When Your Product Manager Becomes Your Boss - Principal Engineering Manager AMA

I just need one second here because Instagram absolutely sucks. Um, let's fix this. I had it all set up to go and then you click in one wrong spot. Come on. Get out of here. Get out of here. This is crazy talk. Um, let's get this fixed. Such a bad user experience. Oh my goodness. It's hard to explain, but they have a dialogue and like I guess I clicked off the dialogue so it closed everything and didn't save all of it, which is which is super annoying. Um, so I just need one more second here. Apologies for that. Okay, we'll get that up and running. Welcome to the live stream. Sorry for the rough start. Um, these live streams are AMAs. I try to do them uh every Monday if I can at 7:00 p.m. Pacific and do it for roughly an hour. Sometimes it goes a little longer. Um, usually we're wrapped up the main topic and stuff well before then. And so how this usually works is that I have a newsletter that goes out on the weekend and it's based on a topic that comes from one of my YouTube channels called Code Commute. And that's where I either respond to things that people have submitted questions on or uh if I don't have any pending questions, I go to the experience dev subreddit. We go check that out. We talk through things and then I write the newsletter on whatever topics seem to have the most engagement for the week. And this time around it's called when your product manager becomes your boss. And so this one is from uh the experienced dev subreddit was a person that was asking uh about this and wanted some perspective uh and like how do you navigate a situation like this? So I figured it'd be a fun one to talk through. Um interestingly enough I have actually had this experience and so this person was expressing concerns um you know is it normal? What's that look like? And I figured this is not it's not a common thing that happens, but it's also not I don't know, it's not super unusual or impossible, right? And I think that uh some engineering orgs and stuff like that are set up in a way where, you know, maybe that doesn't really make sense. It's not really a thing that happens, but certainly not every place has tons of structure like that. And so it can absolutely look absolutely look different depending on where you're working. Um I don't know like maybe you're at a place right now where like that's not the case and over time things change. Uh certainly for me like when it happened to me that's kind of how it was and um you know things changed over time. There was a need for it and um and it it made sense for the business to do. So uh I'm just doing a quick scan to make sure I talk about these things in the order that I want to talk about them. Um, I think yeah, where to start? I think maybe introducing like some perspective on this, like at least my my opinion that kind of uh anchors not in the center of my camera. What's going on here? um some perspective that uh yeah I think anchors a lot of the framing I have on this and that's like you'll you'll see this come up as I talk about this but it's this idea that there's like this I think what I would expect to be healthy conflict between different parts of the software development life cycle and so what does that mean Nick it means that I think that uh yes you know engineers should be product minded. Uh yes, the more technical product managers or engineering managers are, uh you know, the more helpful that can be. But I I think that ultimately these functions are um they're representing different parts of the software development life cycle. And I would say that uh I think there needs to be a healthy conflict between these two groups of people. Uh and there's there's other stakeholders involved, but we're just talking about engineering and product right now. So, I think that, you know, there's there needs to be this healthy conflict. Um, and so I talk about that in in the article I wrote and I talked about it in the code community video that um this idea of healthy conflict. It's not a matter like and sometimes people hear the word conflict and they're like, well, why why do you want friction? Why do you want fighting? And I'm not saying that. Um, I'm saying that there between these two groups, these two stakeholders. Yes. People want to be able to deliver value to customers, right? We're we're all on this mission working at a company where that's the goal, right? To be able to deliver value to customers, but what parts of that we place emphasis on in the software development life cycle look different. And again, not to not trying to make it black and white or uh totally binary here where it's like, you know, engineers don't care about uh product side of things or anything like that. Not saying that. But fundamentally, these groups represent uh different parts of it. So, um I think that that's one of the things that you'll see come up as I'm talking through this and I'll get a little bit more into detail on that. Um, but I think that like for this person that submitted this thing onto the experienced dev subreddit, I think this is also kind of helpful framing because in I think every single role that I've ever had, every company that I've ever worked for, I've never worked at a place that was like what they're describing in the sense that um they work at a company. They said that it was like a primarily like a marketing company, which is interesting because I think if you're if you're like me and you've worked in companies that like what you do is software, then this is a very weird thing to consider because you might say, "Well, what do you mean it's a marketing company?" Don't you mean that it's a tech company with a marketing department? No. Um, there's plenty of businesses, for some people this is very obvious, but there's plenty of businesses that are not like a software first type of thing, right? like having software is part of what goes on. And so it sounds like in this person's case, they're saying they work at a company that is very much like a like a marketing company is how they framed it and then this situation arises where uh engineering manager is gone, product manager kind of steps in. So, um, I wanted to mention that in the beginning because I thought that was an interesting, I don't know, point that they brought up because if you're hearing like, isn't it totally bizarre that you'd have someone from product coming in to lead an engineering team? Maybe uh maybe for some people that's normal. Um, but just this reminder that where we work, there's different types of organizations focused on different things. And I don't know just because some of us are used to like primarily software development companies where what you do is build software. That's not the case for for everywhere. So thought that was kind of neat. Um and some helpful context for the background for what they were providing. Um I'm going to come back to the healthy conflict part between the two. Um I think the other thing I want to introduce here though is like this this topic was really about like if you're a software engineer and this person becomes your boss, right? So your engineering manager is no longer there and someone from product steps in. This can create an interesting dynamic for a few reasons. The healthy conflict part is one. Uh but the other is really around like career development and I thought that that might be u something that's kind of relevant to talk through before I go back to this product versus engineering thing. And uh the reason I wanted to put some emphasis on this is like I think there's a couple of different uh I don't want to say schools of thought but maybe like perspectives on on why this could work well or could not work well. And so when we think about engineering managers, one of the responsibilities of an engineering manager is to make sure that they're uh they're growing their team and that is not necessarily just like grow the team in terms of add add numbers to the team, right? Get more people on board. Um that could be part of it in terms of growing and scaling, but the other part of growing your team is that you have individuals on the team and you're trying to help them grow in their career. So if we think about this and we consider that we have someone who's now our boss who is not an engineer like us, they are a product manager. By the way, I'm saying like us, but I realize there could be other people watching this that maybe you're not a software developer, maybe you're in a different role, but factor in the idea that your your manager is not coming from the same sort of representation as um maybe what your exact role is. Um, so you have someone from product coming in and they are your boss now and they are not an engineer. Maybe they have no engineering background at all, right? Which is I wouldn't say that's unusual for a product manager. I've definitely worked with some that do have engineering backgrounds, but um not necessarily an expectation I would say. So what does that mean from from the perspective of someone trying to help you grow in your career? You know, they're supposed to be giving you guidance. are supposed to be helping you level up in your career, but like what the heck, man. Like, you're not even you're not even an engineer. You weren't an engineer. So, like, how could you possibly help me grow in my career, right? You're not you're not even technical. Like, I'm talking to you about technical things and um you know, you're not coding every day. So, how is it possible that you could help me grow as a software developer if that's not even something that you do or you have done? Right? This is I'm I'm exaggerating a little bit, but like these are sometimes thoughts that people will have around this. So like are those warranted? Um is is it a a real risk? Is it a real problem? Is someone who is a product manager able to manage teams of engineers? Forget from the the roadmap side of things and like how we get deliverables structured and actually deliver on those things. What about the career growth? Is that is that something that they can do? And so this is I think something that's pretty interesting about management is like at least from my experience as an engineering manager like I've been fortunate that I have a technical background. I've been fortunate that I am a manager of software engineers and I do software engineering. Um not anymore in my day job where I'm programming but I program all the time outside of work and I had you know uh almost a decade of working as a software engineer while being a manager. So like I come from a technical background but like it doesn't have to be that way. And so what's interesting about being an engineering manager is that a huge part of your role is people, right? It's people. And so I do personally think that you can have people that uh that are managers in some type of leadership role. They don't have to, in my opinion, they don't have to have the exact same background as you. Is it helpful to be relatable? Is it helpful to have sort of like gone through some of those things so that you can speak from particular experiences? Sure. I absolutely do think that's helpful. Um, is it required? I don't think so. Um, another thing that might happen is that you're in these, you know, think about like having a one-on-one with your manager now. And so maybe as someone who is very technical and you're thinking about one-on- ones you've had with your manager who was an engineer and you're going, "Oh man, it's like we can sit down and we can talk about code and like we can talk about super technical things and like they get it because they're an engineer, but this this product person like what the heck? They're I you know I start talking to them about like what classes and files I'm changing. They just don't get it right. They're they're just not technical. We can't talk about these things." And so I think this is another very interesting dynamic. This idea of like how technical is your manager. Now this isn't unique to product managers being the the boss of an engineer. Same thing could happen for an engineering manager, right? And I I I want to keep drawing these types of parallels to illustrate that some of the the parts around people management I don't think are um I don't know like super unique or problematic with a product manager being in place there just as a spoiler alert. Um so with this idea of like how technical is my manager I want to I want to give you this example which is myself because I think it's I think it's helpful if I can speak from experience on some of these things. So, um that you feel like it's more real and I'm not just not just making stuff up and you know talking under my butt. Um but like before where I used to work before Microsoft like I like I was saying I was a software engineer at the same time um that I was doing engineering management. I built a lot of the the initial products that we had at that company. Right? So I had spent a lot of time building things. I was very technical. I could talk to my engineers about very technical things. I could, you know, jump over to other teams and point them to code that I wrote years ago and like here's how you go fix this or here's where the problem is while still managing. Now I come to Microsoft and like I was in a completely different domain. I was in code like I was responsible for parts of code and and software that were you know significantly older than um I don't know like code that I had worked on prior um and I have zero experience in it new domain totally unknown code base older codebase you name it right um all of these things where I'm in a spot where I'm like I have zero technical mapping to this and so I need to be able to step in as a manager to make sure that I'm bridging some of that gap. So even for myself like I went from being very technical in a a niche domain in digital forensics in software that I had built helping my team and those around me into a new domain where I know literally nothing. I shouldn't say literally nothing that's the wrong use of literally but I know a lot less on the technical side. I don't have any prior experience and so how I need to make sure that I can manage people right I need to make sure that I can learn from them that I can have proper conversations with them and I'm going to come back to this in just a moment because I want to answer this question in chat um in search of IQ asks is there such a thing as paid training for software dev yeah absolutely um do you mean uh like my employer will pay for my training or do you mean uh you as a software developer want to pay for training. I'm assuming the former both. The answer is yes. Uh if it's the former like will my uh will my employer pay for this? Uh the answer is depends on the company for sure but it absolutely exists. Um I obviously I can't speak for every company but uh many companies will have some type of training budget. Um, I've worked at places where Oh, let's see. Uh, if if I like, uh, if I wanted to start getting experience as a software dev that will pay me for the training. Oh, oh, oh, I see. Um, let me let me back up. Uh, so there's I was conflating two other things with this. Uh, I thought you meant to pay for you pay for training to get training as a software engineer or an employer pays you to go for training. But I think what you're saying is um pay for you to be trained. Um they will pay me for the training. Yes. Okay. So this is really uh what you would call like an internship or a co-op position. And so a lot of the time internships are framed around like you are in some type of postsecary education like college or university and there's internship programs and you a lot of the time this is done through school right? So, uh, some business will have some internship programs set up. They they can recruit from the schools. Sometimes companies have pipelines set up with the schools, but it doesn't have to be just with schools. I'm only mentioning it because it's one of the really common formats. Like, company X will say, "Hi, we're taking interns." And they might advertise internship positions. And they might have some requirements. I'm just kind of making this up generally that that might have requirements of like hey if you apply and you can show proof of like you go to you go to school then we will take you on as a paid intern. Um there are other situations where the internship programs are actually set up with the company and the school so they have more of like a dedicated pipeline. Um yeah. Okay. And I'm sorting to read your your message here. Are there any that don't require a college degree? So the answer is yes. um only have two months of experience, no problem. The ability and drive to learn, but I'm right now uh a plug looking for an outlet. Yeah, fair enough. It's a it's challenging, right? So, um what what happens here, and I think it's especially challenging right now, and I want to say this not to uh I don't know, not to what's the word I want? Like I I don't want to make you feel like uh it's hopeless or there's no point or there's no chance. It's going to be difficult, right? It's going to be difficult especially right now because there are many companies that unfortunately are look like oh we have AI like we don't need to hire I won't I'll try not to break your heart I promise uh I promise there are places that do this still so I think there's a lot of places right now that are like hey um if we lean on AI a lot we don't need to hire juniors right and by the way it's a mistake that's doesn't work like you you just suddenly don't have a pipeline of humans where you're like getting more junior people ramped up to become more senior. Like it just doesn't work. Um but there are some companies that are starting to believe this. Uh there's some companies that have tried this and have failed miserably at it and they're going back. Um but unfortunately I think there's um I think there's a bunch of companies that are kind of stuck in this mindset currently. Uh, I think it will probably get a little bit worse before it gets better and people start to realize like, oh crap, not a good move, but it's really challenging right now. Um, I say this, I'm making an assumption that you have looked around already and started to see um some of this stuff, but maybe not. Uh, I know there's people that have been, you know, they graduated from college or university and they're like, I'm still looking for a job or I've been laid off and I'm still looking. Um, not to discredit how, you know, how tough the job market is, but there are places absolutely hiring. There are, um, internship type positions that are that are hiring that you don't need college or university for. Like I said, many of them structure it that way. The problem or the challenge is really like how do you find those? Like where where do you go, right? Like where's the website that says, you know, www. uh pay me to be an intern but not actually go to to collegeun university.com. Um I don't know the spot and I don't think there is the spot. Maybe that's a fun project to go build but I I would say there absolutely are. I think this is this is part of the process, right? It's it's networking. So, get on LinkedIn. Uh, start, you know, reaching out to people, communicating with them, not here's my resume, please hire me, because that's the fastest way for people to just not respond to you, unfortunately. But, um, I think you need to start connecting with people, start going to meetups, start talking with more people, network. It will be your number one tool. Unfortunately, it's not fast. There's no like, you know, one one quick tip that doctors don't want you to know about, like solution to this kind of stuff. And I hate saying that because I would love to sit here and just be like, "Hey, everyone, come on this stream and I'll give you, you know, the shortcut to to doing this kind of stuff." There's not um the I I say this for almost all things in life. Like there is no shortcut except for the sooner you realize there's no shortcut and just start doing the work that's the shortcut. It sucks but like if you do the work you will make progress and that's I can promise that. So unfortunately no shortcut but networking I think is huge. I think it's going to mean researching companies, trying to look for whether it's local businesses, whether it's looking for places that might take an unpaid intern and you're like, I just need to get some of the experience. Maybe you're building stuff on the side. Maybe you can do um you know, contract website work or make apps for people. Whatever it is, like you I think you can and should be doing all of those things. cuz I wouldn't put all your eggs into one basket, but like be doing all of that because um the opportunities exist, but you have to go looking for them because people won't hand them to you. And I'm not saying that you're waiting for people to hand them to you, but I say this because because it is challenging and because it is easy to get kind of I don't know like to to start feeling hopeless like you're trying the things and it's not working. Like it will work. It's just that most people give up as soon as things start getting hard. But like it will work. So I just I want to keep encouraging you to continue that. try that. I'm going to read more of what you wrote in the chat. Um, yeah. And by the way, uh, for folks yourself in search of IQ included, if you're just joining the stream, it's your first time here, I have a topic that I go through, but it's fundamentally an AMA stream. Like, if if I joined this and I didn't have a topic ready to go, it would be super awkward if I just sat here and waited for people to be like, "Please put a message in the chat." If you keep putting messages in the chat, I will keep answering them until I have to leave. So, I will happily do this. Um, so I I hope that uh I hope that part helps on on the internships and stuff. I hope that's not too like heartbreaking. It's going to be hard, but the opportunities exist. Um, just so the reliance of AI is a replacement for devs, isn't that a mistake? Yes, it's 100% a mistake. uh over reliance on AI with no human oversight problematic. I think right now absolutely. Do I think that there's uh a future where that's less of a case? I think for sure. I I don't know what that looks like. I don't know how we get there trusting it enough, but I think it takes steps, right? Like just as an example using models from one year ago like I I can't even trust I don't know like GPT41 to code a feature all the way through without you know putting a bunch of code vomit into my codebase. Like I'm like absolutely not. But there's stuff like now like if I'm using Opus 48 I'm like yeah there's a I can trust it with big refactors. I can trust it with a bunch of stuff and I have a lot of guard rails in place to help. So, I think there's some things that we're getting we're moving in that direction. Uh fully hands off, fully trusting it. I don't know. I don't know what that looks like, but uh I I like looking at things in like what direction are they going and then trying to see like can I understand what's or I don't want to say predict like it's a game or something, but like can I start looking at where I think it's heading and start trying to to get ahead so I can understand that before I'm like trying to deal with it. So I I think that we're heading in that direction where we can rely on it more and more. there is more confidence in the answers we're getting from it or the work that it's doing and a lot of the tooling whatever the scenario is having more guard rails in place right like think about all the the situations where people were putting like you know keys and stuff into their code repositories and they're going public like I think there's a lot of stuff now there's sometimes where I have AI telling me like hey there's like a file in your repo that like I happen to that has keys on it and like they're like it's not it's not committed but I know the files there so you might want to do something about it. So like we're already seeing some of the tooling and stuff being like hey like maybe I'm looking out for you right but I think it's going to take time. Um what else we got here? These are great questions. Thank you for asking them. Um that is the issue I'm having especially aware of uh fake acting companies and scared of being scammed. I think that's I have no experience with that unfortunately. Um but like it's real and so I think there's people that post on LinkedIn where they have like horror stories of this kind of stuff. I'm sure on Reddit there's a bunch of stuff like this but um yeah I I would you know it's it's a thing that you need to look out for. Um, I would hope the overwhelming majority of places that are hiring and actively interviewing people and stuff like that are not doing that kind of crap, but I think people have to be careful. Um, I know that I had a period of time, knock on wood, that they continue to stop, but I had spam email for probably more than six months straight where regularly, sometimes multiple times a day, I would get recruiter emails that were um, they were so good. They were they were AI. Um, they were so good that they had the person's LinkedIn profile and it was not a fake LinkedIn profile. It was literally they had like pretended to be the person. Sometimes it was like executives at companies, but when you start seeing enough of them and they're like all roughly the same, like how do I say this? the words weren't the same, but like you can see the pattern coming up where you're like, "Okay, we have a a perfect LinkedIn profile. There's some executive at some like, you know, high ranking or high like some big company, some executive. They're very interested in me specifically reaching out. Hm." And like very weird that it's a Gmail address, right? like there's some giveaways and once you start to realize um it becomes more obvious but you got to be careful. Uh but I had tons of spam like that and fortunately it stopped so it's real. Uh yes and I saw uh your your point there networking is the hard part. Um, so as I will say this as someone who makes YouTube videos and like I make lots of social media content outside of work because this is uh something honestly for me that like it feels good to do if it's helpful. So for example, I'm just going to say it. If you find this conversation helpful in any way, like the fact that I got to stream tonight and have this conversation, that actually makes me feel like good inside. So part of this is like a fulfilling experience for me that um getting the opportunity to try and help is like makes me feel good. So um as someone who likes to make content and hopes that it's helpful, I would still encourage you like it's not enough to consume content. It just isn't unfortunately. So my biggest recommendation to you is like action, right? I'm not saying like don't watch videos to help or don't watch tutorials or don't come back and join the live stream, but like here's what I would tell you. I want you to come back to this live stream whether it's, you know, next Monday, the Monday after the Monday after that. And like I would love to see in the chat what you're doing. What like what what hackathon did you try to go to? Did you go to a local meetup? Did you try networking with people on LinkedIn? How was that going? Right? Like come back. take the action and come back and share it. Because if you just sit and watch, I think it's easy for people to start feeling like it's not that you're not making any progress because I think that would be a very unfair statement to make. I think that you are not making uh as much progress as you could be if you are taking more action to go network and do outreach and things like that. So, um it's easy to say like, "Hey, I watched some videos. I learned some things and you get that like accomplishment feeling which is good but like don't stop. Don't stop there. Um because you need to start taking action because I don't want you to get to this point where you're like hey I'm I'm doing all these things and nothing's happening. But all those things are really just like trying to learn uh instead of taking the action to go uh beyond that. So, this is me not trying to be a buttthead, but like you have to you have to do the hard part. Um, bought this 800 mag programming book. Uh, sort of like, well, this would be a piece of clay in the world of diamonds. Yeah, it's it's kind of crazy. Um, AI is definitely able to generate lots of code. I think AI is already, like I was kind of saying earlier, the ability for it to to actually build useful things, like has, you know, gotten significantly better over the past year or two. Uh, like it's it's pretty incredible. It's awesome. But, uh, I I I think there's fundamentally like a benefit to understanding software and, uh, software engineering. Um, uh, oh, we got a lurker. Welcome to the stream. Good to see you. Uh, I'm just kind of scanning through the other questions, too, before I get too far ahead. Uh, okay. Yeah. Um, but the the idea of like having some background in software engineering, I think makes a tremendous difference. Um, and so like why do I think that? Um, so I got to got to block the chat bots from trying to advertise. Like they want me to buy streamers or like viewers. I mean, like why would I why would I do that? So inflate my inflate my stream numbers. Oh. Oh, hope you're all impressed by my my stream numbers. Um, I don't get it. But uh if you are trying to like put yourself in this situation, you might have already done this or done it with some things. Um ad revenue. Oh well, I don't think I I don't think I get ad revenue, so it's not going to work for me. Um if you have tried working with Copilot or Claude or Curse or whatever you want, right? And if you've tried building something that you're not totally familiar with, so just to give you an example, if you're like, "Hey, I've done some web development, but I've never made a mobile app." And you sit there and you're like, "Hey, co-pilot, like build me a Android app and make no mistakes." Um the the thing is like at this point, you may have you actually might have success with um some of the models and stuff we have. even with like a really simple prompt like it might basically oneshot you an app which is cool but then you're in this situation where you're like well did it did it do it good like it maybe it runs and you're like holy crap it works but like is it good is it going to like if you change something is the whole thing going to break like how do you add a new feature like without you know risking everything um So, your 1027 are supposed to be ACA, not 80. Oh, I haven't read that one yet. Okay. Um, the the the point being that if you don't have some background in some of this stuff, you have you don't really have a choice but to like just trust what the LLM is telling you. Now, what's cool though is like you can go a step further if you're like, I don't actually know what's going on. if you are willing to be curious and learn. What's really cool is that you can ask the LLM, right? So, it spits out this app and you're like, "Holy crap, it built me an Android app and it works." And then instead of going, "Cool, add the next feature. Add the next feature." Until you have this pile of garbage where you're like, "I don't know what it's doing or how it works." Instead, stop, right? Like, cool. Like, h what what what tech stack did you do? Oh, I'm definitely I'm definitely signing up for the Argentina viewers. Um, the the idea being that you can use these tools to ask them to explain things to you and teach you, right? It's a I feel like it's a completely underutilized aspect of using LLM and agents and things like that is that we often use them to blast out code and then we go, "Oh, yeah, but I don't understand it." Ask it. Why did you pick that this tech stack? Are there alternative tech stacks? What are the pros and cons? Right? Like in my opinion, part of being an engineer is being very curious, trying to understand things, right? Pros and cons analysis. If you're not doing these things, like you you can't make engineering decisions without being able to do that because you're going to find yourself in a situation where you're like, should I do A or B and and so what you then you're like, well, I don't have to make the decision. I just ask AI. Okay, but back to the point we said earlier, is it going to be a good Can you trust it? How do you know it's making a decision that's waiting the things uh the way that you want if you can't make the decision yourself, right? So, I think having a background in software engineering in terms of programming, building things, like even if the lang pick a language that you're never even going to use in production, like understanding how these things work, I think is still helpful. Um, and that's a super awesome point. I started looking into philosophy so I can ask better questions since I'm not talking to a search engine anymore. Super interesting, right? Uh yeah, I think that's a that's a really really neat one. Um if you I don't know if you have examples off the top of your head because it's maybe a bit of a meta question to ask, but like do you have examples where you're like, "Hey, if I I notice if I start asking questions this way, I get better results." Because Yeah. If like if you're like me and you just grew up with I have to Google everything I do. Um it sounded pretentious. Well, as a philosopher um I had Yeah. So I had to like you're you're using keyword searches for absolutely everything. And it was like if you had good Google fu like if you knew to put the quotes around things or you can use capital and to actually give you like uh anding or oring on conditions in Google searches like you could you could probably search more effectively. You could get to information better and faster and now like that's a leg up over everyone else who's just googling things, right? Like I I always joke about this but it's real. So, one of the one of the good really good friend of mine uh was a product manager where I used to work. Um we'd always joke that we'd go like searching for things. So, we're on the engineering team like you know uh and we work very closely. He's very technical too. So, he has he has a software engineering background as well. And so, he would you know we got to go build these features. Cool. So, like we'd be looking from the engineering side like we got to prototype it or whatever. We're like, man, we can't find anything on this. And it's digital forensic, so we're like, a lot of the time it's not stuff that's like, oh, just grab it off the shelf and reuse it. Like, we have to go research and figure stuff out. Like, dude, we can't find anything. And we'd be looking for like two days, multiple of us, and he would like go to his computer and just like first Google search, and he's like, "What do you mean? It's like right here." And for some reason, he was just very good at Google searching. And I say this because like I don't I don't think that I'm a stupid person. I think that I should be able to do a Google search and he was still always able to find like anything on the internet. So super cool. But I think just an example that like if you can prompt better this is a whole, you know, or orders of magnitude more effective than just having good Google foo. But um every link copilot links for me is a broken and a 404. I don't trust any any actual links that come out um like from any LLM really. I'm just assuming that it's based on old training data. So I will almost always tell it like if I see it's putting a URL I'm like it just reminds me like did I ask it to do a web search? If I didn't like stop like go do a web search go find these things because if it can't find it I don't want to waste my time on it. Um I'm just going back up because I missed some questions. Uh, are you for or against legal frameworks to be revised to keep up with vulnerabilities online such as social media section? Uh, I actually don't know specifically what that is. Um, in uh in search of IQ, uh, I don't know what they I don't know what section 230 is. um or specifically uh you know I I don't know specifically which uh things you're referring to with regards to vulnerabilities and social media but um am I for or against if the question in general is am I for or against uh legal frameworks being revised? Uh my answer is like on the surface absolutely yes. Again, I don't know the details of this specifically, so I don't know what I'm signing up for here, but I say absolutely yes because if technology is evolving, that came out weird. If technology is evolving and we're not revising whatever rules, regulations, laws that are in place, I think that there's it's only opportunity for there to be problems where things outpace what we have. Um and then suddenly we're relying on laws, rules, regulations that were made at a time where uh the world was different. So I think it's important for these things to be revised, but again specifically what this uh section 230 is, I don't know. So I don't know what I'm signing up for. Um next one was if you go on Facebook, they don't have real people for customer support. Yeah. Uh they allow hundreds of groups that exists with people pretending to be legit. Yeah. Yeah. That's kind of crazy, isn't it? that um like the companies themselves are like, "Hey, we don't need to it's not like cost effective for them to to have customer support filled with people, but like there's like literally people that go on and and go scam this way." So, yeah. Nuts. Um section 230 shields platforms from liability for content it user creates, including ads it promotes. Oh. Um yeah, I again I don't know I think uh I think I would need to know the details of that to form a really strong opinion about it. So um because when I see even if they're malicious well like this is where like political stuff gets kind of weird, right? And I'm I don't uh I don't advertise uh political views and things like that, but I think this one I can kind of talk around without you know uh siding up because I I literally don't know the details of this. So it shields platforms from liability for content its user creates. Okay, so couple things. um when we say the word malicious like what malicious who gets to decide what malicious is like by by what definition by what standard because for example if I wanted to make an ad or I was like I take a screenshot of this chat and I'm like in search of IQ asks bad questions like don't don't hire him or her sorry don't know uh gender or anything uh don't hire them as a as an intern. Like that that would be malicious. But like am I allowed to do that? Like I don't know. Maybe that isn't within the realm of what's okay in this example. You might disagree with that because it's targeting you and that's kind of a crappy thing for me to do. But is that bad? I don't know. Now illegal activity harm. Um like I think that that shouldn't be allowed. Now, this is going to sound kind of weird, but like when it comes to illegal activity, so you're an online platform, let's assume, and it's global. Illegal can mean different things in different places, right? And so, don't get me wrong, like I think that some things are probably pretty obvious. Like, if it's like you should go murder someone, like that's probably illegal, I think, everywhere. Uh I think I hope uh but maybe you know in some other cases there's some type of illegal activity that is not the the rules regulations apply differently. So um in terms of shielding like I don't know how you would enforce some of this stuff. Do I think that it's important that that tech companies platforms whatever um have things in place to to moderate and prevent this kind of stuff? Absolutely. Um, even like I'll give you a different example like aside from advertising, one of the things that from working in digital forensics that really, you know, freaks me out is like um I don't I don't want to like go into details of it, but like when it comes to some types of uh I don't know like exploitation material, let's call it that. Um it's it's literally illegal to replicate it. Right? So, it's illegal to make copies of it. So, imagine that someone uploads something like this to your your website, right? You have some some website, some platform that's able to allow user uploads. Now, if someone uploads that to your website, what like technically wherever that got copied to is like that needs to be quarantined. Like that should not be connected to the internet. That shouldn't you shouldn't be replicating that. that should be turned off. And so like that scares the crap out of me because I think that people should have uh prevention for that. I obviously don't think people should be using that kind of stuff. But um detecting that kind of thing is not like a a super trivial off-the-shelf kind of solution that you can just just do. So, I think that there needs to be something and I think that there needs to be accountability, but um I don't know how that gets enforced or what that looks like. I don't know if I could express a more specific opinion on that. Um let's see what else we got going on. Sorry, I talk too much and can't keep up with the chat. Um how to work prompts legit have had thought and Arab you to figure out all the possibilities. Yeah. Uh yeah, interesting. Understanding that's a prediction algorithm has been very freeing for me since it's trained majorly on the internet. Yeah. Uh it's it's fascinating, right? Um we uh I mean for people that are using it for writing code, right? You're there's probably things where you see it and you're like what why did you do that? Like that's not a pattern I have in my codebase or whatever. And you're like I wouldn't do that. And it's yeah, it's been trained on a bunch of bunch of people. Um, not to say that, you know, uh, necessarily the average software developer is bad, but I'm sure there's lots of code that's been trained on that's absolutely garbage. And I say that as someone who has absolutely written some garbage code, so it's fair for me to say. Um, uh, regarding the word prompts, if you know what your goal is, start with that. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So, that's a I think that's a good example, right? Or is React better? Try telling it the end goal. Um, it's true. It's kind of It's kind of weird to think about. Um, if you were like if if you're trying to compare text stacks and you're like, is React versus something else better? Um it's it's tricky, but this goes back to like if you don't have um if you don't have some background in some of this stuff, it makes it challenging to ask the right questions, right? So if if you were like, hey, is writing hey co-pilot or hey Claude, whatever. Um, I want to make a program and I want to I want to figure out what the best text stack and language to use is like is it uh is it JavaScript? I want to use Node and JavaScript or is it Rust or is it C, right? Like what what is the best one out of those three? And it's a it's a silly question, but uh silly if if you understand why. It's not silly if you don't have the background, understand why, but those are three very different languages. Can all three of those languages be used for the same thing? Absolutely. Right? Like you can use those things uh in all three of those can build you web servers. So that's cool. Um, now what does best mean here? Do you mean the one that has the smallest install footprint? Do you mean the one that's the fastest? Do you mean the one that has the most uh widely supported community? Do you mean the one that's a, you know, good middle ground where it's a good balance between these things? Like what does best mean? What do you if you don't know what you're trying to optimize for, how can you how can you expect a good answer? Now what's really fascinating about that is if you don't know right you say what's the best you could even say to it like what are if I have uh multiple frameworks I want to evaluate what are some good questions that I should ask so that I can get a good pros and cons analysis of these things like you can do that and then you can use what it says and go great like let me go ask this now but yeah I think it's a really good point is like having the goal is is helpful Um, I like that. Okay. So, for a really specific example, what is a person who advertised on YouTube, what if, okay, had their page hacked or something and was being used to promote illegal? Yeah. Um, yeah. I mean, okay. So, like, uh, there are no laws that protect the victims that fell for it. Uh, now this is it's tricky, right? Whose fault is that? Person advertising got their page hacked. So, what what does hacked mean? Did did someone just like they left their password on a post-it note and they had it up while they were streaming and it was in the background and someone's like, "That's Nick's YouTube password. I'm going to go on there and take it." Um, should the platform be held liable? I don't know. Like, keep your password secure. Uh, now I don't know. Like it's tricky. Like that that could that could be kind of a silly thing where someone goes on and they're like, "I'm just going to go use this because you literally left your password open." Is it the platform's fault or is it the person's fault for just not being secure? I don't I don't know the answer to that. If data was leaked from the platform and that caused damages, I think that's a different story. But I don't think these things are so uh so black and white. So I don't know. Yeah. with the hacking through a vulnerability. I think that's a bit of a different story, right? Like it's literally there's a vulnerability someone hacked in. Um yeah, I think I I agree. I don't think that the to generalize in that case I don't think that the the company or the the platform should be protected from that. It's like you you had a problem in your platform. Now, now if a platform has something in their terms and uh and conditions, it's like we literally, you know, put this on you. Don't trust us with anything. Uh you know, anything you put here can and will be used against you in life. I mean, if you sign up for it, then I don't know, read the read the fine print. But um I don't know like this is this is the thing like when we talk about things at such scale this is uh I think this is why this kind of stuff's challenging when we talk about things that are such grand scale I think that it is I still don't want to use the word easy. I think it's an oversimplification to keep putting scenarios up, right? We can keep saying, well, what about this? What what about that? What about that? And I think that you can depending on the scenario whatever like you can paint a picture but like I think the if you keep doing it you will keep having exceptions to it on both sides and it makes it very very difficult to have um something that's uniformly applied across everything without a million little oh except in this case or except in that case. So um I don't know I think this kind of stuff is super challenging. This is also why I personally don't like I don't spend a ton of my own time and energy on this stuff because uh I think that I would get exhausted and frustrated to be honest. Um, it's also the same reason like I don't spend a lot of time on political things in general because I if I generally speaking kind of meta uh if I think about my time spent in life um I don't I genuinely don't think that's the most effective use of my time in terms of being helpful and I don't think it's something that I enjoy. doesn't mean that it's not good sets of questions to ask or that they're valuable things to have answered because quite literally people are impacted by this. Absolutely. But it's kind of like there are some things that um over time I kind of have to decide like is that it sounds kind of funny like is is that how I want to spend my energy and it's not I think it's a great question so but thank you for asking it but like that yeah that's why I don't think I have like a super well I don't know like formed or like solid opinion on it. I'm very much like uh it depends but that's also a typical software engineering answer you get. Are we pro PM? Oh, man. No, we hate the PMs. Um, yeah. Cheer up, board, please. Yeah, exactly. Um, yeah, it's it's interesting. No, I think um I think maybe I'll come back to to the PM thing to kind of wrap up some of the topic because I I introduced it at the beginning and I think I I wanted to close on it, but on the PM thing, we talked about like career development. I think I said about like a Canadian. Um I'm Canadian. I'm allowed to say that. So uh we talked about career development and the that main point I was trying to say is like I don't think that you need to have an engineering manager to be your Yeah, I guess Canada Day is very soon. This is true. Um you don't need to have an engineering manager to be your boss and I think get good career growth. Right. I don't I don't think that that's required. I think it's helpful. I don't think it's required. Um I didn't say this part, but the quick story that I'll share because it's I talked about it on code commute and I talked about it I think in this article. Um but I think one of one of the best managers I've ever had was was literally a product manager. Um and so we had our VP of engineering leave. um the the product uh person came in and kind of assumed this VP of engineering role and uh he was amazing. He was incredible and he would tell you like I can't code, you know, like he's not not a software engineer, but he was really good at communicating, right? He was very clear like if I don't know something, I'm not going to let you sit there and blab at me and be like, I don't know what this guy's talking about. Like he'll he'll stop you and say like, hey, like I don't get it. can you talk about it uh from this angle or explain it to me a different way and and yeah and then I would figure out like how do I uplevel with him like he was really good. I think the other part this is going to bridge the gap a little bit to my other point was that um he really unders he really understood why factoring in engineering into product decisions was really important. So as much pressure as he was under timelines and roadmap and delivering like he would still make space to hear from the engineering side and would like respect the input. He knew he knew that like engineering was going to be the group that had to get done. So instead of just being like no no no like too bad you guys really got to just like crank out more features. It was like, "Hey, like I'm going to want to tell you to crank out more features, but like I need you to push back on me and tell me if that's possible or not cuz if you don't tell me it's impossible, I will keep the pressure on." Right? And and in my opinion, rightfully so, because where he's coming from, back to one of the things I said at the beginning of the stream, he's representing a different part of the software development life cycle. He's he's trying to optimize getting as much value out the door to customers. That's what he's doing. He doesn't like it's not his responsibility in my opinion to know about all of the engineering challenges and all of the technical things that go behind that. I do think it's his responsibility to be able to listen to those things and strike a balance. So, I think that he did a really good job um bridging that gap. And again, as someone who didn't have an engineering background, I still think that he he was a he was a good coach and mentor. Um, and I think, yeah, one of the best people that I've ever had as a as a manager. So, um, you know, my lived experience is that it was totally okay to have a PM as your manager, as an engineer. Um, okay. The other part to bring it all back together was around this idea of like healthy conflict between product and engineering. And so I think it's super important to have because if I don't know if people have like lived through both sides of this, but I think a lot of the time if you have under representation from engineering, uh I think even the video I filmed today for code commute, which will be up probably a couple weeks from now. Um, but that topic was really about a tech lead that um was new to the role and they have a product manager who's basically like everyone's got to keep delivering more and more and more and this tech lead's trying to figure out like am I allowed to push back on this person and like we got to steer this ship in maybe a slightly different direction and my answer is like 100% yes and especially because they had clarification from their manager that is expected the their engineering team was being under represented in those conversations. So of course and I feel like rightfully so the product side is going to say okay like keep keep going like you guys delivered that okay like well can we get more from you okay like they will keep asking and if they keep getting it again I feel like rightfully so they're going to keep doing it now there's nuance to this because obviously that doesn't scale forever of course but this is some other facets to this right there's How are the people doing? Right? If that person is not managing the engineering team in terms of understanding like are they being burnt out, what's going on? Like if there if that's not being represented, the people part is it that is it that product manager's responsibility for taking care of everyone on the team? I don't think so. I think it would be nice if they were aware of it, but I don't think it's their responsibility. Personally speaking, I don't think it's their responsibility. I think having awareness is good but again their their focus is how do I make sure that I can ship value to customers. I am you know exaggerating these points a little bit on the engineering side though for this tech lead. It's like yeah they need to push back and say hey look like fundamentally if we look at some of the issues we've been having like this is it's because we're trying to do too much too fast. we're cutting corners on testing. Um there's too much in this case, there was too much manual testing and no like automated regression test. They're catching the same issues like weeks or months after that they've already caught through manual testing. Like just nonsense. Um so I think they didn't have the right representation of engineering. Um and again the chat I absolutely agree about having healthy conflict. We need advocacy and everyone needs to not take it personally. Yeah, you can be wrong and I can be wrong and resolution and compromise is healthy 100%. I think some of the best solutions that people come up with are not, you know, my opinion versus yours. It's somewhere in the middle or something completely different. So I I think that uh in this topic where it's like hey your manager just you know your manager is now a product manager. One of the risks that I would say is like do you have the right representation of engineering and I I don't know the answer to that. Like I said in my lived experience, I had an awesome product manager that became my boss and I thought he did a great job in balancing it. I don't know for your case. I don't know for this person's case who wrote the Reddit post, but I think it's important to have the healthy conflict for the same reason that I think that again if we exaggerate a little bit. I know I know this is how my brain works. If you said, "Nick, what's a what's some fun what's something fun that you could, you know, you could program, you could build, like what would you really like to go build?" And I would tell you tell you very quickly. It's role playing games. I love role playing games. I like building them. But you know what I don't like doing is finishing them or getting them to a playable state. I have no interest. Zero interest in that. Which is absurd because the whole point of a game is to be able to play it. And I I've said this many times. I don't DND. I don't. I should, but I don't. Um I've said this many times. I I literally have one of my first projects from when I started programming that's over 20 years old. And I constantly remake it, reinvent it. The most recent version of it, I sat down and I said, I'm going to build that whole thing with AI. I'm not even going to write the code. I'm not going to look at any code for this. I'm just going to use C-pilot. And I sat and I I mean, I haven't opened it up in a little while. Um, I sat there and I was like, "Hey, like start building the the infrastructure for this." And it's just because I like to build this stuff. It's fun. It's enjoyable. And my point is that there's literally zero product representation in me programming my role playing game. And that's why it's never getting finished. I've delivered zero value to customers in 20 plus years, including myself as the only customer, right? I've never got it to a playable state ever. And so I think if you don't have the right balance where you have product pushing, we need to ship value, we need to represent customers, get them value that left, you know, left to their own. Exaggerating again, uh engineers will, you know, we'll refactor, we'll rearchitect, we'll rewrite, we will keep doing these things because that's the part we like to do. So if you have individuals, engineers who can be more product minded or you have product managers who can be more engineering minded, I think that this really bridges the gap a ton. Um let's see what do we got in the chat. Uh yeah, I'm not a I'm not a book reader, so I definitely would not finish the books I think. So I've only I shouldn't say the only books I've ever read because I I've read some books. Uh, I don't enjoy reading because I feel like I need to be doing, which is kind of weird, but um, Lord of the Rings I read because I like like my Lord of the Rings. And then, um, Game of Thrones. I'm not a TV watcher, but when I was convinced to like catch up on Game of Thrones, I think I missed the first couple seasons and someone was like, "You you'd really like this. You should watch it." And I did it. and I liked it so much I was like I I think I have to read books now and so I read books and it was weird. Uh but yeah, I don't I don't really read real treasures and the friends you made along the way. There's some people at work that D and D. Um and I don't know how often they do it, but I I really wasn't aware of like how much goes into like I don't know like the social part of the campaign. And it's like I I play role playing games because I I like the idea of like building a character up and it was really interesting and I like loot. I'm like obsessed. I think there's probably some weird like I don't know something in my head where I don't like to gamble but apparently like loot drops are kind of like gambling. So maybe I got some wires crossed and I got a loot addiction or something. But uh yeah, I didn't realize for people doing these D and D sessions like how much like like social aspect they get out of that cuz I just assumed it was like isn't it just my character can beat up your character or something like that. I don't know. But yeah, I think there's some people at work that really like it. Uh so I was man when was it? Maybe within the last 6 months to a year or something when people were visiting they were talking about it and I was trying to learn cuz I'm like hey this is super neat. I didn't realize like how how into this people get, but it's cool. Um or the vibe code you had GBT. Yeah. Um I should hire a boss. Yeah, I should hire a boss. Um I should Yeah, I I need to I think I need to have income to hire anyone. So yeah, I don't know. I'll figure that out. Um someone said he was waiting for Winds of Winter when his wife was pregnant. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I I feel like I haven't even caught up on the latest like I think what was even what came after the Game of Thrones series. They did like the what did they call it? It's like not the I want to call it the prequel, but um they were they were doing a lot of the story coverage from before. I don't even think I finished that. I think I just What of the dragon? Why can't I I know you put ho td, but I don't know. Why can't I? My brain's not working. House of the dragon. Thank you. H is for house. Like it's not heart of the dragon. Um yeah. Uh I I don't think I watch all house of the dragon. Um and yes, there's a delay in the chat, so I promise I I guessed House of the Dragon before your message came up. I promise. Um the Yeah, I didn't watch all of that. I don't know how far I got. Um but yeah, it's it's honestly cuz I I can't be bothered to watch TV, but I should probably go back. I think my I think the other thing is that like if I'm going to watch TV, it's going to be what my wife is going to want to watch because I generally don't watch TV. So if I'm going to be in front of a TV, it's going to be with her and it's going to be whatever she wants to watch. And she is not she is not a medieval fantasy kind of person. Um I know I know it's blasphemy but um we have uh what is it? Uh Love Island and there's Real Housewives and uh we watched Traders. Uh but I guess yeah I watched the Real Housewives with my wife Summerhouse. Um, so I know a lot of the gossip from um all the reality TV unfortunately. Um, but yeah, no, no, no Game of Thrones. But yeah, um, to wrap that whole thought up, I think that there are some risks with having product managers as your manager, but I think it's really just about understanding like what what role is being played and are they able to step in and do that, right? So, career development, can they still help you with career development? Pay attention in your one-on ones, right? Um, like I say this all the time, but your you care the most about your career development, don't wait for your manager to do that. So, if you're you have a product manager who's your your new engineering manager and you're like, well, they're not they're not advancing my career. It's I mean, I think that we all want that, but you have to be the one driving it. and then hopefully they're supporting you through that. That's part one. And then I would say if you're noticing that uh the engineering side is not being represented in sort of the software development life cycle, that's probably another bit of a red flag. These are things that can be mitigated. They they are things that uh you know, not not every PM is going to be bad at these things. So, I think it's worth understanding them, feeling it out, and at the end of the day, if you're like, I'm not in a good spot where like, you know, you're getting burnt out because the software development life cycle is all just like features and you're like this tech lead that I was uh responding to on Reddit, you know, if it's like try to take action, right? Try to bring visibility to it. Try to make suggestions. If you are putting the energy in and it's not moving, it might not be worth it. And similarly for your career, if you're trying to push and get support on on career advancement, um, and you're constantly met with like, you know, um, you know, maybe maybe next time we can talk about promotion or raise or whatever. Um, if it's always like maybe next time, maybe next time, and there's no specific guidance, there's no uh, I don't know, it's just kind of on repeat and very generic, uh, I think that that's also a red flag. But I hope that's helpful. Um, I know we were kind of all over the place, but that's why these are are kind of fun. Uh, thank you for all the good questions in the chat. Um, I don't know if uh we still got in search of IQ here, but I appreciate your questions. I hope they were kind of helpful. Um, I do hope that, you know, you continue trying to network, reaching out to people, looking for for internships, however that looks. Um, and uh, yeah, I think it's I think I would be lying if I said it's going to be easy. It's going to be hard. It is going to be hard, but I think that it's absolutely worth it. Um, I don't know. I say this as someone who's been in software engineering for a while, and I literally can't imagine doing anything else. It's it's a really rewarding career. had lots of interesting challenges and you can take that that learning and experience and apply it to to anything really because I think it's not the software part, it's like the engineering mindset. That's really what's going to make the difference. So, hope that helps. I appreciate the Game of Thrones chat too and Dn D. So, thanks folks. I'm gonna sign off though. I got to say hi to my wife because I saw her for probably six minutes when I came home from work before running up here. Um, yeah, you are welcome for lurking. Thank you for for engaging in the chat and not just lurking. I appreciate it. Um, but yeah, I hope see folks next week. When's when's a long It's a long weekend. Is Friday off? Is it Monday? I don't know.