A Letter To Junior Developers - Principal Software Engineering Manager AMA

we should be ready to go on Instagram here LinkedIn should be going I'll mute myself so I don't have to hear a delayed Echo because that's the absolute worst thing what's worse than hearing your own voice is hearing it on delay so we'll get that going I'm just going to check YouTube and then we should be good to go just need one sec here just like double checking that everything's coming through okay before getting too far I have had once upon a time I live streamed and I didn't have audio and it was a few good few minutes in before people in the chat were like by the way I can tell you're trying to teach us at a program but we can't hear you so it was nice and awkward and I want to avoid that for the rest of my life okay so this is an AMA live stream that I'm going to be focusing on uh my last newsletter article which I'm very fortunate someone submitted a bunch of questions for Jun your software Engineers I thought that was awesome and it felt very relevant I had a lot of people kind of mentioning on different platforms like thanks for putting this together and really what's cool about that is like I'm just sharing my experience but the fact that someone could speak up and ask these questions it's such a good reminder that um you know if you're at work and stuff like that you need to speak up to ask questions like there's going to be other people wondering this kind of stuff too so when you're able to speak up and ask like you're doing other people a favor as well so I'm going to go ahead I'm going to put the newsletter Link in the chat um not forcing you to go read it or anything these are just the topics and I do have a couple of additional questions that I did not answer in the newsletter I will see if by the end of this week if I have a couple of more uh to add to that list that was sent over to me and I may continue that theme and do another follow-up newsletter on that um but we'll see um I do have a busy weekend coming this uh up this weekend it's going to be my wife's birthday and we are getting cats so we're going to be adding two more furry Critters to the bunch we have three dogs that all look like different sizes of wolves mine are very small wolves and they're very fluffy but we're going to get fluffy cats too so we're going to have five pets so five Pets Plus her birthday it's going to be a lot going on so I may try to have a lightweight newsletter and uh kind of plan to do an extension of this on Monday so uh as with all my live streams if you are watching this live and you have access to chat if you want to ask questions please do I am trying to watch chat across uh if you've seen pictures of my desk set up I have uh I don't know like over 60 inches of screen uh in front of me so I'm trying to watch everything to make sure um I can get it all covered so please uh ask your questions in the chat live streams are for all of you so participate I'm happy to stop what I'm talking about like oh my God cats yes in the chat there we go right uh ask your stuff I'm happy to to answer as I go along uh of course I prepare something to talk about so that it's not an awkward silence waiting for people to jump in but hopefully if you've seen these before you know the drill so I'm happy to to answer your stuff okay cool so I'm going to start this off um the the setup of the questions that I received was really focused on Junior Engineers you know you've uh started off your career right and I think for some of you that haven't yet done that if you're still trying to land your first job or you're like going through school or boot camps and stuff like that this is still valuable because it's something you can be thinking about as you're going to go into the workforce so um you know if you haven't started work yet that's okay this is still applicable but the idea was really like you know as a junior engineer how can I start having more impact and I love this set of questions because I've noticed when I do early and career mentorship at Microsoft uh there are a lot lot of people that as they're starting their careers they're kind of like hey like doing my job like they might have different challenges ramping up or things on their team but almost everyone kind of reaches this point where they're like how can I like how do I do more how do I how do I grow um and it's really interesting to hear that for people that just started right that's already on their mind how do I continue to get better I love to see it and I think it's top of mine for a lot of people so um one of the first questions was really around How can I my manager effectively in a sense uh of the type of questions I should be asking them right so this person's already got on their mind I need to be talking with my manager so what kind of questions can I be asking them to understand how to succeed in my role and then there's kind of a follow-up question was like um what types of questions and like how do those conversations look when I want to have them with my manager so I always come back to when you're talking with your manager one of the most beneficial things you can be doing is getting alignment and what I mean by that is if you're aligning on expectations uh your managers like one of their responsibilities is to help you grow as a software engineer right we have a responsibility to the business that we want to make sure that things are getting done we're focused on the right priorities but at the end of the day the engineering manager is there to help ensure the team is able to do their best work possible and one of the ways that we do that is by helping the engineers on the team focus on uh you know challenging work interesting work work that's aligned to their growth areas and then helping them grow in their careers so in order to do that effectively as a manager we need to be having conversations with people about how we see their career growth and making sure that as managers were aligning with the employees and it works the other way especially so if you are a junior engineer and I've had people again in my uh early incer mentorship circles asking this like hey is it tooo soon to like be asking my manager like how how I should be trying to think about going forward and uh thinking about promotion right they're not saying hey Nick I just started at Microsoft I think I'm ready for a promotion they're asking how do I talk to my manager about what that even looks like right A lot of these people especially early in career folks that I Mentor they have not had jobs yet and I think that it's a totally fair question they're nervous to ask because it's it might seem like a weird topic right you might be feeling like how do I how do I ask someone about getting to a point where I deserve more like it it almost feels like selfish I guess um so I can totally rationalize that I can understand why it might feel awkward but I do think one of the most important things you can do is start with your manager trying to have open honest transparent conversations ask questions about things like career progression I think that's super important so I'm going to I'm going to focus on the effective 101s right after this but uh in terms of like leveraging your manager right um the key things that I want you to keep in mind are like what your manager's responsibilities are in their job role so I mentioned business priorities trying to make sure the teams focus on the right areas but it's to help you grow and be effective so what you can do is think about that's what your manager is supposed to be doing that's what they're responsible for so I like framing this as like think about how you can help your manager help you so if you can make their job easier in terms of making you more successful then it will be a very positive feedback loop right so uh an example I wrote in my newsletter is like how do you like think about this for yourself because I can't tell you this this is something you have to understand for yourself because everyone's very different on this and it's a very simple one but how do you like to get feedback think about what that looks like to have to have feedback given to you and like when that feels motivating when that feels like it's helping you engage some people need basically zero feedback that's like spoken to them in one-on ones and stuff like people are like you don't have to tell me like I see the work I'm doing and that's good and that's that's motivating enough that's that's pretty rare but some people are like that and often it's a lot more the other direction where people are like I wish that I had someone telling me that I'm doing a good job especially as a junior because the expectations and understanding like that alignment because you're very new to all of this it feels weird you haven't figured it out yet and it's not your fault like I said you're new to it so having someone be able to say like hey like that first bug you fixed awesome job like such a good job getting that through the poll request portion getting feedback responding to the feedback putting things through the build system getting it deployed out like you did a great job and just having that positive reinforcement in the beginning can be very helpful but you have to decide for yourself like what does that look like for you that feels good because the next part to that question is like how often do you expect to get that because it would be unrealistic if every time you did something that someone jumped you know like uh rushes over gets on a call with you or sends you a message as soon as you push in your code and like such a good job you did there I'm obviously exaggerating right but if you can figure out what feels good for you and what will keep you engaged if you can communicate that effectively to your manager I'm not saying that your manager is automatically going to do that but at least they know right and I think that's the theme for a lot of these things um something else I wrote is like in terms of uh high impact areas right because this is a concern I think for for some juniors and I think it's a it's a valid concern that you might have but uh I think it's easy to explain so um people here you know if you want to continue to grow in your career and stuff you have to work on high impact stuff and some juniors are like well I keep getting like bug fixes and small features like how do I know that's high impact like how do I get the high impact stuff and that's why I mean like it's it's valid to kind of feel like hey am I doing stuff that is good enough and especially in the beginning at more Junior levels it's totally normal to be getting smaller things like that because one of the goals at least that I have for more Junior Engineers like whether they're new to a team early in their career like it could be even a a more senior engineer that it's their first time kind of doing something on the team my goal in the beginning is to make sure that you can be effective in sort of the uh the whole development cycle so how do you take something from nothing like you have some requirements and for more Junior folks they might be very specific because we're trying to set you up for Success there's as little guessing as possible more senior folks that might have a little bit more digging into to do right more vague requirements because they need to go ask questions figure out the right things to be looking at but the goal in the very beginning is like can you get the work done can you do it to a high quality can you get the feedback on it push it through and deliver it and for more Junior folks that will take more practice I'm generalizing here some people will get it right away and that's totally cool that's great but some people and I expect they need more practice at it so when you think about hey am I getting high impact stuff and it's like your first your first job or you know you're still very Junior it's totally okay if the very first things you're doing aren't like I optimized all of our performance to be you know you know 99% faster and save the company $2 million in my first week and if I didn't do that then like I'm not going to get promoted it's just it's not quite the right Focus so I think in the very beginning think about how you can get to being effective at what you're doing then from there it will become a little bit more natural to focus on the higher impact things and I think one of the ways that you can start kind of working towards that is and maybe I'll kind of bleed into the next section here um about like effectiveness of one-on ones because a common thing that comes up in one-on ones and I don't want people to hear this and think that it's bad necessarily um I don't think there's like a right or wrong way to do 101's and they're very different between everyone I work with um but a lot of people especially more Junior folks will gravitate towards very specific code related things that they are doing um if you've seen my other talks or other posts and stuff about communication in in software engineering um hello on Twitch um I would say that this comes up where I want you to think about your audience so if you have time with your manager to sit down and talk and go through things if we think about the effectiveness of your Communication in that meeting that you're having most managers are not going to be uh and this obviously this is generalized it's not going to be the same case at every company but most man managers are not going to be in the code there with you that doesn't mean they don't understand code but they're not doing the changes with you some managers especially on smaller teams they might be coding like I spent eight years of my career before Microsoft coding in all the same things my team was coding in every day but in many cases I would not expect that your manager is extremely familiar with the code you're working on so if that's the case if you are getting into the details of your code changes in your 101 that just might not be an effective thing and that's for a couple reasons one it might not really resonate with your manager in terms of like why that's valuable but generally what people are trying to do when they have this conversation is say like like hey look I'm doing stuff that's important and I want you to take that and step back from it because if that's the goal I think that that is a valuable thing to talk about but there's a better way to do it and you can step back and think about the impact of the work you're having or the impact of the work that you're doing there we go um words are hard so the idea there is yeah even if it's something that is small that is like a you know it might be a bug fix or a small feature like that's okay you can still talk about the impact of that and sort of the meta points about what you're doing so for example I'm going to give you two variations of these I'm going to try to exaggerate uh on the like maybe don't do it this way side just to kind of prove a point but if if you sat down with your manager and let's say that you had a bug fix to do if you were like to your manager hey like yeah so I basically I got into visual studio and then I was debugging uh these particular classes and I started looking at these lines and then I found that there's a problem and then I went over to the unit test and I found the area in the unit test where I could go update that and then I could prove if I Chang the values I can actually have the test also assert this and then I ended up having some problems with the build system system when I pushed it up and that meant that I had to go talk with so and so and they helped me and then finally it built and the test passed and then I had problems deploying it and then I and then you see the pattern like you start going into too many details and instead if we back out from that you could say that I worked on this thing I had a couple of roadblocks but what was really beneficial is I got to work with so and so on the team and they were very helpful so you're demonstrating that you're using the resources on your team you're collaborating with people you're also giving some feedback that's potentially positive about your teammates right so your manager seeing these interactions okay they might also be taking a note they might be like hey that's like the fourth time this week someone's told me that the build system is doing something weird right it's all these meta points so that as managers are trying to extract those things but as you go through that I might as your manager I might be able to say hey look okay no one else is getting stuck on this stuff maybe this is the fifth thing that you you've done and like you seem to be getting stuck at all these points maybe there's something more we can dig into here and I can try and help you right it's it's the meta points I don't need to know the lines of code you touched now I'm a little different if you're programming in c I love to hear about that stuff but I don't need to hear it so I think if you focus on the impact and The Meta points that's a lot more valuable I'm just checking an Instagram message here um hi I'm from Indonesia I have just started my career in web development but I have been interested since 14 years ago I have no academic educational background that's awesome I don't know if uh sorry I don't know if you had a question for that but that's um you know I think if you are interested in the field of software engineering in general you'll I have a a strong opinion about this a lot of people will say like not everyone can code and I'm very much of the mindset like literally if you want to do it barring any uh you know some type of disability that may literally prevent you from being able to do it if you are interested in doing it and you apply yourself I think you can get there does it mean that you will get there at the speed that someone else might know it will look different for everyone and does that mean that you will enjoy it I'm not going to say that you will enjoy softw engineering like I can't say that and I can't say that just because you can means you will enjoy it but I do think that there's a lot of things that people are looking at that are like constraints like can I do it can I get a job and it's challenging especially right now but I think if you keep putting in the effort you will absolutely be there so it doesn't matter the especially we're seeing more and more for educational background now like I have I went to University for computer engineering and I did that because at the time I was like I think that that's the only way that people are getting jobs so let me go do the thing that everyone has to do and very much now like that's not what I'm observing I think does it help sure I think there's a lot of places that will set that bar and say hey you need to have postsecondary education do I think that it's the right or wrong thing to do I don't I'm not going to have a strong opinion about that but I I think that basically people are doing this to try and set a higher bar so they can filter through people applying um okay so the rest of that oh sorry there's another question on Instagram I'm going to come back to the Instagram question because there was one that came up on on Twitter here uh or I guess we call it X um quick question what is your team coding in every day you said you did it for eight years before as well yeah so um CP I program in C primarily um and I when I say primarily I mean like when I'm coding it's in C do I know other languages yes but I program in C because I prefer it um and because I'm extremely comfortable with it I will generally use C for anything even if it's not the most effective but um before Microsoft I worked at a digital forensics company uh we used C there so we built digital forensics Tools in C that meant uh you know basically making full copies of hard drives phones like doing Imaging and then doing like a search engine that would run on on those devices are on the copies of those devices to go extract information so um C there and then at Microsoft um I'm in the office 365 side of Microsoft so it's in an area that we call substrate and substrate the platform that all of those Office 365 services are built on top of there are a bunch of different languages that get used there primarily C there is a lot of Powershell for different scripting type things and then the team that I have now also does uh some C++ and some Rust so we're not like only C you can only touch C it just is the most common thing that we have uh and then we see yeah same here with CP applies for all my needs since I do it for my windows Yep there you go so yeah let me know Cameron if that answers your question but primarily c um if you're curious about teex stacks and stuff I don't know how much detail I can get into on that but um if it's not work related you want to know my personal stuff I'm happy to chat about that I got another question here on Instagram before I move on been working as software engineer for about 12 years from no voice without any it academic background awesome start from local internet coffee help people create Gmail and Yahoo 360 blog yep there you go so no worries I think that's awesome to hear right it's there are so many people that are and I don't want to minimize how difficult it is to apply for jobs and get them so I don't mean to come across that way but I do think that it's so awesome to hear people sharing different stories about how they just kept going and how they kept trying to move forward and found success doing it so I I like when people can share that because from what I've been I haven't been doing the streaming stuff or the content creation like content creation for me is this is the 18th month straight so still very early in my content creation career and one of the things that I found be extremely helpful is sharing experiences with people that's why I've been doing a lot of software engineering um interviews on my uh on my YouTube channel because I want people to hear those other experiences um yeah I'm GNA have to figure out how to block those people from my chat okay so yeah I thank you for sharing that kind of stuff and you know for folks if you have others things you want to share I think it helps other people to hear that uh here we go currently this is also from Instagram by the way I'm saying it because the Instagram chat for some reason doesn't go onto my feed so I'm reading them out I promise these are real messages uh currently I'm working on a project with the status of an intern with a very cheap salary uh but at least I got more value experience yeah and I'm not going to I'm not going to say what's right or wrong based on salary and stuff like that uh on the inter I can't speak today on the internship side of things I think if you have internship opportunities say you're going through school and you're like I don't know if I should but there's internship programs whether they're through your school or through different companies you're looking at if you're considering it please do it it is one of the best things you can do and I say that because if I would not if I would not have gone I had six internships at University because my program was specifically what we called like a co-op program at the University of waterl if I would not have done those I would have told myself I would have been very convinced that um software engineering or computer engineering was not for me because I hated it I hated school I thought it was completely pointless I was just doing like very theoretical stuff there was tons of math and I was like why am I doing this and then I would go do an internship and I was like this is the best thing ever I can't wait to do this so highly recommend um I'm not again I I I'm not going to tell you to go work for cheap if it's something that you can't afford to do but um I mean I think the experience is incredible at uh doing internships so do recommend hey gani in the chat um good to see you here and then Cameron as well I guess when you work on C is it in the net world still yep um so yeah C is is based on The NET Framework so you you can't have C without net um any asp.net um so for my personal stuff absolutely um I basically primarily outside of work now build like web services um before that though like when I was working at the digital forensic company it was all desktop development so I have tons of experience building Wind forms and WPF applications um in the scope of forensics especially for what we were building if you think about the users this is something else to think about when you're going through software engineering is when you think about the users we had a lot of law enforcement government military these types of individuals don't want to have like very important digital friends information just like they're not comfortable with it or at the time this is going back years now still having it not sitting directly on their machine or having something that's running somewhere else makes them feel like oh crap this is scary um a lot of them would be air gapped so they would have machines they would run scans on that were not physically connected to any network because unfort this is the sort of the dark side of this for them a lot of the time there was I mean it's evidence that's private but we would be talking about like child pornography and things like that so really really dark terrible stuff and they can't have that leak out obviously um that in particular but even just you know forensic evidence they can't have leak out so there was a lot of desktop development uh but yeah primarily asp.net for me now um C and substrate is like a lot of the a lot of the infrastructures built on that so how we keep the how we deploy Services I mean it's so ridiculous to try and explain all the pieces that are in substrate because it's massive it's I have said this on streams before but I feel like almost every day after four years of being at Microsoft I feel like almost every day I hear about a new team or service so there's lots um yeah and then so for us how do I frame this I guess there is a lot of asp.net development but um it's not we are still Building Services that aren't necessarily um responding to a web request so they could be other types of servers that are backend so they don't have to be asp.net asp.net we're primarily building things that are serving web requests but there's other types of stuff that are like not like an HTTP request they might be something else coming in so it might not be and asp.net core but could be related when forms is still the fastest way for me to do a gooey yep I I feel like if someone said to me right now go build me a desktop app um I would want to go do it in WPF because that was the last thing but I still have a feeling my muscle memory from Wind forms would come back faster so we'll see cool I think that's all the questions I see right now I'm going to jump back into the conversation here so when we're talking about having effective one-on ones that's where we left off um I want you to think about how you get the most value out of that time right so it's not just relaying the very small details to your manager and when I say manager you could think about your Mentor if you have one in the same context here so you want to give meta points the next part is about um if you're thinking about status updates something that is beneficial is if you're blocked or not right you want to be able to give this type of thing if you have standup meetings and stuff like what you don't want to do is if you have a one-on-one with your manager once a week and you get blocked the day after you talk to your manager don't wait till the next week to say oh and by the way I know we met last Monday but on Tuesday I got blocked and I've been blocked ever since so now that we're talking I would like to get unblocked do not do that um not good but I think it's if you're like hey like maybe maybe just it just came up and you're working through being blocked you could raise awareness to it that could be helpful um but in general status updates I want to share with you from the manager side how I try to navigate this kind of thing if I have employees where they're very focused on status updates I try to make sure that like I want one ones to be focused on what they want to talk about but if that's all that they talk about I try to after a few those I try to say awesome like let's pivot like I try to get them to see that we can talk about other things because I want them to know like we can and should be talking about your career right so if you're coming to me only giving status updates and you feel that's all you can talk about let me kind of open the floor a little bit and say hey by the way like these are good career opportunities let's talk about that let's talk about uh where your current challenges are so this is another thing too um I need I've said this on other streams um I I wrote a newsletter article on this like I'm I'm not your manager so when I talk about you building a relationship with your manager to be able to have conversations like this it's it's very important that you understand what they are like because if you hear the stuff that I talk about and you go oh well Nick said just do this like yeah your manager might not do the things the way I do them so I think the best thing that you can do is learn that about them so it does take time and effort to go build that working relationship up but there's a lot of value in doing it um on the career progression stuff this is something that I think is important you try to bring up in one-on ones My Philosophy I've told people this before is if we talk about career stuff in one of the one-on ones if you leave that and you're like you kind of go back I want to say back to your desk but I mean we're we're all working remotely right now so maybe you're already at your desk but you get off the call and if you're sitting there going like I still don't really feel like I have alignment or understand like the direction Nick was saying that I should be heading in or what things are priority if you still feel that way I would I mean it genuinely I would still want you to say hey Nick like next time could we talk about that more or could we get more time to talk through that because on communication if I just spent the time communicating that to you say it was a 30 minute oneon-one and we spent 20 of those minutes talking about career progression if you didn't get what I was saying that's not your fault like I don't sit there and I go oh well you must be dumb you didn't understand what I said it's quite the opposite it means I need to change how I'm communicating so you can understand clearly I need to own that communication so when it comes to career progression stuff I genuinely feel that if you you're ever in a state where you're like I just don't really know that that is an opportunity to bring it up with your manager I wouldn't have the expectation that your manager drops everything they're doing all the time to just say okay like let's go make sure we can go figure it all out but it should be top of mind for them when they're talking with you to make sure they can clear that kind of stuff up if you don't have that kind of thing in your working relationship with your manager I feel like that's one of the biggest areas of friction that can come up and it can come up because you might be thinking like I think I'm doing everything my manager said I'm doing the work items that are assigned to me I'm pretty sure he's giving he or she is giving me stuff that's important to focus on and then it comes time for promotions or Rewards or whatever and this is going to look different at different companies maybe there is no time for that I don't know most places have something at least annual and then nothing happens and you go well what the heck like I thought I was doing everything I was supposed to so you can avoid that you can avoid that by having the conversation and making sure that you stay on top of it yes I think that should be the responsibility of your manager and I would be lying if I said I did a perfect job of that as well if any of the people on my team are watching this video or people that I have managed they might go well Nick there were times where I didn't know like and I understand like we're we're all human I can't be perfect at it but that's where I need my team to also speak up and say hey like I know we might have just talked about this or we haven't hey Nick you talk to everyone else on the team about it but not me like that would be terrible I would feel so bad but if someone can raise awareness to that like I want to go corrected I want to make that better so I say this a lot but you're you're in the driver seat of your career right I want manag including myself to be able to help lead that but you need to kind of have the initiative because if you sit there and wait you you probably will find your disappointed and that's because managers and other people get busy with stuff too I think they need to be dedicating time to this type of thing but I've seen it I've done it before especially earlier in my management career I've talked about this a lot before or I would flipflop doing like heavy management stuff for like two weeks and then I would ignore it for two weeks and just code like not not a good thing so you want to be in the driver's seat for that stuff um checking out the LinkedIn comment hey this is a great initiative to help Junior Engineers awesome thank you um in the initial days as you said there won't be much work on big features in such situations how do you think a junior engineer can improve encoding implementation outside of the task but within the company's codebase this is a good question and this will be very situational depending on where you're working um there's I don't even want to frame it to like start up to Big Tech okay the reality is in every company there's always work to do so that is a known thing if you're at a company and there's no work to do uh I don't know how well that company is doing there's always going to be work to do right so uh this question is great from Shrea here on LinkedIn and so you're say you're a junior engineer you're working in some area and you're like this is going well um the first thing I would say is if I had someone come to me on my team and they said like um like I I want to figure out how to phras this properly um outside of the task within company's codebase the first thing that I might say because I have a responsibility for a team it would basically be hey if you're looking for more stuff if you're looking for more work I got more work right I would first try to keep that individual focused within my team because I have a responsibility to my team for that now what we can layer on to that is someone goes I'm going to just make up a contrived example because we were talking about some language stuff earlier right so hey Nick um I've been doing a lot of C stuff for some of my initial tasks those are going good but I think it would be awesome if I can get some exposure to Powershell I've seen some areas of the the code base that have power shell do we have any work items I could tackle in that space and my answer might be no like right now we don't we we have a lot of priorities right now we don't have that but if they come up I can make sure that we're like hey look you wanted to go work on this like I can try to prioritize that for you and make sure you have exposure to it so the key part I'm getting at here is two things one being transparent about where your interests are whether it's technology product area different types of work is very beneficial to bring up to your manager so that they understand that kind of stuff because without that it's like they can't just read minds I'm working on it I still can't do it but I'm hoping someday I can get to the mind reading part um but if you can share that kind of stuff with your manager it's very helpful and then the second part is that it's this understanding that like the the needs of the business like we are all working at a business that needs to take priority so that will mean there are times where it's like hey I don't have something that fits that for you and with have to continue on working on the next high priority things so if you're still looking for more stuff I can find more stuff and we can get you more work and you can keep progressing um but again once I know that when it comes to like the next wave of planning or we're at a Sprint boundary or something I can be like hey I wonder if someone can do this there are situations as well and I've done this with multiple people at Microsoft uh Microsoft actually is we have different initiatives that we're either piloting or they are in full force where we do some types of rotation which is super cool I love this initiative I think it's great and it's great for people in this situation where they go hey I've been doing a lot of this stuff but I would like exposure to this other thing and then we can actually do a bit of a rotation so there are programs like I mentioned where it is a full-on rotation so you would go be aot to some other team temporarily but even on my team uh all the explain a little bit of the hierarchy sometimes we have teams and then there's like feature Crews within the teams that work on different sub areas and in the previous team I was on we had some sub areas that had some front-end work my team had none zero frontend work and of course for especially a lot more Junior Engineers they're going hey like I know that there's a lot of frontend stuff going on like in the industry like feels kind of weird that I don't get any of that so some were asking about that and there were absolutely opportunities to help my partner feature Crews so under deployment still but on different feature Crews and they could go help because that's helping deployment overall so um those are a couple of ways uh this is sort of from the Microsoft perspective but like I said could look different at different companies I think a risk I'll call out two risks I guess one is that if you are more Junior and you are trying to I'm going to use air quotes you're trying to help by doing work in other areas one is that in terms of aligning where the business's Focus that might not be conducive because you might be kind of going around things to go help and then that means we we have a potentially over staff team doing something and an underst staff team now doing something so not that it's right or wrong if people are paying attention to this it might be totally fine that's one thing and the other part is that uh I'm going to use from a startup perspective especially we've had situations in the past a startup I was at so when I was there the company I was at for eight years where your intentions are very good to help and you are going to go touch code somewhere it wasn't planned work but you're like I can go make this better and might it might be an area you are familiar with maybe not but it's not scheduled work and that's what I'm trying to get at here is the scheduled work part's important but you want to go help you go do some unscheduled work and then you basically get it to the point where it's creeping into the product and then you have other stakeholders that are also responsible for the product so we had dedicated testers we had uh a team that was doing uh like focused on building in for tools we have uh documentation people like basically you could get to the point where you go add something to the product and you've now created more work for other people and that's like not your atttention obviously you were just trying to help trying to get maybe some exposure to some other area but that could be seen as challenging because you've created more work for other people so I do think the best path is still having conversations about it and then that way in terms of prioritizing people can people who need to be in a spot where they can work on priorities are B to do that for you um so I hope Tre I hope that helps answer your question uh that was about the company's code base of course if you don't care about doing extra stuff in the company's code base you just want to learn pick up a side project build some cool stuff um I've been programming for 21 years I'm an engineering manager now I don't code at work I love coding outside of work still and doing content creation helps me get better at coding so a lot the content I put out that's specifically on programming is because I'm building stuff and going ah I ran into an issue I just put out videos and did a live stream the other day on downloading large files and I was running into some funny stuff in C and I was like I making a video on this or I'll write a blog on this I need to do that because it helps me and then I think I can help other people so those are some other ways outside of work um got another message here from Cameron uh hitting 6 months on the dot tomorrow at a new job awesome congrats on the 6 months after hearing this going to speak with my manager this week to make sure I'm meaning expectations on track to be rewarded for it good timing thanks there you go awesome I'm very glad to hear that and try to remember so 6 months have the conversation great now build that into your routine with your manager ask them hey like after you have that conversation I'm sure it's going to feel good to get on the same page you can ask them and say hey like this was a really good conversation like do you think we could do this I don't know how often you meet with your manager could we do this at least once a month could we set up some interval and then feel it out because waiting every six months or every 12 months to be the only time you're getting feedback I'm not going to I'm not going to swear on the stream but it's a it's a it's a crappy it's a crappy situation to be in so try to avoid it and you have the tools to be able to avoid it and that's having conversations okay I think that might be it for the effective oneon-one part but uh of course if you guys have more questions on leveraging or manager effective 101s please just ask I'm going to jump to uh scope of impact I've been touching on a little bit um but what I want to kind of touch on that I haven't so far is that there's a natural progression that happens and I think that um like being hyperfocused on it is not super helpful as as a junior I think it's good to have awareness so don't get me wrong I'm not saying like hey like you don't got to worry about this forget it you're just a junior that's not the case um I think it's very good to be aware of it because that suggests to me that you understand having impact is valuable and that will help you grow in level and experience in general so it's important but I think what can happen is and especially when we start doing this comparison thing so you're a junior and you see a senior on your team they're working on a huge project and you go well I want to get promoted the seniors are doing the big projects like where's my big project and sometimes it's not about just taking that huge jump to do that and I think if you're having conversations with your manager about this kind of stuff they can hopefully in my opinion if they're doing a good job get you situated to have a project that will stretch you a little bit and that might mean that it is and I'm going to kind of go through a bit of a spectrum here but it could be something at some point where you're starting to own some of the pieces you might have other teammates that are kind of like following your lead so let's go through a little bit of this right the natural progression as you are growing in level is that your scope of influence will increase so the number of people that you're interacting with and the number of roles all that kind of stuff starts it's increasing as your level goes up in general and the amount of impact you have per I don't know if you'd call Like You could argue per unit time maybe but like per per thing that you're doing is going to be higher so generally people that are more senior in roles it's not like they're doing a thousand small impact things and they can just do them super quick and it's it's usually the inverse right they are doing things I'm not going to say they have to go slow but usually they are bigger things that probably take more time and have higher impact as a result so these are natural sorts of progressions that happen so these two types of growth of impact and uh what was the other word influence that I use right so at a junior level you may be working on bug fixes and small features but like I said earlier the goal is to get you ramped up and be effective on the team so you can deliver software effectively so that's the goal in the beginning then from there hopefully again you're having conversations with your manager they start to go cool like you are doing this effectively how do we give you more of a challenge okay well the first bit of work that you were given was pretty well scoped out right we we had those bugs were filed by a senior person on the team they actually know the solution we just haven't made time for it it would be good to fix but there have been other priorities or that feature yep if you go talk to the person that wrote that um that ticket that work item they could probably explain to exactly what has to happen these are well understood problems usually so a growth opportunity from there is saying hey this is a problem we have but it hasn't been totally figured out or we need to make a solution for this enhancement that hasn't been totally figured out but there's a couple of subject matter experts you could go talk with so you start to get some responsibility for going to figure out some of these details so you're starting to deal with uncertainty so this is one bit of growth and your circle of influence starts to grow here because now you have to go contact the people that might know work with them get the information right so it's a small progression but it's a good one and then you do more of this and then you have more uncertainty and more sort of uh size of projects you're working on and then it gets to the point where your manager hopefully will find something where that's like hey there's this other initiative and it might be we need you to take the lead on it and I'm not trying to jump the gun to like a team lead thing this is still within the scope of a project right need you to take the lead on this project can you get a design dock together uh we need to we need to see how many people we might need to help on this so now you're thinking about some of the coordination pieces how we can break down this problem into smaller pieces this extends more into hey we have a cross team effort going on right we're planning this work across these two or three teams we need you to help represent our team on that it grows even further to say hey there's this challenge that spans these teams in our organization we need you to come up with the solution for that and drive it so it's a natural progression that happens and I just fast forwarded there through what could be many years of your career where those become more and more of the norm of what you're doing it doesn't mean that the person who's doing the organizational wide efforts never goes and fixes a small bug it's just that the majority of what they're doing is they have fewer large impact items so when it comes to scope of impact my again going back to my recommendation for junior Engineers is keep this in mind because that is important for progression but it doesn't need to be a hyperfocus if you're nervous or questioning if is what I'm doing having impact there's another conversation you can have with your manager and that is hey like and you can ask it genuinely and curiously and not factiously so the question is not hey what's why am I even doing this that's sarcastic that's factious that's kind of you know not a good way to represent it but if you were genuinely like hey I'm really curious like I know I had this work to do and I have have a fix or have the implementation but like I don't really understand um could you help explain like the business value or like how this helps customers so this should be coming up more than it probably does for most engineering organizations I I had an experience on my new team where I being new I'm a little bit naive to i' say a lot of bit naive to a lot of the things on the team and like the technology and the domain and and I held a meeting for something that I talked to someone about had a few different people come in and we were chatting through this problem space and I was as I was running that meeting I was thinking you know what I wonder if this was more for me like I understand these things better now and maybe these people already understood and I remember the very next day in a 101 I had someone I followed up with them I said how do you think that meeting went and they said to me that was so helpful because I didn't know why I was doing what I was doing and what I'm I'm paraphrasing that they were saying like they know the technical uh implication of what they're doing and they know how to do the work not an issue but they didn't understand the motivation behind why we were doing that why was that a deliverable that we decided on for this period of work and they got that context so that kind of thing could be really helpful and sometimes if you are feeling like I don't know if the work I'm doing is having impact that could be a question you ask so just a different way to frame it Cameron in the chat says sounds intimidating and a little tongue face so no yeah it's it the idea is that in the very beginning of all of these it probably does feel a little bit intimidating and that's what I meant when I said your manager can kind of help stretch you out of your comfort zone sometimes this stuff will happen very naturally and you are if you're very proactive and the opportunities are there you might just be doing these things and it comes up other times your manager might be looking for these opportunities for you so for example they might be chatting with you and they're like hey you know what part of growing to this next level is we need to see like consistent working with other teams we need some of the feedback from people on other teams to show that your scope of influence is growing so like I think that you're ready for this project that's going to involve team uh Team X and they got some great Engineers there and we our team mostly owns this space but they need to interface with us I think that you could do a good job working with one or two of their engineers and coming up with the solution for this and yeah the first time that happens you might go oh crap like what does that mean like how do I do that some people are very confident that's fine but I think for a lot of people it can be intimidating and that's totally cool and like I said the first time for a lot of people it is intimidating and then you try it out you realize hey like working with people isn't so bad it's actually kind of cool right you get people that help support you they're working on similar problems you meet new people or you build better relationships with people that you already know so it can be really good so little scary at first but it's not so bad and you get used to it and you'll do awesome so that's the scope of impact part and within scope of impact is also the uh your influence right your circle of influence I'm just double checking to see if there's anything else I wanted to to bring up there oh um I kind of said it right at the end of my my little ramble there but um being proactive about things can be very helpful that's another way that you can demonstrate growth so uh it's kind of come up throughout this conversation but like hey I'm looking for more I want to get more exposure to the code base I'm looking for more work bring that up with your manager right if you're just sitting back and going I finished my work and I wish I could be looking at this other part of the code base or um I wish I could have more work to do because I feel like I'm not getting my full potential out of me or I'm not learning fast enough because I'm not getting enough work bring it up make it visible I mean try to work with people excellent okay there we go yeah that is that is what it is all you Linux folks um no people right thank you for the laugh that's awesome I I don't know I posted a a meme about that on the internet the other day I didn't come up with the meme but uh I feel seen um that's funny good job thank you so yeah being proactive is very helpful um can demonstrate some growth and again can be a signal to your manager like if I'm trying to help this person scetch in different directions they might be able to have that inclination like hey they have asked for more things they have like they've expressed that they are being proactive I should be able to you know lean on them a little bit more so there is that what else we got here um I think this is the last part traits of successful Engineers I actually didn't even get to the other questions and I'm getting a little low on time I'll go it's almost 10:30 here in uh in Seattle a area uh so what I might do is rhyme off a couple of my um traits for successful Engineers um by the way fun exercise if you are in the chat and want to participate um feel free to write what you think is a trait of a successful engineer so I'm very curious about this I think people have different perspectives and it might be very interesting to see if you don't mind spending a couple seconds in chat and saying I think a successful engineer does does and just bullet points whatever couple words I'm super interested to see but I will start with my list and my list goes as follows so uh I think successful Engineers are curious so questioning why I think is very important um even if we've been doing things a certain way um I think it's just important to understand things and why that's so important is that things change over time so you might build based on some architecture you might build based on some understanding of requirements and that kind of stuff changes and then you have a team that's been working together two years go by 3 years go by and everything else is changing around you and you might not notice or pay attention to it then a new person comes onto the team and they go well why do we do this and you might go oh obviously we had to make this decision and then you start having the conversation you're like actually yeah but like maybe we could change that now it's been 3 years we made it based on this assumption it's not true anymore like so if you're always asking why I'm being curious you can really come up with um innovative solutions for things and keep things moving forward so I think that's really good so see Giovani in the chat there Curiosity adaptability yes I think those are excellent ones thank you for participating um the next one I have is uh being open-minded so the reason I wrote this one and I wanted to frame it up for juniors as well is that uh I think in the beginning probably for most Junior Engineers you probably feel like you're like a sponge right like there's all these more senior people around me I have so much to learn from I'm just getting the information coming in and that's great that's nothing wrong with that right so when I talk about being open-minded something that you don't want to have happen is that as you're gaining experience in your career you're going to have all of these experiences and this knowledge that you can lean on right I've seen this before this is a pattern those types of things can be very helpful in Saving you time because you can say I've seen it before we should try this other thing that has historically worked well the problem is that when that goes to an extreme and you become close-minded and then you see something that comes up you say no 10 years ago I saw this exact same thing it's it has to be done this other way and you don't listen to anyone else's input and it sounds like I'm exaggerating but I've seen things quite close to this where people just won't budge and it's because they've seen something before a particular way and when they're not open-minded you can't explore other Solutions and genuinely when you're working on a team with someone who's close-minded about things like this it's extremely difficult if not impossible to solve problems together people people that are close-minded can hold back an entire team from being effective so it's kind of like not a warning but like a keep it in mind like as you are building these experiences that's super awesome but try to keep an open mind as you go forward um I have a comment here when the poop hits the fan and you're closer to leaving than staying the company do you have some thoughts how to do it better next time maybe even a dedicated post for that um yeah let me give that some thought um I will try to write something about this thank you for that question um very briefly I think that there is a question you have to ask yourself about um how much energy you can put into driving change and I have been in situations where I had a lot of energy to drive change multiple times at the startup that I worked at before Microsoft multiple times I was like something has to change here and like it's worth me fighting for this and I when I say fight I mean not like literally it's because I have a problem with a person it's worth me standing up for this talking about it putting energy into making this better my situation was a little bit unique like I didn't it wasn't my startup company but I felt very much like I had a lot of influence and autonomy and if that's probably why I was able to put a lot of energy into those types of situations because I felt like if I made a stand for something I could truly make it better now there have been other situations where that absolutely not the case and I've question myself like I really would like to see this changed and I I can bring awareness to it and if that's not being received like I'm basically fighting an uphill battle and I have to decide how much energy do I put into this so that's my really generic way of answering that is like I think being honest with myself about how much time and energy I put into something because at the end of the day if I don't think that I can put in enough time and energy and still kind of keep my peace of mind um then it might not be worth it for me so that's my generic answer there hopefully that helps um but yeah I will try to write a post about that I think that's very helpful um another key trait for engineers being collaborative you might see a theme as I go through this and um I didn't write C sh as one of the traits so uh maybe next time I will but has nothing to do with what programming language you know so being collaborative so how well you work with others software Engineers are almost all of the time working with other people right if it's not another software engineer it might be another role and if it's neither of those it might be because you have to work with your customer to understand them you have to be able to collaborate it's necessary so unless you are building things completely on your own and putting them on the Internet and then not listening to what anyone says for feedback which that is a real situation I suppose maybe you don't worry about being collaborative but I think for literally everyone it's it's worth doing so spend time with it spend time focusing on that it's a skill you have to work at it so be be conscious about it right pay attention they'll help I'm just going to check the chat before I go on okay how would you handle some other juniors in lagging behind a team this is a great question um I think the first thing that I would recommend um so how would you handle some other Juniors lagging behind in a team so I'm going to assume the situation is you are Junior and the other person is also Junior and you happen to be noticing like you might be doing when like going at a good Pace you feel like you're getting things getting more challenges to work on and you're observing that they might be lagging behind a little bit um the first thing is that everyone is going to have a different rampup curve so I don't I don't read your question as in you're like accusing them of being bad or something like that so that's good because I think the reality is there is going to be a difference um now a couple things you could lean into being helpful if you have capacity for that so you might be able to reach out and see how you can help them and helping people the way that we don't want to help people as funny as it sounds we don't help people by giving them answers and actually if you're watching this if you have messaged me and I'm trying to do better at this if you've messaged me on social media and you say hey Nick what's the best way to do X or how do where is the best resource for why you will probably notice I'm trying to do better at it but you'll probably notice that I don't give you an answer I basically give you a question back what have you what have you looked at so far what have you tried I'm not telling you the answer because I don't think there's one answer same thing here when you're if you're leaning into helping other people on the team try not to like I don't like the term like spoon feeding people but try not to give them the answer because you're not you're just kind of being a uh like a crutch for them like you're just helping them get by The Next Step but they're not learning to to do better next time so you can lean into that um you could raise awareness of that to your manager and I think there's ways to do that that are not um that you shouldn't feel like you're like tattling on someone because you might be able to say instead of saying like hey well I'm going to use my own name here so it doesn't sound like I'm picking on anyone like hey I noticed that Nick is like I'm like 10 tickets ahead of Nick and he's way behind he's not even writing tests for his first thing yet it's been like a month like don't do that uh and sorry I try to exaggerate my examples so that you can see where I'm where I'm heading with this um but instead you could bring it up to your manager and say hey like I I think that when I was talking with Nick on the team it seemed like he might be uh facing some challenges I think it might be kind of stuck in some of these areas but not really sure I just wanted to let you know in case there's something we can do to help get them unblocked or uh maybe one of the onboarding buddies or something can kind of help spend some more time with them maybe we could do some learning sessions in these areas there's so many helpful things that could happen here so you could lean into to try and help or you could raise some awareness in a private manner that is trying to be helpful and not malicious so that would be my answer um hopefully that helps uh Cameron I don't know how I ever thought of it that way need to gauge how much energy one has Drive the changes they want to see and fix things yeah um yeah that's my take on that from I guess my life experiences so far um like I said earlier in the startup kind of area it felt so easy because I think two things enable that autonomy is one and then like having trust from people in leadership or management positions so if I have autonomy and I feel that people trust me then I'm able to say hey look I need to be vocal about this I know that you trust what I'm saying so if I start making noise about it I don't feel like oh it's just Nick the guy who whines it's no it's Nick like we trust what he's doing so if he's raising awareness about it it's for something important and if I have autonomy and there's trust then I could be the person that helps and goes to drive that change and not just hey I need to complain about something but not my problem like you guys go figure it out so I think that's what really helped me before collaborative means dancing together it very well could for some people um I would prefer to be dancing in the code perhaps or dancing in the the problem solving or the whiteboarding um not a great dancer though so might have to pass on that uh or just leave maybe if you don't have much energy yeah so that's the other side of uh other way to look at it right if you don't have the energy to drive the change um at some point you could be complacent and say well I guess I can't change it guess I have to stay guess that's how it is or and it's not that it takes zero energy to do this as well you could say well I think it's time that I need to I need to change and the amount of effort you put into that is hopefully less effort than you feel like it would be to drive the change where you're at because if it's going to take even more energy to change maybe you do invest the time to where you're at because you want to see it succeed so some some questions you have to ask for yourself Nick the whiny guy yeah ain't nobody wants to be that guy I definitely don't um and and I you know I don't recommend that other people are that way either right you can raise awareness to things but I do recommend you try to come up with Solutions bring the visibility try to suggest Solutions try to volunteer to help action them more possible the goal is that people want things to be better right and if you want things to be better be part of that change don't just say I this sucks this sucks I don't want to do it the builds are slow I hate it here the tests are flaky I hate it here why do we write these tests who wrote these tests they suck I'm never writing a test I hope no one else does ever again because they all suck like it's not what we want we want those things those things are helpful how do we make them better proposed Solutions try to get involved it will feel better when you can be part of the positive change analytical is another trait for successful Engineers uh I think that when I when I think about lot of people that are kind of going through getting their job in software engineering right like I'm one of the people that I think that I think the word engineer is a very important word and I I have acknowledged this bias before um the bias is that in Canada an engineer is a profession that you need to go to an accredited school you need to go take an Ethics exam after that you need to go work for I think it's I don't know how many hours it is but I think it comes out to like two years of work experience under a professional engineer it's like a it's a serious thing so I in Canada I am not a professional engineer because it is a professional designation there so I'm not that but my framing for that is less about hey look like I got a fancy thing to call myself an engineer it's more about what it stands for and I think aside from ethics because ethics is a huge part especially when we're talking about other engineering like Building Bridges and stuff like there's a lot of stuff going on um software is important too but the other part to all of that is the amount of analysis that gets put into things and that's something that I sometimes feel like is missing from people going through their uh especially like early programming and software engineering Journeys is that what what's the best language to learn show me the text Stacks show me the HTML and the CSS show show me the you know like follow the tutorial it's not that these things are bad it's just that when it comes to genuinely having to engineer Solutions not just write the code for something to truly do engineering work involves analysis you need to be evaluating pros and cons looking at your constraints and I think that this is an absolutely critical skill that if you are just following step by step you're not looking at the constraints it's not it's not engineering it's just coding and there's not it's not that it's wrong I just think that we can do better by doing more analysis understanding why we need to analyze things why we need data what data we need interpreting it um I've said this in other podcast scenarios and probably written about it but I uh What's the phrase I like to say it's like constraints breed creativity so you can give uh a problem to an engineer with no constraint and you'll get a solution and you start adding in constraints and more constraints and you keep getting Solutions because Engineers are great at giving you Solutions and the more constraints the more creative it gets so just something to think about because I think analysis is very critical okay um problem solving building on the uh uh analysis part I think that's very big too um problem solving involves being resourceful it involves thinking like obviously thinking through problems uh especially from the context of Junior Engineers because that's mostly what I wanted this to this talk to be about um you need to fail at things to learn I feel but getting stuck on certain things um sometimes it doesn't warrant the time spent on it so for example I the way that I break this down is if you need clarity on something ask for that right away go get the clarity right away because if you're just guessing at what you need to be doing it's a waste of time get the clarity right away that's not a problem you want to be stuck on otherwise I think you need to explore you need to try things you need to fail you need to poke around and be curious this will help you problem solve you'll reach a point you either come up with one solution and you're like hey works great move on or you come up with multiple and you go I don't know which one we value more like what's a better solution or you have a couple that are not quite getting there and you're like I don't know which path we should try to go down further these are generalizations right but when it comes to problem solving like this I think you need to go through the steps of doing that especially as a junior if you sit back and go yeah I don't know the answer to that I Googled it I asked Chachi BT no answer hey hey Nick like what's the answer and then Nick just comes and tells you you your problem solving skills have gone from zero to zero they are still at zero you need to go try things so I think that's very important being able to explain what you're trying tying in the communication piece I think is also very important here um okay so I will try to try to wrap it up Cameron just for you so I got one more after I answer saa's question here maybe have an Insight when it comes to actual architectural implementations do you think we'll revert back to use some more monolithic applications um we are we are going back to monolithic stuff for sure I think there's a lot of people talking about it you will see uh modular monoliths popping up it's all um if you guys uh I don't know how many people watching this are uh genuinely software Engineers are just kind of like stopping by or whatever but if you are building software applications and you're interested in architecture my personal opinion is that the best person you could be watching online to get information about this is Derek Co Martin of code opinion Derek is brilliant I love the way he explains things he takes the perspective if you listen to him talk through things it's almost impossible to debate what he's saying because he's just literally saying in this context this is something that works well in this other context this is something that might work better it's not like you know microservices are best monoliths are best are the best or this is it's not there's none of that and I think that it's so good Derek Co Martin of code opinion he walks through all sorts of different software architecture uh problems solutions for these things different text Stacks you can look at and it's brilliant he's so good at what he does I can't say enough positive things about him and it all comes back to he will say like context is King right if you don't have particular context someone like I I like using plugin architectures and vertical slicing do I think that that's the best thing that there is for all situations absolutely not I use it for most of what I do because I'm comfortable with it and it's a habit that's it but that's the context that's why I picked it doesn't mean it's the best and Derek is very good at explaining these types of things so so yeah I would highly recommend check out Derek Co Martin of code opinion sounds like it's sponsored by code opinion no Derrick is not sponsoring my live streams um how does he post this information Cod opinion.com so it's literally I think it should be this and then code opinion on YouTube I don't know if I I'm using a aggregated chat I don't think I can tag his channel he's on LinkedIn he's on YouTube and he has that website as well I believe that's the website I should have probably checked it before yeah you click it you can see the bulkhead pattern R away dererk is awesome okay um okay the last one then Cameron can go to bed and I go to bed too uh the last one was just about getting unstuck unstuck so I actually already kind of talked about that but um sponsored by Derek confirm things yeah um that would be cool but I don't think that's the case here um getting unstuck I think is incredibly important uh for everyone but it Prim arily comes up with Juniors I think there's a lot of things that uh I feel like kind of work against us especially today with so many people being remote I think the remoteness plays into this but if you are a junior or you're not try to imagine yourself in this situation you're brand new to a team right you might know the programming language you're working in maybe it's new to you the text stack might be new to you the domain is probably new to you everyone in the team is new to you literally everything is new to you and you're getting your first bit of work to go solve and you let's say the problem is clear like you know what you have to go fix like it's very well explained and you go looking at the code and you get stuck whether it's I don't know you're trying to clone the code down and it's not working or the build locally is not working and the first thing you do is you say oh crap I don't know how to fix this I don't know what to do here and now you have this situation where you go how much time do I spend on my own trying to figure this out or who do I reach out to what the heck am I going to say am I going to look stupid to this person I don't want to bother them they're probably busy oh they're a principal level I'm just a junior like they got better things to do and then you basically say a million reasons to yourself why you should not go reach out to anyone and then you sit there and you poke at it for a bit a couple hours go by and now you start to feel more I'm going to use the word stupid you start to feel more stupid here because you're like I can't figure this out and it's been two hours now maybe it's three hours now I should have reached out to that person but I can't do it now like oh like this feels this is gross like I don't want to bother them what am I going to say to them they're going to think that I'm so dumb because I don't know this they're so busy I don't want to disrupt them they they just had to go solve a livesite incident yesterday they don't want to talk to me so it's all bull crap it's all negative selft talk literally every person on your team wants to help you because even if they were just selfish they want to help you because you're on their team and they need their team to do better and succeed there we go two hours in still haven't cloned the repo right like this happens all the time this kind of stuff so you are not alone if you're watching this live or watching the recorded version of this this happens all the time this kind of stuff so don't worry the point here is that especially with more remote work I think that it makes it even harder for people to feel connected on this kind of stuff if you were in the office you could maybe look over at Joe and Joe is laughing he's having a good day and you're like actually maybe I could go bother Joe today cuz he seems like he's in a good mood right you then Hey Joe like by the way like this thing it's all cloning do you know what's up with that and Joe goes oh yeah you didn't plug in your ethernet cable right like it's probably something silly and it's okay sometimes it's hard and then they go oh yeah like wow we haven't seen this before and then you can document it and then everyone else benefit it's ask for help get unstuck the caveat that I want to add here is that you want to balance this with your problem solving so do get a little bit stuck when you're stuck try some things out explore a little bit but I would say a good way that I don't know if I have a good way of saying this now my recommendation is generally that you want to consider if this is something that is probably solved on the team things like credentials things like builds not working things like cloning code all this stuff should probably be working already don't spend too much time on it if it's like hey I need to go solve a problem for the building the feature that I'm working on you may want to get a little bit more stuck and explore it and that way you're forcing yourself to problem solve a little bit so I hope that helps forell on LinkedIn watching this all the way from Munich preparing to go after my first role as a software engineer these are very helpful insights thank you so much for covering these topics of course that's what I like to do I like to help I hope it's helpful um I will sign off I know Cameron needs to go to bed I also have to go to bed I just blaming on Cameron so he can take the fall for me um Cameron thank you so much for taking the fall uh folks thank you all for watching I do mean it seriously um I had more questions the person who I'm not going to call them out but the person that submitted these questions was on the stream today so I'm letting you know this if you ask me questions if I can help I will spend time either writing about it like I did I will do live streams about it like I did I want to help you I'm not saying I have all the answers I have experiences doing some things and I'm happy to share them with you so please feel feel free shoot me a message I don't connect with everyone on LinkedIn uh I do have an open profile it's nothing personal if I don't connect back with you so please don't look at it that way the reason that I do that is because when I'm creating content if I have too many connections my feed on LinkedIn is very noisy and like I said it's nothing personal in terms of creating content it's very helpful for me to be working and seeing other content creators creating content so again it's nothing personal I try to make sure that my LinkedIn is very much like my feed is something I can navigate so feel free I you should be able to message me I think my profile is open so if you want to reach out to me on LinkedIn please do Twitter Instagram Tik Tok leave YouTube comments Facebook if you name a platform and I'm not on it let me know because I'll be on it so I hope that helps I do these every Monday at 9:30 p.m. PST I will be trying to do more coding live streams during the week and a Shameless plug that if you want to learn C instead of sharing my screen I'll just drop it into the chat I do have courses on C if you want to learn about them look at this video is sponsored by me um so there are courses on that uh the bundle there has two courses together literally takes you from knowing nothing about program to being able to program at a a decent level in C you will not be a pro at the end of that because anyone that tells you that after 11 hours of a course is lying to you do I think you'll be able to program in the language absolutely so here we go courses are available Spanish Nick is proud is that are you thinking Nick chapsas is Spanish Nick because Nick chapsas is Greek Nick living in the UK and I am Canadian Nick living in Seattle but thank you so much everyone I do appreciate the time Cameron good night I hope you have a good sleep and take care everyone I do appreciate it and we'll see you next time