Uncovering Motivation in Software Engineering - Engineering Manager AMA

All right, it is time to rock and roll here. Just waiting for Instagram to come through and we should be all set. Wait one more second. Come on, Instagram. There it is. Boom. Go live. Okay, welcome to the live stream. Um, I just noticed this because every time I go to do this and I have to get Hey Ryan, I have to get uh Substack set up, I have to do Substack on my phone and it's like over here. So, hey Substack folks. But I just noticed in Reream that they have a Substack like icon to select and I had like one minute before the stream and I was like, can I get it to work? Can I get it to work? But I think you need to like be part of their beta program or something. So good news for Substack folks. Soon you'll have a first class experience. For Substack folks that are joining right now, if you want a better experience, I would recommend going over to YouTube. Uh it's just dev leader on YouTube. The folks that are on YouTube will tell you it's a decent experience. I think out of all of the streaming platforms, it's probably the best one that this streams to. Although the people on Twitter are also every single time the most amount of people come from Twitter. So, hey Ryan. Hey Devin, thanks for joining. Um, good to see folks back. My chat count is not right. So, I'm just going to refresh that. Give me one sec because I like knowing as the numbers are changing. It's like there's zero people, but then I see messages coming in. So, one of those things can't be right. So, cool stuff. Okay, if you're new to the live stream, then the way that this works is I generally have a topic that comes from my newsletter. And the newsletter topic comes from code commute. So, I do this sequencing of content creation. Um, and so the way that this works is my other YouTube channel that's called code commute. Throughout the week, I take user submitted questions on software engineering. And then otherwise I go to Reddit and look for fun topics to go uh talk about. And then on Friday nights I write a newsletter that goes out on Saturday and I pick the topic from the week that seem to have the most interest. I send that out. So um if you're interested in the newsletter, it is just at weekly.devleer.ca. I'll put that in the chat. It's an email newsletter, but you do not have to subscribe. If you enjoy this live stream and you're like, I wonder what's next week's topic, just check out the the newsletter on Substack by going to weekly.devleer.ca. It'll be up on Saturday, so you can check it Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, and then make up your mind if you want to join or not. So, that's where to go to check it out. My newsletter is not refreshing. Give me one sec. Come on, Substack. There we go. So, we're going to be talking about motivation for developers. And I like this topic because there's no like one right answer for this, but I think that it's good to talk about so that people can kind of get an idea for themselves, right? And this is going to change throughout your career, too. So, um, the other thing I should call out on these streams is that there is a chat and if you would like, please participate in the chat. The whole idea of me doing live streams is not to just stress myself out and talk to uh you know one way to an audience. If I wanted to do that, I would just make YouTube videos and not edit them and it would be a nightmare. So um instead, I much rather that if you have questions or topics you want to go through, just bring them up in the chat. Uh I think last time or the time before it must have been last time Reream actually like sent me a message like after and was like this is like a new record for chat messages that you've had which I thought was super cool. It's been um it's been awesome to have the chat picking up more and more. So thanks for participating. Of course there's no pressure, right? But you'd be a lot cooler if you were participating in the chat. So this topic is going to be what motivates developers. And like I said, jump in the chat as we're going through. So the reality is like for software engineers, right? Like I kind of start off this article by saying it's not just like we want to be software engineers because we love going to meetings. We like repetition. We like just the same old boring stuff over and over. But like at some point in time in our careers, uh things might start feeling like they're on repeat, right? So, if you're brand new to it and things are still new and exciting or things are crazy, whatever, that's fine. Um, good stuff. But at some point, you might start noticing that you're kind of getting into I don't know if I'd call it a rut, but kind of like some like a plateau almost, right? Things are kind of just a little bit more monotonous. Um, maybe the amount of engagement you have in your work is dropping, right? Um, but the reality is that, you know, you might change jobs or something. This is going to kind of come up again and we need to be able to think about what actually motivates us because in theory we should be doing the job that we're doing for a reason, right? So, as we go through this, I just want to remind folks that there is no wrong answer for what motivates you to do your job. I think when I posted this on LinkedIn or even the thumbnail, did I put it in the thumbnail? Yeah, the thumbnail I have like a stack of money and I have pizza, right? like the the stereotypical like oh developers give them pizza parties for doing good work or whatever and then you have uh the other sort of stereotype which is like you know people are just in it for the money and I mean like we make fun of that right we make fun of like oh like if people are just in it for the money it's the wrong motivation but the reality is like it's not like there is no such thing as like a wrong motivation you're allowed to be motivated by money for your career In fact, I would hope that for most people there's some minimum amount of motivation that comes from their salary or compensation, right? At some point at at some point for diff and that's a different point for different individuals that might fall off. Someone might I'm just making up numbers randomly, right? Someone might say, you know, 60k a year is fine for me. Someone else might say 100k a year. Someone else might say I need half a million dollars a year before that sort of box is checked. and like then I don't really care. I can get motivated by like I need some other component in my motivation. It's just going to be different for everyone. But money is not like a problem to be motivated by. So I just wanted to like talk about that at the beginning. And like I think that I would say if it's your only motivator that might be where you might want to kind of I don't know if I'd say like rethink things but maybe put a little bit more thought into like is there more beyond money. So just to give you an example what I mean by that like I am motivated by money right if I had an opportunity to double my salary right my compensation for the same amount of you know same type of work or whatever I'd probably be very interested in doing that because I am motivated by money but um the difference is that like I would say if folks are going I just want money because I want a number to go up in a bank account maybe like I think if you know who Alex Hormoszi is? He's a, you know, he's a content creator. He's a successful business owner when he makes content. And he's kind of controversial because some people are like it's it's too much or whatever, but he is someone who's just like like he loves the I like the aspect of making money. That's just like what he's into. And like I guess there's nothing wrong with that. I just would encourage people that if you're falling into a cycle of like it's only money and that's the only thing maybe kind of broaden your horizons a bit. So I I've said this before on stream and I never know how to show my my arm. How do I show the other side of my arm? It's like impossible. Do I to turn this way? Yeah, if it'll focus. I have a tattoo on my arm. It's an hourglass on the inside, right? Kind of hard to see. It's the most awkward thing to hold up. And I guess if you're on Substack, you can see it perfectly. But um I had this tattoo put on my arm because I wanted a permanent reminder on my body. That's if you're working to make more money. It's not that it's wrong. It's just that don't let money be the only thing because someday we're going to die and you don't take the money with you. So just wanted to kind of put that out there. There's nothing wrong with being motivated by money, but uh at least for like for myself, like when I reflect on this, like why am I motivated by money? That's because I want to be able to sort of buy my freedom, if I can put it that way. At some point, I would like to not have to worry about having an income. So, I'd like to make more money earlier so that I can invest it, do things so that I don't have to work, so that I can kind of do whatever I'd like to do. I love building software though, so I'm always going to be working in some capacity, but I'll get to pick on whatever I want to work on. So Scott says, "For me, it's not about the money. I enjoy the challenge of solving problems and seeing people use the software I create." Right? So like I think that's an excellent point. If I reflect on even my like so I work at Microsoft now and I've kind of told stories about this depending on if you've been on the stream or not or if you've watched other videos I've made but like I worked at a startup before Microsoft and so Microsoft is great. The startup I used to work at was a digital forensics company. So, we made digital forensic software and that was sold to law enforcement uh to investigators and basically it got used a lot for helping catch uh basically like child predators. So, that wasn't the only reason, but like that was one of the primary uses of it. So for me, uh, to Scott's point, when he says, "Seeing people use the software I create," that was like probably the most rewarding sort of feeling from a job I think that I may ever have, right? To be able to be part of building software that can have an impact like that. So, I think for folks that have not, you know, if you're in the software industry, you've been building software and you're like, I've never really felt like I don't know, like the software that you're building has an impact or, you know, kind of just like the paycheck's the only thing, but the work that you're doing, like the the result of it, it's kind of like whatever. It's just part of what has to get done. Um, I just want to say there's there probably is a job out there for you. You just haven't found it yet. where um you'll probably feel like holy crap like this feels awesome that I can go build stuff like this. Um I think you know I I think that a lot of us when we were getting started in software development like I can I can definitely say this for myself and I know I've talked with people on LinkedIn about this but I think for a lot of us we were like I want to get into programming because I like games. Like that was the exciting thing. I want to build games. I love playing games. I want to make my own, right? But what motivates you will change over time. So, um I wrote down in the article like as an actionable tip, I just said like start kind of like checking in with yourself. I said quarterly. You could do this at some interval. But my point is like don't just do it once, right? Because if you do it once, you might kind of get an understanding for yourself around like what gets you engaged and motivated, but that could change. um quarterly might be too frequent you know once a year might be too frequent for you I don't know but doing it at some interval I think is really good because as you are growing and changing as a person what motivates you you're sort of um your life situation will change over time right I always say um back when I was working at that startup I was working around the clock non-stop I didn't have any other obligations work gym eat, sleep, that's it. That absolutely does not work when you're married or if you have kids. Like it just doesn't it you have different priorities in your life? And I certainly do now as well. So some things change over time. So I just said like you want to ask yourself um around like so I said is the work I'm doing buying me the freedom I care about? Right? Are you getting that flexibility in your schedule? That might be something for some people where they're like, I need flexibility because of the other things I like to do. Um, this the second point I wrote is like saving to walk away someday. For me, that's kind of it. It's not because, you know, not because I hate work or something like that, but that that freedom of being able to walk away and being like, I just don't have to do I don't have to work for someone. I love that idea. If I reach that point, I don't think that I'll instantly just like quit whatever I'm doing, but I I want that feeling of like I don't have to work for someone. That's a cool spot to be in. Work, gym, eat, sleep. That's exactly it. Yeah, that's a way to do it. Um, and then, you know, the third bullet I wrote was ability to build something on the side, right? So again, I think the the second and third bullet I have I'm just going to share my screen by the way because I'm talking about it, but I'm not sharing I'm just kind of reading through this part here, right? So saving to walk away, ability to build something on the side. Those two things for me are like right up there in terms of like self-fulfillment, right? Don't want to have to work for someone. I love building stuff though. So if I had just had more time to build fun stuff on the side, like that would be awesome. And then the last one I wrote here too is like more time for your spouse, children, friends, and family because I think, you know, obviously for me that's a big aspect of my life now. And I think for many people that's going to be a big aspect, right? Especially if you have children, right? You don't want to be, you know, working your entire adult life non-stop and not having any time for your children. So I think that's an important consideration, especially for people with families. So nothing wrong with money though, but I would say what is the like truly are you motivated just by a number going up or is it because that you're sort of buying time to to have later for something else. So to Scott's point, the next section I had in the newsletter was around impact, right? So, I've kind of already said the part that was written out in the newsletter, but before Microsoft, I worked at this forensics company. And for me, that was that was a a top-notch feeling, right? Um, I think that it's really important to figure out why you're doing the work you're doing, not only for yourself, right? So, finding out what actually motivates you in the work you're doing, but I think that one thing we miss a lot as software engineers. Hey Andreas, thanks for joining in. I think one thing that we miss a lot and I don't blame just the software engineers like as an engineering manager I miss on this a lot too. We don't talk about why enough, right? And I and I mean this it's kind of weird but like think if you're a software engineer, right? I want you to think about the last project you were given or the last, you know, feature, the last ticket, whatever it happens to be. It doesn't have to be a really big project. Did you go through that and it was like you almost like understood the what like I have to go add a new menu in. I have to go make the service uh faster or I have to go fix this bug so that this you know this workflow doesn't mess up. You you kind of know what to do or what you're going to be tackling. But do you understand why? And I mean for a bug it's like why am I doing it to fix the bug? Of course. Like but but what is the impact of that? Right? If you're adding a menu into a product, like why is that menu helpful? If you're trying to optimize things, why is it actually helpful to be optimizing? I think that a lot of the time we don't ask these questions. So, one of the things that I wanted to remind people of, you know, if you are a software engineer, I like I I wrote it in a particular way that hopefully kind of stands out, right? So, just to kind of flip back, share my screen. I wrote it this way. Ask the who cares question. I feel like who cares maybe is a little bit more memorable than just why. But when you ask yourself like who cares? It's not to be sarcastic, right? It's not like a facicious, oh, who cares? I don't give a crap. It's like who cares about this? Like to understand who cares, right? Who does this help? what kind of impact are we having for that audience if this is successful this project and how do I make this outcome more real right why do like how do I get like invested into this to make a positive impact on whatever it is that you're doing because this is the kind of thing and I know this probably sounds a little bit like woo woo fluffy whatever I get it um this is the kind of thing that I think that can help turn on engagement in the work that you're doing because you might be given a series of things at work and you're like I just don't give a crap like okay give me the next ticket sure whatever right like thanks for the paycheck whatever in here 9 to5 whatever but what's happening is that you're not actually caring about the work that you're given and I don't mean that because you're doing something bad or wrong I mean because we literally don't often question why. So Ryan said in the chat, "The why is crucial, especially for the up and cominging generation. They strive on the why." Um, Andreas says, "Uh, do you think it's, uh, it's harder to have impact and to find a sense of why in large corporations as opposed to smaller companies?" I think it depends. Um, you know, my my experience is only between two companies. So that's my bias. The way that I would answer that for my own experience is absolutely yes. Except I also have this kind of ridiculous bias where I went from the digital forensics company I said that I was at where it's like we're helping save kids to like Microsoft which uh I was on the deployment team for office 365. So the scale of the impact is planetary that gets across the entire planet. So that's really big impact in terms of coverage. I'm on the routing plane team for Office 365 now too. We do trillions of requests per day. Like that's also ridiculous scale. So like the scale in terms of impact is there but the why is kind of interesting. I know why. Like we're enabling the entire Microsoft Office suite to work. That's that's pretty impactful, right? the work that we're doing enables Co-Pilot to be successful at Microsoft. That's also ridiculously impactful. But in terms of how that aligns with like my personal values, like I understand the impact of that, but to me, what feels like more impactful is, you know, the like when I was basically writing software to help save kids. That hits closer to home, but that could look different for different people. So my to answer your question Andreas I just feel a little bit biased because the sort of the the dichotomy between these two scenarios is like pretty extreme. So I I think the answer though might be yes generally and the reason I would say that is that um there just kind of like to generalize right a lot more bureaucracy things are a lot more slower moving at larger companies versus at a smaller company you're kind of like go go go ideally you have this really tight feedback loop with a customer or customers to be able to build things that you know you're that they need like so that feed feedback cycle is very short and I just find it maybe at larger companies it's slower you're more disconnected so that sense of why is harder to get sort of naturally but we can and we should ask that right if I have engineers I tell them if I have engineers that come to me and they're like why is this important I don't I don't take that as a question where they're like Nick I don't trust you on this or I think this is dumb I would want them to ask me why it's important so that I can help explain pain. I'm just going to check the questions in one moment just to finish up this thought. I had an employee on my team and I I've shared this story before. When I joined the current team that I'm on now, I was trying to catch up on one of the projects. Okay? So, I joined the team. I'm brand new to all of it and there was a project going on and I wanted to basically get a meeting held where I could talk with the PM. I could talk with the engineer on the team and like they knew what the work was, right? So, we talked about it and I remember syncing with the engineer the next day on our one-on-one. You know, like I said, I'm new to the team. So, I was like, "Hey, how do you think that went? Like, you know, did you anything that you learned?" Like, I want to make sure it was valuable for them, too. Not that I'm just wasting people's time. And he said, "Yeah, like that was super helpful for me." And I was kind of like, "Okay, like that's awesome news. Like, it was really to help me, but awesome news that it helped you." And he was like, I he said like I kind of knew what I was doing, but no one had actually stopped to tell me why we were doing it. I didn't know why. So, it was a I'm not going to get into the details of it, but it was a cool moment where I was like, "Holy crap." Like, you're not going to I'm going to remember that one and keep bringing it up because it's an awesome reminder that like understanding why can get people more engaged. Uh engineers are super smart people. they can get more creative, right? If you tell them what to do versus why, if you tell them what to do, they're just kind of you don't you can kind of uh like that's that's what AI is for, right? You can just have AI go do it. But when you tell people why and they can get creative and solving problems, that's where I think the real value is. Uh Devin says, "Yep, the software I work on is something that people interfaced with uh during what can be very frustrating process. It needs to be there to help and inform, not get in the way and add friction. Yeah, this is um I think a lot of people create software, and I'm not minimizing what Devon's saying. I think a lot of people create software that uh can be in scenarios like this. And sometimes we think about like, oh, as long as it can get the work done for them, but it's like, man, if you put yourself in their shoes, if it's in a stressful situation, whatever, if you can minimize the friction, you can make it smooth. that is such like a level above just getting it done. So definitely good to call out. Jonathan Baron, welcome back. Uh question at the entry level, do you judge motivation a lot more uh to know if they'd mess up a team dynamic? Asking because I don't know if it uh if fit doesn't matter at higher levels much. Um I think I I'll frame it this way. if I were running a company um and okay so how people are motivated I don't know if this is the right way I think I think everyone's gonna have their own internal motivations right so to be careful on how I answer this if someone said to me I'm motivated by money or I'm motivated by you know making sure that I have a flexible schedule what they're motivated by I don't think really affects my perspective on that Um, so it's not the what around the motivation, but I think the word I like and again this is kind of like woo woo, but like passion is the word that I like, right? So if I am work, if I were running a company, I would really want to find people that are passionate about what we're doing. That's how I would frame that because I find that when people are passionate about some topic, they will be more naturally engaged. They will be more naturally curious. That doesn't mean that I expect crazy hours from them or something like that, but I like the word passion to describe that because I know that they have like built into them an interest in having something succeed, right? So, that's something that I would really chase especially and I know um Jonathan your framing was kind of like entry level versus um higher levels. I think it's important for me at all levels. Now the the other framing that I would add in is like earlier on in a team's creation that is the most important thing above everything else in my opinion. I would much rather have a team of people that have never even programmed before that are like really passionate about something. I would rather put a team together like that than getting like, you know, like one super programmer brought in and they're like, I don't care about what we're doing, but I have all the skills. Like I I honestly would not prefer that. I would much rather have people that are super passionate because I know that those people will stick around. They want to grow and they want something to succeed as that grows. And I'm talking about this too from the experience of when I was at that startup that I talk about. It was like seven or eight people when I started there and it grew to like over 250 people by the time I left. So the people that were there in the beginning, I'm not saying that other people that came later didn't have passion for it, but I know that people there in the beginning had passion for it cuz I was around them. We watched it grow. We watched it scale. You know, we were in the trenches in the beginning like typical startup times. And then at some point in the company's growth, you're going to have more people that come in that aren't like, you know, super in love with the mission, super passionate about it. And that's okay at that point. We've already like we've scaled up enough that um I feel like that can get a little bit diluted. Ideally, it doesn't in my opinion. Ideally, it doesn't. But I think realistically it's almost impossible to expect that 100% of people that work for your company are like the most passionate about that as a topic. So I hope that answers Jonathan. I know it's not quite the motivation part, but I think that's the metric that I would really look at. Um I think I think that I don't frame the motivation as an entry level to to more higher level kind of thing honestly. Um, but yeah, hope that makes sense. Uh, Ryan's responding, Andreas. Yes. However, it's up to the manager to make sure to explain and relate to them why from executive leaders to the why that makes sense for you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think absolutely. Right. Um, that's the thing. The why for execs is different for the Y for directors, which is different for the Y for managers and so on so forth. 100%. Right. So, this is why, no pun intended, this is why I like talking about this because you when you have bigger companies, and this is kind of I think Ryan's kind of explaining this pretty well. When you have bigger companies, there's more layers involved. There's more opportunity uh for miscommunication. There's more opportunity that we can create communication. My dog Laya just came in the room. You gonna You're leaving already? I see that that my door is over here. You guys can't see it because it's off camera, but I see the door open and there's no human. And then I can hear this one. You want to come on the stream? You guys can't see her, can you? Who's up here? Yeah, she comes in here and then she farts. That's what she does. It stinks. Okay, Lila, you gotta go. You're farting. I can smell you. Come on. Okay. But yeah, the um when you have different levels, right, and different stakeholders involved, the the why does change. And I think that like I was saying before this smelly dog came in here, um it's it's important to be able to talk through this. I was saying there's an opportunity for miscommunication but there is this opportunity we need to create and fulfill to communicate across all these levels so that people do understand why so that we can motivate each other behind the work that's going onto hi uh nice to see you again yes thanks for joining again u I was hoping to ask your take on something of a few people I know at Microsoft here in Washington state who got laid off under the premise of AI remaining people are afraid to speak up and keep it to themselves. Do you see this happening from your end? No, I don't on my side. Um, I think that there's a Okay, a lot of different angles on this, right? Um, I think that what you see in the media a lot is there's an opportunity to conflate a lot of things because it makes a good narrative. And even and sorry and I this is a like a touchy subject, right? So, as I talk through this, I absolutely do not want to minimize anyone's experience. Laya, you got to go. Come on. You got to go. Just trying to lick my leg now and fart. Um, I don't want to minimize any anyone's experience because, you know, that's their own unique experience. I was not there for it, right? I it's it's really difficult for me to comment on it. But I think what we end up seeing is like you have all of this AI stuff in the news. Okay. So people see AI, they see AI is replacing these types of roles, these types of roles, right? Software engineers, we're all screwed. That's the end of the line for us. Then it was, oh, AI is going to like we don't need AI or sorry, we don't need the PMs and engineering managers because of AI. But like, is that the actual narrative? Because I I don't actually believe that that's the true reason. So, I am not privy to the conversations that were happening around the last round of layoffs or the most recent sort of big wave of it. I do not believe that someone said, "Oh, you know what? We can just use AI to replace these people." I don't think that that's what's happening. And I say that because I have not seen a single team at Microsoft and I only work in a part of Microsoft. It's huge. I work within Office 365. I don't even work in Azure. Okay, Azure is a whole that's a different that's a different thing. I don't even work in Windows. I don't work in Xbox. I don't work at LinkedIn, right? I work in a part of Office 365, like specifically the infrastructure part. I have not seen a single team that has had pressure from executives, pressure from any type of leadership to be like start culling people because the AI replaces them. It's it's just not it's just not a thing that's happening. There has been no mandate at least anything that I've been privy to. Okay. Now, what we have had forever, and when I say forever, I've only been at Microsoft 5 years. Before the big AI push on everything, right? Since I've been at Microsoft, there has always been conversations of we need to be more efficient as an engineering organization because that makes a lot of sense, right? We need to always find ways to be doing more with less. always take AI completely out of that conversation. I stand behind that. I think that totally makes sense. We're always trying to optimize what we're doing. How do we become more productive? Right? If you can't grow your team, how can you be more efficient? Right? So again, forget the AI thing. We all know what happened a few years ago, right? Where there was a big mass amount of hiring in a lot of companies, a lot of remote work. We all remember that sort of sort of dark period across the world but there was a booming amount of like software engineers being hired and then kind of peaked right and then everyone's like oh it's because AI it's not because of AI there also happens to be an AI sort of factor here but that's not what happened okay and then so hiring slowed down then hiring you know ground to a halt And I would say like are we like when I say we I don't just mean Microsoft. I mean like many big tech companies or larger companies in general. Are we at a point where we went hm maybe we hired too aggressively. I think the answer is yes. Right. You're rapidly trying to scale up to meet demands. You have to keep growing teams. I got to get this dog out of here. You got to give me one sec. Sorry folks. Laya. Come on. You got to go. Get out of here. Can only take so many dog farts before I can't think straight. Oh boy. Um, but yeah, I think in general with um what we see going on is that it's not a I don't think it's like directly tied to AI. Now then people can make the statement well if Microsoft is so focused on AI isn't anything that they're doing if it's going to be layoffs or efficiency or anything like that doesn't it have to directly correlate to AI then sure um I just personally I don't I don't see it as a matter of like AI replace the human and I have not seen any of that happening from from my experience so hopefully that helps and uh of course um the the layoffs and stuff suck. I know I've had um conversation I I didn't have it directly. I was sort of part of the communication a couple years ago where there were layoffs and I remember there were people at Microsoft that were like hey like our or is hiring like why did we not just like whoever got laid off we just transferred them in. In my head it seems like a very obvious thing right? If you I'm just making up numbers here randomly. If there were a 100 people over here that are getting laid off because the business organization that they're in just ceases to exist and we know that they're great people because they've been working for Microsoft. If we have a hundred spots over here, why would we not just find a way to try and keep those awesome people? Like to me it seems like it must be so simple, but it just doesn't work that way apparently. So, I remember having a like hearing from an executive that was like, "Hey, we have spots open. If anyone knows those people that were getting laid off, like, you know, get their contact information. Let's try what we can to like try bringing them back in." But it's not like an internal process. I don't know why that's just not built in. Seems weird, right? Because you see it in the news. It's like, "Oh, there's all these layoffs and could be at Microsoft, could be at any company." And then people are like, "But they're still hiring." Like, "What the hell's going on? It's not it's not right." Yeah, it seems weird to me. But I guess like I don't know the complexities of companies this scale. There's got to be some reason for it because if it seems like it's illogical, it's because we don't know all of the details of what's going on. There is a logical reason for it. You might not like it. You might not understand it. I certainly don't like it or understand it, but I can trust that there is a reason. It's very unfortunate though and I do wish that there was a more streamlined mechanism for, you know, if there's a business organization that is just going to cease to exist, then we can have a way to bring people over. So hopefully that helps. Sorry I don't have a, you know, better answer. Um, bit skeptical when it comes to these statements, but I do understand how people may feel regarding being laid off. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean this is the like kind of the very last part of your comment like as someone like I'm the person on the video saying the words out loud, right? What I don't want to do is I don't want to tell people like you're wrong for thinking that. Right? I would I feel like that's the wrong thing for me to say. So when asked why it's easy to pin it on AI, like I think it is easy to pin it on it. I don't I just don't necessarily think that it's a direct relationship. Like the example I gave was, you know, get rid of uh you know, one human because you can bring in AI to do it. I don't think that's the case at least for what was going on. But I don't, you know, I don't know. Maybe maybe someone was making, you know, these decisions in a room and they said, "Hey, we can get rid of these people because we can just get 6,000 co-pilots." like I don't I just don't think that's what happened. But that's my my take on it. So, um, data dog cameo. Yeah, she's I love Yla. She's 10 years old now. She just turned 10. I've told stories about Laya before. Um, Laya is the the dog that I got when I was reaching peak burnout in the startup that I was at. And when I say peak burnout, it wasn't like when I've I've made videos and stuff on this before, it's not it's not like traditional. I loved going to work, but like I was reaching a point where I was developing social anxiety because I didn't do anything except work. So, I ended up deciding I'm like, I need to have a responsibility outside of work. I'm like, I'm going to get a dog. So, I've always, you know, once I had Laya, I've made posts and videos and stuff on this. I will always say Yla has saved my life because if it weren't for that dog, I probably just would have kept working to a point where the amount of social anxiety that I had would have been pretty crippling, right? I used to be like, you know, in high school, in university and stuff, love to go out, hang out with friends. I go party on weekends and stuff. I used to when I was in high or I guess high school and end of high school like into university. I used to like DJ in my hometown. So I'd hold it's a small town and I'd have all the all the people from the town or the the kids, right? Like the high school kids would come in. I'd hold these arena dances for them. I thought I was a pretty outgoing person. I'm introverted, but I thought that I could like be social, right? And I just remember the years after university just constantly working. I was like, I don't like people. I don't know what to say around them. I don't even like it's hard for me to be around my own friends. Not because I don't like them. It's because I'm anxious. I have nothing to talk about, right? I just work. So, Laya was the solution to that. And she's been amazing. But as she gets older, she gets quirkier. So, she's just odd. Um, she probably didn't do it when she walked in here, but she walks backwards a lot, which is really funny. um the farts get more aggressive. So sometimes she'll be sleeping and then she'll fart and wake herself up and if she doesn't have a carpeted floor, it's a vicious cycle because she'll start to slip when she's running from her her fart scare and then she farts more and then scares herself more and then it's amazing to watch. But anyway, she's she's getting weirder as she gets older. But she's a lot of fun. Um architect, I can hear your dog breathing. Yeah, she when she walks in like that, she's like she's on a mission. Like, so she's panting sometimes. She snorts and stuff, but um yeah, she's a lot of fun. Um Matthew, latest phase of my primary motivation, setting up the dev teams to succeed. Most consistent personal struggle, almost uncontrollable tendency to defend the team, even if it puts me under the bus. Interesting. Matthew, if you're still on the stream, sorry that it took me a little bit of time to get to your comment. Do you want to elaborate on that? Because that sounds like that's pretty interesting. I'd love to dig into that. That might even be like a good code commute topic for me to to stream of consciousness on if we don't get to it in in this uh live stream. Um, proper duck games still merit based though. Were they awesome people? uh for the last round of layoffs it was merit-based. If it was then I mean I don't think that it's it's even more reason that it's not AI related. Um I know that like so without tying it to the last round of layoffs because again I don't know I wasn't laying off people. I'm a I'm a middle manager. I didn't have to go through any of this. I didn't get laid off. You know managers are part of the layoffs and stuff too. Um, I know that people have asked this and I've done videos on it for Code Commute. People were saying, "Oh, I heard like Microsoft is going hardcore with pips and stuff now and like basically they're going to be cutthroat and like tell me what you've heard about that." And I was like, "I've not heard anything about that." And the only thing that I've heard that's remotely close to that is like that's a gross exaggeration of it. So the what has been communicated was that like people that are consistently underperforming for over a year, they're like, "Managers, you need to do something about that." There's a very obvious signal. We do these checkpoints with people and it's a really big deal. If someone is not performing well, you have to have a conversation with them. You have to basically make it very apparent, right? So, it's not a surprise to people when they enter that phase. But that's not like that hasn't changed and that doesn't mean that you're getting fired either. Like it doesn't at all. In fact, I've worked with people that have gone into that and come back out of that totally fine. So, that's that's always been the same. Now, if you are doing that for an entire year and there is no progress, that's the only communication we've had that's like, look, you need to take responsibility over this, right? If you're trying to coach people and it's not working for over a year, you've already indicated this person's underperforming. So, you need to go figure this out. Otherwise, you need to be making sure that as soon as someone enters that period of low performance, you are absolutely doing what you can to get them out of that. So, that's all that's been communicated to me. And that 100% makes sense. If you're an engineering manager and you have people on your team that have been communicated with that are consistently underperforming for over a year, probably makes sense that they're not a good fit on the team. or you've been doing a crap job coaching and mentoring. So like I don't know that's what I've kind of been hearing and to me it makes a lot of sense but it was not um like put you know put the X bottom percent on pips like stack rank people pip them out like manage them out nothing like that. So anyway, just to clarify, um, cool. Let's, um, let's jump back to this to this article. Um, the one thing I wrote, I'm just going to switch back so you can see it. I talked about underdog energy. Um, this was something that I realized for myself like really gets me motivated. I don't know, maybe it's weird. Maybe other people feel this way. would be curious because I have talked about this before but I don't think I've talked about it on a stream to see like live and get feedback from people um if this is something that aligns with you. I'm going to explain it a little bit though. So I I like using the digital forensics company I was at as an example not only as the company itself but even one of the teams I managed. So that digital forensics company was a small company when I started there. There were two major players in computer digital forensics. They already had monopolies over the entire industry. And here we are. We're like the founder of the company is like I made a tool. I was giving it away for free. I started selling it as a police officer. Maybe I should make a business out of this. And so that's our starting point. And these companies already have a monopoly. They are the two players that if you are doing digital forensics for computers, you have their software. That's just how that's just how it is. And so for me, working at that company and being like, we're absolutely the underdogs and everything is against us. We have the biggest mountain to climb. That was actually like really motivating because it was like, "Okay, we're going to show you, right?" Like we It's this feeling of like you like you can't tell us what to do. You can't tell us we can't do it. Like we're going to show you that we can. And having other people around me that also felt that way was just like an absolute multiplier to like why that felt so good. If I was the only person that felt like that, I think that would take a lot of energy, right? I think some people have experienced this, right, where you'll have someone tell you you can't do that and you're like, I'll show you. And like you do it, it might feel good, but it takes a lot out of you to go like invest that time, that energy, that focus. But I found when I had people around me that were like this, it was just like, you know, amplified that feeling so much. Um, so sorry I'm just reading the chat before I see if I need to to pivot what I'm saying. The other thing that I wanted to say from this company is that I managed a team at some point and we were leading the mobile digital forensics and by the time we were doing this um it was like when we started it was me and one other person and the one company there was one company that has like a billion dollar parent company that has a complete monopoly over all mobile phone forensics and there were two of us at this company and we're like guess we're starting to build you know the mobile forensics solution for us and we started building it and we formed a little team around it the team was always very small I think at most that team probably had six or seven people tops including like an intern at any given point in time and that team was basically indirect direct competition. This team I managed with a company that was backed by like a, you know, multi-billion dollar parent company that had a monopoly and we were building stuff and we were like, "Yep, our stuff can do things that your your software doesn't. Our stuff can do it better. We have better user feedback." It was so awesome to be like, "We're the underdogs." So, for me, that was a huge huge motivator. Um yeah, I I really like that. There's one one more example from from Microsoft because I think on the code commute episode when I was talking about this um you know that feeling like of it can't be done. So I talked about underdog but that feeling of it can't be done like we'll will show you. I don't know if they're the exact same thing, but it kind of feels like they're related to me. But there's a an example from Microsoft from when I first started because I was thinking, you know what, I don't know if at a big company like Microsoft, can I ever get that feeling again? Like, we're not the underdogs. We're Microsoft. It's a huge company, right? Given the distribution channels at Microsoft, if someone at Microsoft was like, "We should launch a product in a completely different industry or niche or something. If it were supported, you have like a ridiculous distribution channel to start putting it in front of people. So, you could very quickly, I'm not saying that you'd be the top product, but you could very quickly have your product in front of many, many users. So like how do you how are you the underdog ever? So I was like maybe it's not an underdog feeling but this feeling of like it can't be done like it's an impossible challenge and like okay we're going to own it and so the example I had was that when I started at Microsoft um I joined at a time where my team was just going into planning and my manager at the time was like hey like I know you just joined we're going into planning. He's like, "I obviously don't expect you to come up with the plans for a team that like you don't even know what we're doing yet." So, he's like, "I'm I'm doing the planning. I'm I'm involving you, but I I'll sort of set things up, make sure that you know, you have alignment with them, and then you can go drive the team, right? And then, you know, next time that you this is something you can own. Makes a lot of sense." And I remember that he had set a target for something. My team was focused on uh optimizations during deployment, just for context. and he set a target for one of the optimizations we had and it was like a 60% reduction and I was like okay seems like a lot but like cool and when I went to the team to talk about it they were like that's absolutely impossible like not a chance and so they were saying like based on work we've done before we've already done optimizations we're kind of at a wall right now it's not going to So now I'm in this position where I'm like okay um you know my my manager says should be feasible. The engineers on my team are like not going to happen. And the other thing that I should mention too is that the goals are set to be aggressive and they're to um not hold people accountable for not getting 100% of the way. But like if we got 80% of the way, that would be definitely a success. Setting them aggressively like that is to make sure that we're thinking about things in creative ways, not just like chipping away and making like very very small improvements. So I talked to the team about this. They're like, "Hey, it's not really going to work. You know, we've already done this." And I'm like, "Okay, well, where are we at right now?" "Well, we don't really we don't have that measured." Okay, so basically all the optimizations that were done were done and measured but we don't have a trend of it. No. Okay, let's go build the trend. So start, you know, doing the analytics for it. We start realizing that we can break down um the analytics to be more granular. And then we started to realize we can chip away at this. And it turned into this like again this momentum around we we heard it was impossible but now we have we have evidence that we're progressing against it. We are tackling this problem down. So um for me it was just another example of like the impossible is going to be conquered and that is a really big motivator for me. It doesn't come up in all the work I do though, right? But when it comes up like if I could pick the and I guess I'll get to this in a moment so I'm not going to spoil it but um it's a it's a factor and I think that I I want to make sure that throughout my career I can find a balance that includes that. Um Matthew says the team is doing great. We didn't have the support we needed for a while and that was back related to um almost uncontrollable tendency to defend the team and if it puts me under the bus. Okay. Uh, Saratu, hey, think of building something huge for my next startup. Uh, do you know what? N8. What? I can't keep seeing this. Why do I not even know what this is? It's some Yeah, AI automation. But what is it stand for? What's it stand for? Sorry, I'm searching it, but it doesn't even tell me on their site. It stands for something, right? When you do the N and then the eight and then the N, it's because there's characters in between. They've replaced there's eight characters in between or something. Maybe not. Maybe it's just called N8N. There's a huge delay between the chat like here and then the chat on YouTube. So, I'm just going to sit here looking like an idiot until someone tells me um what does oh the the Google search there's a what does N8N mean? N8N is nodebased meaning each step or action in a workflow is a node. These nodes can be anything from sending email. Okay. Yeah, it's B. It's Zapier, right? And I think that that's um seems like Zapier to me. I don't know. I've never heard of Framer, though. And I have heard of N8N. I just don't know what it is. Low code, no code platform. I will never touch another one of these again in my life, just for the record. Um I'm not saying that you should not or cannot. I just will never do it again. Um and I'll tell you why. Because I built um the original version of Brand Ghost is what which is what I'm building on the side. I built in a nollow code platform and I can build stuff. I just decided I'm going to do it this way because then trying to fight my inner software engineering urge like don't go build it yourself. Just like connect the dots, it'll be better. And I did this until I realized I had all of these things going and I was hitting an absolute bottleneck. I'm like, I can't do anything that I want to do because I'm on this stupid platform. So then I started extending it. So I had a server that I was calling like you could use like custom integration. So, I'm calling my web server to go do the other work. And I started replacing it like over time, like just building out the functions until I could drop this thing all together. That thing was Zapier. I was spending $1,200 a year on Zapier. Zapier is trash. I have never had I'm just going to say it. I have never had such terrible support from a company in my entire life. ridiculous. So, no, I personally won't be using any other no/ low code platforms. Um, I'm not saying that you can't, but I basically hit a limit, started building stuff myself, and I should have done it from the beginning, to be honest. Um, but that's that's me. Uh, Deon says, "I had the underdog thing when I worked at the startup. We were uh going up against established players who had gotten too comfortable." That's exactly it. The established players get too comfortable. The unfortunate thing is that when you stay at these companies for too long and they grow, you also get too comfortable. That is the biggest risk is being too comfortable. So it all it's going to take is for a scrappy small company that moves fast, right? Don't get too comfortable. Um, Young Bird, sounds like my team I just started with seven devs total and we were rewriting an entire API and two devs are building our mobile app. Yeah, who here believes that Jesus is Lord? Um, seems like maybe not the right chat for that, but it also looks like a spammy username. Anyway, um, yeah, Cerrito. Um, I don't know. I think if you're building something cool, sounds fun. I'm just not using those platforms at all. So, um I wrote in my newsletter, autonomy is not a perk. So, this isn't the some of these things were my reflections when I was thinking about engagement, motivation. Um autonomy is huge for me. I It took me a while to realize this. I don't think anyone really likes being micromanaged, but I found that when I am being micromanaged, I am absolutely zero interest in what I'm doing at all. I could not have my engagement drop any faster than having someone micromanage me. Hey, the great Wah, thanks for coming back. I think this is week three in a row. Good to see you. I appreciate you being here. So yeah, autonomy for me is a huge one. Um, I think that I think for me I like understanding why, right? We were talking about why earlier. I like knowing what the goal is, why we're doing it, and then I like having the trust in me and the sort of uh the safe place to fail, right? knowing that there is trust in me. Um, if I'm communicating effectively, we're making progress on things. If I'm going to fail, it's not going to be a spectacular failure where everything blows up. It's more like, hey, this is we can I don't know, we can pivot. Like, we can that might not have been the right direction. Let's go a different course, right? But there's enough trust and respect with me to go take that and own that because if I mess up, I will take it and own it. I will learn from it. I will teach others about that experience. But I cannot stand when someone is telling me exactly what to do because as soon as that happens, I go, "You don't actually need me. I am not the button presser. I am not the email sender, right? I am not I'm not just here to like pass your message to the next person. I cannot stand it." Um, and I think that was a good learning for me that motivation is going to be needs to involve autonomy. So when I think about roles for my career, I think the reality is like I need to be in roles where I have that level of autonomy. So for example, I'm just going to say this, right? Like if I were if I'm at Microsoft and if my manager let's say I switch teams or something and my manager is like, "Nope, here it's clearcut. Like here's the stuff you got to do. Here's how you're doing it." I would leave. I would need to because I would be so disengaged with my work that it just it would be awful. So I think that was something that I realized. Um I was reflecting on this stuff because on code commute when I was driving I was going through the things that I was like these are things I've experienced that I really liked and then I had to kind of go through the opposite and I was like okay like in those situations I really didn't like that so that tells me that one of my primary motivators is sort of the opposite kind of thing. Um Sarah too um how do you go about learning new topics textbooks projects AI reading docs um not textbooks I am not big on reading to learn I need to be doing so projects are a huge thing um having AI available now is absolutely um a big thing so generally what happens is YouTube is the thing um and I want to say like social media in general, but primarily YouTube. YouTube's the thing that puts ideas in front of me like, "Oh, I haven't heard about that." Right? Okay, I'll give you an example. Um, I had never heard about the NADN thing until like social media, right? Today on this live stream was the first time I even looked it up. So now I'm exposed to a topic. Okay, just as an example, this is one simple one. Now I'm exposed to it. What I'm not going to do is just go reading articles on it. And obviously there's no textbook on it, but I would probably, you know, now that it's shown up in my search, YouTube will probably recommend something at some point to me. I might watch a YouTube video, right? Cool. But I use YouTube generally to dis to discover or it's kind of like a news thing for me where it's like, oh, haven't heard about that. Am I interested? If so, then there's this next step which is like maybe I'll try building something with it depending on how much time I have which is close to none now. Uh the other thing might be like asking AI about it, right? And now that we can get AI to go searching on the internet more effectively. We're not just like constrained to some point in time before it was trained. Um that can be really helpful. think AI and building stuff, but YouTube generally to discover topics. Um, the great wall autonomy and mastery are important to me. Yeah, that's an So, what's interesting is for me, mastery is not a huge one. Kind of weird. I think at some some point in my career, I was like, yeah, mastery for sure. At this point, not really. Um, I think that I used to be super motivated by the idea that like I want to be the best at what I'm about a thing I'm doing. But the I think the more time that I spent in management, the more that I realized that like I think I need to have broader uh broader scope of impact and that's like motivating for me. So it's not that I don't want to be good at things, but I don't feel like there's things I need to master. I've kind of accepted in my brain that like it may be difficult for me to find mastery in things because of how I've been operating. So, um, but that's that's interesting, right? I think a lot of people can get behind the idea of mastery being a motivator. For sure. Um, seems like the entrepreneurial mindset is somewhat appreciated at Microsoft. It's good to know. Yeah, I think like I think it probably depends on the team, right? And it's kind of weird to say because I'm sure there's teams where like at any big company, I'm sure there are teams where it's like we don't talk about the why, right? This could happen at Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Google, wherever. Any big company, don't talk about the why. Here's work to get done. Ship your features and bugs. Go home. Get your pay. Like, I'm sure. But um yeah, I think the reality is that on different teams you'll have this like even just to give you a good example, I remember last week my skip level manager, we were chatting with them and he said basically like how are you thinking about things compared to like industry standards? How are you thinking about things outside of what we're doing? Right? Which is cool because we need to be challenged that way. We need reminders to ourselves. It's not just about like chip away at something. It's like let's zoom out like how do we look at this problem space more broadly. So that kind of stuff does come up. I just don't think that every team probably does it. Um which is unfortunate but uh I I also don't know every team. I've been on two different teams at Microsoft. So um Certo, do you think that scaling with uh scaling with LMS will result in reaching AGI? Do you think that there needs to continue to be new discoveries to reach AGI? Um, I want to say the second part. Um, I think that we can probably I What's a good way to say this? I haven't I don't think I've articulated this thought before, so it might be a little messy. I feel like we can probably reach what looks like a simulation is not the right word. Like a fac almost like a facade is not the right word either. almost like a facade for AGI where it's like it's believable. I want to I want to bring up like the touring test, right? Like that exists to be able to, you know, detect if someone's or detect if something's human, right? Um and I think that if we had something like that for AGI, I think that if we kept on this track, we could probably convince people of it without it actually being like that. And I don't know what the threshold is. Again, I haven't really articulated this this thought before. There's probably on this trajectory without new discoveries where you could do like you could convince like 75% of the world that you have AGI based on what they're seeing and how they're interacting with it. And then I think once you start looking into it, it would be like well it's not there's enough patterns this is explainable whatever or that it's not AGI. So, I think that there needs to be new discoveries, but I am not well-versed enough in all of the different things when it comes to training or different technologies for this type of stuff. So, I'm saying that making an assumption, right? I don't like I don't like trying to to masquerade like I know things that I don't. That's like one of my biggest uh icks. That's what we call it, right? An ick when you're grossed out by something. The kids say that, I think. But um that would be an ick for me and I try to avoid it. It's also why if you watch videos um I always say that I overexlain things to teach. I also overexlain things because I am trying to prove to people that I know what I'm talking about because I have a fear of coming across like I'm just making a statement and it's completely empty, not based on anything because I have met too many people in my life that do that, right? They talk confidently about something and it's like they actually have no idea what they're talking about and I'm like, I don't want to be that person. So I end up overexlaining things a lot just like what I did right now. Um the great wall that's a healthy way to go about things for sure. Introspection is really important. Absolutely. Jonathan Baron on the autonomy. How do you know when red tape is appropriate versus slow slowing work down? Um depends on context I think obviously like software engineering answer it depends. Um how do you know when red tape is appropriate versus slowing work down? Okay. Um, a good way that I would frame this is like I'm going to use the word agility and I don't mean like agile software development. I just mean the nature of being um of having agility in the work that we're doing. I think that we want to be able to move fast but we want to be able to pivot fast too. If you are moving fast in a direction and it means that when you need to pivot and hit the brakes to go in a different direction. If hitting the brakes is too slow for you, it's too uncomfortable or it means that you have to spend a lot of time. I'm using like kind of an analogy here. You have to use a lot of time and energy to back up before you can go reset in a different direction. That's where I think some red tape is appropriate. So ideally you can move as fast as you can in one direction provided that you have a tight feedback loop and then you can turn on the dot. So if you're going this way really fast, you have a lot of signal and as soon as you have signal coming in that's like no, we're not moving in the right direction. Boom, you go this way. Boom, you go this way. Right? As fast as you can. If you're finding that you can't change directions fast or like I said you have to go backwards first and that's painful then I think we have to start introducing red tape to make sure that doesn't happen. Um, so to give you I'm just going to make up a random example, right? So let's I'm I'm really bad at coming up with ideas off the top of my head. Uh but it's a good practice, right? So uh let's say like Microsoft, we really value security. Uh if we were moving really fast on something because hey, like we're trying to be productive and we've been doing this stuff. We're move like go go go. If we were in a position where we were like, "Hey, we're gonna keep moving fast, but that might put security at risk, like automatically, no, we need red tape to make sure that is absolutely never going to happen because that's something that's so critical for us that we cannot risk it. As soon as there's an issue with security, we lose trust. And if we don't have trust with customers, we're toast." So, there needs to be red tape around security stuff. And sometimes it's super frustrating cuz we're like really security for this and it's like yeah like there is security around this like deal with it. And I'm saying that even to myself cuz sometimes I'm whining about it but like it's there for a reason. We need red tape on things like that. But my general perspective on that um yeah Ryan said it exactly. Moving fast does not equal a Formula 1 race. Moving fast equals pivoting quickly without skidding. Right? You want to be able to move fast, but you need to be able to turn fast. I'll give you another sort of real example um that is like technology based. I worked on the deployment team. Okay? So, we were responsible for rolling out all of the services for Office 365, hundreds of them. And we roll out like we tried to make the technology so that it can roll out as fast as possible. But we don't use it to roll out as fast as possible. We purposefully slow it down. Why? Because we need to introduce red tape so that we have enough time for signal to come in. We can understand things. We can pivot. We can mitigate risk. So slowing ourselves down means that we can move fast. We can change directions fast because we're not going too fast in one direction. technology supports it, right? Because if there's an a situation where we do need to do it, we have it. But in general, we don't. The other thing is if you need to go backwards, right? You want to make sure that if you go forwards, you want to ideally you can go backwards uh at the same speed or even faster. If you go backwards slower, this is that feeling of like, well, it's kind of extra risky now because if you're going in one direction, you're like, "Oops, we got to go back." Like, that's going to cost you even more time. It's painful. So, hopefully that helps. Um, I think it's a great question, though. Roadmap planning is helpful, too. Yeah. What's your take on roadmap planning? How far out? I have thoughts on this but um I think my opinion on roadmap planning is the conversation around what's going into the road map is the most valuable part. The actual plan almost never seems to come to fruition but I would love to hear more on this. Uh Ryan says also moving fast for you isn't the same speed for others. It's okay to move slower than other others if it means fast for you. Absolutely. It's totally true, right? All these things are relevant. Relative. Relevant and relative. There we go. Words are hard. Cool. Um I'm just looking back. Um couple other points that I made in the article for motivation. Um, I realized that um I like I think fulfillment for me, this was like the the reflection outside of stuff that is like just happening at work or has happened in my career. I think I really want to feel like I've created something that's my own um at some point in my career, right? It's not it's not today. It's not tomorrow. Hasn't happened yesterday, right? Um, I want to be able to I want to have my own software company. I want to be able to build something and say it's my own. And right now, like brand ghost could be that someday, but it's it's not in a spot where I'm like, oh man, like one more customer and I'm leaving Microsoft. No. Um, it's nothing like that. It's just like that that could be the vehicle for it someday, but I I really want to own my own thing and I I don't like it's kind of like I was trying to think about this on code when I was talking about I don't I don't fully know why, but like I feel that in me like I want I want to do it for me. I want something. And when I think about like that startup I was working at, um, those guys became extremely wealthy. I love them to death. Uh, the founder and the CEO, absolutely love them. I invited them both to my wedding, right? Uh, so it's not like I left and I was like, "Hey, you guys never talking to you again." But they they've they've absolutely made it. They're crushing it in all aspects of life. And when I think about that, I was like, and by the way, this isn't to regret what I'm about to say. always like to put this disclaimer in front. When I think about my time there, I was like, I invested so much of my time and energy into someone else's dream, right? I I enjoyed it, don't get me wrong. They compensated me. I got to work on really uh rewarding stuff. Like that part of my career is probably I don't know like in that time frame is probably the most that I'll ever learn in my entire career. just jam-packed into eight years. So, absolutely no regrets. But when I think about it, I am like, I helped build someone else's dream by putting all of my time and energy into it. And I was like, I want that for me. no regrets for them, but I want to be able to do that for me because if I can do it for someone else, and and when I say this, by the way, I'm not trying to say that I made them like I'm the reason that they're successful. I just mean that I was part of building something successful. And if I can put all of my energy into that for someone else, I want to put all of that energy in for me. I want that at some point in my career. I don't think that I will be fulfilled until that happens. And when I do like the the deathbed test, right, where you're on your deathbed and you're reflecting on your life, I would have a huge regret if I did not accomplish that. I don't know why, but that's something that I really want for myself. So, I think that's a good indicator that at some point in my my career, I need to find when that opportunity is and pursue it because I'll be missing that fulfillment. Um, Jonathan, thanks. Dropping times. Uh, I would agree with that. Just having a plan, thinking through potential issues is valuable. The pivoting when necessary. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Sorry. Thanks. Great. Well, yes, that's that's accurate. So, uh, the pivoting when necessary, like you said, signals could change the order of the feature entirely. Yeah. So, um, great point. So just to touch on this I think sometime and I'm not saying that the great wall I'm not saying that this is your claim. I have felt like in my career I see that people take planning as like if we plan super hard then we'll have all of our bases covered. We'll just we'll just predict everything that can happen and like we'll have plans for it. And I feel like the problem with that is that it's wrong every single time. The only thing I am 100% confident about from any planning I've ever been in, whether that was at Magnet Forensics as a startup to small company or Microsoft, I can say with 100% certainty anytime I leave planning, we will not do that plan. That is not the plan that we will follow. It's not going to stay consistent as long as we plan for. we will do something else. Now that doesn't mean that the planning was useless. In fact, I think that it's very valuable. But I think that what happens is that sometimes people overindex on how deep to go into it. And we start to lose sight of like I think the biggest value is the conversation, the the ideating, the the brainstorming, the thinking of what things we could do, trying to come up with ideas around them. But we have to acknowledge shit's going to change. Pardon my language. it's going to be different. We need to plan to be able to pivot from those things. If you can do that, then great. But I can tell you that the plan is not going to stick. And the further out you plan, the less likely it is. So when we do like, you know, six month planning, I'm like, it's not happening. First couple weeks maybe, if that, but you need to be able to have checkpoints so that you can pivot, right? You need that signal. My first professional IT role was a project manager scrub master. I know the plans change often. Yeah. Yeah. Um and you know I think I was recording a video today for code commute. I was saying like I don't have stats on this but I think probably at startups you probably notice this a lot where things are just more chaotic, right? Just like oh we got to go this direction. know this direction like and you know who knows which direction is actually right but you you pivot to keep testing things. Jonathan Baron reminds me of Harry Potter. Yeah. Uh when in the final one they realize none of their plans ever get used. Interesting. I have never watched all of the Harry Potters before. I'm not a Harry Potter fan. I don't know why. I think I'm team Lord of the Rings. And I I think I held it in me that I'm like, Lord of the Rings is better, so I can't like Harry Potter. Don't tell anyone I said that, though. Um, scroll moment. But I remember a speech that I was going to title winning the 100 meter dash by walking. Ah, there we go. That's cool. That sounds like a very good speech topic. I like that. Um, I think Okay. Yeah. couple couple points left on the article. So uh I think another thing that I realized this is from like a management perspective I think what motivates me is helping others and this took a bit of reflection beyond just work because it's something that I've tried to do like for a big part of my life like even um in high school like I would tutor people. I like helping. It feels good to be able to do it. Um, so help like when I do so when I do content creation, my goal is to help people, right? I make tutorials. I I'm do these live streams. I do code commute literally so I can answer people's software engineering questions, right? I'm just trying to help. I I always joke around with people on code commute like I lose money on YouTube like crazy, right? I make uh in across two YouTube channels in a month, I think I make $100. I think if I'm consistent with my publishing, and when I say make a $100, I mean from the ad revenue, I'm actually losing hundreds and hundreds of dollars because of the the video editing. I'm doing resume reviews for people. People send in their resumes, I review them, make videos on them. I don't make money from that. I lose like, you know, $40 to $70 per video I make on that plus my time. I'm just trying to help because I enjoy it. And so I feel like as an engineering manager, that's something that that aligns well for me because I get to try and I'm not saying that I'm always the most helpful, but it feels good to help. So I like helping the people on my team. I like helping make sure that they can grow in their careers. It it is a fulfilling thing for me. So um that's something you know when I was reflecting on motivation I need that in my life whatever that looks like. If um if I'm not managing people at some other point in my career I will need to find that fulfillment somehow. So hopefully whatever I'm doing is helping other people because I if I lose that connection of like I am responsible for helping then then it'll be a gap for sure. I think the thing I wrote down was like um and I'm sure many people have had this when you're helping someone and they finally go like oh like they have this aha moment where they're like that totally makes sense. I get it now. I love that. That is like for me it's such a good feeling to be part of that experience for them. So um anyway that's my reflection on that. Um the great war reading the fellow uh rereading the fellowship of the ring right now and very nice uh been grinding leak code recently to learn data structures and algorithms more. Do you have any advice on that? I'm really trying to prepare technical interviews. Yeah. Um Deon says code answers a question I didn't even know I had. I'm glad. Thanks Devin. I appreciate you being here. Um yeah, the great wall I think my my advice on this so for I'm just going to start by saying I absolutely cannot stand lead code. I think it is the dumbest thing that we have in the software engineering industry. And I don't mean that the concept is dumb because I mean if you like solving lead code problems like hell yeah go do lead code problems. you like I don't care what people's hobbies are. If you love to do lead code or like anything like that, great. Please go do it. Have fun doing it. I cannot stand that it's part of interviewing. I think it is the most useless thing ever. I say that as someone who has to interview like I am being interviewed as an engineering manager. I still have to do lead code problems. What the hell am I solving lead code problems for? It's completely useless. I've been on the other side of that for 13 years now almost in a couple months. 13 years. So, as someone who is conducting the interview, a lead code question is useless to me. What am I testing? That you practiced enough questions online that you can memorize enough of them. So I don't use lead code when I interview. If I need to have a programming question, I basically will use data structures and algorithms, but I will start with something very simple and just walk people through it, right? Tell me how you would build this with these constraints. Cool. Like no tricks, right? That's the thing I hate about lead code is you have to understand all these tricks. I've been in interview loops where people are giving their feedback about a candidate and they're like, "Oh, I asked them like whatever like lead code style question and like they they'll be like, "Oh, they did good, but like they they didn't know X and like that's how they they didn't get the answer. So like or not, you know, they don't have my vote." I'm like, "What the hell do you mean? They didn't know the trick. You tried you gave them a question with a trick. They didn't know the trick. So, you don't want to move them ahead for for conversation even though you said everything else is good. Like, what what are you testing? Like, I I can't stand this. And I've seen this happen so much. It drives me nuts. If I could change one thing about the software engineering industry that out of the way, get it out of here. But to answer your question, um how I would practice lead code problems is um I personally I need to time box things. So if just to give you an example, if I was like on a Saturday I need to dedicate my Saturday to grinding lead code. I could not do an eight hour session. I could take an eight hour window and say I'm going to do like 30 minute intervals. So 30 minutes I'm going to grind leak code and then I might take a 20 minute break to go do something. Half hour break to play video games. Just something else. Boom. Go back for 30 minutes. So time boxing is huge for me. Uh something that I like doing is checking like check the answers after and make notes of the questions that I'm I'm not getting. What I want to do is go back to those questions in a non-deterministic order because if I were to just go back and do it after I have the answer, I know how to solve it. I don't want to leave too little of a gap that it's still the same thing. It's kind of already in my brain. I want to come back to it and try to place it at a point where I'm like, I remember there was a thing here and then I need to struggle through it a little bit because I find that that helps me kind of solidify it. So it's not I don't just want the memory recall. If I leave it too long then I get stuck the same way. So I need to balance like you know I think a long session like an 8 hour window or something on a Saturday or you take an evening do a few hours but I need to chunk it up and then the ones I fail on I like revisiting but I have to kind of figure out a good timing for them. Um I think it's good to time box your questions. I think that it's good to talk about them out loud, which might feel silly because if you're doing these at home and you have, you know, a significant other, you have children, whatever, and you're like hanging out somewhere just like talking to yourself, solving Leco problems, might be weird. Um, do it because that's what you have to do in the interview. Practice it. Make it as close to the interview scenario as you possibly can. So that would be my recommendation. Um Devin says, "Hot take lead code is a loweffort way to whittle down the applicant pool." Yeah. You know, another hot take that I heard I think maybe today on LinkedIn, it was something along the lines of like lead code is just the thing that uh that is introduced by interviewers to make them like feel good about themselves which uh I think that's probably true for a lot of them to be honest. Great says not even just Le code but learning data structures and algorithms. I have degrees in the space but I did it not CS as a as a concentration. I enjoy software engineering and want to do that more. I think if you like if it's not just lead code if you just want to learn in like data structures and algorithms for me the best way to learn is by applying it. So if you had something like that, like what I would just recommend is whatever data structure algorithm you want to go learn more about, I would literally just go to chat GPT and say like uh I want to learn about the AAR algorithm. Like give me, you know, three quick project examples that I could go build where I need to implement AAR because I would need to do it. if I read the algorithm and try to just like learn by reading about it, it's just not going to work. I need to walk through it and do it that way. So, that's what I would recommend for me. Uh I don't know your most effective way for learning, but I've been I've been trying to use AI a lot more just for like I don't know like knowledge in general, right? So, you can the reason why is because you can ask it things and have it ex you can tailor how you want that response. Right? So in my example, I was saying, "Oh, I want to learn about the AAR algorithm." If you didn't say anything more, it might just describe the algorithm to you, but I want to learn about it. I know I learn by doing. So I would say, "Give me some simple project ideas where I can go implement it." So if it's explaining things to you in a way that you're not getting, you tailor those answers. Um, Jonathan Baron says, "I'm starting to learn the pillars, time boxing, level set, taking notes here." Yeah, Devin has called me out on for code commute cuz like every episode I'm like you need to level set expectations with your manager. That should be uh I think we were talking about shirts or something that said level set expectations or something. Um Deon says I think it's good to have a mental index of data structures and algorithms so that you have an idea uh what can apply to a problem. Yeah, I think for me personally on the data structures and algorithms part, I think that it's important to understand that there are data structures with certain characteristics if you have them memorize different story because at this point I don't think there's a lot of value in things being memorized because you can find answers very quick but knowing that there's data structures that have certain characteristics. You might not remember the name. You might remember the name, but you can't remember one of the characteristics. Whatever. If you have some breadth of knowledge around that that when problems come up, you might go, "Oh, like I think there's a thing that does this." I think that's the important part where you can kind of stop yourself and go, "Oh, uh, what is that again?" Because you can just ask AI, you can search it online, you can ask a friend. But the point is that you remember there's a thing that can do it. Same with the algorithms, right? If you're traversing a graph, there is guaranteed there's guaranteed to be an algorithm that can optimally traverse your graph, you don't need to go reinvent that. So, if you're working with nodes in a graph, um you could probably find something that exists already that will do it optimally for you. There's many examples like that, especially like, you know, you're going over sorted data and stuff. you need to go find things. Like there's a million different things, but I think the most important part there is that you have this ability to um to sort of stop yourself from from either reinventing the wheel or um I don't know like failing to acknowledge that there's something there that can go help you. Uh you might pick the wrong tool, right? But I think if you have this opportunity where you're questioning it, that's an opportunity where you might stop yourself from picking the wrong tool. So, uh, Carlos, some interviewers just want to show that they are smarter or know more than you. Yep. My worst experience during interviews has been when the interviewer is another developer. Yeah, I've had I've had weird situations in interviews for sure. Um, and like I said, even being in the interview loops talking to the other interviewers, I get that feeling where I'm like, oh, like what are we doing here? Like, are we just trying to make people feel like crap or are we looking for talent? I don't know. Like, anyway, okay. Um, I think that's probably it, folks, on um on the topic. I think the very last thing there was I was just saying like another way to look at motivation is to look at what demotivates you, right? I kind of touched on this earlier. If you have a hard time trying to pinpoint the stuff where you're like, I don't really know. Like, if I could make a list of all the things I want in a job or in a role, you're like, it's hard. Like, try the opposite. Like, what really demotivates you, gets you disengaged? And then the opposite of that might be something where you're like, hell yeah, like that's the thing I want. So, something to think through on that note. But this is of course the part where I jump over and I share stuff and I awkwardly try to tell you about all the other stuff I got going on. So this is Dev Leader Weekly. This is where my newsletter is. This is uh the live stream to Substack which is a total inception. But this is the article that I was just talking through. So I will apparently not share the link. Let me copy it from here. There's my big dumb face. There you go. So, a reminder for folks because there's a lot more people on the stream now than when it started. If you enjoy these live streams, they are every Monday at 700 p.m. Pacific, unless I'm on vacation or too sick or something, I don't know. And the idea behind the live streams is that they're always an AMA format. Come with your questions, right? Happy to answer. The topics come from my code commute channel. I do vlog entries daily on code commute, especially when I'm actually commuting to work, not just CrossFit. And those are user submitted questions. Talk about them there. Then I write my newsletter article on the most popular one for the week. And then the live stream is on that same topic like 98% of the time. So check out weekly.devleer.ca. You do not need to subscribe to it. You can just view it like a blog post. It's totally fine. Um, now on that note, I mentioned code commute. So code commute is my vlog channel, right? So you can see that I generally am in the car. Sometimes I'm on vacation doing code commute, but mostly I am in the car driving. So this is my YouTube channel that I was talking about. There you go. That's in the chat now, too. Um, I wanted to call out too that code commute got a website. It's not done, but I I'm mentioning it because I vibe coded the entire site and deployment of it. So, this is all just made using uh GitHub Copilot and me prompting. And I did it this way because I originally wanted to live stream it. Folks might have watched the live stream where I tried to do it and it was just not okay. It was terrible. Um, so this time I basically used chat GPT to give me the instructions to get the basis of it deployed. And once I had it deployed, I used GitHub Copilot for every single other feature and I will probably only use GitHub Copilot to build the rest of the site. Um, so I'm mentioning it because I made YouTube videos for it. Those will go up on my my main channel, Dev Leader, which I will jump over to right now. Most folks probably know Dev Leader because that's my main YouTube. And thank you the Great Wall. This This is the car that I use for code commute. This is my favorite car though. It's actually uh used to be purple, then it was white. Now it's black, but it hasn't driven in like a year. I should get it back on the road though. Um this is Dev Leader. So this channel has mostly C andnet development videos. There are uh podcast interviews. You can see this one right here. So, I get on other software engineers. I have a few more queued up. I think I have like four or five more queued up. I took a bit of a break because it was a little overwhelming with other stuff. So, um I talked to other engineers and I try to get them to share their career journeys because I think that's a really valuable thing when you see other people that took a completely different way to get to where they are. Um, otherwise I have ré reviews. I mentioned this earlier in the stream. These ré reviews um do pretty terrible on my channel for for views. Um, like no one no one watches them. Uh, which is unfortunate. Um, so if you want to do me a favor, if you're enjoying any of the videos that you ever see on Dev Leader, please share them. Uh, one of the best spots to share them is a spot that I can't share them. And see this little icon right here that says Reddit. Um, Matt, if you share them on Reddit, that would help tremendously because that's one spot I cannot share content because almost every subreddit is no self-promotion. So, if you enjoy my content, that's one spot that I basically have no coverage. But, um, the resume reviews, it's free, right? If you're interested in having your resume, I just saw the great ass. If you're interested, you have to watch a réé review video. Um, I tell you how in every single ré review video. So, that is your homework. Plus, I think it's good that if you see how I review the rums, you know what you're getting yourself into. I do not roast résumés. I don't make fun of résumés. I will absolutely tell you the things that I think you can and should improve and I will tell you the things that I think you're doing awesome. So, um, I would recommend that if you're interested. Like I said earlier, it's totally free for you. Um I got to a point where I had people asking me like, "Can you review my resume?" I'm like, "I don't have I don't have time for this." And I'm like, "I have to create content." And then something clicked in my brain and I was like, "Wait a second. I can create the content out of the resumes. Like this will help everyone." Um which is good because I think I've had good feedback on that. I'm happy to help. I just wish that they'd get more views. Like look at this. Look at this thumbnail. It's a stack of pancakes because it's full stack, right? It's it's good. I didn't make it. I came up with the idea and I'm pretty proud of it. But like 171 views in 4 days and I have uh almost 12,000 subscribers. Like no one no one watches them. It's very upsetting. So anyway, share them. Thank you. I appreciate that. Um what else I mentioned? Um Code Commute is also on Spotify. One of the pieces of feedback I had was that because the episodes are they're vlogs, right? I'm just talking for, you know, 20 to 40 minutes. People were like, "Hey, I'm watching this on YouTube, but I don't have premium. I have to keep my phone open and I'm like doing chores around the house and like it's kind of annoying. I don't want to keep my phone open. Could you please put them on Spotify?" So, Code Commute is on Spotify. And actually, I think if you go to I think I did a fancy thing where if you just do this That should take you right to the Spotify channel. So that's that. Close that off. And then I'll do courses before brand ghost. Oh, it's not me there. These are my courses. I'm not going to go advertise everyone else's courses. I do have courses on dome train if you are interested in learning C sharp or if there's these other courses I have that interest you. We have career management. I paired up with Ryan Murphy for these ones. So, career management, behavioral interviews, getting promoted as a software engineer, and soft skills for software engineers. Um, is my chat did that message go through? Oh, my chat might have stopped working on my side, but I think the stream shows that the message went through. I'm just going to give it the old refresh. There we go. Okay. Um, yeah. So, these two, uh, really proud of these ones. I'm proud of them all, but proud of these two because, um, having the opportunity to have the like the intro car courses on dome train is pretty huge. Um, if you guys aren't net developers, just to just to kind of share why this is so important to me is the owner of domain. His name is Nick Chapsis and he is the biggest YouTuber for C and.NET net content. So, to be able to have basically the the primer courses on his course channel, super uh super cool for me. And I can check I don't I should check how many people have actually gotten them because we were giving it away at the beginning of the year for a couple months and there was tons of people tons and tons of people that got it for free. So, uh that makes me happy, right? like obviously would be nice to get paid for all those, but it was it was nice to be able to give them away and have uh have a lot of people take advantage of that. So that's super awesome. And the final thing, and I realize that this is not um core for the entire audience that's watching the stream, but the context is this is brand ghost. This is the uh social media and content posting platform that I am building on the side. I use this for all of my content creation. Um, so the idea is that you're able to create content, put it into Brand Ghost, and then it will go post for you. So if you're just using the free version, you can cross-ost and schedule totally for free. There's, you know, Buffer has been around for a hundred years now. Like when I first tried doing content creation in 2013 and gave up, Buffer existed then. I'm pretty sure there was also Hootuite. like Buffer and Hootsweet were like the big ones. I'm pretty sure Buffer was around then. Anyway, um they have a free version and you know you can hook up three accounts. We're like you hook up all your accounts. It's totally free. There is no reason to use Buffer's free version because we give it all away and more for free. Now, the more advanced paid for features, those are what I use in my content creation. So, the way that it works is that um I create all my content, put it into Brand Ghost, and then it's on a recurring uh schedule. So, and then Great. Well, yes, thank you. Um so, this is what I showed off on stream last time. And just to kind of show you quickly because it's I think once you realize like how much content goes out, it's like it's pretty nuts. So, give me one sec. I'm just pulling it up over here. So, this is my content calendar that's loading. Come on, server. Go faster. Boom. Okay. So, I showed this last time, right? Um, pick any day of the week. Like, this is the full month of June. But what I showed last time is if I jump to July, August, like if I jump a year from now, there is content like on a recurring basis scheduled indefinitely. So as long as brand ghost is running and I keep creating content, it will just keep going. If I stopped creating content, it will just recycle. Like I have 300 plus blog posts. I haven't written a blog post aside from the newsletters since last April. like 2024. If you watch on social media, I share a link to a blog post every single day because I have 300 of them to go through for my YouTube videos. It's the same thing, right? Someone commented the other day, they said um something about the YouTube videos and they're like, "But um I noticed like they're they're kind of old or something." And I was like, "Yeah, because I I started posting them from the beginning." So, there's hundreds of YouTube videos to go through. Um, Code Commute has um what are we at now? 278 videos on Code Commute. All of those will get posted again through Brand Ghost. Right. What's been really cool is that when I'm re-sharing my older videos, if I go to the analytics, I can see a spike up. might not be a lot, but some of the older videos from two years ago when I had, you know, a couple hundred subscribers, they didn't get a lot of views in the beginning anyway. So, it's been really helpful to share content, but the whole point is that I don't have to schedule content ever again. I get to focus on creating it because that's the part I care about. So, what I always remind people is that you don't have to be a content creator necessarily, right? If you are and you want to talk through this, send me a message if you're interested to see how Brand Ghost can help. But I remind people too, there's a lot of people watching that might have a business, right? How are you advertising your business? If you're trying to post stuff on social media, you know, it's a pain in the butt. You would rather be working on your business than posting stuff to social media. And if you're like, "Yeah, I don't post stuff to social media." you're like, you probably know that you should be advertising your business on social media, but it takes time. So, Brand Ghost is something that you can use for that. We had a real estate agent that was using Brand Ghost. Um, so he made really good videos, right? really good uh like what's a good way to say like Tik Tok videos or Instagram like reals and stuff where he's doing walkthroughs um informational videos and stuff and like you could use Brand Ghost and advertise his real estate business so it's not just for content creators but um yeah if you are interested uh it's totally free to start like literally this free crossosting and scheduling there's you don't enter a credit card you just use it um if you want to use some more advanced features. That's where you get on a paid tier, but there's a trial for it. And if you just have questions, message me. Um, like I have social media accounts on every platform. So, pick your poison and message me and we'll chat about content creation or how it can help with your business. So, I think that's it for the stream, folks. Thank you so much for joining. Same time next week. So, that's 700 p.m. Pacific. In the meantime, I will catch you on code commute. right? Some of you for sure. Um hoping to see more folks on code commute comments and then reminder newsletter goes out on Saturdays and then you can see the topic for the next stream. So take care. We'll wrap it up here and thanks everyone for the questions and comments in the chat. Take care.