Your Job Is To Make Your Manager's Life Easier - Really???

that's not what I want you to do and obviously I'm being factious here tossing my straps all around look software engineering advice on the internet can be ridiculous to follow you have people debating different Technical Solutions like which language is the best which text stack tabs or spaces and on the non-technical side you have things like what's the best way to get promoted right like just work hard work on the most visible high impact problems or even just jump from company to company and you can get to higher positions faster now I know it can be ridiculous to follow but let's face it you're probably here because you want to hear some software engineering advice hi I'm Nick centino and I'm a principal software engineering manager at Microsoft and I'm not your manager well I guess statistically speaking I might be your manager if you're one of my employees watching this video I wanted to make this video in particular because there's some stuff that I've been seeing on social media and I had this recent event at work that really made me think when I was giving advice I need to consider that I'm not your manager as I'm giving it I want to share some of this with you so that you can help navigate some of your own opinions as you're hearing different things on the internet before I jump in just a quick reminder to check the pin comment for my free Weekly Newsletter and my courses on D drain so at work aside from managing teams of Engineers at Microsoft I also do what's called early in career mentorship and we have these things called early in career mentorship circles in this case I'm one of the two people leading a particular circle of early in career mentees that we have and these are such a cool opportunity not only for me because I get to help Mentor but for all of the mentees that are early in career they get a chance to ask me and the other person that I'm working with and this rotates there's many different circles they get to ask us all these different questions about how to navigate early things in their career as the name might suggest and in that case that means that they get to ask me who's at principle level a lot of different things I have a manager background so I can help them with that and I'm often paired up with a software engineer or a project manager product manager now we do end up having these sessions as a group where we can come together and talk about some some hot topics because you know time and time again there's these really common themes that come up like how do I have conversations with my manager how do we navigate promotions rewards things like that what's cool about these groups is not only do we have these sessions once a month all together where we come together in a conversation but we also get to do one ones between myself and the other mentor and the individual mentees that are in the group now I've done this a few times I think this is my third time doing early and career mentorship but something really dawned on me this time and that's when I was giving advice to people I started realizing look I'm not your manager I need to be careful about what I'm saying because a lot of the way that I frame the advice I want to give is if I was your manager and that means that if I'm trying to say hey go talk to your manager this way that's how I want to be talked to right I need to be very careful about the advice I'm giving and this is the first time I really started to realize that and it made it difficult because I found that in order to provide advice I have to think about how their manager might perceive it right if they haven't given me the full context about how their team Works what their manager is like and truthfully I'm never really going to know that unless I'm on the team then I have to start making assumptions about how they can work with their manager so I wanted to give you a couple of examples right because I want this to be practical I want you to walk away with this not it just being Story Time with Nick right I hope you like my stories but I want to let you walk away with something that's useful here and I'm going to follow this up with a couple of more things that aren't early in career mentorship it's going to be something from LinkedIn that I think is super important that we touch on and I'm going to wrap up the video with pointing you in the direction of the most important software engineering skill that you can learn so one of the Hot Topics in the early career mentorship circles in my one-on ones was really about how you have conversations with your manager if you want to start bringing up career conversations in particular how do you talk to your manager about that the advice that I traditionally like to give here is exactly how I would like to be approached so I say to them look if you have to spring it in a one-on-one conversation that's okay I think if you're expecting a lot of detail in that conversation it's the first time it's come up you might not get all the detail you're looking for but I would start providing you as much detail as I can about the different things that I think are a priority for you at your current level then I follow by saying but if you could give me a little bit of notice like even if it was the morning of or something and we were meeting in the afternoon I could follow up on that I could give you some tips and I could give you a little bit more detail than being put on the spot and while I think this is probably pretty true for most engineering managers it might not be true at all for some of them I've had to do this kind of thing a lot I've had to have career conversations I like prioritizing it I think it's important some other engineering managers maybe they think it's important but they don't prioritize it they don't actually do it as often as they want to or think they should and that might mean if they have to go into a conversation like this they need a lot more preparation it might mean that if you ever bring it up and it's sprung upon them that they're totally not ready they're going to want to crawl into a corner they're not ready to talk about it they might need a week in advance to prepare they might want to write some notes I actually can't speak for all managers right it's not fair for me to give someone advice saying here's what I would want if it's not going to be the manager that they're working with so I was trying to be very careful about that because it came up in every single conversation that I had that day now one other really popular topic that came up was what should I focus on what I'm starting off under my manager right I'm new to the job I'm new to the team I'm new in my career what's a priority for me right like what should I be doing in order to get promoted and I have been more careful about answering this one in the past so what I don't like to say is well you need to start working on projects that look like this they have to be this particular type this is what you need to be doing um you want to deliver at this certain Pace I can't say things like that because I am literally not your manager and I think the most important thing you should be doing is having that conversation with your manager the person who can give you the best answer to that question is the person who is is managing you it sounds kind of obvious right but I think a lot of people avoid the conversation with their manager about this topic because it's uncomfortable right you have to basically say to someone what do you expect me to do right like I want you to be very specific or you want it framed a certain way you want to really understand and it's a little weird like we don't do that often with people and if it's a new person that you're trying to build a trust relationship with that you report to I can understand that that's uncomfortable but you need to do it you need to do it or else you're going to be uncom able the entire time trying to figure out if you're doing the right work to be on track for promotion if you're even you know in your boss's frame of mind doing the right things at all are you working on high priority things things with visibility are you working at the right pace all of these things you're going to feel very uncomfortable about because you won't have answers about your boss's perspective now the flip side is again me as a manager if someone came to me and wanted to have this conversation I want to have it with them too yeah it can be uncomfortable even for me right like I have to make sure that I'm prepared to give the right information that I can be aligned with them give them you know actionable advice it can be uncomfortable it can be challenging but it's important for other managers they might find it so wildly uncomfortable that they don't know what to do like I don't know just do your work right do the priority thing that we talked about in standup like I don't know how to tell you how to be more specific about the work you're doing they might just find it uncomfortable and you might be saying well they must be a crappy manager then if they can't do it like I don't know if that's fair to say I don't think it's a good spot to be in personally but I'm sure there's lots of managers like that and the reality is if you're a software engineer you might have a manager like that you have to find ways that you can work with them in order to try getting that information and just to wrap this up one of the last things on both of these topics that I said to these early in career mentees was that if you leave these conversations feeling like cool thanks but I still don't really get it like it's not enough for me to understand like follow up with them and again this is advice that I would want people to tell me thank you but I need more details I need more clarification could we talk about it again I think that most managers should be open to this if it wasn't clearly communicated following up is okay but again you're going to want to feel out that relationship with your manager understand how they want to communicate and work with them on It ultimately it's going to come down to getting a good communication pattern with your manager and making sure you're having some of those uncomfortable conversations if they're not already happening okay so that's going to wrap up the advice that I was giving to these mentees and how I had to try and shape it because I'm not their manager right I have to think about what's more generic advice it's still useful now this next topic that I want to go over is from LinkedIn I've seen it come up in a few different places over a different period of time and it's very much related to this earlier topic but it's not necessarily geared specifically for early and career Engineers it's probably more Junior but it could still be senior Engineers it could be people mostly new to teams and things like that too and the advice is really framed around like what's the best way to get promoted right like if you're working in this job what's the best and fastest way that you can get promoted and it's not going to be a direct quote but it's something like go solve the biggest problems for your manager or another way that I've seen it come up is go solve problems that make your manager's life easier and here's where all say look I'm not your manager but I really don't need you going out of your way to try and make my life easier if you want sure you can come over take the garbage out you could walk the dogs I'd love to have my house clean too that would absolutely make my life easier that's not what I want you to do and obviously I'm being factious here tossing my straps all around but I think the important thing is that I don't need you to go out of your way to try and optimize parts of my process that's not something I need you to do that's something I need me to do what I need you to do is focus on the things that we've talked about together right we've talked about high priority things we've talked about your focus areas for growing in your career I want you to focus on those things but like I said I'm not your manager so that advice that I'm reading on LinkedIn that actually might really work well for some people it might work well with you and your manager it's not actually fair for me to say that it's not good advice and just to balance this out because I gave you my own opinion if I were to try and think about a whole different perspective on this yeah maybe there's someone who's a new engineering manager right they're trying to figure out how can I manage effectively maybe they're new to the team they're trying to figure out the different processes how to spend their time right like they have these reports they have to put together they have to start analyzing numbers that are coming out of this system week over week yeah it might actually be useful for you to go spend time trying to say hey look I can go tackle some of this stuff right I can go do this for you and make your life easier and I think what's important to recognize here and maybe where I was having some friction with this advice you're actually finding things that are high priority your manager might be doing it because it is high priority and they haven't figured out how to delegate it yet so yeah I wanted to back up on my stance on this advice when I first read it because I was thinking what you're just going to try and go out of your way to please your manager find anything that you can do and try and get promoted but I don't really think that was the intention I think that this can be useful if you're going out of your way to find high priority things that maybe your manager is spending time on for people on my teams and for people that manage like me I'm hoping those conversations about what your priorities are are already happening I don't want you to have to try and figure out on your own what the priorities are I do think you need to be the driver in your career and be proactive but I would much rather you be proactive and try and talk with me about what you think priority should be right you think you might see these things as a priority I'm going great cool to grow in your career focus on these things here's the business priorities we get on the same page and we set you up for Success like that's what I would want but I'm not your manager so you need to have the conversation with your manager to find the right priorities to focus on when you are reading advice on the internet it might seem polarizing it might be something you don't agree with it might be something you strongly agree with I highly recommend you try to think about different perspectives of this think about the context think about the scenario and see how it can be applicable to you and your situation without just making assumptions about it and like I said at the end of this video I have the most important software engineering skill that you could possibly focus on that cannot be disputed and if you want to see that you can watch this video next thanks and I'll see you next time