How and Why to Have Career Conversations With Your Manager - Software Engineers

are you having career conversations with your manager on a regular basis in software engineering I think this is one of the most important things we can be doing for our Career Development and obviously outside of the direct work you're doing writing code and working on projects like that I think that this is something that does not get a lot of attention but really should so I wanted to make this video because it's something I'm really passionate about and if you haven't seen already I'll link you to something at the end of this so you can see just how passionate and I spent a lot of time with folks on this uh as an engineering manager right for my direct teams and also people that I Mentor so I wanted to make this video to bring some clarity I want to kind of talk about what I mean by these career conversations why you should be having them and then how I don't want to make this super in-depth like a 20 30 minute video I'm gonna try to keep it pretty short and then that way if you have questions or like how do I approach this in my particular situation leave a comment if you're not comfortable you know posting things like this on social media like you know leaving a comment like that you can find me on LinkedIn you can find me on Instagram Tick Tock whatever Twitter shoot me a message I'm happy to kind of walk through if you have a particular situation I can create content about it and generalize it because I can promise you if you're experiencing some challenges in the space you're not the only person um I can I can guarantee it so I'm happy to help and just Reach Out okay so what do I mean by career conversations like what are they right so when I talk about career conversations in this context I'm talking about something that is you know it's going to be highly personalized for you and it's going to have aspects of short and long-term um goals that you might have in your career right so for example it's not just you know I may I'm just making up an example so I'm not I'm a junior software engineer and I want to be an architect in 10 years in five years it's not just that right that's part of it you want to have some direction about where you would like to be heading based on your interests and it's okay if you don't know um you know I try to I try to get this out of people to see if they know but if you don't that's okay sometimes you just need a bit of exposure in the industry and you'll find your footing right so sometimes people gravitate towards more architecture kind of stuff other times people might feel like I've seen transitions into project management product management engineering managers all sorts of things so you don't have to know just something to try and keep in mind and think about but the other part is the more short-term aspect and I think for a lot of people um and I I notice this in particular with more Junior people because they're trying to find their footing um the shorter term like how do I get promoted what do I have to do and focus on so that's in my opinion the more short-term thing that you want to focus on in these types of conversations and then the other part of these conversations um and it's a critical one is just alignment of expectations between you and your manager so when we're talking about career conversations a lot of it is talking through this information short and long term and then the entire goal is that you're aligning expectations between you and your manager your manager should have an idea of the direction you'd like to head in your career and you should have an idea from your manager about how you're performing and the right things you need to be doing so that's the the what in this conversation okay so why should you be doing this and it's kind of funny right because I'm saying that I'm very passionate about it so I have a bunch of reasons why um and you know I think as I mentioned in my last point for what these are the one of the biggest pieces is really just about the clarity and Alignment so just to give you an example if you can imagine getting if you have your company has like a performance review kind of period where they talk about promotions usually it's like an annual thing can look different everywhere but could you imagine going the entire year thinking that you were performing at a super high level and then it comes to performance review time just for you to have your annual surprise of being disappointed right oh you're not ready for promotion oh you're not getting um the salary increase you thought like these types of conversations and why you want to be doing them are really to help prevent this kind of thing um not not the only reason but it helps a tremendous amount and prevents um these types of surprises right so um you get this alignment you get clarity about your manager's expectations of you and how you should be performing and in my opinion this really helps with Focus so if you're thinking about the different types of projects that you might be able to pick up and work on or the different work items that you might be coding right so the types of bug fixes or features you're developing and and all that kind of stuff this should help you focus on on where that effort needs to be going right so another example maybe your um kind of breaking out of the junior software engineering phase and your manager saying hey like you know as you're getting more senior it'd be good if you work uh with some partner teams it would be good if you can start leading some of these projects that might kind of frame up for you like okay like based on what we have coming up maybe I should be asking about working on this project over here because I can work with Team B and C or I could be actually leading this project within our team because I have some of that experience now but that should help you try and focus where your efforts go and the other part that I want to mention here is is about engagement right so if you take the inverse of what I'm talking about right now say you're not having these career conversations um I'm not saying you can't be engaged in your work you might have awesome work and you're super excited just to work on the tech stack that's great um that's awesome um but I've I've absolutely seen where people are you know they're not sure about how they're performing they're not sure if they're on track and this can kind of eat at their engagement and it's a really crappy thing to watch because you can have really awesome Engineers super smart bright people um that had tons of energy and they get to this point where they're like I just don't know like am I putting in all this effort and like it's not gonna lead me anywhere in my growth um and their engagement plummets and when your engagement drops a tremendous amount the quality of work that you're able to do your total productivity that also plummets right like as an engineering manager one of my ultimate goals is to ensure that your engagement is up very high because you're going to be doing your best work and I think that having career conversations why you want to be doing that really helps with your engagement okay lots of other reasons I'm Gonna Leave You with just that and I want to get into how just so we can keep this video pretty short okay so how do you have these conversations I would say uh the first thing I want to mention is do them early do them often I can't stress this enough career conversations if your only time is annually it's just not enough um you know it's it's good to at least do it annually of course if you're not doing it even annually I think you have other conversations to be having too um but you want to be making sure that these are early and often so uh one-on-one conversations with your manager hopefully you have something like this set up on maybe maybe it's weekly bi-weekly monthly different Cadence for different teams different companies different individuals all of this um but if you're having one-on-one conversations I would try to encourage you to at least make sure some of them are around this kind of thing um I could just to give you an example if you were meeting weekly with your manager for one-on-ones and every single week you were trying to have uh career conversations like this that might be in it might be Overkill right because week over week you might say well I don't really have anything else to kind of build on this conversation so you have to um kind of tailor it to your situation of course um but the other thing that I want to mention too is because I can't speak for every manager right I have different expectations of how I think managers should be operating if you're not having these career conversations with your manager already in your one-on-ones I strongly suggest that you ask them about it and the way that I might approach this just to make it a little bit easier is that you don't want to uh like put your manager on the spot necessarily so you're in you know you're at the end of your 101 on a given day and it's a 30 minute call uh 30 amended in person meeting and and the last like five minutes you're like oh by the way I just want to go over all my career stuff um they just might not be prepared on the spot to give you the attention that you deserve in that conversation so what I might recommend doing is ahead of a one-on-one reach out you know and just say like hey this is something I'd like to be able to go over um in a one-on-one you could say hey next time could we go over this or even the mix between those two things where you're saying like even if it's not in a one-on-one could we just schedule some extra time to be able to talk through this kind of stuff and I just wanted to mention that like yes my expectation of other engineering managers is that they are proactively doing this with you but I have been guilty of this myself over the years I've seen it with other engineering managers there's a lot of stuff going on for everyone and unfortunately sometimes things like this seem to take a back seat um and especially especially if people are doing well if you're a software engineer and you're performing well sometimes it for an engineering manager it can make them feel like oh well this person's doing well like I don't have to give them that extra attention right now and things are busy let me focus on this stuff um so what's like don't take it personally but sometimes like sometimes uh the rest of what's going on seems to Edge uh out uh other priorities that engineering manager should have so um I've certainly had my current teammates uh teammates like the people that I manage reaching out to me and being like hey could we just go over this in the next one could we talk about this a little bit more in depth and it's a good reminder for me right because I have awesome team members right now and like I said I end up being guilty of it too I don't get messages like that and being like oh these people are so selfish asking for more time for me it's like no it's a reminder that I need to be giving them more attention and it's a you know I appreciate having the upfront or the heads up I guess on on like I'd like to talk about this it gives me an opportunity to make sure that I can prep some information and um not feel like on the spot and trying to think about like their entire career and and all that kind of stuff so um yeah just give your manager a heads up if you're not currently having these conversations I I do think one-on-one conversations hopefully that you already have scheduled are you know one of the best forums for this but if you find that those one-on-ones just don't have enough time or you're talking about other things please ask your manager for some other time to be able to go through this um the other thing that I want to mention here is that it and this will look different in many places right um big tech companies I would say might have a little bit more luxury this way and it doesn't have to be like a Microsoft a Google Amazon thing like even just well-established software engineering companies you might have something like a rubric or a talent guide or something else that can actually give you some some concrete pieces to work with and talk through your manager on like at level just making numbers up or whatever it's different everywhere at level one like here's how you should be operating and if you want to get to level two you have to you know be able to focus on these types of things and level three like here's what you'll be looking at if you don't have one of these um you know like I was at a startup for a long time and we just did not have anything like this and tried to put something together um ask right ask if if there is something like that that you and your manager can align on again coming back to aligning expectations incredibly important if it doesn't exist depending on how much you want to push for it if you're at a smaller company maybe you can ask your manager like hey this this is an important thing could we as a company start looking at this kind of thing um I'm not going to tell you how to go operate but uh if you have something like a rubric or a talent guide that you can align on I think that that's an incredibly valuable tool um and then the next part that I want to and next and final I guess part that I want to lead into here is that even even with something like a rubric let's say I I want you to go into these conversations with Fair expectations so what does that mean well again especially with something like a rubric I don't want you to be like going through and being like I you know check check like I've done all these things one time kind of thing so like hey manager therefore like promote me right now like there's just a lot of things that go into those types of decisions and sometimes there is a handful of things that the manager has no control over so having aggressive expectations about expecting to be promoted or expecting arrays I would say is not necessarily like a a good good way to approach it but I would say that like I would encourage people on my team if they felt like hey I feel that I am doing these things regularly that I've been demonstrating them consistently over a period of time if they felt like I think that I deserve to be at the next level I would love to have conversations with them about it um I think for a lot of people this is including myself so it's easier said than done I think that this is a really uncomfortable thing for people they're not um you know not confident or they're just uncomfortable being able to speak about like I think I think I deserve more so it's okay to to feel that way and it's okay to you know Express that but what I would say is kind of a you know a difficult spot and like I would recommend you try not to get into is like like ultimately expecting a decision is made within a short amount of time now with that said um if you are you know if you're approaching this with an open mind and you are presenting this kind of stuff to your manager you are having these conversations you are aligning on expectations if you're doing all of this and your timeline personally is not being met like this is your career right I'm not I don't want to encourage people like hey just go like leave companies and jump between companies just you know chasing salary and stuff I think that's you can do it it seems kind of crappy to me if you just want to actually improve as a software engineer so um if you're chasing money sure but um it's just not something I recommend for actual career growth and Skilling up but like I said it's your career so if you're feeling that the the expectations for how what you want to get out of your career aren't being met and you're going through all these steps I think you know you're able to make a tough decision if you need to but I I just want to say again that I think you owe it to yourself to be trying to go through these conversations um and have career discussions with your manager so I think that's all I wanted to go over today was actually a little bit longer than I thought um but yeah we covered the what so personalized conversations short long-term kind of goals that you're having with your manager um and really aligning on expectations why you want to be doing this helps with your engagement helps with your focus I didn't mention this but helps your manager understand how they can try to align things for you so there's a lot of reasons why I think you should be doing this I highly recommend it and then how I recommend early often trying to leverage one-on-one sessions and then you know if you have other tools like rubrics that you can bring into the picture I think that's great and then get again like going in with expectations that um that seem fair right you want to be able to to articulate how you where you feel that you're at but understanding too that things just can't immediately snap into place just because you're asking for them necessarily but also be honest and fair to yourself about your career so hopefully that was helpful I did mention that it's a really passionate topic for me so even when it comes to editing this video um I feel like I probably won't have to do too much just because I'm talking naturally I hope that comes across that way and I think yeah you might enjoy I'm going to put the link to this video over here um watch that next because I think you'll kind of see the same thing going on so thanks and please feel free to ask questions take care