regular uh sync meetings to report on progress and periodically we have a really big sync meeting or at least when I say a big sync meeting I mean a big milestone kind of sync Terry says we're here awesome thanks Terry I appreciate it uh there's a huge delay in like the messages versus me talking so sorry that that was probably awkwardly delayed but thank you um so there's a big sync meeting that we do less frequently and this goes up to leadership this way the people like the executives a leadership team understands that we are making progress on this project and that way we can demonstrate to them like like here's our objectives here's all the work that's going into it and we can either I mean we can take the opportunity to highlight if there's things we need help with like Hey we're trying to Trend towards this but like we need your help getting support on this or there's conflict and like sort of like different priorities across teams like we need you to kind of step in and help with that um my mother's also here hello Mother people are going to know it says Katherine centino they know because that's my last name too that's my mother everyone say hello to to Katherine centino hi mom um so we have this this meeting that we have to do with our leadership team and that involves putting together a big presentation so big formal document big presentation so this was another piece thanks mom um this is another piece that I had to lead as part of this project and the idea behind this like I said is communicating uh not only the status but our objectives everyone's going to know you mom um and demonstrate that to our leadership team right so in our case the cool thing is I mean going into this it felt good that we didn't have these really big blockers and to be honest I wouldn't have waited to demonstrate that in like the in the leadership sync to be like by the way we didn't tell you for weeks but like we have a really big problem that we've been waiting on you for so that wouldn't have been good but it felt good to not have to be in that kind of position so that was nice so it was like here's a status update like we got we had holidays and stuff that was probably the trickiest part right A lot of people out for like Christmas and and New Year's like that kind of time frame um people are a lot of vacation taking that time so the the side effect of that was like there was a lot of work in progress but like there's a lot of people working on this stuff so feel pretty good about it put the together present it actually before we presenting it there were like um because we do like an asynchronous review first there were comments coming in and I was like hey this is great like these are good questions I can answer these so like I'm feeling pretty good right we're getting good questions and I'm like I know the answer to this because it's a big project I need to make sure that I can represent the different aspects of that project and at least at some level of technical depth because if I have to go to for every single technical question I have to go say hey engineer who's working on this can you tell me what this even means like not a good spot to be so I have to understand enough detail about these different pieces so I feel pretty good I'm answering questions and then we get onto the the presentation to walk through and basically answer any topof the- Mind questions that needed more more attention and the feedback was essentially like I'm going to be blunt with you nope like this this document's not doing it for me and the feedback was essentially this seems like a lot of work but not uh it's not communicating your overall goals so without going into more detail on that my number one job of trying to communicate to my audience in this case was completely missed completely because the one person who needed to really digest the information that we had to communicate to it was like no like what what you've put in front of me I'm not again not saying the work is the wrong work but they were saying like I cannot tell from what you've put in front of me how this is aligned with the objectives you have so like this basically you know it's inadequate and that's something that's like it's really hard to hear right um because it's not it's not like we were like oh like it's just a presentation screw we'll like procrastinate and we'll we'll hand it like like you're in school or something like we'll just hand this in like 5 minutes before the deadline and like hopefully the the teacher okay with uh with still grading it no like this was like uh a lot of effort that went into this and you know lots of help from different people that I'm very thankful for so it was kind of like hey we did all this work and getting told like basically right off the bat like this isn't good was like oh man like not and especially after feeling confident about answering questions and stuff I was like this is okay like at least that's out of the way now we have like a the rest of the presentation to talk through things but like it can't get worse from here right because that's the that's the heartbreaking news from the start but that's kind of like the point where you realize okay and you know you walk away from something like that feeling and I'm being transparent about the feelings just so like and I want to be clear because my mom's watching and she's probably GNA want to message me after and say is everything okay everything's okay I just like to be transparent about like because you weren't there to to live it with me and if you're going through a situation like this I want it to be kind of uh relatable to you so you've basically put effort into something someone gives you feedback right away that's like no this is not good but it's like it's direct feedback this person wasn't giving the feedback to be mean they're not a mean person they're very direct and that's very helpful because we trust that they are giving feedback that's meaningful they want us to succeed right this is the kind of person in their leadership role when they're giving you direct feedback you know it's not because they're a jerk they're literally just trying to get you to do good work and we value that a lot so you go through this initial phase walking away from that where you're like your head's kind of hanging like man like I just screwed up real bad like that was supposed to be a really big good opportunity and like man like that you know nothing about that feels good and you need I feel like we all need like that little bit of a a breathing room to kind of digest that um my wife is not on this uh on this live stream but I'm sure if she were in this room she could actually explain from like a psychology perspective why that's probably valuable to like actually feel some of your emotions and of pretending like they're not there and being like no no no we have to we have to stay strong and like it's so like pretend like it didn't feel bad no I think it's good to acknowledge like it felt felt terrible it felt terrible but like right after that you go through like and I'm talking like when I say right right after I mean like within an hour okay so feel bad for about an hour trying to digest what's going on then it's like okay okay we got to do something here like that's not the end for us and given that this is a project I'm leading it's like what yeah my mother said it right listen to Kathy Kathy knows learn from it thanks mom um so you know right after that feeling of like this is terrible it's like well I got to own this like that's not there's still months left in this project months and it's not just going to end here because of one bad presentation so what are we doing we're restructuring the entire communication to do it in a way that we feel is going to convey what our point was yes that's more work it's been tons of extra work I've had days in the past couple of weeks that have been over 12 hours working on the weekends I'm not complaining about this I used to work at a startup and basically work seven days a week like 12 to 16 hours by choice so being able to do something like this I'm like I understand this kind of thing comes up I'm not upset about it but it's a lot of work and it's a lot of extra work that I wasn't planning to do but the reality is we need to be able to take ownership on this and specifically I need to own this because this was my thing to put together it's a project that I'm helping coordinate like taking the lead on that and I need to be able to communicate the status updates that is my responsibility so we reorganize this we're re like we we're not going through a whole presentation again on this one we're just going to reorganize it kind of get the sign off that the format is right and like it's coming across clearly and then going forward we will relever that for the next status update but the point of explaining this is like this idea around instead of just being like well hold on hold on like other people participated in putting that presentation together maybe it's their fault like I'm pretty sure I did a really good job but so and so I mean maybe the section they wrote maybe if they just would have wrote that better maybe we wouldn't be having this conversation right now or maybe someone gave me the wrong guidance and um that's actually their fault like at no point at no point did that happen unless someone Clips the set of context and they're like look at this jerk from Microsoft talking about his peers don't do that um at no point did that cross my mind where it's like I need to blame someone else for this right this was no this was my responsibility I missed the Mark I'm not blaming even the person who gave the feedback I can't be like oh it's their fault they didn't understand like hell no that's my fault I didn't communicate it properly this is a time where I would say I absolutely failed at something I know people don't like the word I failed at it that's okay cuz as my mother said in the chat learn from it and we take action to learn and then we try to move forward from that so this for me was a very recent thing and when I say very recent I mean like over the last week and a bit so uh we're still wrapping that up um and then you know the rest of the project we're moving forward on but this is a it was a helpful exercise to go through I learned a lot um it's uh like I said it's crappy to have an experience where you're like man like I feel pretty defeated by that but like you don't just stay defeated right you're going to learn from it you're going to do better hello Amar on on Tik Tok good to see you you've said hi four times now hi hi hi hi that's four yeah there we go um so selem uh during your time at Microsoft did you get the chance to work on any product launches um I don't think so um not actual product so I work right now in Office 365 in the area called substrate and substrate is the platform for all of The Office 365 services to build on top of so very much platform team and I've worked on two different platform teams the first one was a deployment team and the second one is for uh routing traffic and um the like so no I've not worked on product launches but also I don't work in like uh product space so I worked on many product launches at Magnet forensics before Microsoft I was there for eight years building digital forensic software so many product launches there um but not at Microsoft but it wouldn't it wouldn't look the same and even even if I was at a at a point on my current team or say we had launched a new service or something that probably looks different than what you might be expecting me to talk about so if you have with that said if you have any further questions or want me to dive into anything let me know I'm happy to try and answer but yeah certainly no um no product launches from the perspective that you might um be guessing Okay I got time still for another story this one's not uh for me necessarily but this is from uh the perspective of an engineer that I was working with and that's all I'm going to say about the person because keep it fully Anonymous but I thought this is a really good example um essentially this person is working on a pretty standard set of you know feature deliverables and um they had basically what's a good way to say this we don't have like the teams that I'm on right now in terms of deadlines and timelines and stuff like that they're not like what I would say like carved in stone it's not like if we said hey it's going to land today but we had to land it tomorrow morning or something it's not like you know to this person asking the question around like um product launches it's not like we missed the product launch it's like we have a live service and if it was just a feature and it had to to slip it's okay um we try not to obviously if we can set timelines we want to stick towards them uh and that's okay but so in this situation engineer was working on something had said hey look this is the timeline I'm expecting for it great okay and then what had happened was that they were unable to um essentially do some amount of testing that they wanted to do some of the infrastructure that's owned by another team was not working so for a little bit more context we can do things like writing unit tests we can go run them in visual studio and have have that kind of feedback uh there's an automated build system that will go kick off and run the test Suite so you have like your your cloud builds that have tests and stuff that run and give you coverage so like all good but there's also these types of tests that we can run on a like a separate environment and that infrastructure was not working so um this individual was like okay well I want to like I want to feel confident in the tests that I need to do for this feature and um and they couldn't get them done so we were having a conversation about this and what what I wanted to call out to this person and I we had a conversation about I thought it was really good was that they number one they raised visibility to like hey look I said that it was going to land at this date and it's looking like it's not going to good right not not a good scenario good for bringing it up though because that's part of taking ownership it's being accountable trying to raise visibility to something not not hiding from it I think a lot of people have this feeling in their mind that like if something's slipping or something's not going as planned like I don't want to tell anyone because it's going to be my fault and I'm going to look bad or some people might do the opposite while they'll say oh it's slipping oh but it's that other team not my fault so this person brings it up to me and they say Hey look it's going to miss um and then they explain the situation but what they didn't do was say Hey look it's the infrastructure team hold it's that other team they own this thing it's their fault so like not like nothing I can do about it like we just got to wait not what happened they actually contacted that team ahead of time and said hey look this thing's not working could you please have a look at it to make sure because it's blocking some of my work but also they didn't stop there because in their head they're like I know I have this deadline I'm trying to meet so not only did I ra awareness to it not only did I try to contact the team that owns the thing that's blocking it now I'm going to have a conversation with my manager about what to do because again they could have stopped there and then given me the update after and been like yeah we missed the deadline because like just waiting on that other team but that's not what they did they said this is my thing to own and if I'm going to be blocked by that other team what can we do instead so we had a conversation about it and this is like like in my opinion this is such a good uh way to demonstrate and they're at a senior level this is what I would expect right it's like if we plan for this and it's not going to plan instead of just giving up or blaming other people it's a matter of okay what are we going to do to get this done and yeah it's going to miss by a day that's okay but we're going to talk about this plan to go forward so in this particular case the what we did was we talked about those test that you wanted to run on that infrastructure like what are they doing that you that um like what kind of uh scenarios are they running to give you confidence and we talk through that okay so that's good now we understand like those tests versus the unit tests versus the other tests that are running we have an understanding of what that was trying to accomplish and then we talked through it and we said hey look if we run them this other way we don't use that infrastructure but we run those scenarios this other way does that give you the confidence that you need and the answer was yeah like that and that's actually there's nothing blocking that we could go do that right now so just a very brief story of someone that was like taking ownership the whole way they had an opportunity to basically not put their hand up and say a deadline was going to slip they had an opportunity to not contact the other team and just wait they had an opportunity to um take the right steps and then not uh you know not follow up with an alternative path so they had three different scenarios where they were like it's a step forward but it's not yet enough it's a step forward it's not yet enough and they're keeping uh forward driving with potential actions they can take so I thought that was a really good example that's real obviously I left out the details I'm not saying who it is or whatever but like I thought that was just such a good example of working through something and being accountable right when I talk about someone taking ownership for me that's the kind of thing that if a person was doing that on my team I'm like I can trust I can trust that I can give them complicated things and even if they don't line up perfectly I trust that person will try to take the right steps right they're accountable when you have people that aren't accountable it feels scary to give them work or at least complex work because what's going to happen if this is really important or really complex if I give it to someone who has not demonstrated they can be account they don't take ownership like ultimately I have to take ownership for the team when things don't go right I don't want to find myself in that position having to go do extra stuff that I'm not prepared to go do because someone didn't take ownership so I want to make sure that that succeeds so I think they did a great job and I just wanted to share that story because it's more more of like a software engineering one for for taking ownership Harry in the chat says I'm currently volunteering at a YC startup since November and job searching do you think I should focus on on the current bird in the hand and push for a greater impact at YC startup that's a funny analogy that's good current bird in the hand um yeah I think this is a it's interesting right I it's hard to answer this for you because I don't know um where your alignment is um YC startup that's a good good spot to be right if you have YC backing um I mean that's probably a pretty good sign the tricky thing with advice like this is like and this would be the same thing for any kind of startup is like startups are of and I'm not an expert on this my opinion I think startups are often not necessarily uh successful because they have the idea I think startups are often successful because of have the right people I don't know anything about the people I don't know anything about your interests how that lines up in your career so it's really hard to offer advice on this um I would say though just to to add in some data and you can figure out if this lines up with you if you like the work you're doing if you believe in the team you feel like they have a track record you have uh you know your level of confidence in what's going on around you um you feel like I don't know you feel like there's a potential path here you said volunteering so I'm assuming that means that you're not getting paid for it um if you're like hey this would be an awesome job if I could get it I would say why not yeah go do that now the tricky thing though is like and I again I don't know your current situation in general like financially we're obviously not going to get into the details of that but if you're in a situation where like I want this to work but like I also need money so I can eat like again my my advice might change here right you may have and I don't know I know the job Market's tough but you may have better chances applying other places like entertaining that at least to get a job um versus like hoping the startup will take you but you know I think if you're interested it might be worth a conversation with them at least to to at least acknowledge is this a possibility like I'm volunteering here but like you know is there a possibility if I demonstrate myself like there I could you know potentially be employed here as a software engineer um that might be worth having a conversation about I think if you're thinking about it it's probably worth a conversation but hard to offer a specific advice on this I'm sorry um but I I think again if that's aligned with your interest could be awesome um it would be silly for me to say like no absolutely don't do that because like that's I wasn't volunteering but when I had graduated and I went to magnet forensics that was a startup it was like seven or eight people but my my risk analysis cuz I I'm I'm pretty conservative when it comes to taking risks I think um at least like I think financially I'm pretty conservative that way but it was a startup they didn't have investment so it was you know totally privately owned between the founder and the well the co-founders right so privately owned that way and they were profitable so it wasn't like hey like we have investment and we don't yet have customers or make money they're like no we're making money we don't have investors we have customers you're not going to have to worry about your paycheck next week doesn't mean it's going to be an easy ride but like you you don't have to be concerned about that and I was like okay like that sounds pretty cool because generally my concern with startups is like um like how much of a gamble is this and then they had a really good Mission so I was like okay I feel I feel like this is a risk right because it's a startup every every small company is going to be a risk but like I feel good about this and I feel like the space is interesting and then what really sold me on it once I started there so I realized the Situation's a little different was that the people that were leading basically gave me a ton of autonomy and they trusted me to get done so as a result I was able to have autonomy and get stuff done right so I think without that it might have been a very different story I might not have been as engaged so I think I got very lucky early in my career that I found something like a scenario that was was financially rewarding it was very motivating from like a career development perspective like I could feel like I'm accomplishing things and I had a really good Mission so I feel like if you're checking some of those boxes for yourself like absolutely ask about it I think that would be great I just can't give you advice on it because I don't know all the details right so I hope that helps Harry sorry if that's not the perfect answer but um Ryan Wakefield how do you handle situations where you have leadership pushing you to take ownership of a situation SLP person when you really shouldn't be taking ownership of it okay this is interesting why does and I have to I have to ask this back Ryan it's not me challenging you on this it's uh it's sort of challenging how you think about it or how you phrase it I guess but I I don't mean for it to be like um what's the word like I can't think of the word I'm not trying to like battle you on this I guess is what I'm saying so just challenging the the how it's phrased so leadership wants you to take ownership of a situation or person but you're saying you really shouldn't be taking ownership of it so like first of all how do we know who's right and who's wrong I think like this is the part that we need to clarify because if you say you really shouldn't be taking ownership of it then don't but how do we know that you have the definitive answer on this and not leadership right so I know it sounds kind of silly but when you when you put the question that way it makes it very like I I basically have to pick a side and I don't have any detail on either of them so if you want to add a little bit more context with out like Ting a real situation please try in the meantime I'm going to see if I can try to to address this in a way that um will be helpful so it might be a little bit rambly and a little bit of stream of Consciousness but I'll try my best as you're if you're thinking about some other details to add um okay I think the the primary thing right now what I can extract from this is like there's a bit of a disagreement in like what needs to happen so I think first of all my my take on this kind of stuff is like understanding um I think that it's really difficult to move forward on situations when uh and and be effective cuz even if you do this right even if you do this how do you know you're going to be successful at it in their eyes you might be like okay like I have no choice I have to do it I don't understand why or whatever and then you go do it and then they're still not happy so like they're not happy with it and you're kind of pissed off and like frustrated so step one I would be like understand where that's coming from and you might know um so I don't based on what you said so far but um I think that you need to be able to start off by understanding why I think that's important now from there if it's been explained to you and you're like okay I understand what they're saying but I disagree with it I think it's a good opportunity uh I don't know again the relationship going on here because you're saying leadership are we talking senior leadership then like your manager and then you or is this just your manager or I don't know the relationship or the dynamic um if there's an opportunity to have a conversation with your direct manager about this maybe they are the person telling you to do this if they are even even better because I think what I would recommend is you've been told why you don't agree with it let's go have a conversation about this because I think it's important that you don't just do stuff and be like yes sir yes ma'am like I'll just do whatever and I hate everything going on I'm disengaged I don't think that's a good way to go about anything but I think there's a way to be curious I think there's a way to raise awareness or like concern without being a jerk about it right um and again I'm trying to think about this like me being in the situation where someone comes to me so I'm going to make this up like so I say Ryan I really need you to to go make sure you can handle um the situation with Jimmy Jimmy on the team not really delivering and I really think that you need to go take some ownership of that situation and you might be like what the hell man like I'm not I'm not dealing with Jimmy like why do I have to do that so Step One is like okay well why do I have to do it right and it's like well Ryan you are one of the more senior people on the team I think that Jimmy needs a little bit of help and guidance I think this would be a really good opportunity for you in your career growth to be able to help Jimmy not only that Jimmy's working on this thing it's not the most important right now but we're trying to get him ramped up so he can take on some of the other important things and we can distribute that workload a little bit better so now I've given you a why and you might be like okay but Nick I don't agree with that still because you just said I am one of the more senior people on the team there's two other people that could help with this and by me helping with this that's detracting from the the big project that I'm working on right that's a fair thing to say like hey Nick you told me that I'm supposed to work on this big project now I kind of feel like my priorities are torn so could we maybe walk through that like do you really want me to go help with Jimmy instead of this project or do you want me to focus on the project cuz I don't know if I can balance both now we can have a conversation about it and you didn't have to say it in a way that was like screw you Nick this is this is dumb right like I'm exaggerating right but you don't have to be I think if you can work on relationships with your manager like that this is one of my number one pieces of advice that I try to tell people it's like and I realize it probably sounds repetitive and people are like dude like get some new advice but as an engineering manager I just try to make sure that everyone on my team has a lot of trust with me they respect me they know that I'm there to help support them like I am their support I'm here to help that's my role that's what I do so I need you to be able to trust that you can come and talk to me about things so that's what I would appreciate right um and again I'm not in a position where I'm uh what we would call like at Microsoft like a group engineering manager I'm not a uh uh a manager of managers but if I were and someone felt like they had to come and talk to me about stuff like this um I would absolutely like try to be open to that like that's that's what I want to be able to create so uh Ryan I realize it's not like getting you to an answer but I think that's how I would approach that part of the dynamic so hopefully that helps um Nasser how do you handle your anger as a manager it's a great question um I don't know if my mother is still on the live stream but if she were she would tell you as a kid I used to get very frustrated with my video games um I have been known to be a frustrated child that kicked in the cupboards while playing Monopoly because I was losing um I'm just waiting to see if my mother's still in the chat oh no she is here don't don't tell them all the secrets mom um but yeah you know I I definitely definitely growing up like difficulties controlling anger I've I can I can say this I think I once took a cordless telephone in my hallway at at my parents house my mother's my mother's here she can vouch for this don't tell them too much but I once took a cordless telephone and I was very upset as a teenager I don't know I was pretty young and I took the telephone and I threw it down the hall and it went through the door like not through both ends of the door but like it went into the door so like I definitely think that I probably have some level of like I got to work on my anger management but um I think the I want to find a good way to answer your question there are absolutely times where I get mad at things um I you know I was saying earlier I think like it's important that we don't like just like pretend uh hello Shadow judicator R4 what's up we're just talking about anger management right now apparently uh you can't see the other chat but my mom's on the chat so we're talking about it um but I think yeah I don't like to hide emotions like pretend like they're not there so I definitely get angry at things but I think the number one thing for me when you're saying like as a manager how do you how do you handle that um I need to make sure that how I present myself to my team is something that I would want my manager to emulate and I guess I have I have never in my life watched someone get angry in front of a group of people or I've never in my life watched someone get angry at me and felt like wow I really respect this person I really want to work for this person I really trust this person I have never felt that way ever in fact every single time especially as an adult when I watch people lose their temper and get angry at things I sit there and go that's embarrassing like you should do a better job with that that's embarrassing to watch so I think in my head I have told myself enough times don't do it because nothing good comes from that there's nothing wrong with feeling angry or frustrated but you don't need to do that to your team especially because it's it's especially because it's likely not directly your team's fault or directly someone's fault you're frustrated because of a scenario you're angry at a scenario go turn grab a pillow off the couch and yell into it do what you got to do like not on camera go be frustrated it's okay but at the end of the day when I have to go communicate with other people I have to go work with my team like that's not the anger is not what's coming through um I don't know if that's doing a good job of explaining it but I I want it to be very clear like it's not like I don't get angry but like it's not at people it's at scenarios at situations it's mostly frustration and a lot of the time it feels like I don't have control over something that's for me probably when I feel like I'm most frustrated it's like I I'm responsible for something or I want to result and I don't have control anymore there's no like it feels like there's nothing else I can do to make this progress and um that's frustrating so I think that's probably when I get angry now but certainly it's not it's not something you'll see I have a couple of Vlogs that I've recorded um if you and I I'll kind of do a a pivot in just a moment um to kind of do some shout outs for some stuff but on my my second YouTube channel called code commute um I've talked about this I don't know in which video there's a bunch of them now um architect you know you haven't missed it I'm still blabbing away here and my mom's on the stream she's in the chat I guess so he didn't miss um but we are wrapping up soon but on in one of the Vlogs I talk about um thiso this story where uh it was at Magnet forensics and I'm not going to repeat the whole story but the long story short is essentially at one point in my career I almost got very mad in a meeting almost and I was there with my team and we were debriefing on something and there were some other stakeholders and I remember someone in the room I guess I'm telling the story right now aren't I someone in the room basically was throwing me under the bus for something that had um essentially like incorrect data so Not only was what they were saying just inaccurate data which which is okay if you don't have the right data and you're making decisions and stuff on it like that sucks but like it's a mistake that's okay but not only that but they were like wrong data plus like throwing me under the bus and the reason I like telling this story and I realize it doesn't come across as effectively is because I know if I picked up my phone right now and I called someone that used to work on my team and I said do you remember that time and I said what the scenario was they would say oh yeah and they could tell you the exact same story basically this person was throwing me under the bus and when they finished talking they like went quiet to wait and my entire team turned and looked at me like part of my language but like oh what is he going to say because they knew they could tell that I was like my like I was about to blow my top and I was sitting there and I just remember like waiting and just going and I had to take the biggest breath I've ever taken in my entire life and the only word that I said to them was just no and I realized that's anti-climatic but the point is that that deep breath probably saved my career because I have never been so angry at someone in a meeting in my entire life anyway it a fun time um I think it's always a fun story when I'm catching up with people and we say remember that time that you almost got really mad but you didn't but we all knew you wanted to yeah um but no I try not to get mad um in settings like that like I said I it's not something that I want anyone else to emulate and it's uh something that I from observing I just have a really difficult time having respect for people like that so not something I want to not something I want to do okay we're going to do some shout outs because I got some big news for folks uh oh thank thanks Nasser I appreciate that um I got big news for everyone though so thanks for being here it's not something I did but we're going to go over to it so this is my newsletter so again if you want to know the topics for the live streams I'm just going to put it in the chat again it is a newsletter but you literally don't have to sign up and get email if you think email newsletters are dumb that's totally cool I appreciate it you don't have to sign up but if you just want to see the live stream topics for next week check it out it's going to be here I put it out on Saturday morning so you have Saturday Sunday and Monday to see the topic but I mean like you already know you want to be here next week so just plan for it but if you want to know the topic here's where it's going to be but the big news that I have for all of you is that I have these two courses and I know you're thinking Nick I know your plug-in courses they're free these are free right now um this is a pretty ridiculous uh offer that um so Nick chaps is the one that runs Dome train and I make my courses on um I make my courses on dome train but on topics for C or Career Development and I have these two courses getting started and deep dive C they're 11 hours in total 11 hours and 35 minutes 11 and a half hours and they're 100% free right now for life so um I know I realize if you're on Instagram story it's cut off and if you're on substack so sorry you can't see anything just my face but if you go to do.com there's a banner right at the top of the screen I will scroll up here right until the 28th of February get our getting started in Deep dive courses for free literally for free for life so please um please go check it out um if you want to learn C like I said it's totally free so uh they're usually I think together it's uh they're 150 bucks I think in a bundle something like that so it's totally for free um if you watch my main YouTube videos I realize a live stream's a little bit different my main YouTube videos which I might as well just jump over to you right now so Dev leader is my main Channel you can see I'm I'm literally live streaming right now um Dev leader is my main Channel but um the videos that I put on here are very much like tutorials okay so if you want to go watch like a c tutorial or understand how to do something step-by-step edited videos the courses are very much that format so I walk you through things so you can learn them um conversely this other channel I have code commute is the opposite it's very much like this live stream and you'll see that uh there's a few that I've done from home uh but most of them are done when I'm commuting and uh it's not a live stream because that would be ridiculously uh unsafe if I was trying to read the chat and live stream but we don't do that I just set up the camera and I drive and then I talk about uh software engineering stuff and basically I have people submit questions and I answer them for you so that's been really fun this channel is so much fun to make because it's just talking about software engineering and between my two channels now I put out about 12 to 15 YouTube videos a week this channel during the week uh I post about two videos a day that way when you're commuting to work and from work you have a video to hang out with me um so yeah they've been really fun the um the reactions or like the engagement I guess is significantly better than my main Channel but it's very much like this style where I'm just talking about stuff so you can put it on 2x speed listen in the background while you're cleaning stuff or commuting um it's been a lot of fun for me though so this channel very much like these live streams in terms of topics and Dev leader is primarily my um edited polished YouTube videos like if I scroll down a little there's some podcast episodes uh there's some topics like this one which are about um like software engineering in general and then like these ones over here you can see are like C programming tutorials so please check those out if you haven't already and otherwise you can find me all over social media as Dev leader or Nick centino on LinkedIn my mother's also on LinkedIn um lost worlds do you have your code commute stuff on something like Spotify I don't someone's asked about this let me explain let me explain the situation which is a good opportunity to talk about the last thing that I have which is called brand ghost I'm going to connect the dots here I'll talk about a little bit of software in just a moment because I I want to explain what's going on there's a reason I don't have it on Spotify and it's not because um it's not because I don't think anyone would listen or I never thought about it it's on purpose right now it's not a good reason but I'll explain it so in order to explain it I have to explain this platform I'm building called brand Ghost Hear Me Out brand ghost is my social media scheduling platform that I have and I use it for all of my content creation yes I know this sounds like a pitch but the spoiler alert is it's 100% free to use so I'm not selling you anything um it's 100% free to use to cross post and schedule posts okay so you if you wanted to start posting stuff to like blue sky and Twitter and threads you can do that it's for free there's other platforms that you can use and they'll like limit you at three accounts or like you can only post like once a day no this is free um if I see people abusing it then I will absolutely just limit them or stop their accounts but like it's free to use to cross post and schedule we have paid for features that are more advanced so myself as a content creator I've been putting out content now for over two years every day uh like most platforms I do about five posts a day the last um time I did like a measurement on this when I went to Hawaii with my wife in October brand ghost for me posted 150 times across my social media accounts automatically for me it's my content but I didn't have to schedule any of it so I've created the content it does it for me where I'm going with this and why I haven't put code commute onto Spotify is because this sounds like it's trivial but it's for a reason the amount of effort because I do 15 YouTube videos a week roughly 12 of them come from code commute that's 12 times where I have to go copy and paste stuff into Spotify reformat it upload wait for it to go make a thumbnail I'm not doing it it's so much work when you're layering all these things together the reason I built brand ghost is the exact same reason I want to post across every social media platform I am absolutely not copying and pasting posts across all of them how do I know that because I did it and every time that I was like this is too much I would automate it in brand ghost until it is where it is today so I have a feature that I need to build in brand ghost so this is the coding part um it will listen to RSS feeds so that way when I publish my YouTube video brand ghost will listen to the RSS feed for my channel and it will say hey look Nick has posted a new code commute video let me go get that then it will download it and then it will go upload it to Spotify automatically for me and now I never have to worry about it so that's my plan um I'm going to build that there's other ways that I could do this with other tools tools but I'm not using other tools cuz I'm going to build it into mine and it's going to be sweet so um that's my plan and I think when I have that done I will do a big import from YouTube into Spotify but I think code commute already has how many 135 Vlogs it's a lot of Vlogs um so yeah I got to wrap that up soon so I can get that working automatically but I think at that point that's when I'll have stuff uh on Spotify uh architect okay now you're coming in with the questions right at the end of the stream okay okay if a if a project is delayed due to a dependency of other team but I can work my ass out not comfy to catch up after the other team deliver what they're responsible meet the deadline should I uh well what does it mean to take ownership here are you responsible for that project because if you have a responsibility for that project I would say absolutely now what I wouldn't do is not raise awareness to it I would be like if we go through the example I gave and I can't remember if you joined right after but I gave an example what what a software engineer on my team had done recently I would say number one raise awareness about the dependency number two come up with a plan for how they're going to address that so make sure it's not just Hey look it's it's not working or it's behind it's like hey look let's talk about the strategy for you getting this done and then three is the risk mitigation part part which is like what are you going to do to try and expedite this should that um that plan not work like what's your fallback basically come up with the plan and communicate it but at the end of the day like this is the kind of thing that I I would say is like demonstrating taking ownership um I realize that when some people hear this they say but that's not fair and like my company can't expect me to work more or work harder um and like that's just not fair but this is where like I don't know like I my bias is like I worked at a startup for a long time and I feel like that's the only reason or not the only reason one of the reasons we were successful was like stuff never goes as planned but we have to be accountable we have to take ownership and we have to get it done right at the end of the day a business is looking to be able to ship value to customers now you might not feel like you have good engagement with the business you're like H whatever it's someone else's company I get it I get it I feel like I said very fortunate that I worked at a place where it felt like really good to be able to do work so that really reinforced like taking ownership for me at Microsoft it's not like I I don't like the space I'm working in nothing like that it's such a huge company sometimes it can feel almost like disconnected right even the space I'm in is huge like it can feel like it's you're disconnected from it but when you when you start to feel that sense of ownership I almost feel like for me it's like kind of keeps you attach I don't know how to phrase it like once you get a taste for it you're like okay like yeah like no I want I want this responsibility like I I do own this um and I think it's it's a good thing so architect in your case it says yeah I'm being assigned the project I assume I'm definitely responsible I would say probably uh in this case I'm kind of required to work no paid overtime to complete the project yep most Sofer are not on a an hourly rate it's a salary this is one of those things where I'm like yeah like it sucks um now other people and rightfully so will chime in and say yeah but you shouldn't do this kind of thing if it's constantly happening right so as architect saying here just not sure what I should feel hate no paid overtime 12 hours a day but I feel the responsibility to complete things so then I would say okay is this every single time are you working 12-hour days all of the time has this become the new Norm the new expectation that this is how you work because then I would say might be worth having a conversation in terms of how to balance this out because work life balance is important um even for myself right like when I was working at the startup before Microsoft uh I was actually told like genuinely because of how I was working people were saying look you're leading teams you need to be careful about that because people that work for you we don't want them to have the expectation that they're working like the same types of hours you do like that's not really fair and it was funny because this conversation would come up from people on other teams that would observe and go oh like you know I wonder what it's like to work there because like you know we see how one person's operating and like it was almost like speculating from the outside in and I don't think anyone on my team from conversations I've had I never had to tell anyone to go work extra there were times where people were like they loved a project they were working on they were super engaged with it um there were times where people are like no I can't be doing this like you know got to be with my family like I don't know um but I think if you're in a situation where you're constantly doing really long days and that's not Chang in that's worth a conversation about work life balance uh that could be with your manager to say hey look like uh and it's not necessarily like I kind of said this earlier you don't have to have conversations like this where they're like confrontational like listen up like I'm not putting up with this any longer no I mean if you've been putting up with it so far no one's going to change anything unless you take some action right but you don't have to be mean about it or any confrontational so if you've been doing this for a while and it doesn't feel sustainable I'd raise awareness and say hey look like I just kind of been realizing I've been doing this I think I need to take a step back to be able to have a better work life balance so I don't get burnt out so I can stay engaged and then talk about what that looks like if this is a temporary thing you have this project the project that I shared architect I think you missed this on the stream but you might have seen it on a code commute video or maybe that was I can't remember when I recorded it must have been last week you might have seen it but I was talking about like over the past little while I've been working 12 plus hour days I don't love it but I know it's a temporary thing cuz like I've been through this kind of stuff before where we have to make a push for something and I feel treated very well you know I respect my manager I have trust with my manager same with my skip same with the leadership team like I feel okay about doing that but if you're in a position where you're like I don't then I think have a conversation for sure so uh I think the reality is though you're asking about the ownership part sounds like there's an expectation there so it might be worth a back to my typical advice might be worth a conversation with your manager about it but I hope that helps folks I'm going to wrap it up here um I think that's all I got today so I wanted to say thanks for being here remember don't forget literally these two courses are free for life it's like 150 bucks you get to hear me blab about C if you want to learn c um by the way this teaches you from scratch you don't have to know any programming with a getting started c one literally from zero and I hope you try it out I hope you find it helpful hope you learn some C it's pretty sweet and uh I guess with that said um that's all I got so thanks for being here check out code commute during the week if you want to hang out and otherwise