Why You're STUCK at Senior Software Engineer - Engineering Manager AMA

Okay, we're just getting connected here. Let's get rocking and rolling. I think I forgot to press go on Substack last week by accident. So, just making sure this all works this time. I won't mess it up. I promise. Let's see. Substack is actually streaming this time. Instagram is not. Oh, Instagram is going. Okay, go live. There we go. Nice. Cool stuff. Uh, thanks for being here, folks. I'm just refreshing the chat. I got to turn the chat on so you can see it and we'll get going here. So, if you're new to the live streams, welcome. These are basically AMA style. So I have a topic that I go through but of course the chat is open for everyone and anyone to go ask questions ideally about software engineering career development that kind of thing because that's what I'm hoping to to offer in terms of perspective. So um the topic this week is from where is this from? This is from LinkedIn originally. Someone had messaged me on LinkedIn asking about this and they framed their question more along the lines of like hey look I'm a senior engineer and my goal in like with the question is not to ask you like tell me how to get promoted. They said I want to I want to be acting like a principal engineer. I want to be doing the things that a principal engineer does. So I thought that was an interesting framing because I you know of course I believe that their goal is to to be promoted into such a role but they were saying you know it's not just about how do I get the title it was like how do I get such opportunities where I can be doing these types of things and the framing that they provided big cat or dog hair uh the framing that they provided was essentially that they're in this position where um it seems like they don't have those opportunities like their their manager does give them some flexibility in terms of working on some backend things although they primarily work in the front end. So there's a little bit of kind of doing some extra stuff but they just don't feel like they're getting to do the things that a you know someone the next level up would be able to kind of focus on. So they wanted some perspective on that and then I talked about that in code commute uh and then that happened to be the video last week that had the most engagement and views. So, wrote about that in the newsletter article. Um, and welcome Devon. It's relevant to your interest. Perfect. Get that popcorn out. And for folks that aren't aware, I'm just going to put it into the chat, but uh this is where my newsletter article is. Um, I mention this every time, but don't feel pressured to, you know, sign up for an email newsletter or anything like that. I realize that's not for everyone, but if you enjoy the live streams and you're interested in knowing what the topic is, you can just go to weekly.devleer.ca. CA. That will take you to Substack. Like I said, you can close it pops up automatically that's like put your email in. Just close it if you don't want the email. Totally cool. And then you'll get to know what the topic is for the live stream. And so this goes out every Saturday at 5:00 a.m. PST. Um I'm usually writing it the night before. That's my my Friday nights for the past almost two years aside from a couple of vacations. So with that said, why you're stuck at senior software engineer and I wanted to to make a note on this because someone had commented on LinkedIn and I don't think they were being totally you know taking a jab at it but they were saying like you know I'm stuck because I don't want to be you know going to the next level or whatever and I said like hey that's totally cool. Um, kind of talked a little bit about this on code commute before, but the idea uh that many companies have and it's not it's like I feel like it's just not talked about a lot, but there's this concept of a terminal level. Okay? And even when I was filming code commute videos driving to work today, I I brought up terminal level again and I wanted to to mention that before getting into this into this topic really because this person had reached out to me originally because they are interested in going from senior to principal and that's great for them, right? They want to be able to grow in their career that way, no problem. Um, but this other individual on LinkedIn had basically said, "Hey, like I'm not even interested in that. Like I'm I'm at senior and I've been at Senior forever and that's that." And that's also cool. So, the idea behind a terminal level is that a company is able to employ people at that level and that's totally okay. The terminal part means that they don't have to progress. That's the end of the line for them and that is acceptable. Now to give you some context into this, a situation that you would not have is a terminal level being a junior developer. Companies don't want junior developers to stay junior indefinitely. They want to invest into the juniors. They want to make sure they get to mid-level and then those mid-level engineers. That's probably not going to be a terminal level. Why? Well, they're having impact, yes, but they want to get them to senior engineer at least. This is usually a terminal level where people that are operating at senior can be very effective across the entire team. That's a great spot to be. There's no shame in getting to senior and staying at senior. That's not like you've failed in your career or something like that. It's very good. And many people go to senior and stay at senior. And that's okay. It's a terminal level for a reason, right? It's totally acceptable to be there. Some people will maybe have aspirations to go beyond that and then as they're getting there, maybe their life changes a little bit. They have a family. They have other interests and they go, I don't want even more responsibilities. I'm comfortable with my income. It's all good. I'm happy at this this level. And they will stay there. Hello Ryan. Welcome. Thanks for being here. I'm noticing it's really interesting the chat numbers. Usually they only climb up as it starts, but I've seen the chat like climb up and then fall back down. So I'm like, is the chat working or like is the stream broken or something? Um, kind of interesting. It's uh Where's my mouse? Oh, you know what it is? I think it's uh I think the people from Twitter aren't pouring in yet. Twitter usually has tons of people that view compared to the other platforms. So interesting. Okay, but with that out of the way, I just wanted to kind of talk through like if you're watching this and you're like, I'm at senior and I don't want to go higher or whatever it happens to be. The whole idea behind this is that someone had asked and I kind of made this in response, right? So, it's not to make you feel pressured. I don't want you to feel like it's an an endless rat race and you must get to something beyond senior or anything like that. Um, and some people that are thinking about this, like I think Devin was saying in the chat, like this is relevant to his interest. So, perfect. Right. I'm hoping it helps some people. At the end of the day, it's just different perspective to talk through. So, uh, Ryan says, "I have to admit that when I saw your blog post this past weekend, I thought you were speaking to me directly because your topic is one that I've been thinking about a lot from personally." Awesome. Well, I'm I'm happy to hear that. Um, I can't read that username, but good evening to you as well on YouTube. Not sure about others, but Twitter video on Android keeps closing instead of minimizing. Oh, interesting. Well, thanks for sharing, Steve. I I I think you know this. I don't have control over that. I wonder if there's a weird update or something that hit Android and it's being wonky. Um, that kind of sucks. I'm sorry to hear about that. Um, and I think the Oh, you know what? I don't think I can see on Substack if people have joined. It doesn't show a a watch icon for the count. So that's interesting. But uh Jonathan says, "Might be the fault of YouTube. The design now shows an ad which forces users to scroll way down to see chat and type." Oh, it show when you say shows an ad. Okay. I thought it says shows an ad button. Um but it shows an ad. You know what? I can I don't think I can change that midstream. Let me maybe I can. You know what? We're doing it live. Can I just change that? What hap just for context, okay, I putting there's not enough people that watch my streams where I'm like, I gotta turn on an ad and make tons of money. I don't I probably make like 10 cents or something from the ad revenue. Woo. Um, but what happens is that once these go live, I turn the ads on and then I make probably a dollar maybe. Um, I'm not exaggerating either. Like it there there's no money for me in this at all. Um, so I probably have it left over because I think it keeps the I think it keeps the settings once I put one live and then turn the ads on. So, give me one sec, folks. I just want to make it I don't I'm assuming I can tweak this while it's going. Monetization off. Let's get that off. Here we go. Let me know if it makes a difference. Um, if not, maybe do the old little refresh. Um, if you have an ad showing, I do have it turned off, so I hope that helps. And sorry if that was causing a bit of a crappy experience. Um, and yeah, Ryan, I I also have premium. I basically have a family plan and stuff for that. So, made me feel uncomfortable to do that, but I ended up getting it. But the ad I see is for something I already bought. Perfect. Buy another one. I heard somebody say one time that live streams hurt their algorithm rankings. I don't know. It's all snake oil and cargo whole thing. Yeah. So, I'm going to pivot just for a sec before we go back to the newsletter because I think I said this last live stream. So, I use Vid IQ and Vid IQ. Like, I'm not sponsored by Vid IQ or anything. just a plugin you can get and it shows some analytics and does uh it just makes things a little bit easier as a creator, but then there's like a paid uh version and stuff and then on top of that there's an extra paid thing where you can get coaching and I think a year and a half ago, two years ago now, I was they were launching coaching and I was like I don't know how to YouTube. I should I'm willing to go pay for a coach. It was like reasonable price. I think for a month it was like a hundred bucks or something and I'm like I want to be able to do this effectively. So I worked with the coach for a little bit and I thought he had great advice. It kind of got to a point though where like the the feedback loop just wasn't like helpful. So the the intervals at which we were meeting were kind of weird. So like again not his fault at all. I think it was just kind of the setup of things because you can only send like a couple messages in the week or something weird like that. I don't know. Anyway, he was giving me a lot of advice on like how to tell stories to try and be engaging and I I don't really think that I've done a good job with that, but the like the concepts made sense to me. If you fast forward, um last week I was saying like my channel is completely stuck and I didn't realize that Vid IQ had this video review thing. Um, thank you Daniel. I appreciate that for the extra dollar from the ads. I do appreciate that. Um, so I basically didn't realize I have a video review feature and I think I could do like two videos a week or a month. It was probably per month. I was like, I'm going to get a video reviewed. Why not? I'm paying for this. I didn't even realize it was here. And the guy reviewed my video and I said, "Hey, I have really low click-through rate. I have 12 and a half thousand subscribers. I've been posting videos, you know, three times a week at least for two and a half years. I feel like I'm doing something wrong here because my channel if I stop posting just like comes right down. And he was saying he was he basically the first response was like did you like did you bot all of your subscribers? Like did you use bots and like get that you know amped up? And I was like no I've never I've never I told him the only thing I've ever paid for on YouTube was that weekend that I hired him. There was some drama going around in the net land about people paying for you get a sponsor and then you like use monetization to drive more views from like cheaper countries to your platform or to your uh your videos. And then so there's some drama about this and I was like I didn't even know that they had a built-in promotion thing in the YouTube and I was like I'm going to try it. So, I spent $100 on a video in YouTube and promoted it and it did exactly what I've heard all of the YouTube people say would be bad and it drove. So, for context, I don't get many views on YouTube. I think I had a,000 views on that video after a week and then I paid $100 and over two days it got 5,000 more views. And I'm like, pretty cool, right? That's 5,000 more views and they're real. It's like it's promoted through YouTube. It's through ads. And the problem with it is that if you look at engagement graphs, it basically plummets through the floor. So, my engagement at the beginning of a video is already terrible. I'm not helping with these live streams where I won't go on a complete tangent to talk about not the topic, but that's okay. Whatever. Um, this is code commute style. We don't care about anything. And so, my my graphs drop off. I lose 60 to 70% of people in 30 seconds. It's crazy. And then once I paid for promotions on that one, it was like over 70% in less than 30 seconds. It does terrible for retention. Now, I sent him over all this data because he can't access my account on the coaching platform. So, I screenshot everything. I send it all over to him and he goes, "Okay, I'm going to analyze it over the weekend." and I get a 10-minute audio response from him today and we've concluded something. He actually said that um he's like I had to go talk to the other coaches about this because like it's still like was really weird. Um he actually believes and I'm sharing this with all of you because if you're doing YouTube and doing things the way that I've been trying to do, hopefully this is helpful. He actually said that he believes that because I share my video content out to social media proportionally, I have like a bunch of views that come from social media platforms versus YouTube itself. Now, YouTube, the way that it will work, very high level, I'm not an expert, is that it goes to what it believes your core audience is and it will try to serve your video. It tests it. Okay? So, test it. If it doesn't do well, it's probably not going to be a big hit. Because if your core audience doesn't even like it, what makes YouTube think that it's going to go to a bigger one and be like, "Hell yeah." So, your core audience really has to resonate with it. This is why also staying on topic with your videos is really important. I also think that's why my resume review videos do poorly on my channel. I think that's why when I do other videos that aren't C development do poorly on my channel because my channel was built from C developers. It's why doing a live stream like this probably is not helpful. At some point though part of me like doesn't care because I want to be able to make helpful content in general and if that's going to make my channel grow slow. It kind of sucks but like at least I'm kind of doing the things I want. So the problem with promoting on social media uh initially at least is that you're driving traffic to YouTube and it's now confused because it's going I'm getting this traffic from this different source that also affects your metrics. If I have people coming from LinkedIn click it for a second and drop off crushes my metrics, right? YouTube's going that's the initial audience. That sucks. We're not going to do much with this. So, um, I'm basically going to stop posting my videos to social media except for the ones that go through Brand Ghost and we're basically like, I don't know, like four months. They're they'll be like four months old by the time you see them coming out to social media. Um, so I have to stay on top of that. But he was basically saying the only thing worse than a channel in a situation like this is creating a channel from scratch. That was the news I got this morning was like, "Hey, got bad news for you, but the only thing worse than this is making a channel from scratch." So, um, he said it could take months and months and months to to recover from my channel being like this. Or maybe it never will, which is really crappy because, um, I work pretty hard at it. So, um, but yeah. And so, Ryan, absolutely prefer to have impact versus reach. Better impact outweighs mass reach any day. Yes. The um just to like I don't disagree with that but um the thing that is challenging is like it it means that I cannot if if truly and I mean this genuinely like if if what the things I talk about end up helping people and I hope they do. I don't have control over that. I just hope they do and I keep doing what I can. um it means that I can't help more people and at the end of the day that becomes like kind of a a thing that sucks for me is like the reality is like for YouTube to replace my job or something I would have to I don't I don't even know what that would look like. But um it's it's not going to happen. So YouTube's not a full-time career opportunity for me. But um for me, this is an outlet to help people. And if it's like I'm going to be throttled in my ability to help people, that really feels crappy. So, um, but I do, you know, I do appreciate it. Um, I see LinkedIn user, it's not sharing the name and they say, "Happy to learn from my experiences." So, thank you. I do appreciate that. And that's why like I'm going to take his advice, but I if he was like, "Hey, you have to stop making content like X." I would just say, "Hey, can I make another channel for that?" And if he's like, "Hell yeah, then you get another channel from Nick and I'm just going to keep putting the content out." So, I don't want to stop making it if it's awful. Um, yeah. So, anyway, that's that. But let's get back to the topic. So, um, high level with this topic on senior going to principal is the idea that it's not that fundamentally the things that you're doing are different. It's that the impact and the scale is larger. Okay, that's in a nutshell. That's what we're going to be talking through here. So, um, let me kind of just pull this up as I been rambling about other stuff. So, I think that people get this confused originally though, and that's kind of the beginning the article is about, is that when people think about trying to like trying to progress, the way that things have been looking for them up until the point of senior is generally improving technically, right? when you're a junior, you're like you have a ton of things that you have to learn about the domain you're in, the code base that you're in. You have to even learn how to kind of like work in teams and stuff like that. There's everything you're doing is just like this new experience that you can get better at, which is awesome. And then you move into midlevel and then you're kind of refining these skills that you're building up. Right now, you're able to work more independently, right? You're you're truly building up technical skills that can support what you're trying to do. And then when you get into senior, like your technical skills are really starting to take off. You're able to start leading projects for the team, having impact across the team. And again, that's all supported because you've been building up these technical skills. And what's an interesting kind of litmus test is that you could switch domains entirely, right? You might work in the same team or something for a long time and you're not switching domains. But as you're progressing to senior or once you're at senior and you switch you know when I say domains I mean you could be building I don't know like finance software and then you switch to go to work in digital forensics and then you could go over to like mobile applications whatever you switch domains your technical skills will really help you because you'll notice that like hey yeah it's a different language different tech stack but like all these things are familiar to me it's just like package in a new way. So those technical skills truly do carry you. So up until this point, there's a lot of like tech skills, tech skills, tech skills. When you're at senior, you start to realize like you need to have uh more interpersonal skills. Like this is where it's start to ramping up, starting to ramp up. Words are hard. Um so you start realizing this because now you're leading projects. But when we want to go beyond that, this is where it gets a little weird because it's not that you're fundamentally doing different things. It's that the work that you're doing is progressing beyond your team. You are doing things at an organizational level. And if you're working at a small company, I had this conversation with someone on LinkedIn the other day and they said, "Hey, in the comments they're saying, hey, like most companies are only one team. So when you're talking about switching teams, like that doesn't even make sense for most people. So to be clear, when I talk about like a principal level or staff level in this context, I'm talking about organizational impact. If there's only one team at the company, it makes it a little bit weird to kind of talk about, you know, cross team organizational impact. But you could still apply these concepts because if the work that you're doing is going beyond the team for impact, that's still kind of the same realm of what we're talking about here. Um, so and then Ryan says, "Could this whole moving from senior to principal also apply to moving from senior to manager?" Um, I would say yes. Um yes, but the um some of the focus areas would be different and like the the way that I would kind of package this response is really around um when I talk about senior to principal, I'm going to be talking about scope of impact, right? Like going from team to organization. Now um this is a little bit funky because at Microsoft like principal and principal is the first level you can be an engineering manager at. So it makes it a little murky to talk about this but conceptually if you were to go from senior to manager regardless of the the prefix if that's just manager you're putting another like principal or whatever in front of it. Um I would say going from a senior to a manager role is less about like organizational impact. That's kind of the the qualifier for principle I would say is that sort of organizational impact but going from senior to manager it's uh less about the organizational impact and more about the people impact. So, you know, senior to manager is often like I would say like basically all of the time. Uh there's are exceptions, yes, but almost always it's packaged as a promotion um up, right? And generally like it it makes sense because for the most part, most manager level positions like I was saying at Microsoft, they start at principal. At least in Office 365, they do. So you would be if you're not at principal already and you were being promoted into that, you would technically yeah, you're going up a level and changing roles, but generally like you're at principal level and you'd be moving over to manager. And the the whole idea that I'm trying to get across here is like it's very much a lateral move because it is a different role. It just is different. Um yes, title soup. Exactly. the senior principal staff CTO. Um that is the new that's the new soup dour. Um so so Ryan yeah I think conceptually there's there's some overlap but the um the I don't know what the right word is. It's not the mechanism but like the focus the focal point is going to be different. manager roles. I would if people were interested in that, I would be hyperfocused on like people people because the biggest sort of mistake or misunderstanding that I find people have is they go into a manager role and they go, "Okay, well, you know, like I was just saying, this entire point in my career, technical skills have got me here. I just started tapping into my soft skills and like but my technical skills have really carried me here. I'm going to be a manager and my technical skills. No, stop. It's not your technical skills are going to carry you as a manager. Your technical skills will be a great value ad as a manager, but your people skills will be the thing that makes you a manager in my opinion. There's going to be tons of people that debate this. It's always so much fun posting online where I'm like, "Hey, I have this perspective that engineering managers are a people first thing." And people are like, "No. and software engineers don't even need managers like okay you do that that's fine that's totally cool um I my role doesn't exist um but yeah I for this topic and this conversation will be focused going from senior to like principal in terms of the impact scaling but u of course Ryan if you're interested as we go through this if you want to sort of draw upon what you're perceiving as parallels or you have questions about that, like just bring them up in the chat and I will see if I can like pivot it a little bit because I think that we're we're talking about similar things, but the the focal point is going to be different. Um, so when I go through my newsletter articles, I do try to put in something that feels actionable that you can try. Actionable is very subjective. It's more like if you're reading this, try this out or next time think about this. So in this section when I was talking about you know it's not just technical skills um I was trying to get people to think through like your impact okay so I said go like think about the last few months of work you've done and this is applicable for anyone by the way so if you're like I'm not even senior whatever doesn't matter like think about the last few months of work right think about the last few months of work you did who like who was impacted by that work right is this a, you know, a feature within the team and you're like, well, the customers are going to be impacted by that. Okay, awesome. Where you're doing work to help out the sort of like developer productivity of your team. Okay, like that's great. Um, you know, you might have been refactoring things and cleaning up the code base. Again, that's going to be helping with developer productivity and things like that. Um, bug fixes. Okay, like um, you know, I had to go add tests. So that's going to stabilize the code base and help the team also fix that bug though. So it's helping customers if you're going through this exercise. One of the things that is helpful to note is that when you start having things where you're like I was helping and even just helping a partner team that's a really good thing like I would say at a senior level you're doing more of these things where like you could be having cross team impact. You're collaborating with a different team to help them out that kind of thing. But if you start identifying things where you're like the organization that I'm in, this is work that I drove across like a large majority of teams at an organizational level, this is where you start to be like tapping into what you know we could argue like principal or staff level. The It's always weird talking about the titles because like you go different places, they mean different things. So, I I'm talking about this primarily from my understanding and working at Microsoft, by the way. So, if anyone is in the chat and wants to debate this stuff or you're watching the recording and you're like, "No, that's not how it is." Let's pause for one moment because we might be agreeing about things but be talking about different titles. Just for the record. So, um, so who did it impact? Principal engineers write documentation. We do not. No one writes the documentation. We are the documentation. Um, so yeah, did it help your team? Does it benefit in the local scale or does it go beyond that? And what's interesting about this is that I bring it up a little bit later in this article and we'll we'll talk about it unless I totally forget. But conceptually, you might have delivered something for your team. I mentioned like hey maybe you were maybe you're doing some process change for your team or you're cleaning up some code or you're rearchitecting something whatever you're doing something that's helping out your team there may be an opportunity there where if you zoom out a little bit you're like wait a second like every team has this this same problem every team has it I just solved it for us I wonder if I could take this and go basically make a pitch across different teams and say, "Here's an initiative that if we all do this, here's the benefit that we all get." That's the kind of thing that we want to start being able to look at when we're talking about principal level impact for context. Okay. Um Jesse is saying they know um they know it's the most important thing and that is everything wrong with the software industry. Everything in hardware uh has a detailed data sheet. Yeah, it's honestly Yeah. Like the but I'll I'll tell you this though. So I agree that like we lack with documentation for sure, but I think what happens is that um it's it feels like everyone wants documentation and no one wants to maintain it. Finally, someone's like, "Okay, fine. I'll write the documentation. I'll go do it." And then they do a kick-ass job. They write all this awesome documentation and it's obsolete instantly and there's no plan in place to keep it up to date. Like people are going to roll their eyes at this, but some of the the best documentation I've seen is onboarding documentation. And I know I said you were going to roll your eyes at that because you're like, Nick, all the onboarding documentation is always out of date. Uhhuh. but it's probably the least out ofd because the last person on board had to go update it. And that's one of the reasons I feel like it's some of the most upto-date. So if you don't have processes in place to keep documentation up to date, it ends up being a graveyard. And it sucks because like I think that tools like wikis and things like that they can be such awesome tools for knowledge sharing especially now that we have LLMs they can go you know use rag on that or whatever other type of uh indexing they want to go search and index they want to use on that. We have these really comprehensive knowledge bases that you could have LLM running on and you can just go talk to them and they can give you answers. Super cool. But when the data is obsolete, when the documentation hasn't been touched, it's like and everyone has experienced this, right? You've either like there is no documentation and you're upset or there is documentation and you're upset because it's obsolete. So, um, sounds like I need to have a conversation with EM to figure out what our local equivalent of principal is. Yes. Um, we have level one and three. I'm a three, which might be terminal level for us. We're growing though. Yeah. So Devon, um, on this note, I, you know, you've probably heard me say this in code commute, but where I was working before at Magnet Forensics at the time for developers, it was developer or senior developer. That's it. We we only had two roles because we didn't know like we were building it. And when I've talked about this in code commute, the reason for that is like if you go introduce too many levels and you put people into those levels and you go, "Oh crap, we don't really know what we're doing." It's really difficult to go adjust things once you've already made the changes. So having fewer things allows you to like kind of feel things out. And it sucks, don't get me wrong, for employees that are really interested in titles and stuff, not denying that, but at least allows some flexibility or like a safety net for the company as we're growing. And I I don't work there now obviously, but I think they have, you know, engineer, senior, they probably I know they have staff. I don't know if they have like an internal leveling scheme. So um you know for example like at Microsoft uh like a junior engineer would be level 59 and 60 and then like SD2 would be like 61 62 senior 63 and 64. So there's multiple levels per like per title sort of thing. Um, so I don't know if they do something like that, but Devon, yeah, it sounds like the I would always kind of have these conversations, right? It's like some people look at this differently like um you know, they might say, "Hey, like where you are right now with us, we don't have plans for different levels and there isn't like a a clearcut promotion to the next sort of software engineering level." And I'm just being transparent. If you're like, "Well, that sucks. I want that for my resume. like I want to be able to demonstrate that. That might be a deal breaker for you. But if you're looking at it like in a way that I would have where I was working before, if you're like, "Okay, um, well, what does it look like to get, you know, more compensation and more responsibility?" Because if you don't give a crap about the title, that might be totally fine because you can still put all the awesome stuff on your resume. And if they're compensating you fairly, who cares if it's staff or principal or, you know, software engineering wizard level 92? like I don't know, you might not care, right? Uh I feel more biased now from being in big tech that like unfortunately I do care about these things because I know that if I want to go move companies or I want to switch teams or something like that, my my level matters. I don't like that. But that's kind of how it is at some of these big companies. Um, okay. Visibility is a big thing when it comes to trying to move sort of beyond the team. Give me one sec. I've been talking too much today apparently. Um, and I think that like I've made videos about this before talking about visibility. It's something I have a big challenge with coming from a startup where I never had to think about that. Like it's basically impossible to not have visibility at a smaller company. is how it felt for me. And at Microsoft, I felt like, you know, I could be doing all the things my manager is putting in front of me. Hey, this is like the best opportunity for you for promotion and not in a malicious way, not like a they're being negligent or they don't care. Like truly trying to support me and I'm like, okay, I'm going to go deliver on these things. And then feedback is like boom, not visible. So that's been a big struggle for me over the last five years. Um, but the way that I'm I tried to write about this and that I want to convey it is like sometimes we like we think about creating visibility like okay well if it's not visible I have to go talk to people. My chat just said it disconnected. So give me one sec. I don't know if if I'm still here. I'm probably still here and the chat's very delayed too. So, you're going to have this awkward experience where everyone's like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're still here, but I just refreshed my chat on my side." Um, so I think people think about, okay, well, if I'm not visible, then I have to talk about what I'm doing more. I have to go like artificially go say, "Hey, you, you know, I'm working on this, right? Hey, you, you know, I'm working on this, right?" And like that's not really what it's about. I think that you can lean into some of this where you're like truly trying to bring visibility like like manually to the work that you're doing. And I think that that can be done well. I think that can be done in a positive way if you're engaging with your stakeholders, right? You're like, I know these teams are impacted by this work. Um it could just be a single partner team. If you're going organizationwide, you're communicating with all the different teams that are involved or are going to be impacted by it. And you could be doing that early and frequently and that's great. But the sort of meta point around this is that when we think about the type of impact that we want to have, it's actually correlated to the visibility. My chat's still not back, so I'm very nervous. Devin, Ryan, Jesse, anyone there? I'm just looking at the my video stream to see if I can find other people that were engaging. um because I don't know if I lost my chat. That's a reream problem. Um so if we think about visibility and for context, let me take a step back. Um for for principal level, one of the things that we talk about at Microsoft at least, and I'll even back up from that. Sorry, I'm trying to think of the like the right framing for this. as an engineering manager. If I have a junior engineer and I want to promote them, I basically make a case for that. Thanks, Devin. Thanks, Steve. I see the chat messages. It's working. Um, if I want to promote a junior engineer on my team, I collect my evidence for that. I can make a case. And basically, I could say to my manager, I want to promote this person when it's when it's time for that. And odds are like they're not going to fight me on it, right? They might ask questions. They might say, hey, like, do we have an example of this? Yep, no problem. here you go and they're cool. Thank you. Pretty straightforward, right? Doesn't mean that I can just like randomly promote people like I still have to provide evidence. It's part of my job. And then if we go up a level and say I'm trying to take someone from like uh now they're at an intermediate level and I want to move them to senior, it's similar, but there's going to be more scrutiny, right? So I can say, hey, I'm making a case for this person. Here's all of my evidence. I believe that this person is performing at this level based on these things which we have rubrics and things for and you know that might go to my manager. he might push back a little bit and say, "Well, what about this or what are the future opportunities?" When I have to discuss that at my skip levels meeting, there might be other managers that say, "Hey, by the way, like when I promote people into senior, here are things we have to look at and like have you considered those?" So, it's really good from like a level setting expectations perspective. Code commute viewers love that phrase. Um, but we get on the same page and it's like, "Hey, you know what? This person is knocking out of the park on this stuff. Um, yes, you're right. We need to make sure that they are focusing on these areas. But like, you know, point is that for the most part, I have, you know, my say in that. As long as I can back it up, it's good. But it changes at principal. At least for us at Microsoft, when things go through at principal, I still have to, you know, put a case together for the engineer that I'd like to promote. I have to make sure my manager agrees to that, which that's been common the whole time. My skip level has to agree with it. And generally, if my manager's agreed with the more junior engineers, my skip level's probably not going to fight me on it. But obviously, he's welcome to. And I would encourage if he has, you know, considerations that we hear about that. But even at principal level, he has to agree to it. and he's not even the final say because then it will go to other individuals, his peers to have a say in it. So when it comes to visibility, it's not just okay, well go to your skip level, go find all of his his or her peers and then just like try to tell them everything you're doing. Like that might be a strategy, but I think the meta point here is that the work that you're doing has to have enough impact that they feel that impact. Right. So it has to be significant enough that it's across the org and they feel the significance of that and that is big impact. It makes it tricky because it's not just hey this is a really important thing but it has to be things like organizational impact. Now, this gets I find like some of the times this gets weird because you you might be thinking like, okay, you're telling me every project I do, I have to be going like outside my team, chasing down these like what feels like companywide initiatives. By the way, companywide at Microsoft would be so ridiculous. I can't even imagine that. But, um, you have to do these really big initiatives. And the reality is that like not every single project is going to be like that. um because I think that it would be really difficult to chain those back to back to back and find those really big opportunities but that is the type of work that is expected at that level right you need to be showing that you can do it at that level so the point that I wanted to make for this part is really around the idea that visibility like yes you can manually drive visibility to the things you're doing nothing necessarily wrong with that but if you're doing that and the work isn't actually impactful to to those people that you're trying to advertise it to, it's not going to land as effectively. Now, if the work is genuinely that impactful, those people will know about it because they will feel the impact of what you're delivering. So, just a heads up on that. I think that was for me like that was something I kind of struggled with because when I was being told visibility is the issue, I'm like, well, what do you mean? like you told me this was the important stuff to work on. So like didn't you tell me to work on stuff with visibility. Um and the reality is like it was important work but it was important work for our team. It didn't have the impact beyond the team. Is that my manager's fault? No. Is that my fault? Like I guess mostly my fault, right? But the point is that like in hindsight now that I know what I know, I should have been like, "Okay, if they're telling me this, is there a way that I can I can sort of position this to be more impactful across the organization? If not, it might not be that it's it's not like it's bad work to do, but I probably need to think of some projects that I can have that level of impact." Daniel says, "Uh, I I don't What's it?" What? What's that acronym mean? Why do I feel stupid? I'm searching it. Come on. No, that's not the right definition of that. Institutional management and higher education. [Laughter] Uh maybe that's supposed to be in my honest opinion. Uh the employment context has a uh at best poor integration between two pizza teams. They don't talk to each other. Often can't see each other's code. People are reluctant to expose any weaknesses by acknowledging potential improvements without pairing it within. This is how our team is solving it. Incentives are to focus on deliverables. Is that common? Um let's see. The employment context has at best poor integration between two pizza teams. So Daniel, do you mean within the team like so you're saying with with a two pizza team that's enough people on a team that you need two pizzas for. So are you talking about like within a team uh that's the thing or or sorry or do you mean like like across teams? Can you just rephrase that and they'll try to answer at least I know you're not looking to me like I have all of the answers in the world but at least my perspective on it. Um I'd like to try and answer that. Um, yeah, I I think I see where you're going with that. I just don't want to like totally miss it and then you're like, "Thanks for nothing." So, I will try my best. Um, so the next thing that I wrote here, and this is kind of like the last part I was just talking about where was like, you know, historically I've had managers that have said, "Hey, like here's a thing to work on. um you know this is the this is like the sort of the the thing that I think will help you the most for this. If I'm looking at that going, okay, I don't think that's organizational impact. I need to find work like that, but there doesn't seem to be any because my manager put this thing in front of me. I need to be like, again, as a principal level engineering manager, and this would apply for principal level engineers, you want to start looking for such opportunities. That doesn't mean you neglect what was put in front of you as a priority, but it does mean that you want to start looking for such opportunities where you can be having a larger impact. So this part of my newsletter that I wrote was around like don't wait for opportunities. Yes, focus on the thing that's put in front of you. That is, you know, if that's been what your manager says is the priority, that's the priority. But that doesn't mean well guess no organizational impact for you. That means you got to do that plus you're looking for organizational impact. So, um I wrote like in here like you might find that your days are sometimes like you know fully just like fixing bugs, you're debugging, you're tweaking configs. Um you're doing things are they feel like the scope of them isn't big. Sure, the work is valuable. It has to get done, but you're like, "Okay, I'm like I'm cranking out a bunch of like smaller things." And that can happen. It's not that that's not allowed to happen. there's going to be periods of time between larger projects and stuff where that's totally fine and totally normal, but the challenge is like when that's all that you're doing because it's someone, you know, at principal or like you know, senior that's like aiming for principal, you're probably able to crank out bug fixes and smaller features like like rapidly in comparison to more junior people on the team. Scrotto T Baggins is back. I haven't read this username in ages. Thank you. I will do my best to slay as a queen. Um, and good morning and good evening to you as well. Um, so it's totally normal that you'll have these periods where the work you're doing is not, you know, the biggest project in the world and that's okay. But when when you're having these periods where you're like, I don't have a thing lined up, we don't just want to sit around and wait, right? People that are at principal level are people that have t they've either coincidentally been put on projects that have really big impact. So it can happen. I'm not saying it's not possible, but other people, they weren't just like accidentally put onto a really big impactful project. They started working on something that was very big and impactful. that help contribute. So you have to start created on what's happening inside your team and that's all you're ever doing. You could have a really big impact within your team. But again, we're talking about going beyond that to the organizational level. How are you going to understand what types of impact you can have at the organizational level if you're not having conversations with people about it? Are you talking to the other engineering teams at all? Are you talking to any of the the product managers, the engineering managers? Are you going do you have like again some of the stuff is big tech kind of centric, but you might have similar things? Are there like um you know architectural reviews for the other teams that are happening? Do other teams are there demo days where people are showing things off? Like try to get involved in those things. Understand what's going on around you? It's it's going to be very difficult to understand the landscape of the organization if you are doing this and focusing purely on what's going on in your team, right? This is this is like extending beyond the team. So, you could um again, you don't want to like drop what you're doing in terms of priorities, but you could be trying to pick up something on the side to say, "Hey, I wonder if I could do like a little like maybe a one pager dock on this and like getting some feedback like is this a painoint we want to solve. Is this something that you could prototype depending on what what you're talking about in the first place?" And show like, "Hey, look, we seem to have this, you know, common problem. Like, here's an example of a way we could fix this. Can you start to solicit this idea with the people that you believe have this problem? Basically, can you sell, right? Like, can you get people bought into this concept? Um, now this like obviously is very generalized. I can't tell everyone how to go do this exactly within their teams. Uh, and any given point in time, this could look very different. But the the whole idea behind this is like you need to have visibility into what's going on in different areas of the organization to have such an impact. Uh Experto, hi Nick. Nice to see you as always. There's been a massive layoff in Redmond's office. How are you guys holding up? Um yeah, I've actually started having conversations um about this the past few days because um for total transparency like in my my area I have not heard of anything. Um, but you know, we go we've, if I rewind a few years back when there were like when sort of layoffs were I don't want to say when layoffs were starting because it's not like layoffs were invented a couple years ago, but when there were some massive layoffs a few years ago. Um, you know, there were questions that came up especially up to I'm not going to say like my senior leadership cuz I I wouldn't be part of those, but at least my like sort of immediate leadership um questions were bubbling up. And so I can share a little bit about that. Um, I'll give a different dialogue than I gave to like some employees recently because it's interesting like this is all over the media and if my employees aren't talking to me about it, I'm like, I know you see what's in the news. Are you nervous to talk about it? Are you are you like, you know, you're totally content? You're like, I'm not actually concerned, not affected. Um, but I started to have more conversations recently and um, so I want to like I'm happy to like try and talk through this. When I say happy to, sorry, not the right word. I don't mean happy that there are layoffs and I can talk through it. I mean I feel okay to try and and shed some light on this. Um, I think that, okay, first of all, be very transparent. I don't I don't like layoffs. I don't like the concept of it. I think it's uh when you have to lay people off, it's because you've um like something has gone wrong and you are compensating for it. Um, by the way, Daniel, I don't think all your messages are going through. I'm going to check on LinkedIn cuz I asked uh about clarification and I don't think that that message that you sent went through. So, I'm going to pull that up as I'm trying to talk. Um, so I don't like the idea of layoffs. And when I've talked about this before, um, oh man, there's there's a bunch. Sorry folks, on LinkedIn, the messages are not totally coming through. Um, like Robert left a message on LinkedIn. It's not in the chat at all. I got to come back to that. Um, sorry I'm all over the place. And with the layoffs, the I I can't even remember what I was saying because I was jumping around LinkedIn. The um Okay, so don't like them. And I think that it's generally something's gone wrong. When people started talking about this more, I started to realize that Yeah, Deon Devon's saying exactly where I'm going with this. I feel like the public reasons for layoffs aren't always going to line up with the reality due to stock price considerations. Um the when we see the public reasons the public reasons you see are the reasons that the media has come up with. That's it. And of course everyone all together now what is the biggest reason that Microsoft would be laying people off right now? What's the biggest reason? It's because AI is replacing the jobs, right? We have the proof now. Microsoft is an AI company and AI is replacing the jobs. That's why there's layoffs. It's not it's not what is actually happening. It's not like they took 9,000 people and they said, "Guess what? We built an agent for that. We don't need you." Nope. That's not what's happening because we don't have agent. No one has agents like that. It's just it's not happening. You know this already if you talk to customer support chat bots that are agents and you go I know that a human would be better than this. We can't even do that effectively. Okay. So that's not what's happening. The reasons like in a nutshell like or the reasons I guess like specifically for each organization that was impacted. I don't have those specific reasons. At a very very high level here is what happens is my understanding. Again, this is my understanding and someone who is an expert on the inside could disprove this if it's wrong and I would be happy to stand corrected. But my understanding is it's not that SA stands at the top and he goes starting right now 9,000 people must go. It's not what happens. My understanding is that because it's a business and there is a profit sort of goal that has to be met based on shareholders and whatever else, you have revenue and you have costs and the difference very simplistically is going to be the profit. And they would go to the business leaders across all of Microsoft and say you have to make up for something here. So generate more profit or cut costs. So it is not a matter of SA going we must lay off again this is my understanding it's hey business leader of exorganization more profit so like more revenue or lower costs you're the business unit like leader you figure this out this is up to you now I'm not again I'm not saying that this is a good thing so don't come attacking me But I would suspect that probably the easiest thing to do is to look at that and say, "Well, where can we cut costs?" Because if we could snap our fingers and be generating more revenue, we probably would have done that, right? Like it's I feel like it's harder to just go make more money versus cut costs. Not saying it's a better thing to do. I'm just saying probably what's the quicker thing and they end up looking at their business and going these units of the business are not generating profit. We don't need these units of the business and then layoffs occur and that sucks. And you'll see time and time again in the layoffs there's tons of people affected. Um, you'll have people that have been working at Microsoft. This is the same at other companies where they've been working there for decades and they're like, I just lost my job because they weren't being let go because of them. It had nothing to do with them as an individual, which makes it even feel even more ridiculous. So, um, I don't I don't think that um, you know, I don't think they're good. I don't like that they happen. But people have started asking questions at work now and they're like, "Hey, well, what's up with us?" Now, again, I'm giving you a like a more reduced down version of um sort of what I've been talking to my employees about, but um the I think I've shared this like publicly before, so I don't think it's like a secret or anything, but at a high level, like the the business leaders that we have in my organization have been very focused on trying to do everything they can to make sure we don't need to have layoffs. So when such a you know decision comes up where it's like okay more revenue or cut costs they're in a position where they're not like oh crap like we are way overhired. So that means for us like I've been at Microsoft for 5 years. Guess how many people I've hired like for to my team? Zero. Right? Like we we have a it's much more controlled in terms of growth. There are mechanisms in place to make sure that we are not going over and that way when there are layoffs my understanding is that there's a lot of these decisions that have been made by leadership in my organization to make sure that we don't have you know such an impact. Um, I have also heard people say that, you know, we can't make a promise that there's not there's zero layoffs because the layoffs you see in the news are big sweeping layoffs and the reality is that there could be micro layoffs here and there there or like individuals being laid off for different reasons. So, it's not like zero is the number. But anyway, I hope that helps. Um, and so I want to go back. Hopefully that makes sense. People get laid off because they are not valued. Sometimes that's because the focus is only on profit generation. I mean the reality is unfortunately um it's a business, right? It's it's it comes down to profit and it's a it's it's shareholders. It's a publicly traded company. It sucks, right? It sucks when that's how it's looked at. Um you know this this idea of like well it's people working like 100%. I was talking to people about this and I don't think there's any manager that I that I know of. I'm not saying they can't exist, but I don't think there's any manager that like likes looking at their employees and being like, "These are resources. These are assets." You know, I don't feel that way about my team. I know my manager does not feel that way about the people that report up to him. I know that my skip level absolutely does not feel that way. No one is thinking about their employees as just like assets, right? But what's really bizarre is that when it gets bubbled up enough layers and there's enough disconnect that like I guess apparently that happens or else there wouldn't be layoffs because there would be too much human connection for people to be like we can't do that. So it's a really crappy situation. So, I'm I'm trying to talk about this in a way that is like my understanding of it. And I don't mean to make it I hope it doesn't sound like I'm sitting here going and that's hell yeah that's why we have layoffs like no I don't don't like them. I don't like the idea of it. Um Daniel I think I'm going to go try and go back because I think you're saying or Robert was saying some of the messages are cut off. Let me go check on on LinkedIn comments. Um, okay. So, I don't I still don't see some of Daniel's messages, so I apologize. I I saw the the two pizza teams, they can't see each other's code. People are reluctant to expose any weaknesses by acknowledging potential for improvement, and this team is solving it. Uh, is this comment? I I was kind of asking for some clarification on that. So, I I don't know if I saw that. Uh, but Robert, I see it's so bizarre. The chat messages just aren't lining up with what's on LinkedIn, but I can see your messages. Um, I think on LinkedIn, and I saw they just put it in the chat, but it looks like the whole thing's in the chat now. Let me just read that. Um, join late, but love what you do. It's interesting to hear you talking about what your uh what your manager wants in your role as a leader inme. How do you overcome personal issues? For example, when you don't agree with management decision that ignores the knowledge you have, you're heading for failure unless you can change course, but your manager won't listen. Uh, do you rebel or wait to say I told you so? Um, great question. Um, this is the kind of thing that I'm sure if I were asked in an interview, I would be like, I actually don't know if I've had an experience like this. I do have experience blocking people on Twitch that spam. Um, so I don't know um if I have a genuine experience like this. I think that there's a bit of a balance here. Um, because I think there are things that I would say there's I think is it Amazon or is it Facebook? There's a company that like in their leadership principle they have like an agree and move on like statement. I think it's Amazon but it could be Meta. I don't know. And part of me gets this, but I think it depends on like the severity of it. So, for example, I'm just going to make something up. If I was told, if I was approached by my manager, my skip level and they said, "Look, you must you must fire 10% of your team. The bottom 10% must be fired." And then I'm going, okay, well those big tech leadership principles are like disagree and move on. Like I would go to my manager, I disagree with that, but I'm just going to go carry this action out. This is one of those examples where I would say, hey, look, if you need me to go fire the bottom 10%. If I don't have someone that's already being exited as we speak, then I don't have a bottom 10% that I'm going to fire. So I would absolutely say no problem. We can get rid of 10% and we will start with me. Thank you. And I would be done. I'm not doing that. I don't care. Not for me. I just won't do that. So that would be something where I'm going to rebel and just not do it. I would resign. either that or I would just say I'm not doing it and then see what happens and if they want to fire me or something for it then it would be the same thing. Um at that point it's like I've collected apparently if it were that bad then I would have collected my paycheck a little bit longer and I'd be out anyway. So for transparency that's not what has happened. Just using it as an example but that would be the kind of thing for me where I'm like I'm just not about that. Um what about if they asked you to lay off the top 10%? What? Even even more ridiculous. No. Uh if I if I got told to to stack rank and cut anywhere. Not doing it. I don't care. Um let go 10%. Here's a list of stuff that won't get done with those those people. Yeah. Like this is the thing, right? So there's certain things like morally I'm just against that. And you know if that if that means I'm not a good fit for some places, that's totally okay. Totally okay. That would suck if I had to like if tomorrow I went to work and I was, you know, my skip level manager was watching the the stream and he was like, "Guess what? It's time. You have to fire 10% of your your team." I would be like, "I okay." Like, I'm resigning. It would suck. I don't want to do that. But I what I don't want to do more than that is fire 10% of my team. I just I won't. So, um, but let's use a less extreme example, right? because I'm I picked one from the start where I'm like here's here's one end of that spectrum. Um I think there's times where where I do absolutely agree with um man what's with these spammers like just um yeah yeah exactly so the extreme examples but those are my values and principles right um so the I want to see if I can come up with an example where it's like an agree what what agree to no disagree and move on whatever that that that uh that statement Um, okay. I'll I'll use another example. This is one where um and I've talked about this recently. Um, we have on call rotations for our organization and there are labor laws in different countries and especially now that we have more employees working in these different countries that are on our on call rotations. Um, we we must abide by their labor laws. That's how it is. And so a lot of this is being put together and they came up with the agreements with those countries like basically for HR and those countries and stuff. It's not something they can just snap their fingers and do overnight. So they put all this together and for total transparency the I don't have stats on it but the number of people in these countries is significantly lower than what would be in the United States at least for the organization that I'm talking about. So I was fully under the impression that what was going to happen is that they would come up with an exceptional on call rotation for the people in the different countries, right? Like they have these laws that we have to work around. No problem. We'll make sure that we can make that work within our rotations, but they get an exception. Like they are the exception to the normal. And that's not what happened. In fact, it was the exact opposite. And initially I was like, "Oh my god, this is going to be terrible." Total transparency here, right? I was like, "This is going to be absolutely awful. We're about to disrupt everyone. Everyone that does an on call rotation in our organization, I was like, I don't I don't know about this." And uh I had you know so initially I'm like in my head I'm like I know that I like there's no choice. This isn't something that I'm going to like end my career over but it's something I don't agree with because I'm like this just doesn't make sense to me. It's so disruptive. Now I started already mentally aligning to this. Okay. Like I have to message the team about this. The best part, and this is very sarcastic, by the way, the best part about being a middle manager is that when you have to relay messages that you don't agree with and then make sure that you're in agreement with them is probably the worst feeling in the world because you know that you're the messenger and there's going to be a lot of unhappy people. But as I'm mentally preparing for this, um, I also had clarification as to why this decision was made. And once I heard the reason why, I went, "Oh, I can actually really appreciate that a lot." And the idea behind why this decision was made was that if we treat the people from the different countries that have those more specific labor laws, if we treat them differently, then they actually don't have a fair opportunity the same way the rest of us do with our on call rotations. Now, for some people, they might say, "I hate on call. I don't want to do that. like you I don't care. Make it special. Make it different. Whatever. But the reality is as an on call you learn so much about supporting your service. You learn so many things that you're not regularly exposed to. That learning opportunity would actually be unfair to have people treated differently on that. That's actually a really big milestone for people on teams to go do their on call rotations and help support their services. So they said it it would be unfair to those individuals to treat them differently. So we came up with what's effectively like the common denominator across all of the geos. And I said, "Oh crap, I do really appreciate that." So with this one, it was like mentally prepared. I was getting all my messaging. Now, do I agree with that decision? I think in my mind personally, I think that is the right decision. I think that's a really good reason to make that decision. Um, personally, I would have optimized for the least disruption. Personally, I the sort of the equality part I hadn't even considered was not even on my mind. I was like, how do we minimize disruption for this? So, um, that was one where I was like, I'm, you know, agreeing to it or like I disagree with it, but I'm going to be agreeable on it and deliver the message. And I did have to go answer tons of questions and sort of be the messenger and be the bad guy for that. Um, but, you know, I I have like not only am I direct reports awesome, I think my engineering manager, he's done a very good job with the entire team in terms of like a team that actually cares. So they're passionate about things, which is really good. So when they're getting heated about discussing things, they're not like yelling at me. They're like, "This is why I care about this. This is why it's important to me, and I really value that." So um Steve says that fire, the bottom 10% behavior was picked up from people reading too too little about Jack Welch. He gave reasons to justify many of his points contradicted concepts the same managers try to champion. Interesting. I know of Jack Welch. I don't think I've read um I think I've maybe read one book from Jack Welch, but I don't think I've done much reading on Jack. Um Kim Scott from Google Established Radical Cander. Yes, I love Radical Cander. Care personally and challenge directly. Great book. Recommend read. Yes. Um if it's a great call out if folks have not read Radical Cander. I actually didn't realize that person was from Google. Um I love that. Uh, I don't remember the book like the specific details of the book, but there's some really good concepts in there. Um, and like one that comes to mind is like you'll hear people say radical cander, but the other, you know, huge one that stood out for me is this ruinous empathy idea. And if you get like definitely go read the book, like it's probably cheap on Amazon or something like go read it. It's really good. But um, they they draw a quadrant. This is my quadrant, by the way. Whatever that is, that's a quadrant. And um they have ruinous empathy labeled on there. And I think that some people may have managers like this where usually you'll hear people complain about their manager like they're a total a-hole, like they don't know anything or they're really mean and, you know, they're too hard on them. Um, but there are absolutely managers, I'm sure many people have had uh that are on this stream where their manager is just like too agreeable. They they never push back on anything. They're just like they're a complete pushover and they don't like confrontation. They try to they avoid anything that might be a little bit of friction. Um, you know, good job. Like, yay, everything's happy, but like no no friction. We don't want friction. um you know, how do how do I improve in my role? What should I focus on? Oh, you're you're doing good. Good job. Pat on the back. Like it's that's ruinous empathy. Like you're not actually doing anything to challenge or move things in a positive direction. Now, if you go to the other quadrants, I can't remember the names of them, but you have these other sort of like crappy behaviors, but radical cander is absolutely awesome. And um I think is a really good reminder for people that if you genuinely spend the time to build up relationships with the people you work with, you build up trust. You build up respect. Um I'm not saying to you that you must be best friends with people on your team. I'm about to use a best friend example here, though. You know, if you have a best friend that if they really needed to hear something, you would tell them bluntly, right? If my best friend came to me and said, "I'm going to quit my job and be a master Pokemon battler," I would say, "Dude, that is the stupidest thing I have ever heard. You better not do that. You have a wife and you have a child on the way. You are not going to do that. That is a dumb idea. The way that I talk to my friend in that case is very different than if I were talking to someone that I don't have as much trust and respect built up with. I can do that with my friend because I can be very direct because we have that level of trust and respect. They know that if I'm using extreme vocabulary with them, if I'm being very blunt and almost like that's kind of hurtful to be saying something so extreme, they know I'm being serious and it's because I care. It's radical, right? But you can't do that. I couldn't have that same conversation and have it land have it land well with like a stranger, right? It just wouldn't work because they would be like, "Dude, I don't even know you. You can't talk to me like that." and they'd be right. That would be a terrible way to talk to a stranger. But, um, if anyone's aspiring to be a master Pokemon battler, please let me know. I'm I'm interested. Um, Steve says, "Working on call rotation was generally a good experience for me. Quickly showed what things people were confused about for UX." Okay, awesome. And what tooling improvements to provide first level support to better assist the customers? 100% on that second one. I'm not disagreeing with the first part, but on the second part, oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. Yes. Um, one of the things that we're talking about actively is like, hey, when we get all these questions coming in from partner teams, like it's frustrating because we're basically handling alerts, but we're also handling like these questions that come in. Wouldn't it be nice if we had tooling that was self-s serve that people could go get answers for, right? So, uh, lots of really interesting things to learn that way. Robert says, "One more question if there's time." There's always time for you, Robert. How do you think AI code generation has affected the way you interact with other developers? Oo, good one. Um, for me personally, I don't write code at work anymore, so it makes it kind of tricky for me to answer. Um, what's a good way to think about this? So, I can tell you how it's affected with my my workflow, but I don't think that's your question. It's how uh how I interact with other developers. I'll tell you one thing. I'm I'm nervous the way that I talk to LLMs and get frustrated. I am nervous that that is regressing my and I haven't tested this yet, but I'm worried it's going to regress my ability to um to effectively interact on poll requests. What I mean by that is like I will be belligerent with LLMs. I will say things where I am absolutely not okay with what they're doing and I let them know. Um I don't know why. I think it's just because I get very frustrated and I know it's not real. So sorry, not a not a real person. It's a real thing. Um but that interaction I'm like I hey like you you should probably stop that because when you're working with people you can't do that. So, it's getting me to practice things that I like like I'm not proud of and I wouldn't use with people. So, I'm slightly nervous about that. Um, I don't see at least where I work on my team, I'm not seeing like, you know, AI slop being pumped up to pull requests to have people review. So, that's not a thing yet. Um, I have I build stuff on the side and there's definitely AI slop that like gets up into pull requests and it's like oo like should should we not do that? Um, sometimes we're like it doesn't like it's a small thing and we're probably changing it anyway and we're like whatever just do it. Sometimes some I find some frontend pieces are like that where we're like we know it's functional and like we're about to build the next part anyway so like who cares for this moment? It's gonna get blasted out. So um I don't know like in terms of interacting with other developers I don't think I have enough experience like where we are multiple people are building with AI at the same time in my experience like so again I'm saying for for the team I have at Microsoft that's not really a thing yet. Are people using it more? Sure. I think basically everyone's minimally using like AI autocomplete. Um, some more people are starting with agents and stuff like that, but it's certainly not like everyone on the team is running an agent swarm and that's pushing up code and then everyone's like, "Oh my god." Um, but I can imagine that the Oh, and in the sense AI code generation is an answer to questions that could have been asked. Yeah. Are we collaborating less on a fundamental level? I think perhaps. Yeah. Um, I think that's an interesting way to put it, right? you probably there's probably some things that um and like so it's a good question because I have not had the experience of doing this yet. I think that a lot of us who have experience working on teams uh if especially if you can remember when you're new to the team there's a lot of benefit to like to collaboration right how do we do things on the team like what are the patterns we use where are examples of this in the code you go talk to people right you might go searching for it yourself but you're kind of getting on the same page as other people um and we might be like doing less of that communication because if you were to just ask the AI like you're collaborating, but it's with AI now. Um, it can go get you those answers or or a version of them. Who's for me to say if it's right or wrong? But I can imagine that will pull back on some communication. I think that's really interesting. I'd like to pay attention to that over time. Um, but I I think that's an interesting hypothesis that we're collaborating less at a fundamental level. So, I think really good question. Um, that's food for thought for me. Um the just on the the senior to principal thing, last thing I want to wrap up with. Um and this is because it came up in the message that I received and I thought it would be a good clarifying thing for other people. Um they had feedback, this individual that submitted this question, they had feedback that the work they were doing was not complex enough. And I wanted to like be very clear. Um, okay. Thanks, Devin. Take care. Um, I wanted to to be clear that when it comes to complexity and the feedback this person got, I said either either that feedback I feel is wrong or I feel like maybe you you maybe misinterpreted it or or I misinterpreted what they wrote. feel like there's a misunderstanding somewhere because I said I don't think what you want at any level I don't think you want to be going after complexity. I don't think the goal is to have complex solutions. And that's kind of what it seemed like in their message was like the feedback I got was that the projects I built are not complex enough. And I'm like okay well I could see maybe where that comes from. like you haven't built larger systems with more moving pieces, but at the same time, I'm like the the goal is never complexity. Like if you could solve a problem with a the least complex solution, that might be the best thing to do. Um, but I I wanted to kind of maybe flip this around a little bit is that perhaps what the feedback was intended to be, and maybe I misunderstood it myself, was that um the problems they're trying to solve are not complex. They're not ambiguous. They may be more simple and well understood. Um, and they're going because you're not solving difficult problems, like we don't see your work at that level. I could see that maybe. Um, but at the same time, like just to say it, like if you could deliver on work that was very impactful across the organization and you were like, "This is staring at us in plain sight. It's not really difficult, but I'm going to be the one to go do it." I I don't see a difference in that, right? Um, but anyway, I wanted people to to at least like sort of come to the come to an agreement that like we don't want complex solutions. That's not a goal. Um, I don't think that's a good metric. And I I hope that if people are kind of ever getting feedback like that, like you're not building complex enough things. I just don't think that's a I just feel like that's the wrong thing. So, I wanted to share that with folks because I felt that if someone else got that feedback and they were questioning it, they're not the only person. So, that's my take on that. But overall um in a nutshell highle meta point for all of this stuff is that when you are considering how you go from senior to principal is that you want to take all of the awesome work that you've been doing to deliver projects and things within your team and you want to start even if you've been doing that across teams you want to start expanding that type of impact to across your organization and looking for opportunities where you can do that. That will mean getting outside of your comfort zone. You probably have to go talk to more people. So, practice those soft skills. Go network with other people on teams. Go attend other sessions where you have developers or other stakeholders talking about problems or things that they're trying to solve. Try to build bridges, come together on these things. So, I hope that helps. Um, infected FPS just showed up. Come on, man. Right at the end. Um, you're just in time for me to blast out all of my channels and stuff, though. But thanks for thanks for trying to make it infected FPS. I appreciate you. Um, it's so cool to see the regulars coming in. Um, I'm going to switch over. So, there's my newsletter. So, this is the newsletter I talked through. I was struggling with the thumbnail this time. You might be able to tell I am not an artist. Thank you, Canva, for generating me a thumbnail. Um, but that that's my newsletter and um, so if you're interested, the the live stream topics are basically at dev like dev leader weekly. Did that chat what's going on with my chat? It went through. Okay. Um, this whole time my chat window that's not docked on the video, the one that I have on my screen keeps being like, "Oh, we disconnected. We lost your chat." Um, so I keep losing my mind, but the the topics are generally the ones that are going to be on my newsletter. So if you like the live stream and um, Monday raid for my guild, yeah, man, you got to invite them over. So you want to be software engineers, we got to go to the Devleer live stream. Um, yeah, if you want to know what the topics are because you enjoy the live streams, then just head over to weekly.devleer.ca. you don't want a newsletter to your email, don't worry. I don't want you to go subscribe to that if you don't want it. So, please don't. Um, now my YouTube channel, this is the one that probably most of you are aware of, but it's just dev leader on YouTube. Um, I have a bunch of different types of videos. I'm trying not to just drop them for only C tutorials, but um, I have been putting up a couple more AI ones where I'm building stuff and showing you how I'm using AI resume reviews. I am catching up on some of these because my video editor was out and these videos do pretty terribly, but I think that they might be some of the most valuable at least for the people that watch them. So, if you want a resume to be reviewed, you can go check out one of these videos on my channel and um they have uh instructions for how you can submit them. Thank you very much, Robert. I do appreciate that very much. Um, otherwise like a lot of C programming tutorials. You can see that my best ones are C# programming tutorials. Um, they're all my old videos, too. I've fallen from grace. I never even was never there, but that's okay. Now, over here is Code Commute. This is where the magic all starts, though. So code commute is my vlog channel that I use to basically ideulate on all of the topics that come up on the live streams. And so code commute is driven by questions that people submit. So that means if you want a software engineering question answered, you want to talk about you know career advice, a certain situation, you can uh basically go to code commute, you can leave a comment on a video or we have this new feature brand new. One sec. One sec. Oh, my icon's not loading. Anyway, the codemute.com website now officially has a contact page. All done by AI. Thank you very much. This entire site is vibe coded, by the way. So, um, it works. I've tried it. It works. Someone reported the other day it didn't work because I accidentally committed a local host instead of an actual address. But if you want, you can submit questions on code commute and I will answer them on the channel. Uh you can send me a message on any platform with a question if you want and I'm happy to try and answer. And it honest like people submit them and then I basically just have a list of them and there's almost 300 videos now and I just make them when I drive to work. Like I made two videos today. On Wednesday when I go to CrossFit I'll probably make two in the morning and you know another two driving to and from work. So there's that. And then if you want because code commute episodes are generally like 20 to 40 minutes because of the commute. Um, people asked to have them on Spotify, so I've been uploading them to Spotify. They're actually starting to get some traction now, which is cool. But there are 180 of the 300 episodes up on Spotify. I'm uploading 20 of them a week to Spotify until I catch up. So, uh, the nice thing about Spotify is you can just let it run in the background. If you don't have YouTube Premium, you don't have to sit there with your phone open. So, it's kind of nice. Otherwise, folks, I do have courses. This is the thing that pays for the YouTube channel. It would be nice if the YouTube channel paid for itself, but it doesn't. So, if you want to learn about how to program in C, I have the getting started in deep dive courses on dome train. If you're not familiar with domain, this is a course website run by Nick Chapsis. He's one of the most popular YouTubers for C and net development. So, uh, felt very fortunate that early on in my content creation, he reached out and asked if I wanted to make courses and, um, it was even more of an honor to be able to do like the intro level ones for, uh, for his website. So, um, I've helped, you know, thousands. At one point, we were giving it away. So, you know, there's been thousands of students that have, uh, that have learned from for my courses, which is cool. It'd be sweet if all of those people came over to the YouTube channel as well, but they didn't. Um, but if you're not interested in C#, totally cool. There's a few other courses on here that I paired up with Ryan Murphy on. He's an engineering manager at Yelp. And so we have career management, getting promoted, behavioral interviews, and soft skills. You can go check those out if you are interested. Final thing is probably not relevant to the software engineers, but this is what I build on the side. It's called Brand Ghost. And Brand Ghost is my content scheduling and cross-osting platform for all of my social media. So basically, if you see my content on any social media platform, like for those of you watching on Twitter, anything I post on Twitter comes from Brand Ghost. If you see my content on LinkedIn, everything I post is from Brando. So this is the platform I built where I can put my content into it and it will go distribute it for me. The nice thing is um given the type of content I make, it's more educational, evergreen. So if I give advice today, it should hopefully be valuable next year, two years from now. And that means that if I ever need to take a break, like say I need to go on vacation, all of my content is on autopilot. It's already been created. It's perpetually scheduled indefinitely. So helps for creators. Um it's totally free if you want to try it out. Like literally, it says it right here, right? It's no no strings attached. You don't need a credit card, nothing. If you're like, I want to start posting stuff to social media. Say you have a business and you're like, hey, social media is a pain in the butt. You can start for free with us. And if if you're building up that that momentum with crossosting and scheduling, you might say, "Cool, I want some of this on autopilot now." That's where the paid tiers come in, and we can help post your stuff on repeat for you. So, that's what I'm building. It's a lot of fun. If you are curious, it's built in ASP.NET Core. The front end is React with TypeScript Nex.js. Um, runs in Azure. It's cool stuff. And that's all I think folks. So, wanted to say thank you so much for watching. If you are interested, you enjoy these live streams, join me next week, same time, 700 p.m. Pacific. I don't know what the topic is, but it will come from Code Commute. So, if you are curious, go follow Code Commute, check it out during the week, and I will see you all next week. Same place, same time. Take care. Thanks for being here.