Stop Being Unkind To Yourself - Principal Software Engineering Manager AMA

LinkedIn Twitter Facebook Instagram I got Tik Tok going on on my phone cuz I can't yet do it for my desktop just going to kick things off here one sec got to make sure my chat's working I can see people joining chat so that's good hey folks on Tik Tok if you're new to this please feel free to ask questions in the chat I will try to answer all right um today's topic is going to be about it's going to sound kind of funny it's about being kind to yourself as a soft engineer and this is advice that is applicable to people that aren't just software Engineers but I find it's pretty common that this kind of thing comes up especially for software Engineers because there is a lot of stress in general I mean like I said this applies to other jobs but we hold ourselves to high standards so as a result of that sometimes we're not very kind to ourselves so I did write a newsletter article about this it's kind of a theme for my live streams that I do on Mondays here and I'm going to put that into the chat but for folks on Tik Tok I'm sorry I can't yet send you links in the chat very easily so we'll do that soon but into the chat for everyone else there you go it's incoming this is at weekly. Dev leader.com so um in typical fashion if you haven't done or been on my live streams before please please feel free to ask questions as I'm going through I'm happy to Pivot about whatever I'm talking about to answer your questions it's probably more valuable for you and other people if I'm answering your questions and not just blabbing about stuff that I think is important so please feel free to uh to ask away I do monitor the chat if you're watching this and it's recorded obviously I can't answer your questions live so feel free to join the next time you can leave comments on the video you can reach out to me on social media I'm happy to answer stuff for you please do that happy to engage with you okay so to kick things off when I talk about being kind to yourself I was kind of making some jokes about this on social media last week that it seems kind of funny that we are generally a lot more kind to other people and we don't really give ourselves the same respect right so what I was kind of alluding to in some of my posts and stuff was that it's very uh top of mind for a lot of us to especially if you if you're already in industry for example you might be um helping out the junior Engineers right you might be helping interns on board you're helping more Junior Engineers um you're working with other stakeholders that are new to the team and stuff and you're helping them get acquainted we often go out of our way to go help other people right we're kind to others because uh it's the right thing to do we understand that if we're helpful to others they can get better they can do better and we lean into this a lot most of the time right not everyone's like this or sometimes you might think you know some people that don't act like this but I feel like most of us do this we go out of our way to be kind to others right so this comes up like I said all the time you can think about code reviews right if you've been on poll requests and code reviews especially for people that are new to the team you can imagine someone's doing their first poll request on your team it's probably going to be pretty likely that there's going to be a lot of feedback for this person right they haven't coded up to your standards before for your team right they might be new to the technology new to The Domain it could be any number of things right and they're going to get a lot of feedback that's the reality but if you imagine having gone through this situation before usually what you do is you also let the person know that they've done a good job right like good job for getting your first one up sorry there's so much feedback you're going to do great like we encourage people we are kind to others right we do this a lot so we I'm going to keep scrolling through my article here so I can come up with some other examples for you but you depending where you work uh and for folks that aren't yet employed um this is a relatively common thing it's not the same at every company but sometimes you're in positions where there's like what's called like a 360 feedback type of thing so that's where you get feedback not just from a manager to the direct report but you might be getting feedback uh between individuals right so your manager might ask you to give feedback about someone else or at Microsoft we have this thing that's called perspectives and perspectives are super handy and they're an opportunity for you to give feedback to someone else that you've worked with it doesn't have to be directly on your team could be another team that you participated in some projects with and you give them feedback and the managers are able to also see that feedback because it helps us get some also have that perspective right that you're giving to the other people and it's pretty common in perspectives that you'll see uh very positive feedback for people I do encourage you to try and give constructive feedback where possible that was previous talk that we did together here but often you'll see like very positive feedback given to people right we are kind to others and I think that a lot of people lean into this so much in these types of situations because we want to get that positive feedback too right you're being kind to others so they'll be kind to you you want their manager to have a positive outlook about this person you're giving them that that good feedback by the way I've told people this before giving people constructive criticism does not as a manager does not mean that I look at that person and I go oh they must suck they got something they got some feedback that said it would be great if they could work on this therefore they suck like absolutely not uh it's awesome to see people improve on things hello X coding on Twitch welcome back thanks for tuning in again so that's a whole other topic about feedback but generally what I see is that people are very kind to each other when giving feedback right um I talked about the like interns and new employees right some people will sign up especially for interns um even like this past sort of period that we had at Microsoft we had one of my Engineers volunteered to be like sort of the interns Mentor the entire time which is awesome she did an amazing job but she went completely out of her way to help this individual right like this was above and beyond she did great work but she's being kind to this individual right she's making like basically uh she's already at capacity for all of her work but she's putting in extra effort to try and help this person she wants them to succeed and I can tell based on how she's coaching and mentoring this individual it's not just you know I signed up for it I hate it let me get the job done it's like no she wants them to succeed she's being kind this individual so um a more specific example cuz I talked about poll requests and stuff like that another thing that we see is just like being helpful with our teammates right if you've uh for those of you that haven't worked on like a live service where you're um maybe solving some live site incidents and stuff like that uh this can still happen if you're helping with tech support and there's like bugs and stuff that come in but when you go through this problem solving phase you know you might be asking for logs you're trying to reproduce things but you go through all of this effort to go explore stuff right and it's not uncommon that you end up documenting this process and you might go hey I'm going to help the team by sharing this information back whether it's uh you know documenting it in a Wiki or uh an email thread where you can lay everything out and people can see it you might do a a discussion about it so you'll do like prepare a talk and explain um but this is yet another example of like trying to help you're being kind to the rest of your team so you can all do better you're not saying hey screw you guys like it's all on you next time this comes up right so there's so much that we do so much that we do to go and help others and be kind to them and for those of you that are like I don't do any of that stuff I mean my first action takeaway that was in my newsletter was try to start doing that I think most people do right I think most of us are aligned to that kind of thing we see it as a positive thing to do but if you're like hey I only focus on my own stuff like it's me I got to get my work done because my work's the only stuff that matters I feel like this is a pretty rare thing it's not impossible it's pretty rare that people are very self-focused like that but I would say um Step One is you know make sure that you are trying to find ways to help others that was kind of the framing of getting things going right so it's not uncommon that we are kind to others but it does seem to be pretty uncommon that we're kind kind to ourselves and I went on to say in my article here like a way that we have to experience growth is that we are going to be uh faced with challenges right that's you need to be faced with challenges so that you can overcome them to grow if you're only doing the things that you're comfortable with that you know how to do all of the time and you just keep doing them and there's no challenge there's nothing new odds are you're going to have a difficult time growing right it's like uh you can use an analogy of being in the gym if you always lift the same weights right there's going to be a period in the beginning where you'll get stronger because it's kind of new to you but if you just kept lifting the exact same weight and you never tried to lift anything heavier or change up some other variables you're probably going to Plateau you're just not going to see improvements because you're not challenging your body right so it's the same thing when it comes to growth and software engineering maybe with a little bit less muscle mass or strength but um when it comes to your skills your experiences and things like that you do need to be challenging yourself you need to be trying things that are a little bit outside of your comfort zone and like I said we generally as software Engineers hold ourselves to very high standards and I do I wanted to talk about high standards for a bit because I I don't want people to hear what I'm saying and it's like oh well it's bad to have high standards I think absolutely not I think it's great to have high standards right I think personally I think that this is something that when people have high standards for themselves they try to achieve Excellence they want to do good things they try to take ownership these are like I'm not I'm kind of generalizing but some common traits that you might see in people that um set High a high bar for themselves right they are trying to do better they set the bar high and they say like no this is my expectation I need to be achieving at this level for for me to like feel successful for me to grow and this is is like a it's a framing personally I like doing this kind of thing for myself I've I found that I found that I've had success in my career by doing this it's not just like I'm going to go to work and like whatever it's on the the board for today for stories and bugs I'm just going to chip away at them it's like no like there's there's so much more going on there's so many more opportunities and a lot of the time it's going to mean getting a little bit uncomfortable right so we set this High bar we got uncomfortable but one of the challenges is that when we have this High bar set it's so easy for us to get on our own back about it right so you set the bar high and when the bar is set very high it will mean that there are periods of time where you're going to fail and I use the FW here some people get uncomfortable with the FW the failure word um I also want to pause to talk about failure because I think some people hear it and it makes them uncomfortable because you don't want to fail but I when I've talked um there's a colleague of mine or former colleague of mine a really good friend of mine we podcast about Engineering Management and one of the things that I bring up in our podcast semi-regularly is this idea of big F failures and little F failures and this is just my mental model for it but there's tons of other ways to look at this but the idea is that when you fail you fail at something it's a little F failure when you fail something doesn't go as planned right you uh broke the build you had a bug in production anything right you uh set some Milestones you didn't achieve them it's a little left failure because we're human and you're going to have failures it's only normal that not everything is going to go perfect because you are human that's okay that's a little of failure and if you're working in a safe environment you know psychological safety you know that you have mechanisms in place that you're not going to basically you know the whole company's not going to go under because of one bug or something like that you have all these things in place to be safe to fail for little F failures and little F failures are the things that allow us to grow and learn because you take the little F failures and you go hey that didn't work that didn't go as planned we don't like what whatever is happening is a result of this little F failure and you take the little F failure and you say well what can we do better next time right this comes up in software engineering all the time your retrospectives your um post incident reviews or sometimes we call them post-mortems you take these opportunities to go say what can we do differently to not have this happen so you're looking at your little F failure a little F failure might have a pretty big impact but it's a little F failure still because you're going through these me mechanisms for learning opportunities analysis about what you can do better and then the next time you try it hopefully you don't have another little F failure now my opinion if you keep doing the same thing and resulting in little F failures because you are not adjusting and learning this becomes a big F failure it's a big F failure and when I say big and little F I just mean the capitalization of the word like it's a failure it's a true failure if you're just not learning and you're not doing anything better it doesn't mean the next time you try it you can't have two little F failures in a row maybe what you wanted to try isn't the right Solution that's okay but you need to be learning and trying things so that you'd stop having the same little F failure if you give up and you don't try again your little F failure becomes a big F failure you failed you didn't correct it you didn't learn from it so this is the mental model I use for failure and that's why I talk about failure like it's okay because I do expect that you will fail and I do hope that you will learn from your failures these are two important things so again we only have big F failures or truly fail at something if we give up or we're just not putting in the effort to learn and do better okay so you are going to have failures and I think what happens it's pretty common where people go oh no I failed and it's a little of failure right this is what I'm trying to get at it's not the end of the world but they go I've set the bar up here I'm pretty short so when I say up here I mean like that's only I'm only 5'4 but I mean like somewhere up a little bit higher than 5'4 um it's up high and when you fail and you have the bar set high it's easy to get down on yourself right you're like like I blew it like I suck this is embarrassing you have all these different types of emotions depending on what the issue was and how you failed or you get down on yourself right I I'm going to look stupid in front of my colleagues I have to talk to my manager about this like he's he or she's going to think that I'm an idiot and I can't do my job properly or I have to go present this post incident review people are going to judge me like this is such a silly mistake how could I have ever done this this I'm never going to get my promotion now um may like do I have to work extra hard do I have to do more work like you have all these things then you start creating this pressure on yourself and I truly feel like this is like a bit of the side effect of setting the bar high right and we have to set the bar high for folks that are again like if you're new to software engineering um or you're trying to get into the the software engineering field like we all know it's very competitive right now to get in right it's like it's very challenging for people to to land their first jobs or if you're trying to transition roles and stuff it's it's very challenging so yeah the bar is set high right and the people that are you know I'm not saying there's going to be people that kind of luck out and they happen to get their resume in front of the right person get the right interview and everything lines up it's it's possible right but we set the bar high so we can do better because it's competitive right and then on Twitch chat it's you know too competitive but makes sense yeah there's there's a lot of people going for stuff and they're you know over the past couple years there's been layoffs and stuff too so there's a lot of people in the market and of course there's always more and more people trying to be software Engineers coming on um there's this fear of like AI replacing all the software Engineers which I disagree with um I I'll comment on this briefly I think AI is going to change software engineering like it will many roles um but the way that I look at AI coming into play is that it will obsolete the mundane repetitive things um I guess like more automation of sorts as replaced repetitive things but AI will replace other sorts of mundane things it will mean that as software Engineers we get to focus on other types of problems so software engineering does not go away it just changes the things that we have to spend our time on because we have ai to help us just like we've had automation replace other things so we have a lot of competition so in chat here beside of comp uh of competition is the quality delivery hey I will impact the help but not replace exactly yeah right we're going to we're going to have uh like an augmentation of software engineers lots of other roles outside of software engineering in general right it's going to help a lot of things it will replace things that are not able to adjust to it so there will be roles or there will be software Engineers that that basically aren't taking on AI as a way to help them and if they're only kind of operating at some level then yes of course AI will be able to replace so I've talked about um you know for example different testing roles right I have nothing against software testing I think we need to be doing software testing but there are certain software testing roles that if you're not adapting to what's going on you'll be replaced by different things you can have teams of Engineers who are focused on testing working with product and have putting Automation in place that will replace people that only did a very narrow narrow set of testing doesn't mean it's going to replace all testers just means that there's a very narrow set of people that start getting replaced uh and then in chat I just hope that the new new devs will read the AI output before pasting and learning something from it yeah so that's going to be another interesting thing that we'll see over the the next few years right um is this idea that you have access to something where like what we used to be able to do is search for things I mean we still do this search for things we poke through all the answers that we see on stack overflow on blogs wherever and be go oh this I'll try a couple of these things and like which solution fits we copy paste it massage it a little bit we get it working cool and through that process yeah like someone kind of gave you a set of answers but you still have to kind of poke around and figure it out but the amount of customization and like through prompting that you can give an llm to say hey I got a pretty specific problem go build it for me and it can do a decent job a lot of the time there's a ton of bugs but do a decent job better than if you had no idea what to do it can probably set you off in the right direction and the more that we lean into that and just start blindly trusting it especially as the llms get better it'll be kind of interesting to see how things change we don't want to lose our understanding of how these things work of course but there's going to be things where we may not have to know in as much detail they just don't make sense to know at in as much detail because you never have to do them in as much detail yeah and then in chat this is what scares me a little that we'll get poor quality stuff in big picture right yeah so this is you know something that we all have to be mindful of as we go forward with AI I think it's important we have to think about it it's not going anywhere something to think about okay so talking about being kind to ourselves kind of got to the point of like growth what what do we need for growth setting this bar High we need to we're going to be failing at things that's okay right and then people get down on themselves they're not kind to themselves because they are experiencing failures you might feel embarrassed you might feel all these other emotions but you get down on yourself for doing it so the pivot here that I want people to make is that I think you still can't set the bar High kind of scrolling through my newsletter here um you can set the bar bar high for yourself but you need to change the framing and this is something I never I wanted to share this cuz I never really I want to say like I never believed it um and it's negative solve talk I never really believed this because it kind of felt like people say like woo woo like it's just kind of there's nothing really backing it right it's like prove it like you're just kind of making a statement but prove it how do you know it works like so negative selft talk is something where I was like it doesn't matter like you're just saying words um but I think I was taking it too literally like you say the words and somehow the words themselves manifest and I'm like that's obviously ridiculous it's not it's not just magic right um but the negative selft talk thing over the past couple years I've been taking that to heart and I do find it makes a huge difference but I had to stop being so literal about like yeah man like you're saying the words you're not casting a spell and like summoning bad things when you say the negative things but it's about Framing and I thought that this was really important to share because I think that if you change the framing up and stop being so hard on yourself you can start looking at your failures as opportunities for doing better right it's not I failed this is embarrassing I failed people are going to laugh at me I failed people are going to think I'm stupid I failed I'm not going to get a promotion like you got to stop that right and I'm not saying it's easy you can't just snap your fingers right but it's it's you have to change this framing in chat criticism can always be constructive 100% yes 100% yes I've even tried to demonstrate on social media over the past year where I've had people say some outright rude things to me or things that I thought were just like that's a ridiculous thing to say and I have tried to make sure that when I post about it I try to you know anonymize the person because I don't want people to get bashed or whatever it's not fair but I post about it to say look this person said something and I really didn't like it I didn't think that it was good feedback the feedback is not presented in a good way more like they're try just trying to be rude or mean is how it comes across but let's see what we can extract what kind of value can we get out of this one example is this is going to be not software engineering specific but it's still relevant because we're talking about feedback based on this comment here uh for my YouTube videos I you you people will use filler words a lot right you you're probably noticing as I'm talking live here because I'm not editing my live stream um that there's going to be filler words like um I just said um there right I'm probably doing a lot of them that I don't even realize the more you practice talking the less filler words you end up doing to be conscious of that but I was making YouTube videos and using the word actually a lot and I had no idea and someone watched a YouTube video and their comment was just like you actually said the word actually like 47 times in like 3 minutes and the comment itself was kind of like poking fun at me like look well this is at least how I took it right like you're being an idiot you can't even speak L and you made a video like this like you should be embarrassed and that's how I felt I'm reading this being like man like I suck like that that is and I watched it back and the the hard truth was he wasn't wrong I said the word actually an outrageous number of times so it was like okay he's got a point and you can't control how other people give you feedback you can't control anyone and you shouldn't try to what you can control is how you respond to things so I tried to use it as a teaching example to say hey when you give people feedback try not to do it this way here's why because you want people to be receptive to your feedback if you say things in a way where people will get defensive feel offended it's not going to land well for most people right they're going to say like why are you doing that go away I didn't ask for your opinion but you can extract value so that was the other reason for posting this kind of stuff was saying hey look as bad as the feedback was or as poorly as I received it because I felt it was delivered poorly there's still a good piece of information here and for the next months when I was recording stuff I would stop and I would say I I realized I just said actually like three times in one sentence redo it and I tried to improve and it's all because someone gave me feedback that I really didn't like but there was something constructive inside of it and then in chat but for that you need very strong selfesteem a comment can destroy someone weaker yes and I had some I this is an I want to share this other example very briefly because I think this is a good comment in the chat so thank you for from kick I think this is important so yes um so for context right uh been programming for 21 years I program in C for about 17 years now I've been a software engineering manager for 12 years like I'm I'm I'm doing okay in my career I'm not done I have a lot more to go but I'm doing okay in my career I should be proud of where I'm at I know what I'm talking about for most things right I'm not not an expert on everything but I recently had someone basically try to just I want to say they probably thought I I think they probably thought they were giving me feedback about a Blog article and this was on LinkedIn they basically just repo they did the thing like repost with thoughts and they shared my post and they said this thing is littered with errors see how many you can count and then listed Seven things and I didn't feel like any of them were disagreeing with what I said they just wanted to say it in their way but I'm read it being like I agree with that like that's not I didn't say not that but the feeling I got from that was like why am I bothering to do any of this right this is I'm I'm sharing this with you because I want you to understand the impact of this kind of thing if you're doing it to other people or you see colleagues and stuff going through this I know what I'm talking about because I've been programming in this language that I wrote a Blog about for years I'm not saying I'm an expert in every aspect of but I have tons more to learn tons and I'm glad because I want to be learning all the time but like to basically try and make fun of someone like that wasn't an attempt to give feedback that was an attempt to belittle someone and the feeling I got was why do I even bother doing any of this if someone is that's more experienced is just going to try to make fun of me like truly why would I bother doing that it's not like no one paid me to go write that blog article I had lots of other people say like thank you it was helpful and then it only took one person for me to basically go like why am I doing this and I'm not going to give up I'm not going to give up because 11 years ago I did I started doing not the live streams and the video creation but I was blogging about stuff in Engineering Management 11 years ago when I gave up and I've told myself you're not giving up again I don't care how many mean comments you get about something you're not giving up so I'm not going to but to the point in the chat yeah like I'm only able to do that because I do have self-esteem about about various things there's certain things I'm not confident about that's okay I have to work on that but you do need to have self steam or else you you would be crushed by some of the things that people say online it's it's uh people are pretty sour and chat tech support sisadmin for over 16 years Dev since 2013 is a passion there you go right starts with passion so that's awesome so yeah you can get really crappy feedback right the framing is everything so in this example we're talking about getting feedback that's not delivered well how are you going to frame like what how you're getting that my immediate reaction I'm being transparent my immediate reaction is I get upset right I get frustrated I get angry not like breaking stuff in my room or anything but I get mad at the person when they give me like harsh feedback and I'm I'm not talking about like my manager saying hey like could you I need you to focus on this is my expectation not like that I mean when you get crappy feedback where someone clearly didn't put any effort into delivering their message I get mad and I get mad because I'm like I would never give feedback like that to someone like you I feel like you must be pretty terrible as a human to do that so my immediate reaction is to get mad but I do have to actively remind myself like no like that's not it's not what we're doing here you have to change your Framing and if you change your framing you can get some good stuff out of it and that's what I want people to do for themselves so when you start getting down on yourself you're feeling embarrassed about breaking stuff right it's not there's nothing to be embarrassed about I'm going to check the chat uh thanks Andy I appreciate the shout out have you read The Happiness Advantage great book on this topic I have not could you share more details on Twitch there uh Lord ELR 2023 excellent ELR um yeah if you don't mind sharing some details about that uh if you have a link to it that'd be super cool I've never heard of this but um be interested to hear more thank you the yeah so the point about the framing is that you can do you can start taking action and doing positive things even when you felt like something might not have been good and I was just about to give an example this is the drawback to live streaming if I see something and it catches my attention I forget what I was going to say oh I wanted to give an example about let pick anything right um you you broke the build no Let's do let's the Liv site issue because I want to use like a post incident review kind of situation so you have a livesite incident that was caused by a change that you delivered okay and it's a common like it's not basically I would say B like every software engineer does this at least once and if you do it more than once it doesn't mean it's a big F failure because generally things are failing for different reasons so lots of learning to do but usually how this looks is that you put up code that you were working on now during your development process depending where you work how your teams are structured tests are on that you might have demoed it to a product owner right throughout your development process potentially other people were involved not uncommon then this goes up for review now you have people on your team reviewing it right usually at least one person is going to sign off on this so even if you worked alone odds are you're putting it up for a review and you're having one other person check it at a minimum so now at least two people are involved now this is going to go through your build system now it's going to go through whatever testing automation you have so who built the testing framework right like does it support being able to have different types of tests that you wanted to include so maybe someone else is involved in that you start flighting your change out what types of alerting and monitoring do we have in place right so like do is there a team that owns the infrastructure for that do they support the right types of alerting and monitoring that you would want oh they do but you didn't put them in place okay well is that totally your fault did the people that were doing your review or the other stakeholders that were signing off on your changes they mention those it's a team effort right so yeah you might have been the person that wrote the code push submit and it broke the build or in this case you know livesite issue but there were other people involved so it's not you you're not the only person and hopefully you work at a place where you do blameless post incident reviews because if any post incident review or postmortem kind of situation where people are blaming people you got to change that you got to change that right away um but you can either go through that process and be like I'm so embarrassed right all the emotions I talked about earlier kind of going through this cycle of like everything sucks I'm never going to get promoted my manager's never going to forget this like you know all these things and instead you can acknowledge yeah that sucked right that wasn't good that's okay but what are you going to do about it right this is a learning opportunity let's change our framing not to be you know I'm in the mindset where this is the most embarrassing thing I'm never going to I'm never going to recover from this um it's not like that this is a learning opportunity for you so change your framing what are you going to do next time better right you start setting that bar High because this what we do we have high expectations for ourselves so what are you going to learn what are you going to do better these are all opportunities if you change your framing these are all opportunities you stop the negative selft talk of how embarrassed you are how stupid you must be for messing up you change your framing you have a bunch of opportunities in front of you this is also why I say when people get constructive criticism or even in this case if you messed up right it's like oh we not going to get promoted now it's not true and you can transform your mistakes into really awesome learning opportunities so take this this uh this situation this is a little of failure so far because we haven't given up yet so okay um we do a post incident review and we're looking at this situation and we go you know what uh we talked about writing tests for this to have you know unit tests or some type of coded tests like functional integration tests and the testing harness or the testing infrastructure we have just doesn't really support this yet so I skipped over them cool okay there's an action we can go improve that we have a good scenario and a good use case for improving it so maybe we can go invest into that and we can improve that you could be the person that helps either deliver that or help the people that are responsible for it like work through that because you have a good use case for it there's one very positive thing that could come out of that okay what about the the code review process do you guys talk about that kind of stuff in your your code review right like was anyone looking for TAS do you need to maybe talk about like with your team maybe we need to do a little bit more of a rigorous job on this we should be ask asking each other what kind of tests did you run on this what kind of automation are you putting in place because I don't see it on the poll request like is it on another review that I should be looking at right you have to change that process for your team change the guidelines around it because if so again you could be championing that that's another positive takeaway that you can get out of this what about the alerting and monitoring kind of the same thing about the infrastructure conversation for the test we don't have those things cuz they're not supported cool talk to the team about it how do we build that kind of stuff or you do support it but someone like you forgot and your team wasn't looking at it on the review cool how do you have a conversation with your team about making this better for next time you can Champion these things and transform that was three crappy things that happened and you can transform all three of them into something positive and tell me that's not going to look good when it comes time for review you think someone's going to go oh yeah but remember you broke the build you had that live site issue no they're going to say such an awesome job for making our testing infrastructure better it's such an awesome job for leading this initiative why because you break the build once you have a livesite incident once but your changes going forward help everyone else for next time you can transform all of these things into positive situations if you change your mindset or you could not you can sit there and being upset with yourself and you can go well I never want to push code again because I'm going to break the build probably not the best option right but that's probably going to wrap up this part so again I do recommend people keep holding you know hold your uh your bar high for yourself I think that's totally cool have high expectations but don't be unkind to yourself we give kindness to everyone else we need to be kind to ourselves we need to have positive framing I think that's important okay I'm going to blab about a couple more things here and I like trying to use you know the last little bit of the live stream for people ask questions and stuff so uh I think that I can see them all coming in um I'm pretty sure restream on my computer has shown them from everywhere except LinkedIn so far but maybe no one on LinkedIn said anything um oh you know what I wasn't watching Instagram no sorry Instagram my bad um I don't think I see any messages there though so that's okay next time next time Instagram you got to send your messages in okay so please send in your your questions if you have any I'm going to talk a little bit about what inspired this for me recently and uh couple of things but first one was kind of going through um so I switched teams earlier this year in Microsoft and this was sort of my first time syncing up with my manager to do conversations about performance for the team and things like that and it's a really good opportunity for me personally to be able to make sure that my manager and I are aligned because he would have been managing these individuals before and if we sat down to talk and it was like like oh what are you talking about like that's this person's not like that or like a just completely different perspective about what's going on that would be a big red flag for me like what am I doing wrong here right and it's not to say that I can't have different perspectives that's fine but if we're so misaligned that it's like are we even talking about the same individuals here that's probably a cause for concern so had really good conversations about that I was really happy to see that like I think we're on the same page for these things that's good and what I wanted to make sure is that as I'm going forward and working with my team I know that the team I have now I know that the team I had before and teams I've had before that everyone's working hard I have had only a very few number of people in my career which so far for managing specifically has been 12 years very few number of people that I would say were not working hard there I'm not going to go into the details about it but like pretty pretty obviously not working hard but the overwhelming majority everyone is working super hard everyone's very motivated they want to be doing better at what they're doing they want to get to the next level whatever that happens to look like and people work hard and what I want to be careful about is that when I give constructive feedback to people I want to make sure that we talked about uh like a concept called radical cander if you're not sure what that is Google it radical cander is really awesome um it's basically putting yourself in this position where you've built a good trust and respect relationship with people and you can be brutally honest with them like you could be like hey man like you actually looked really stupid when you were presenting something that brutally honest and when you have radical cander the people that you are having radical cander with they understand that you want them to succeed they understand that you need to be blunt with them to deliver your message effectively so they really get it they don't hear that and they go holy crap like Nick is being so rude like who is this guy it might catch them off guard but they go I know Nick wants me to succeed I know Nick respects me we have a good trust relationship I probably still wouldn't use language like that for the record especially with my employees but if you think about your best friend right this is a good example your best friend you probably have radical cander with right we have some friends where we'll always kind of say yeah know you're it's great it's great but your best friend that you're closest with you'll tell them man that sucks you shouldn't do that that isn't good like you can do that with them and they know that you're not being mean they know that you want them to succeed so that's what I want with my team but I know that not everyone can see the constructive criticism especially when they get it or they're observing it forsel like they know maybe something they want to improve on and they're down on themselves because the bar is set high and they're seeing that they're not quite getting there and then they get down on themselves so I wanted to make sure that I had some framing for this going through these conversations that will be coming up so that was one reason and then the other reason is this is not uh software engineering related but it's about content creation so it might feel irrelevant to you but I want to share this because it's it's just me being open and transparent but over the past little while uh I post a lot on LinkedIn that's primarily like my major audience for making posts videos are for primarily on YouTube but my posts are primarily on LinkedIn and it's been really hard when I say really hard I mean I set the bar high for myself I want to be able to grow my audience right part of being a content creator is being able to grow your audience and if you're not totally familiar with how all this works like one of the things that you want to be able to drive up ultimately is not just like a follower base especially with the direction that a lot of platforms are going in a lot of the cases follower base doesn't mean a lot it's the number of Impressions you get because the number of impressions are literally the number of eyeballs that are landing on your content that your content's being served to and what I've been finding is this feeling I'm I'm correcting myself because I am saying feeling now I've been going over the past couple of months especially in the last few weeks I'm going why am I bothering with this there's a lot of time and effort that goes into it and I'm going man like my my impressions are way down like everything about this sucks like I'm it's not like I'm taking my foot off the gas and I'm doing less so I'm again bar is set high and I'm feeling like I am failing at this it doesn't matter how much effort I'm putting into it I'm failing at it this is not good hey Nick why are you I'm going to repeat the things I said earlier why are you so dumb this is so embarrassing for how much time you spend on it right if you had to talk to someone else who does this and explain this they're going to think you're stupid wasting your time right all of these negative self talk things and I realized I realized something very interesting and I should know better by now but sometimes we need these crappy reminders but it's all for this scenario for me this was a comparison thing this does apply to software Engineers because I've seen this come up a lot where people will say hey I feel like I'm behind in my career because so and so has gotten promoted and I haven't comparison right comparing yourself to someone else who seems to be doing the thing that you want they're getting the the result that you want to have and we compare and then we feel bad about ourselves people will do this in the gym how come how come they can have that thing that I want how can they be strong how can they be stronger and leaner than me that's totally not fair like oh my God I suck at this why am I even trying right there's parallels to all this kind of stuff across everything comparison so it happens a lot in software engineering for sure especially for people that are focused on trying to improve in their career it will come up where you start comparing so this is what I was doing I was comparing myself to people that have smaller accounts or even sometimes larger but what's happing is a disproportionate amount of Engagement interaction Impressions and I'm doing comparison and it's not a good thing to do at least not with this framing so I had a a crappy couple of weeks feeling like why am I even bothering to do this so this is my the other reason why I wanted to write this now the funny thing for me and it was really like that yeah you got to you got to write this one is that I looked at the data compared to what I was doing a couple months ago I have literally 50% more Impressions I felt like basically it went to nothing I felt like nothing's working and I literally have 50% more than I used to so I wanted to share that not to brag about my Impressions I didn't tell you a number it doesn't matter said 50% more I could have went from two Impressions to three right could have doesn't matter the point that I'm trying to make here is that I had so much negative selft talk resulting from comparison which is completely irrelevant unhealthy adding no value and in fact adding subtracting value and it was completely false sure other people might be doing things that are getting them even better results and that's cool that's great for them right that's awesome for them I'm not them doesn't M it literally does not affect me in any way and I had data that I could show myself to be like Nick shut up the data says otherwise so you're just making stuff up in your head so again I wanted to share that because I know that example was content creation and some of you are like I don't care Nick like I'm not making content it's not the point the point is that I'm trying to give you an example of being unkind to yourself and how you need to change that around because if you zoom out right you're a software engineer you're trying to get to the next level and it's it's seeming challenging zoom out a little bit what have you learned over the past year right if you go back a couple years would you imagine that you are where you are today right if if your answer is no if you're like or sorry if you could imagine that you are where you are today and you're like this is literally not exciting like I'm not growing like it's probably time for change for sure but I would guess for many people you would go holy crap like I didn't think that a year ago I was uh at Microsoft still on on a deployment team doing deployment stuff I did not think in one year I would be in a completely different part shouldn't say completely different part it's still Office 365 completely different team different space of things we're working on completely different mission in something that I have no experience in Prior I did not expect that so sure when I'm feeling challenged by things and I'm like man like you really should be getting this like are you stupid like I stop saying those things now zoom out right I learned so much on my previous team I will learn so much on this team as well you can make lots of things a positive situation even when you're feeling negative if you start changing your perspective so that's going to conclude everything I wanted to share again questions in the chat if you have them happy to answer still haven't seen the Happiness Advantage maybe I'll maybe I'll give that a little search here while we're waiting for any questions this is the book so this book is by Sha AER it looks like I'm going to put a link in the in the chat trying to see if I can trim off half this this Amazon is like it's across all of my monitors so I want to make it a little bit smaller here um let's see if this works cool this is the book that was referenced so thank you for sharing that sorry if you're on a platform where you can't see it I think LinkedIn doesn't show it it looks like it goes to Twitch YouTube and Facebook so apologies if you're on a different platform um usually read your post on LinkedIn thank you but there's like a thousand people posting about c yeah there are I prefer videos on Advanced topics my favorite at the moment are haran Milan got a bit tired of Nick's videos yeah there's other Nick yeah uh Nick chapsas um yeah and no and that's good feedback thank you I think um it's like depending on what you're being fed by the algorithm it's like yeah there's a lot of C stuff there's a lot of um I was talking about this earlier there's a lot of stuff that I see posted C or even I see mostly C stuff but like really really basic things like I almost borderline like here's how you declare variables and people are like oh this is the best um I don't really get it um I try to cover really basic stuff I cover some more nuanced things but yeah I try to make them in videos basically but I try to have different form factors for my content so it'll come up on LinkedIn but um yeah I try to mix it up a little bit but I do appreciate that so thank you and maybe I should probably plug my stuff here at the end of this video so I'm going to go ahead and switch over to this mode here and I'll put my face back on I still got to figure this thing out there's my face here I am um so I got courses on C I want to share that with you guys so this is on doome train this is a bundle uh it's discounted when you get these together otherwise you pay the full price for each of them but I have uh getting started and a deep dive so together that's over 11 hours of content the first one getting started if you've literally never programmed ever in your life you can start with this one to get started with c walk you through the basics um I always tell people this when you go through these courses I don't promise you like you're going to be an expert level programmer because it doesn't make any sense at all there is no 11 hours of course material that will make you an expert what I do say is that you should have gone through the basics of all of this and I do recom recomended my courses that you program alongside me I said that funny alongside me not along um so program alongside me programming and practicing is the best way that you will improve you need to be practicing so I have those if we check out the other one by me it is a refactoring one so this is a course you can see the curriculum here um the concepts in here are applicable to other programming languages by the way so if you're watching this oh man this looks really bad on Instagram I'm so sorry um apologies um yeah if you are watching this and you program in a different language this is still applicable it's just that all the examples are in C just a heads up so if you're like hey what are some refactoring techniques how do I work through this kind of stuff but it's in typescript this kind of thing will still be valuable to you so uh just a heads up there but that will conclude I don't like plugging my stuff too much because it feels kind of gross to be very salesy there's my face but I do appreciate the time so thank you so much for joining I do these live streams every Monday at 9:30 p.m. PST so you can tune in if you want to see more of them every Monday 9:30 p.m. PST and then throughout the week I still have not found a Cadence for it but I have been trying to jump on and do coding live streams so pay attention for that if you want to get notified when that's happening the best way is to follow me on some platform so whatever you're watching this on now probably um follow there if you're not already so uh best place is for sure YouTube twitch for programming stuff um Kick I guess that's a platform I would recommend those for live streaming and yeah I think that's all folks so thanks so much and hopefully I will see you next Monday if not midweek at some point when I'm coding something