Practice Makes Perfect: Behavioral Interviews - Principal Software Engineering Manager AMA

get started on Instagram I think that's the last platform takes a second here we go should be coming in and I think that means that I'm also live on LinkedIn let me get my chat turned on here hopefully that works there we go awesome cool let's double check I think everything's working if you're joining in the chat come say hi uh sometimes with the chat I don't know it's working until someone tries and then they let me know I was just looking around it's really awkward I don't have my phone on me my phone has been misplaced and I didn't realize until like 5 seconds before I started uh streaming so I'm I'm feeling naked and I don't like it but that's okay so no phone uh sorry if you're trying to message me or if you're sending me a message on social media I will I will probably miss it because I can't see my phone right in front of me but we are going to be going over some newsletter stuff like normal um the topic this week is behavioral interviews so I'm going to share that uh link right into the chat if you are on Tik Tok and Instagram I don't think that you can see the chat but uh welcome so that's sent across the other platforms um as normal if you're new to these you can ask questions along the way I am watching chat across a bunch of screens um because the shareed chat doesn't get everything of course so you know that means if you are on Instagram or Tik Tok just send a message in the chat I will try to catch it I am happy to jump in and answer things even if they're not related to the topic so I don't mind uh I would much rather answer your questions as I'm going along than just you know stick to the script so to speak but the script if I can call it that what we're going to be going through is the newsletter article I put into the chat and this is from this past Saturday like I said it's on behavioral interviews I'm going to share uh some of my tips and uh you know how I would recommend you approach some of your behavioral interviews this is something that I've had success with personally I don't like trying to make a claim like it's a oniz fits-all type of thing I think advice like that is always uh kind of garbage um I am reading the Twitter chat as well the Twitter chat is coming through to the the shared stream so thank you for testing that out so I will be watching so yeah please feel free to ask your questions there um and the other thing is usually I've been trying to do these for two hours and I usually try to do a coding live stream the next morning so it would be 7 a.m. for me tomorrow but this week I go on vacation with my wife to Texas we're going to go watch the CrossFit Games and something she has really wanted to do and as a result I kind of scheduled some other things I have to get done tomorrow morning so there will not be I think for the second week in a row a coding live stream tomorrow morning so I apologize and I will probably cut this one a little short of the 2hour mark so um we'll see how long I blab for the first bit on behavioral interviews if I'm still going strong and I'm not feeling like I'm going to be having a hard time in the morning we'll jump over to Reddit we'll go to experienced dev's subreddit and try to to look at some things also because I plan on doing that if you have articles and stuff that you want me to check out and offer my opinion on feel free to drop them into the chat I would like I said I would much rather that you kind of direct my focus than me try and rehearse anything and just uh you know do it that way because I make YouTube videos I might as well go you know pre-record something and just put it on YouTube I'd much rather talk with you folks so with that said I think that's enough blabbing um I'm going to jump into behavioral interviews so um the first part that I want to talk about is a little bit of a preface to the newsletter article I wrote and I think it's important for people to to recognize for software engineering right like this is my opinion and from my experience but the software engineering interview process itself is very different unfortunately than what you know what it works like what it looks like to be on the job what it works like I can't speak um and as a result I I really feel like you have to practice at the things that lead to your interviews and lead to getting your job so for example like being able to craft a resume that gets noticed and apply to jobs like there is a skill in that you can't just never have done it and expect to be amazing at it and get a million offers like you have to literally put a lot of things together in a way that's presentable that gets noticed that gets you to stand out you need to be doing the networking you need volume in terms of your applications especially when it's this competitive there's lots that's just to be able to get the interviews right lots that goes into it then those skills I'm not saying there's zero transferable skills to your job but the problem is that like you have to really work on those set of skills and not all of them are going to be like extremely transferable to on the job and the next thing is like in your interviews as well I've talked about this a lot before but your your coding questions that you do right the technical questions you get asked if they if they are of the style of like lead code questions I really don't feel like lead code translates well into on the job experience you may disagree with that I'm not saying that you're not going to get any better at programming from doing Elite code style things but I I think that focusing on truly building software and not trying to look for tricks and algorithms uh is going to be a better investment again you can absolutely skill up by doing elad code I just personally wouldn't emphasize it as much now interestingly I do think that some of the parts that go into behavioral interviews do carry over very well so behavioral interviews are going to be testing non-technical aspects about you and I'm going to talk about uh core competencies uh some like a concept that we'll see especially at bigger tech companies but really all companies have this at some level right they might not even acknowledge it like like it's written down or carved into stone somewhere but a lot of companies do have core competencies that they value what I personally think is that with core competencies these are generally things that you could like you could kind of spoof them uh as an individual but I do think that if you are aligned with a company they core competencies like this is a good thing for you to try and get alignment with the company right you want to try and find a place that has similar core competencies that you value so it's a good litmus test for you as well if you were applying to some company and they publish their core competencies and you were like uh that's kind of weird that they put so much emphasis on that I don't know if I'm aligned with that maybe that's not a good place for you to try and invest a lot of effort into applying to because you're going to have to feel like you're like faking it through the interview and then you're going to get the job let's say and then not feel like it's a good spot for you so I would just recommend like you can use that as a litmus test as well but I do think that there is some good carryover from behavioral interviews trying to communicate effectively I think that's a really powerful thing that you can take into your software engineering job um and the other aspect about the communicating effectively part is like understanding the audience that you're talking to right this is I feel like a really undervalued thing in software engineering because we love working in code we love being technical but not every person that you're talking to is going to have that same uh level of depth right so when you're sharing your experiences we'll talk about some of the details of this coming up but when you're sharing those experiences the person you're talking to was not sitting there writing the code with you they weren't on your team they don't use or maybe they do use your product but like they're not entrenched in the development work so when you're trying to share your impact they're going to have a different lens so we'll see more of this in just a moment but um the point that I wanted to get across is that the effort that goes into all of the steps leading up to your job is not necessarily like a onetoone mapping with a lot of the skills that you require on the job so with that said I find it kind of interesting that uh and this is a generalization of course I have to speak in generalizations a lot of the time but there is so much emphasis from software engineers and I don't really blame them but there's a lot of emphasis that goes into like hey I need to double down on my my technical skills I need to practice and grind lead code I need to be building a million projects like I think building stuff is great if you want to add lead code in great but like so much technical emphasis and the behavioral interview portion of how you're going to be measured is also important it might not feel as important to you because maybe you uh maybe you don't quite value that the same or maybe you don't understand why it's being done but it is going to be critical and I think that if you neglect the the different considerations that go into that you're kind of setting yourself up to practice all these other things and do well and then you're going to go into your behavioral interview and feel like you're you're being tricked or you don't understand the questions or you don't know how to answer them effectively so the thing I wrote in my newsletter was like well you know if we do all this stuff for practicing code like why would you not be practicing for your behavioral interviews right some people do I'm sure lots of people do but I the sort of the thing that I notice from interactions on social media and when I chat with people is like so much emphasis on code so um yes coding is important yes it's a huge part of what we do as software Engineers of course but don't forget the behavioral interviews and that's exactly hopefully why you're here to hear more about this um so I'm going to jump into the next part and talk about core competencies I wanted to pause for a moment cuz I thought this was kind of interesting but um there are a lot of people that will share their newsletters like especially from substack and stuff onto Reddit uh generally I don't like going on to Reddit because I feel like every single time I go on to Reddit it's like being bombarded and attacked no matter what angle like if you're just trying to be helpful it's like you know doesn't matter you're stupid you're an idiot the feedback is it just always reminds me like maybe you shouldn't ever touch Reddit again um but I did tell myself at the beginning of this year I wanted to overcome that so I posted a link to this newsletter article that I put into the chat um and I could tell that it was being shared because I could see it but the one of the comments was basically like uh kind of making fun of me because I talk about the star method right I think the individual reading this stuff they believed that it was very obvious and they were like so why would you ever write about it um now you know this kind of stuff bothers me of course but I have thick enough skin I'm not going to like stop you know trying to put content on online because someone was uh being a jerk on Reddit but I I wanted to pause to mention this not because I'm whining about this person on Reddit but because I want to remind you that sometimes this kind of stuff seems very obvious to you right there are going to be so if you're you know I think right now majority of the people are actually from X watching this so thanks for joining from Twitter it's really cool to see folks coming over from that platform uh LinkedIn is my biggest audience and I feel like for some reason my uh my LinkedIn live streams like basically they don't get uh Impressions when I post that they're happening so I don't even know if anyone on LinkedIn even knows this is happening right now which feels kind of silly um just because I guess how the algorithm works for Impressions but the point is that you might find this kind of stuff obvious thank you for still around and kind of hearing it um but I want to remind you that there are people around you that may not so especially if you are more senior you've gone through job uh interviews and you're kind of used to how this looks and maybe you're just here because you're like hey like I'm curious if there's anything new if I'm not sharing something new with you I want this just to be a reminder that if there are more Junior people around you people you know that are looking to switch jobs and they're nervous you could do what I'm doing right now where you're basically just trying to sh share information and help because just because it's obvious to you it doesn't mean that everyone else gets it so that's the the whole point I wanted to make about the the crappy Reddit comment that was like why are you doing this this is like everyone knows I think they literally said so in conclusion water is wet yeah yeah it is so do better right okay core competencies um most big tech companies if not all have their core competencies published online right I think Amazon is pretty popular for having like their leadership principles so um you can go dig those up um Microsoft has core competencies posted I don't have all of these memorized from the different tech companies but you can go online and go find them right if you want you could go search like company name core competencies or company name like core values sometimes will be kind of framed differently um core values aren't necessarily the core competencies that they're interviewing for but if you're having a hard time finding like you know quotes core competencies you might be able to lean into the core values and see like if these are the things that the business cares about right as a whole then maybe these are things that like I should look into being able to articulate from my own experience so just wanted to mention that but what I have done is I kind of grouped core competencies and maybe what I should do at this point is I'm going to try to jump over and just share my screen so you can see uh what on the newsletter right so one sec I'm going to press this button and of course my face isn't here give me a sec there I am hello I'm going to put the chat up too okay so hopefully that's coming through if you are on Instagram I'm sorry this probably went to being the worst view possible but um I did kind of take a stab at just generalizing core competencies across different companies and so this is not meant to be a conclusive list I'm going to zoom in a little for folks just so you can see it um so it's not a inclusive list okay but it is hopefully a starting point for you so you can get an idea and I want to walk you through like hopefully you'll see by the end of this was a bit of a process I put together for how you can practice this kind of stuff okay so I'm going to go through these core competencies like I said they are generalized because different companies have their own but if you were to go put them all side by side and start looking through them you'll see themes right they might split them out different ways because they prioritize them differently but but there is a theme across all of them right so the first one we're going to talk about is problem solving uh I wrote like this is in my opinion the closest part in core competencies where you are going to see technical pieces right so um you might you might get this Focus during your your technical interview but especially during the behavioral part they might ask you questions about uh different you know challenges and projects you were working on and how you had to basically like literally problem solve you'll hear other parts of it communication and teamwork kind of coming up into these types of questions but they might be trying to see how you like navigated a problem and like what your thought your thought process was right so a lot of the time problem solving will come up in uh technical Parts though but this part here um navigate problems and ambiguity I think this is a really good one that gets brought up so they might uh you might have in your interviews like hey tell me about a time where you had requirements that weren't uh very clear and like basically like what was your thought process right they really want to see how you thought through something by the way um I don't know if I made it clear at the beginning of this stream or depending on when you're joining but when I go through these what we're going to do after is we're going to touch on sort of like a call it call it a method I'm going to use that word Loosely uh for being able to kind of test yourself against these and practice them okay and the other thing I'll mention is that I do um or right I did for this newsletter linked I don't want to call it an ebook I feel like that's not fair like it's a PDF um so I'm going to link a PDF it's totally free it has content that you're seeing on the screen about these generalized core competencies but it also has uh a prompt that you can use definitely tweak it tune it but if you want to practice interviewing you can generate some questions with chat GPT or your favorite llm and just come up with a list of questions that you can practice against because like I said said you want to be practicing these things before your interviews okay so coming back to this list though problem solving adaptability is another one I think that um you know especially for folks that have not been in Industry yet um I think a lot of people think okay the bigger the company the more like well thought out everything is the more systemized it is like everything kind of just goes on Rails the bigger the company is and like maybe in some cases but there's always going to be different things that you have to ad adapt to right there's going to be changing priorities there's going to be uncertainty with customer requirements there's always going to be something always so being able to adapt is generally something that uh interviewers will try to focus on at most companies that will come up at some point uh this third one teamworking collaboration personally one of the most important in my opinion um and I will you know I'll die on the hill kind of talking about this one being one of the most important but software in general for the large majority of software is built in teams so a lot of the time like in my side projects and stuff I might be building stuff on my own uh I do like building projects with some of my friends as well but large majority of stuff outside of work might be you're just coding solo cool no worries nothing wrong with that but in a company odds are you're going to be working on a team doesn't matter the industry like on a team now within a team you might be working on smaller pieces but the goal your team has a mission to be able to deliver value to the customers right so you do need to work together and collaborate and that will mean sometimes how do you like figure out how to help other people how do you come together for you know you might have to park some work over here and go help someone else like there's going to be all these things that are different dynamics that aren't just code and I think it's really important that people figure this out early so that you're not feeling frustrated or feeling like you don't understand how to navigate some of this type of thing so it's a really important part like I said I think one of the most important behavioral traits to look for um leadership this is especially important the more senior senior you become um you know it's not like leadership traits cannot be demonstrated in in more Junior levels or with less formal experience they absolutely can but um I would say the focus is like probably for more senior people and I say that not because like it's not a a valuable thing but in terms of an interviewer trying to gauge your experience with leadership if you are just starting out in your software engineering Journey they probably recognize that like this might be a bit challenging to try and get that information out of you and they might not have as much of an expectation on you when you're just starting out so think it's incredibly important but uh the weight I would say is for more senior positions that where this really starts to come into play but kind of ties back into the teamwork and collaboration but putting you in the driver seat of that right like how do you recognize these things how do you help your team members out how do you try and uh disambiguate things reduce chaos um all these types of things and you don't need a title to do it right so you don't have to be a team lead you don't have to be a manager for this type of thing but informal leadership can show up at all levels right you could be a junior you could be an intern at some place and still demon demonstrate leadership traits right so you might find it harder the more Junior you are or the more new you are to somewhere and and I don't blame you it might be more challenging to kind of do that but you can and if you have these experiences it's great to kind of lean into so we'll keep going along here communication skills um this is uh up there with teamwork and collaboration for me like between communication and the teamwork and collaboration uh for me uh there's only a couple more on here that are like right up there at the same level but definitely communication uh I did mention earlier in the Stream like your behavioral interview process is a really good opportunity especially when you're practicing to try and work on communication so software Engineers we write a lot of code that is a type of communication you have to work with your team members communication you're going to have to work with different stakeholders with different backgrounds different levels of experience right there's so many things that come up you need to be able to communicate so it's just a core aspect of your job and I will keep saying this because I'm not sure if like I just feel like maybe I don't want to say people don't believe it but I just feel like they kind of think if I just become technical enough like communication thing will just happen and it's like like not really you have to you have to practice it just like anything else keep going along though creativity and Innovation um this is a pretty standard one I would say but the reason that I find this one a little bit challenging it's in the list because I think it's important especially because some companies will really value it and they're trying to look for it when they're interviewing but I feel like it can be kind of challenging to demonstrate based on your work history if you haven't done a lot so it could be tricky to gauge but um I would say this is one of the core competencies like do your homework before applying to places and if you land an interview try to make sure that if one of the things they really focus on is creativity and Innovation that you can come up with examples for uh different scenarios like this so not not that it's a waste I just think that it might be a little bit more I don't even know if I can call it Niche but um a little bit more focused I would say for this one but it's obviously important because we're software Engineers so learning agility I didn't have a good way to put this but I called it learning agility um this is another one that's up there on my list personally and I wrote even like I place a high value on someone's willingness to learn so I think one thing that kind of sucks in most software engineering interviews is like the way that questions get asked I feel like it's gauging like what you know in the moment so like so to speak so that like that doesn't feel very good to me um and that's because I expect that you're going to have to learn like anyone coming into a new domain has to learn I I love sharing like when we go through people's uh you know career Journeys and stuff like that and when people talk about like hey I went from this domain to this domain because it's evidence of this right you need to be able to learn fast so when I graduated University I went into a digital forensics company I had no idea what I was doing with respect to forensics zero zero where to start no idea all I knew was deleted information that's it right so going from that and then uh obviously within that there were always these opportunities where I'm like I don't know but I have to figure it out right this is just something that constantly happens going to Microsoft I joined the deployment team for substrate which is sort of like the platform for M365 I knew nothing about deployment nothing large scale deployment to thousands of machines hundreds of thousands of machines across the world never done it before but I had to learn right so I was able to demonstrate my willingness and ability to learn quick and as a result people interviewing me trusted in that and the same thing with my current position I moved over to the routing plane in substrate how much experi experience do I have with firewalls and routing about zero not now a little bit now I got a few months under my belt but at zero at the time right so again being able to demonstrate to the people that are interviewing me like hey look I'm able to adapt I'm able to learn and I'm eager to do so now I will say it makes me nervous as heck to be put into a situation that I don't know stuff it makes me wildly uncomfortable but every time I do it it ends up being good every single time in my life so I think this part is really important for me personally um I think when you can demonstrate this kind of thing like people get nervous about what text stack what language um I want to talk about this briefly because I think it goes through people's minds a lot my personal opinion on this is that uh smaller companies and startups are able to take less risk on people that don't have the exact skill sets and I say that because for startups and small companies they might be in a position where any any time that's not spent just trying to get value out to customers means there is a higher risk of them failing and I'm not saying that this is better I'm not saying that it's fair that they might value you know people with more exact um Tech stack experience I'm not saying any of that I'm just saying from like a startup perspective your job is to try and survive get value to customers try and survive so to say hey we're going to pay a software engineering salary to someone and we have to go skill them up for six months they might not be around in six months right like the company might fail just by doing that so it can be really difficult to hire into startups and I feel like again my my perspective and a generalized one is that you're going to Pro if you have like a limited set of skills it might be hard to find startups unless you align with those sets of skills with big Tech and bigger companies they're not so much in this position where like you know they can't take the opportunity to skill people up to train them up so for example Microsoft uh I did I don't know if this math is exact but I think for people that join the team the two teams that I've uh two domains I've managed at Microsoft the people that were hired on at the same time as me roughly or came after I think out of both of those one person came with C knowledge one I'm not saying the other people hadn't heard of it or hadn't ever used it but one person was like yeah like I program in C everyone else different languages and that's okay because we know that we can skill those people up in C no problem but it takes time right it's not like the first day we're like hey you are a c Guru now we don't have that expectation we have to skill them up in the domain like for example I don't think anyone we hired across those teams to my knowledge has done deployment in large scale or has done routing infrastructure at Large Scale it's probably new to all of them that's fine we're looking for these other things like your ability to learn fast and your willingness to learn okay that's enough on that one customer focus um oops I pressed that shouldn't have done that customer focus this is what happens when you're live streaming you go to make mistakes that's a that's an easy edit for YouTube live stream not so much um so this one is really key as well and different companies will place a different amount of emphasis on this but I think every company values this um It's Tricky for some folks I think because you might go your most of your career without having what feels like direct connection to customers right smaller companies you might feel this a little bit more you kind of get I don't want to say forced into it but just by virtue of the company being small like you'll hear sales and marketing people more um you might have a small product team that is working directly with customers like you just just seem to get exposed to this kind of thing more at bigger companies it's a little bit more hidden a little bit more abstracted from the development team so it can be hard to demonstrate this kind of thing or understand why it's important but it is and the reason that it's important and I want to find a good way to kind of articulate this but uh this is maybe more valuable for folks coming out of like school to here right in school we learn about these different ways to develop software we learn design patterns we learn Big O notation we're learning like computer science Concepts about these data structures and things like that and then what happens a lot of the time and again generalization but what happens a lot of the time is that you you get into your your career and then you see your first code base and you go oh my goodness what is this this is an absolute disaster they're not using the dry principle here uh they have two different styles of doing the same thing across these files this class is 2,000 lines long like how could anyone ever do this and your focus starts going to how do I just make all of this code better or you're working on your first feature and you're going I need to go make it perfect this code doesn't yet look like all of the things that we tried to perfect in school and I don't mean to pick on the school people it's just like I went to University too and I had this this kind of challenge as well so the point that I'm getting across here is that when it comes to customer focus when you can see through this lens of like we need to get value to customers it's a really difficult thing for people to hear especially as software engineers and I'm going to say this in a way that probably bothers people and it's kind of on purpose but like customers do not care how clean your code is they don't care how many tests you have they don't care care what language you used they don't care about any of it they care that their problem is getting solved and they feel like they're getting value out of what they're paying for what I'm not saying is that those things aren't important I'm just saying to a customer doesn't matter they care about the side effects of those things right if your code has no tests it's a disaster to work in the side effect of that is it's probably going to be slower to deliver customers care about that but they don't care about the details of why it's slow to deliver not their problem that's the development team's problem so I think when you can put the customer focus lens in place you can think like is this an acceptable shortcut 8020 rule right did I do a majority of what we need okay cool let's move ahead right we can come back to this oh we're not going to get time to ever fix this up yeah maybe because it's not actually important customers are still paying for it customers are still happy so customer focus for me is a lot about balance it's a lot about trying to understand what customers value and then leaning into this constantly and if you do have opportunities in your career to have more direct um you know lines of communication with uh with customers um I I think it's a huge opportunity so that's another reason why a lot of the time I like recommending to folks that are starting off like join a startup you're going to get this kind of exposure like I can almost guarantee it and it's it's a really good opportunity so that was a lot of blabbing about core competencies I'm going to move into the next section but I just want to remind folks in the chat I got one message from Twitter Twitter's usually pretty active uh Twitter is still like completely dominating the number of people on the stream which is kind of funny so folks if you have questions about core competencies as I move into the next part please ask away or if you're just joining the stream and you miss the intro if you have questions about completely different things aside from behavioral interviews for software Engineers drop it in the chat as we go okay I want this to be for you not just me I don't know like something that's half rehearsed um so how to practice so in this part here uh I I'm trying to do this in my newsletters I don't know for folks that are watching if you're if you're subscribed or not I'm not here to try and like force you to subscribe but if you have feedback on this kind of thing what I'm trying to do is sprinkle in some visual cues for like hey like look at this because this is like one of the takeaways something you can try and act on and I'm hoping that that becomes a little bit more helpful because I like to write a lot um I've had feedback early on uh from other creators saying oh make your newsletter you know way shorter and go like this just not I don't write like that there's a million other newsletters that are really short mine's not so I don't want to sacrifice trying to write stuff but I want to make it more obvious for like get your eyes onto the actions so if you have feedback on that please let me know I'm happy to try and you know play around with this concept so I'm going to walk you through something that I I have found works really well I've done this for techn questions but I framed it up for Behavioral questions as well for interviews obviously because that's what this newsletter and this talk is about but um this is something that has worked well for me this is what I used personally when interviewing for all the big tech companies so um I did interview for Google they said no they told me sorry you're not technical enough which I thought was hilarious that's okay though um sorry Google you loss um I applied to Facebook I got the interview but they I think they filled the role like the same day that I was supposed to interview which was super bizarre because I had a call or a email or something that said like just a reminder for your interview today and then like half an hour later it was like your interview is cancelled and I remember being like I don't know which one it is so anyway I did not actually get to go interview with Facebook but I did interview with Amazon and mic moft and so for Google Amazon Microsoft and some other companies um I just wanted to mention the big Tech on so people understand this is literally the system I used I'm going to talk about some AI tools and stuff that can help I didn't use AI so it was done manually but this is what I did I ended up having three offers from Amazon and the one from Microsoft and went with Microsoft so I I'm just telling you this not to brag about the offers I'm telling you this just because I hadn't applied for jobs for 8 years I had parted my language no idea what the hell I was doing because I hadn't done it in ages but what I did have was a bunch of different experiences and this is why I'm going to walk you through how I practice this stuff so the first part is getting those experiences written down so I wrote here like get out of pen and paper like whatever you want to go write stuff down um for me it was pen and paper so I find when I'm writing notes um if it's written just sticks up here but the idea was that for those core competencies that we just talked about that whole list or if you are targeting a specific company and you want to look at their core competencies for each one of them I want you to go write down a few examples of stories that you feel like demonstrate those things okay so these These are going to be stories either from uh your your current job or your previous job right depending on your situ sitation if you have not had a job yet you could take this from uh from school from boot camp from personal projects you were working on depending on how you want to try and navigate this like saying teamwork for a personal project might be kind of hard but what I would say is if you have not had that experience yet you could be very transparent about that you don't want to lie in an interview but you could say like hey look I haven't I haven't had a good example of of that but is it okay if I walk you through how I would think about navigating that right I've when I've interviewed people I've appreciated that when someone's like just like hey look I just I've been thinking for a bit I can't come up with a good example I'm not going to penalize people for being like I couldn't think of something it's great if you can but if you're like hey here's how I would go navigate this I like seeing the thought process personally so come up with a handful of examples for each one of the core competencies pretty simple if you only get one for some of them that's fine but you want to try coming up with more examples because you'll see in a moment why that's helpful and maybe I shouldn't have said helpful right away it's about to be more work um this is the part the person from Reddit said so water's wet in conclusion right so I call out the star method and some people maybe everyone watching this right now live and watching it recorded maybe all of you know exactly what the star method is if just one of you does not know what the star method is and this is your first time seeing it then I am happy because at least I added this and it will help you so the star method is great for people like me that ramble I ramble and go on tangents like crazy this for example right now is a bit of a tangent and a ramble and my wife knows very well that I go on tangents all the time and she's happy to remind me the reason why that's really crappy in an interview is you only have so much time and you want to make sure that you're answering their questions effectively and getting to the point and demonstrating the core competency so if you're doing exactly what I'm doing right now and just prolonging getting to the point what ends up happening is that you run out of time the interviewer has a hard time trying to figure out like okay like what part of that was the teamwork again like why were they talking about those like that class and the lines of cod like what did that have to do like you want to park that stuff you need to be concise and with the star method it really helps you kind of organize the flow of things so to go through it um you start with the situation so you want to give some context to the interviewer right and I like to think about these as taking a few minutes to be able to answer okay just for context I'm not saying a hard rule they might be shorter they might be longer that's fine but you know uh I would say like account for a few minutes to go through so give them the situation you want to offer just enough context to kind of frame up what's going on okay the next part the task and this is going to spell out Star by the way so spoiler alert if you didn't piece that part together talk about the task so what thing were you responsible for here's the situation what's your responsibility right in interviews you want to be able to talk about what you were responsible for this gets kind of dicey because sometimes people will say Hey look it's a trick question when when you when you talk about you and only you it tells people that like you're not a team player like yes and no um you need to be able to articulate what you actually were responsible for but that doesn't mean that you want everything you convey to be like I don't work on a team I'm a lone wolf because that's kind of weird like probably makes sense you were working on a team it's okay to mention that but if you just said yeah like the team team the team was successful and the team delivered on this and the team did that they like the interviewer does not know what your role was right you might know it might be very obvious up here this is good resume advice as well by the way you want to think about the fact that your interviewer or the person reading your resume they got no idea about you they don't know that you did that you need to be very clear about it okay so what were you responsible for you're going to talk about the action you took so you're going to walk through the steps that were taken and I would offer some detail as to why like it's good to see the thought process that went into it because personally when someone's telling me that kind of stuff like I want to see why they did it did you do it because someone else told you to do it did you do it because you were drawing data and insights from something some past experiences these are all very interesting things to me and then finally the result and this is a big one because this is your opportunity to talk about the impact now sometimes you'll get questions in interviews that talk about like talk about a thing that failed right the result of that failure does not end at and the project totally failed and um customer dropped us and every everyone was upset and we never built software again like the the the part of failing is okay to bring up in the story but it's it doesn't end there right that's the first part of the results but really what you want to be able to Showcase is what did you learn what was the takeaway what what was done better next time how was that part implemented like you're able to talk about failures and spin them in ways that are very positive it's impossible for everyone to be perfect and never make mistakes so you will find that you'll get questions and interviews that are structured in a way for you to talk about those types of things and the value for the interviewer it's not to like make you feel crappy and be like haha I'm embarrassing you in your interview about that failure they want to see what you learned and how you made things better going forward so just a heads up on that so as you can see I wrote here it's a great tool if you're like me and ramble a lot you might notice that I do that so that's the star method I put a link and I should copy it here too so let me put this into the chat again sorry for folks on Instagram and Tik Tok if you're not getting the chat coming through but uh just search Star method online it's very popular um you'll have lots of different websites and stuff that will explain it with examples and things like that so that's what I recommend using you can look for other techniques it's not to say that the star method is the only thing you can use but you want to have a framework and I think the framework's really important because when you go to practice these scenarios which is coming up in just a moment What's really valuable is when you're in the interview and someone goes tell me about a time when and you go oh crap like I don't know if I have an example or okay I'm recalling the example I wanted to talk about but I I can't remember how I rehearsed it you just want to be able to come back to your framework right it's not about just memorizing the things I don't I almost never think that memorizing things is super valuable say almost never I don't like saying always and never but almost never valuable it's like the the understanding right so being able to say Okay I I know I have this story what was the value and how can I articulate that and just being able to kind of fall back to some type of system to talk through I think is very helpful so that's why I like using star and it doesn't have to be perfect right that's okay okay so I wrote next we're gonna have to practice so yes this whole time we haven't done any practicing yet so this is where I'm going to give you uh a link to this free guide uh like I said call it an ebook call it whatever you want this is on a products page it's 100% free just to show you I will jump over to it wow look at that beautiful right um so can I open it is there an easy way to do this is going to make me buy my own prod or buy air quotes for free um did I save it on this computer that's kind of embarrassing this is the thing that happens when you're like live streaming and like it's not a YouTube video but I'm just trying to see if I can preview it no okay I can't whatever I'll come back to this but there's few examples of a little bit later in the article itself but um there's 50 example questions in an AI prompt so if you want different questions or you want to tailor them to the the different place that you're applying for you can absolutely go tune The Prompt use your own prompt I am not a prompt engineer I am not good at prompting but with this prompt it gave me 50 questions that I were I was feeling like hey these would be good to go practice but I'm trying to give you the tools to go think about how you want to go approach this so that is totally free uh it's on gumroad but if you go to products. deev leer.com things there too so coming back to here um I wrote now comes the fun part because we're going to start practicing this right so I'm just trying to see how I wrote it um okay I'm gonna I'm GNA start talking with my hands a little bit more now so the idea now so we talked about writing down a bunch of different stories right for these core competencies and now you're in this position where we're going to generate questions okay okay so that's why I gave you the you know the free little eBook PDF thing here use an llm use whatever you want you want to generate sample questions if you don't want to generate them because you don't like using AI or anything else totally cool literally go online search behavioral software engineering questions you're going to find examples I didn't have ai tools when I was interviewing for Microsoft maybe they existed and I didn't know about them at the time four years ago that's fine but all that I did was I was going around online and building up a little uh I used notepad right just notepad and windows made a bunch of uh just listed out a bunch of them and then now we have a list of questions and we have our example stories kind of written out in a way in the star method that align with core competencies what we're going to do is have that list of questions and this is my strategy that I like to do is start at the top and I like to use a little timer and I would just set it for like 3 minutes let's say okay because I want to practice trying to time box my answers that way when I'm rambling as I do this will help remind me don't be doing that so start at the top and I asked literally read this question out loud right tell me about a time where you worked on a project and it failed okay so Nick that's your question and then you need to recall that you wrote down some things about core competencies right so depending on how tricky you want to make this for you you could try to organize your questions for the core competencies so in the The Prompt and the little PDF that I provided they are organized by core competencies so if you're looking for sort of like the easier version go organize them by core competency so okay I'm doing the adaptability part or the problem solver solving part and this question is about um a project that failed okay I know that I had a story that was about problem solving and had to talk about a project that failed or adaptability for a project that failed okay and then I would go through the star method and with my timer would go answer the question what I would do this is just my Approach but if I answered the question and I felt like I did it well I stayed roughly within the time right maybe not exactly 3 minutes but you're doing this and being honest with yourself if I did it I would go to the next question as it as you might guess right just kind of progress through the questions but what I like to do is when I failed if I was like oh I can't remember the thing or I was three minutes in and I hadn't even explained the scenario yet because I'm trying to you know make my way through it I go okay no problem start at the end and I do this because one of the things that I don't like to do is just move on and forget it because I'm going to come back to this in a moment and I don't just like repeating it and then saying oh I did it like it gives me a bit of a false sense of confidence so I like jumping to the end and then working my way up the list then what happens is going up the list answering questions doing the same thing with the timer is when I mess up right for whatever reason it happens to be I don't feel good about my answer it was too long whatever okay back to the top now I get to practice some things again so I had a bit of an interruption CU I started from the bottom now I'm going back from the top and I'm going to hit that question from earlier that I messed up and it's a good opportunity for me to see hey look with a little bit of stuff in between is it registering up here can I recall the thing that was kind of uh catching me off guard and work past that and I will repeat this I don't know still what a good St shopping point is but I find like if I can make it pretty far right you don't have to make it all the way necessarily but if I can make it pretty far and I'm feeling pretty good I might just scramble the list right start it all again no problem and just kind of keep repeating this process now what I don't recommend for most people is like just sitting there for hours and just trying to do this I feel like your brain will just melt maybe hopefully not literally but I know when I was in university and studying for exams and things like that like my brain just didn't work like that and I learned this way later in University than I wanted to but I honestly found like you probably heard about like May or maybe not like Pomodoro Technique where you have like a timer and then you go focus and then take your break I don't like officially use Pomodoro but for me I like to be able to set a little bit of a Time window for stuff like this that stresses me out where I'm trying to focus and practice it so I might do 20 to 40 minutes some range like that and then just force myself to take a break take a 10 minute break 15 20 minute break whatever time to eat right time to go do uh take out the garbage and do something else time to you know catch up on a couple of messages from social media whatever it is right take a little break and then go back to it and to me that's a similar technique of like starting from uh the top or the bottom of the and switching it up you're kind of just giving your brain a little bit of a reset and going okay what was sticking and for me I repeated this thing uh every day for several hours a day when I was interviewing because that's what I needed to do I was very out of touch with it personally and then on top of that the coding stuff as well but I'm just double checking to see if there's any other part of that process I kind of wanted to mention but oh yeah the the last part was like so you're doing this right right I would say that if you're finding that when you get to some of these questions and you're like I I I'm struggling like I can't answer this effectively couple things you can do are one go tweak your stories like maybe pause doing the little bit of a test going through the questions and say okay time to go back to the drawing board I have a couple of these questions that I'm just like I don't got good answers for the core competencies on these that means I need to pause that and start thinking through you know different stories I can write down and when I say stories by the way I don't mean like you're making up stories I mean you're coming up with examples from your experience right so you want to be able to take an opportunity to kind of pause and do this now you're doing that you're taking a bit of a break to do it then you can go back to the questions and try again so that's one part the other part is if you're making a lot of progress on your list so you picked 20 questions and you're like I can Ace all these questions no problem like time to change them up go use AI to generate more questions go look on the internet for more questions double check that you have the right core competencies maybe come up with other examples other stories this is a like a I don't want to say a pro tip but I feel like pay attention to this because it's helpful you might be nailing it with your one story right and what happens is if you're using the same story to demonstrate different core competencies what could happen in an interview is someone will say oh yeah like you were telling me about that do you have another example for this one right like being more prepared and coming up with things can be better for the interview itself for the interviewer because that's their expectation and it can be better for you because if you have one example in your head and you're in the interview and someone says tell me about a time when and you are like oh crap I can't I just can't I'm drawing a blank I can't remember that one if you have two maybe you'll remember one of the two right like you're just improving your odds of success by doing that the other thing could be if they want you to dive deeper into something because maybe the way you explain the first time wasn't very clear you could say hey look um I do have another example maybe I can walk through that one and it will become more apparent about how this core competency is relevant for my experience and you can lean into that so this refinement process when you're practicing I would do that um especially if you're interviewing you get feedback which I feel like some people watching this are they're going to be like oh man like yeah right we don't get feedback but like you know if if you can reach out to the recruiter and and ask for feedback and and see like hey these are areas that we think that you need to improve in you could take that back and then go back to your list of questions and your stories for the core competencies and try and improve it so I think that's the majority of what I wanted to say took me about an hour to do it's not so bad not too much rambling but um at this point this is like the intermission almost I like going over to Reddit uh chat's pretty quiet you guys are you guys there there's I think everyone there's very few people on Twitch but the Twitter the Twitter group is killing it I don't know if maybe Twitter's just set up in a way where people are like accidentally like falling into the stream like it's just Auto playing in the corner or something but like Twitter's Twitter's doing it but Twitter's quiet in the chat I had a message earlier are you reading Twitter chat as well yeah I'm reading it you guys got to put messages there though so please do I'm gonna take a sip of this I'm here just entertain oh that's good that's great I'm glad you are thank you thanks for letting me know at least it's like um I'm sure people have experience this especially with a lot of the remote work but one of my my favorite like awkward things to observe in meetings is you get on to this meeting and everyone there say there's like 10 people everyone's quiet right everyone's just kind of waiting and then the person who organized the meeting or needs to be speaking they jump in and they start speaking and they're going for a couple minutes and they pause because like no one's been talking it's just them talking and then they go C can you can you guys hear me and I'm I always love it because it's really funny to think that maybe the whole time they were just muted and they didn't even know that would be you that would be unfortunate but kind of funny but what I really want to have happen one day is like a coordinated effort where no one says anything to it like we can all definitely hear but everyone on the call is just like I'm not saying anything and then that person's like what the heck is going on like there's 10 other people on this call and no one can hear me um I don't know what that is I wouldn't click whatever that link is in the chat so I'm going to block that person from the chat sorry on Twitch but I don't know what that is yeah feel you I like to have at least my webcam open because I feel really bad for speaking Yeah I'm saying this uh in a joking way right I actually get a a ton of secondhand embarrassment um and like that kind of thing I like I feel like the scenario would be funny but if it happened would I would not be okay um like for example my I don't like watching TV at all but my my wife loves watching reality TV and one of the reasons like I don't watch like I don't like watching TV in the first place but the reason reality TV is very difficult for me is that the entire thing feels like secondhand something right secondhand embarrassment usually or when if people are yelling at each other and stuff I'm like I feel it like like I don't want to be part of the yelling why are we watching it I don't like watching these people be embarrassed and like make a fool of themselves like I feel it I don't want to watch that so uh yeah the same thing uh on in conversations like that in fact something I've observed so I've talked about like public speaking and kind of feeling awkward talking in front of people and I used to before Microsoft and when I was working at this uh previous company at Magnet forensics I went through a period and like no one's fault this is all my own doing but I went through a period where I had a lot of social anxiety at work felt very confident everything was good but if you took me out of work and put me into situations just like very bad social anxiety and something happened along the way where like when I kind of found my own like self-esteem self-confidence outside of work um this this situation that I was talking about about the secondhand embarrassment I started to notice so I'm very introverted I might not seem that way on camera but extremely introverted and what I started to notice is that if I was around other people and I noticed that we were put into a situation where we had to meet each other Converse or whatever if I could pick up that the other person felt awkward like oh man like I don't know what I'm doing here something about that makes me feel like like I know what that feeling's like and I hate it I know exactly what it's like to be in this spot where you're like I don't know what to say like you feel awkward and then it just makes it worse to try and speak up and like it's this vicious cycle and something about those types of scenarios now makes me feel very extroverted and I don't know if it's because I'm like empathizing with the person or if it's because I'm trying to prevent the awkward situation from happening so I don't feel it but anyway it's kind of neat because I've noticed that if I'm in a social setting if there's people that are more Awkward to socialize around me I become like more extroverted to kind of compensate for it so kind of an interesting thing that I've noticed for myself but yeah secondhand embarrassment really tricky um I I like to be on meetings with my camera on I just you know I I do kind of work hybrid now which is nice because uh previous team not really anyone from my team was in at the office but this current team it's not every day people are in but every day some people will be in so going in is kind of nice Hey on YouTube good to see you here you got to got to represent the YouTube it's just just uh just the Twitter verse but yeah I think I think that's cool I'm going to jump over maybe I'll do like half an hour of uh of uh Reddit posts articles whatever you want to call them so I might do that and maybe not go the full two hours because I probably should get to bed at a reasonable time but let's see we'll start from the top um give this a little refresh being asked to write oh I'm not sharing my screen my apologies there we go um being asked to write a compiler out of nowhere has been the most fun I have fun I have at my job for years I don't know if I want to read that one um no offense to the person uh new CTO is joining my company tomorrow and we'll be holding an all hands meeting with the entire product and software engineering organization what kind of questions to gauge oh to gauge their management style that might be interesting this is one I pulled up before before going on stream I just read the the paragraph but I'm not sure I even remember it exactly um yeah let's start I want to start with this one because I think it's kind of interesting I'll zoom in a little bit um okay I'm the lead Dev of a new product we are developing I feel like I'm the only one keeping the project moving so kind of an interesting take um I'm just realizing my head's cutting this stuff off a little bit let's do that there you go um okay so we have five other devs and I'd say expect one other Dev okay so smallish team that's not bad right the rest keep pushing out buggy code and I don't think they're testing it okay interesting my manager keeps telling me to hold them accountable but I'm so busy with other stuff I don't know how much I should be doing interesting right so managers overseeing this team sounds like they've empowered I'm going to use the word empowered here we'll see if that's the case managers empowered someone who is like a tech lead kind of position it seems and there's just a lot more Junior developers what we don't know so far is is that actually the case like is everyone actually more Junior than them or is there a mix and this person just happens to believe that they are the most best developer on the team right it's not for me to say but I'm trying to just call out these are some different perspectives we might want to take when reading this because it's from the perspective of one person right so my my goal reading these by the way is never I don't like to like I'm not picking on people I'm not picking on how they wrote it picking on their perspective but as we navigate it and try to think about it together I want to try taking more than one possible perspective that way we can think about it more effectively so let's keep going I try code reviews but sometimes the code is so bad it will need to be completely Rewritten and then we get questioned why we didn't deliver a story in a Sprint okay so code the code that other people are creating is bad I've already been having to take on the more complex work or else it will never get done on time my manager even acknowledges that this product would collapse if it wasn't for me but it's burning me out dealing with all the pressure yeah this does not sound like a great spot to be in so what do right what do we do in a situation like this okay so um we can wear different hats and try to look at this uh first of all when I read this I we don't know how much the manager is or is not doing from how it's written it sounds like the manager is not doing an awful lot they're kind of like hey it's all on you go figure it out that doesn't really feel good but we don't know if that's actually true right maybe the manager is trying to communicate things to this person maybe they are taking steps and the way that this is written or it's the person does not feel that way that's not something they're observing so just trying to call that out we don't know now this kind of situation at least maybe not with the manager per se but the situation of having someone that is potentially more senior let's make the Assumption they're the most senior on the team this type of thing does come up a lot where you're in this position where you know we got to move 100 miles an hour and we need to make sure we're getting things out and there's not a ton of skill on the team or there's more Junior people but what ends up happening is that when you have one person who is very effective say in comparison the couple things like they're going to take on the hardest work generally because it's the highest risk most impact like some someone's got to drisk that okay but now we have this is isue where the other people on the team aren't ever working on harder things we might also say according to this person though that doesn't matter because they can't even do the easier stuff so I wanted to come back to this other part about um where did he say it I'm trying to find it uh sometimes the code is so bad it will need to be completely Rewritten this is an interesting sentence so um the the thing that we don't know here is like this is It's just literally this person's perspective right again not not picking on them for writing this whatever but like we as the audience just generally don't know we want to assume that this person is being genuine and literally we can take it at face value or Beyond face value I guess that like the the code that is written by other people is just bad so we want to assume that here but I don't know if we can right the code is so bad it will need to be Rewritten but it sounds like this is constantly happening so something's missing here and that something could be that maybe everyone is starting off by writing really terrible code okay but apparently the feedback going into that is not improving how the code is written so it's hey go rewrite it and then they do whatever and then the next thing they go work on codes bad again so what could be happening here is that this individual that has more experience they might have more like Authority on signing off on code reviews and poll requests but like their expectation of how things should be designed and built is not really being communicated to the broader team maybe maybe those people are writing crappy code that's possible but I suspect that there's something not being effectively communicated here if it keeps happening right the other thing you mentioned a little bit earlier um he or she I don't know um rest of my team keeps pushing up buggy hood and I don't think they're testing enough okay so this keeps happening there's there's a bit of a like a meta Point here right like if we're seeing patterns keep occurring there's things that we need to do to try and break those patterns and the more senior you are the more that you want to try leaning into this try to find ways to improve the team the process the effectiveness of the people around you but this is also something the manager could help with right so yeah maybe there's stuff in the code that the manager is not really uh positioned well to be able to help much there perhaps depend especially in this it sounds like there's uh no awareness of the code and like even for me these days I don't have full awareness of code for my team so I don't I'm not blaming anyone here but there's going to be parts to this that the manager could help with right like testing okay so the feedback from the tech lead seems like there's things that are really brittle things keep breaking we keep falling behind Okay hey manager like this is the situation that's going on like like here's what I'm trying to do to stay afloat but here's some other patterns I'm seeing like I would expect that the manager is trying to look for some of these inefficiencies and then might ask the tech lead this person here to say hey like what are your thoughts on doing this or like can I get your input and then the manager trying to help change and shift the culture within the team you can't dictate the culture but the manager can say hey look our team is supposed to be valuing quality or these other things like this is our Charter it does not look like this is happening like what hey team what can we do better right and trying to get the team to lean into that kind of stuff something else that could be happening here and we don't know is like are the other team members being empowered to do anything else other than just write code that this person keeps saying is crappy like do they feel like they have any ownership in in what's going on like we don't know that because maybe this person could work with their manager to say hey look like clearly we have a testing problem right from from this person's perspective clearly there's a testing problem things keep breaking not a lot of tests okay well could you have someone on the team have a little bit of ownership and trying to drive some improvement there the problem with this kind of thing is like we don't have full context and it's really difficult to try and offer for advice right clearly based on how this is written it sounds like there's no opportunity to Breathe Right There there're suggesting like I'm trying to do these things but if I do I can't even get my job done so I do think in this type of situation one I would love for the manager to be more involved than how this person is describing so partner with your manager in situations like this I think is a is a big key takeaway partner with them but when you're in this situation and you're like I don't know how much I should take my foot off the gas from coding Solutions versus spending time with people like if you don't know I think it's a really good opportunity to go talk to your manager about it get that get those level set expectations like I think that's really key and I say that because at the end of the day your manager hopefully they're a good manager like they're going to be responsible for career progression and things like that and if you have misaligned expectations that's not a good spot to be in because maybe their expectation is has been like I don't even think you should be coding right now I think you need to go help skill this team up and figure things out maybe I'm just I'm making this up right it's an example but maybe their expectation is like I need you to be giving me more visibility and that way I can go help skill up the team in these other areas but we really do need you to be doubling down on the the big scary areas of code we can't we don't know that from from this post right so this person should be trying to partner with their manager uh I would recommend leaning into uh as much as possible like leaning into helping others so the more senior you are try to make your focus as much as possible not all of the little things but the big impact things so if you need to drisk a big piece of work and other people on the team uh realistically aren't going to be able to deliver that effectively on a deadline that might be good work for you but it means it's going to need a lot of your attention you don't want to be distracted by smaller work items but I do think that you need to try and spend more time helping others on the team level up and I say that because it perpetuates the problem if the team is not leveling up that you're just going to keep being in this position burning out and everyone else is going to be in a situation where they're not getting the focus time to level up they keep getting the small crappy things they keep getting told like oh it's wrong just do it this way right you don't have time to go explain to them and help them learn effectively it's just like it's wrong change into this go cod it right like you end up kind of putting a ceiling over the other people ceiling might be too strong of a word but you know you're kind of slowing them down because your time spent leveling them up is limited then you're burning out your Effectiveness is dropping and it's just a crappy situation overall but I I would love to see this person partner with their manager on this stuff personally uh if we have a little scroll through see what some other people said my usual advice is to make it your manager's problem uh interesting you should pull out of all the ACT development work and it's a train up okay this yeah so this is interesting right they say pull out all the active development work and train up uh and upskill your colleagues like I for the most part like that's kind of kind of my perspective this say pull out all active development I would I would put this part as the priority and then this part as the secondary sorry not whatever the the active work then they say this will lead to a drop in productivity at first but you won't be able to scale doing all the work yourself so this part is the takeaway and I agree with this I fully agree with this and I would say that if they're still having a challenge because they're like this person is saying drop all your active work I don't know if I love that maybe it's if you partner with your manager they will agree that that's the thing to do if they say you can't we need you to work on that part then you need to be in a position where you can talk to your manager and say this is all of the you know the training and Skilling up of other people I can do so like I need more help on that front the manager can hopefully kind of lend a hand there drop and prodct straight to jail yeah okay you should uh this says hi probability of backfiring you may have the best intentions okay yeah this is like an interesting perspective problem so they're saying if you uh if you spend all of your time helping colleagues get their work done anyone who looks at the numbers will see you as the weak development team sorry that does see you as that will be yeah your weak development team is submitting more code and closing more tickets than you I don't I think first of all if you're in area where this is how you're measured um get out just like and I'm not saying there aren't places like this that don't exist but or that was maybe too many negatives I'm not saying places like this don't exist there we go but like if I had someone on my team and I knew I had a challenging team to work with and that person was stepping in to try and help everyone I'm not going to be like oh like they're the weak link just it just seems kind of weird like I'm sure there are managers that would perceive it that way but to me it's like I think that they're investing their time into the right thing like we can't perpetuate this problem but they do say better solution continue your work start documenting when your work is delayed yeah so I think like I think sometimes people phrase things a little bit too extreme than how I like them at least but some good takeaways here right I was saying if you partner with your manager that's kind of this part here documenting when things are kind of uh pulling away from your focus so if your manager says I need you to be Skilling up the team and make that your primary focus then work on these big scary items okay then you should be documenting and trying to say like here's how much time is going into these things and here's the portion of time I'm getting on this other stuff because if they're looking at the end result of that and going no this doesn't feel good is it because you're not doing what you agreed upon or you are doing what you agreed upon right if it is what you agreed upon it's a good opportunity to kind of realign with your manager and say we need a different plan so but yeah document and communicate I like that I think that's good just some of the phrasing is a little different than I might have said it um for better for worse you need to start committing to Less in each Sprint yes spend more of your time breaking the work down to smaller chunks yeah like this is just an implementation of of what you could do for optimizing things um interesting uh so I'm in a so in uh Twitter I'm in a place like this trying to get out unfortunately I didn't find anything better yet being a team player didn't end well for me if you don't mind sharing like I'm not going to obviously we're just on the internet here I'm not trying to make you talk about anything you don't want to but if you want to share more about like what are the things that you tried to do and like was it just not observed well or misunderstanding like that's kind of an interesting thing um you know you don't have to talk bad about your manager or anything but I wonder is it just like different expectations that you and your manager had in that situation I got to be clear right like I'm not when I talk about these types of things it's probably like it's implied I guess but it's not always just safe to assume like these these are my opinions I don't I never want people to hear what I'm saying and being like hey if you do this like infinite success Comes Your Way um I wish it'd be cool but um it's just me trying to show you how I think through these things and maybe some interesting stuff we can learn together interesting yeah okay that's whatever overc communicate to your manager document yep don't just do their work yeah this is key right here don't do other people's work for them this is something that happens um for a lot of people that get into a position where there's more Junior Engineers working below them or even you are peers might be peers you happen to be more skilled or have more domain knowledge you're trying to help and you end up doing their work for them and it might not feel that way but if you're in a situation where that's happening the problem is the person that you're helping does not get long-term help from that they get very short-term help from that and that could periodically not be terrible but when it becomes a pattern it is terrible and it's terrible because it perpetuates this thing I've shared a story before in different forums but I have worked in the p with many interns and stuff I have worked with individuals where it sounds kind of funny to say when I phrase it this way but like they could not problem solve on their own and it's not like they're not intelligent or anything some very smart people right very smart people but they don't know how to effectively problem solve so what happens is they get stuck and then their their go-to is well there's experts around me I will just ask for help it's hard to blame someone for that right like I don't know this thing these people clearly work in this code I'll just ask them to help with it but what ends up happening is when you're in these situations and the person offering the help goes no problem here's the answer the person who has a difficult time problem solving on their own they've now been reinforced with well next time if I do that I get the answer and I get to move ahead right not maliciously it's not like they're being evil or whatever but it's reinforcing hey that worked we moved ahead great so they go to the next thing and they get stuck so what do they do hi like hi I need help on this oh yeah no worries like I know how to do that here you go here's the answer keeps repeating so in situations like this what I've recommended to people uh on both sides of the interaction as the manager is for the person asking for help I remind them you want to be in a position where you think that when you go to ask for help that person's going to ask you what have you tried so far very simple what have you tried so far if you have not tried anything it's going to be a bit of a weird conversation because there you say I need help and they'll say what have you tried so far and you go I haven't tried anything they might say well go try something go try anything try something to start with doesn't mean you have to have it working or have it finished go try something put some amount of effort in because that awkward period where you're trying something and even if it doesn't work at all that's the part where you're learning how to problem solve like that Gap what happens is you keep doing that and even when it feels like hey I can't solve any problem you keep getting a little bit better and then you can start solving problems on your own so trying to teach that to the person asking for help and for the person who's giving the help my advice to them is you don't just want to give answers to people so train them to ask that question train them to make other people do a little bit of homework on their own first and then as much as possible try to give guidance not give the answer you'll hear about people talk about this with par programming for example like give the less skilled or less familiar person the keyboard get them to drive do it because they will get better it the person who has less domain knowledge less skill whatever it happens to be if they're not the one doing some of the driving you're yeah you're going to give the keyboard and mouse to the most effective person out of the two of you but like the value of someone just watching versus the value of them doing and fumbling and having someone guide them completely different so I think that Dynamic is really important uh but okay back to chat here long story short work in this company for two years only currently only the junior developer on the team this makes me very upset because I'm only Junior in title in pay and my teammates despite being good aren't all better than me looking for a job for three months and unfortunately still haven't found a better position yeah it's very challenging right now yeah so I want to acknowledge that always trying to deliver the best I can but after two years of doing this and working on three different projects I've uh even LED small projects yeah so this is It's hard right like I I don't know the situation with your manager and all that but this is one of those things where um it sounds like the bit of challenge is like not feeling valued if I that's like one of the takeaways because here you're calling out like the junior title the junior pay you got teammates that might have different title perhaps different pay and you're kind of like well it's not really doesn't feel fair and I would say that other part of your teammates like their skill level their pay their title like that's that's not in your control so um while this might sound like kind of like a sour thing to say like don't compare yourself to them because you can't do anything about them and it's going to make you feel like crap but like I say that only because you can't do anything about it you can't change their title in their pay right so you can't control them don't compare yourself to them not worth it but let's focus on the things you can have some influence on and I think the one is at least uh trying to have more clear conversations with your manager about expectations if you have been trying you've been doing everything you can to do it and your manager is not in a position where they give you good feedback or align on expectations you can try and you should try um I should I'm going to finish this thought I want to come back to this other thing you can try you should try and I think that ultimately at the end of the day if you don't have a manager that's giving you clear expectations about your path forward like what what do they say people don't leave uh teams or companies they leave managers right so I think you need to be in a position where your manager is valuing you and if you're not feeling that way or you're it's feeling ambig uh ambiguous like you should talk with them about it that's some of the feedback I have on that so I'm sorry that you're going through that though I don't I don't want to say all of that to you and make it sound like I'm minimizing what you're going through I I understand that's challenging I'm just trying to give you some different things to think about you might have thought about all of those and you're like yeah Nick like tried that tried that yeah like honestly it might be time to switch I'm not saying that's never an option so the part I wanted to mention was uh about giving your manager feedback and I I want to share this because I think it's it's kind of fascinating to me there was a I'm pretty active on LinkedIn apparently not according to the live stream traffic from LinkedIn my LinkedIn friends where are you I I actually blame uh the LinkedIn like engagement algorithm cuz like I feel like I posted this event and it was like you had seven Impressions and I'm like obviously no one from LinkedIn is going to watch this then um they don't even know what's happening but um there was a conversation on LinkedIn and the advice from someone who has a lot of followers they were saying like hey look like if your manager is uh like if you have disagreements with them or like you need to give them feedback they're basically saying like don't bother your managers they're more power F than you I think they use the word powerful and they basically said it's not worth your effort time to start looking for a new manager like they're in a position of authority compared to you they control your career progression basically like don't poke the bear just go look for something else and I like I kind of hate this a lot not the person who wrote it but I kind of hate that mentality and the interesting thing is there a lot of people in the comments agreeing with them well aside from who knows the Bots the the spot on like superb amazing like yeah you're all using the same AI tool to go generate half-ass answers it's like it's so weird but there's other people that are responding and and it's written by a human going yeah like definitely you know managers kind of sucking here whatever and I'm thinking to myself like that doesn't seem good I'm not what I'm not saying is that there aren't bad managers who would be offended taken back I got to I'm going back to full screen here because I need need to be more animated with my hands need some water so I'm not saying that there aren't managers who would not like that I'm sure there are lots that do but my problem with this is that it doesn't make anything better and that like drives me kind of nuts and what I mean by that is like so their advice was go find another manager like start looking okay so my framing is your worst case scenario is their advice go look for a new manager or I guess maybe the other the worst case scenario is you stay put doing nothing being unhappy and no change that's the worst case okay so you have that stay put do nothing everything's bad you you cry every day world sucks right base case you take their advice which is start looking for a new manager basically switch teams job hop whatever okay because they're saying your manager is more powerful you're not going to change their mind my perspective is and my response to this person was I literally cannot do my job effectively as a manager unless people give me feedback flat out I'm not perfect because no human is all the stuff I talk about from my management philosophies and stuff I need to be clear that I'm not saying that I do those things perfectly I'm not saying that when I get feedback I'm always like hell yeah I got feedback I feel so good about this it probably does hurt to feel or to hear you know constructive criticism like without a doubt but the point is like I mean it genuinely when I say like I cannot be better as a manager unless I get feedback and it comes in different ways I will have people say to me like I try to be open about like if you're not um if you don't understand your career progression or you're feeling like you don't know how you're how you're doing like let's talk about it like let me know and it comes up in different ways like and people will bring it up but they'll find ways to do it kind of like um they they don't say like hey Nick I'm feeling like I don't know my career progression or what I should be focused on can we chat about it that does happen sometimes but sometimes it's kind of brought up I don't want to say like a complaint it's not really fair to say but it comes up in a different way and the takeaway for me is I am not doing a good enough job being clear with this person like that's all it is and I don't like take their feedback and go wow they're they're so crappy for saying it or I can't wait to never like support them because they're being mean or something like literally no it's to me it's this meta point of if you're having a challenge I am not being clear about something what can I do better so I always want the feedback it holds me accountable and it lets me know when I have things to improve upon I might think that for some individuals I'm being very transparent about some things and I think I'm doing a good job and if I don't have the feedback from them I don't want to find out later that they're like I had no idea about my progression or I didn't know if I was under overperforming I would feel so bad so like I just look at it like help help me help you like so give me the feedback but anyway um yeah a lot of people don't like that idea cuz I guess they've been in situ for managers maybe weren't so great weren't weren't good with feedback and then kind of like you know treat them poorly for giving feedback but my point in saying all this was like okay well the best case in my scenario is you improve your relationship with your manager you get clear expectations things get sorted out it's a better working relationship because you trust each other more because you're communicating more clearly your manager has the better tools to help you now and things start improving the worst outcome of that is that you're looking for a new manager right like you're doing what they were saying to do anyway you gave that feedback to your manager and they go yeah thanks but no thanks pal I don't like that and you go great okay well I was about to go shop for a new manager anyway like you're kind of in the same boat as their as their best case scenario so in my opinion I would say like obviously like figure out your your own man current manager but I don't know like I would personally always lean into giving the feedback if they don't change as a result of that feedback right you give them the feedback even if they're not rude to you about it whatever it's a good conversation if they don't change like you're in the same spot it's time for look for a different manager you need to be supported by your manager uh okay so I've already talked to my manager several times everything said about promotion sounds like empty promise yep that that's a a crappy spot to be in manager can only do so much about having the same conversation nothing changes get me tired situation yep yep I you know I'm not I'm not telling you no on uh on Twitter right I'm not saying like hey you're wrong for thinking this way absolutely not I think um you know very valid feelings as a result of that for sure I think you know my my My overall point there was like Hey like go through go through the steps right go through them because I think that just avoiding them and then not doing anything about it like you're not you're not practicing having the hard conversations that need to happen I even said on on LinkedIn with respect to this post that I was talking about this situation for the manager feedback like I wrote that I hope other managers read that comment and they and they think to themselves like why aren't I getting feedback from my team like are you asking for feedback from your direct reports if if that's never happening and you're not making an environment for it like yeah maybe maybe you are that person who's a bit of a a jerk and you can't get feedback and the first time you get it you take it out on someone I don't know right but I want other people other managers to read that and go hey yeah like maybe I should be getting more feedback so that we don't end up in this situation so I am sorry that you're going through such a situation I I'm you know sorry I don't want to say like it's it's all your manager's fault or something I don't know your manager I'm I'm just sorry that you're going through that and I think it's good that you tried to have those conversations but truly I would say this to anyone at the end of day you need to be at a place where you're valued and if you don't feel valued and you're putting in the effort to try and improve that you know I think it's time that's for you to decide obviously not for me but I think that's it folks I don't know if I'm going to get through another article before I got to to jump off here because I going to have to wake up pretty early but I did want to say thank you I appreciate the the chat um appreciate the the Twitter audience this is awesome this is usually Twitter's pretty good it's like way better than uh the other platforms today definitely definitely slaying the the LinkedIn audience just uh feel bad I LinkedIn my LinkedIn family's gone that's okay Twitter's very welcoming um not like not like Reddit what's with that um I'm going to finish with just a quick note this is kind of my sign off um got to do it right I'm sorry if you're just joining the stream and you're like oh it's this guy again doing what he always does um but I do have to mention I have courses for sale on dome train so uh I do primarily focus on C development so I have two courses that kind of get you from basically nothing in C to being able and I mean nothing in any programming language to be able to start with c and then do a bit of a deeper dive so these two together are bundled 20% off it's 11 plus hours of content between these two and I have this other refactoring course uh examples are all in C but the techniques are not specific to C I am currently working on two more courses for Dome train one of them is almost done the other one is just starting the one that is just starting I am so damn excited for so I don't know if Nick chaps allows us to reveal what the courses are I've never asked him but uh I'm not until he ever says something about it so I just wanted to mention the second one coming I mean the the one I'm about to wrap up I'm super pumped about but the next one that I'm just starting is a different level so I'm going to put that into the chat uh folks no pressure this is something I don't like promising people or making them feel like you need to buy courses I think courses are great if you need accountability that's all I put out a ton of free content I won't stop putting out free content so my goal is to keep making free stuff but some people enjoy accountability because they'll say okay I paid money I will focus so if that is you courses might be a good option but otherwise um like I said lots of free content keep doing streams keep doing articles and I think that's that folks so thank you so much for tuning in tomorrow morning stream is not on because vacation and technically next week's stream is not on either um maybe next Tuesday I will do a live coding one but I think I come in pretty late Monday night we'll see I might be back Tuesday morning to stream uh the coding stuff so folks thank you so much uh if you're watching this uh it would do me a lot of good if you want to subscribe to the YouTube channel I put out three fulllength net tutorials every week I do a software engineering interview oh man how don't leave yet I forgot about this this is the coolest thing right at the end I'm catching you right at the end hold on hold on um I forgot about this and I don't know how I forgot maybe I'm tired give me one sec I'm trying to pull it up the coolest thing happened to me last week coolest thing so far and it's this coming right up boom this was the coolest thing I've been able to do so far in my content creation Journey that's in the chat as well this is Scott Hanselman um if you are watching my stuff and you're into net you probably know who Scott Hanselman is if you don't doet stuff you probably still know who Scott Hanselman is Scott is is awesome he works at Microsoft he's a VP of developer uh developer Community I think is how it's phrased but Scott has been like doing Tech stuff for forever um he like he's on he's on Tik Tok he's doing tons of 3D printing stuff he's he's all over doing super cool things but without a doubt if you're watching my stuff you know who Scott Hanselman is and um honestly this is going to sound kind of funny but like I just asked him I just said hey like could I interview you for YouTube and he just said yes there's no more nothing to it wasn't like like have to make a trade or something it didn't have to beg it was just like reached out and he said yes so super cool uh chat's a little bit quicker than some of the other interviews it's 40 minutes uh but honestly uh oh man I'm not even sharing my screen you guys didn't say that here we go this is the problem with live streams I do it live and I can't fix it um but yeah there uh there's the the thumbnail for it um that's Scott that's me if you didn't know that's me on the right that's what I look like and yeah conversation was super cool um like I said it's one of the coolest things I've been able to do is a content creator um because you know I look up to Scott I think he's doing a lot of awesome stuff and one of the things that he really focuses on is being able to to kind of give back right like Scott's in a position in his career where he's done so well and he's had a lot of success and he is able to start giving back to folks so um for me that was like a a nice reminder right like I'm not certainly not done in my career I have a long way to go but it was just this reminder like you know what's really fulfilling is helping other people um oh interesting so the the the messages don't go to Twitter they come in from Twitter but they don't go to it ah ah okay one sec thank you for letting me know um how do I even find my own live on Twitter how does Twitter work anyway I don't know if I'm gonna if you're on actually there it is so if you're on Twitter one sec I'm just going to put it into again I appreciate the call out there that is a comment on there I think that should work so thanks for letting me know um but that's going to be released this Thursday so go ahead and bookmark it like I said it's a 40 minute chat so it's not too long but okay I'm done for real this time I have no other fun surprises thank you so much for tuning in and I will maybe see you next Tuesday morning if you want to