Mentoring The Uninterested Software Engineer: Should We Care?

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all right folks I'm headed to the office I'm going to Twitter for a question and I just wanted to it's obviously kept Anonymous I want to say huge thanks to this person for sending it in um and I know them from across different social media platforms so they know who they are um thank you so much for um your question and for being everywhere all the time I do appreciate it um their question is about software engineer on teams that I don't want to read it verba um but kind of like you try to Mentor coach them but like they're kind of not really open to it they're almost just like quite content where they're at is what it seems like sorry I have like dog hair or cat hair my eye um so it's not like they're bad it's not like they're stupid anything

like that it's like not it's not that they are bad people on the team but uh when you have other people that are like either as a manager Tech lead team lead or just more senior people trying to Mentor trying to help you kind of have some people that are just like they're not really receptive to it and it doesn't necessarily mean they're pushing back and being mean they're just like okay thanks like whatever um like what do you do right like how much should you focus on this like what's the emphasis here um The Challenge ends up being that for some like for engineers like this sometimes they are kind of constrained to what they're able to work on effectively uh so anything that's outside like as this person wrote in like anything outside of their comfort zone they kind of need handholding on

it right so when the team is smaller this makes things a lot more difficult so like what's up right um so the question is really like will it be obvious to the manager um you know if they're able to stay on simple things usually like they're they're productive and that's good but like like how does growth look like for them right what happens when you have more features and stuff that are bigger coming up in the backlog um should you care right so as as an engineer that observes this of someone else on the team should you care right that's kind of what this Talk's going to be about um so let me get on the road here says 50 minutes to get to work which is completely ridiculous it's already 9:30 um is it because it's wet outside I don't know um can't ever

seem to win I'm hoping we get in the fast lane and that's that um part of me is like if you've been watching the videos and you know this car is beeping a lot and I don't know what it is anymore um I was attributing it to there's a wrap on the car and I was just attributing it to the Colder Weather but it's not like like it was just wrapped or something it's been wrapped for a few years so uh if you're not familiar with the vinyl wrap and this actually has an extra layer of laminate on it if that's over the sensors then it can block the sensors and that would explain a lot of the beeping but it's relatively recent the beeping is just getting worse and worse and I was like maybe it's just because the uh the wrap is starting

to I don't know it's getting a little older it's the weather's been cold maybe that's causing I don't know and grime and stuff on the car to build up I don't know maybe that's contributing to it but like I I don't know anymore so it's frustrating anyway if you want questions answered you can leave them in the comments if you want to do what this person did that you can reach out to Dev leader on social media that is my main YouTube channel as well where I have more polished edited down videos because this channel is all about me just rambling driving to work driving from work driving to CrossFit driving from Crossfit so if you don't like that style but you like the topics then uh you can check out my other channel Dev leader um okay so first up I need water and

there's caffeine in here too which will help but this is a really interesting question because this is the kind of stuff that I don't feel like a lot of people pay attention to this is the kind of thing that as an engineering manager it's like uh and I've been doing this type of role for almost 13 years now I always see this kind of stuff I have to pay attention to this kind of stuff because that's what my my job is um but it's not something that comes up uh frequently when I talk to to individual contributors and I guess I should say it's not that they don't notice it right um but it's not something I hear people bring up and talk a lot about uh so I thought this context was kind of interesting for a little bit of background uh I can't

remember uh specifically if it was team lead or Tech lead but this person has a team or Tech lead kind of position so um in my opinion that's a really good thing that they're noticing not not necessarily that it's happening but it's good that they're aware of it I think that's a really good observation um and it's not something you just want to ignore uh the other thing to mention that is I guess helpful for some context for why this person was was curious about this is that they were describing their their situation with how their manager is um set up in their organization it sounds like their manager spread across a a handful of different things and um I'm not here to say that's good or bad I'm just just saying this is how it is um and the result of that is it's

like their manager only seems to have like 20% time kind of thing with their dedicated team which is I mean I I said I wasn't going to say good or bad that doesn't seem very sustainable but I think this is why this person was saying like I'm a team lead for that kind of reason so that I can help support uh the team in different ways um construction I don't have the insta 360 going so nice thanks for turning the sign around to let me go so right this person is in this position where as they're doing their role trying to be team lead and do it effectively they're going hm I'm noticing a pattern with some Engineers where when it comes to mentoring they're not really receptive and um the the tricky thing here is I find like with a team lead role like

a team lead is not like not the direct manager so it's not like their responsibility for uh facilitating career growth and putting people up for promotion and stuff like that right so it's not not the job requirement but at the same time like I would say that good team leads are of course like they're assisting with that right it's uh it's not how do I say this it's not the responsibility of the team lead to be able to go put people up for promotion like that's not part of the role but um to help guide People Help mentor to help them grow like that is certainly part of it right and um you know there's other roles on the team that will do this more informally right like please don't cross the road oh man person has an umbrella over their head they looked the

other way before crossing the road and then took a step out onto the road they would have died they would have walked right in front of my car um so yeah there's other roles like on the team that will do this more informally like other individual contributors that are uh that have more seniority they'll be helping out more Junior people that kind of thing but it becomes a more formalized sort of responsibility of of Team Le needs to be able to uh to help with mentorship and guiding and this kind of stuff it's just not on the promotion or like actual career progression as a responsibility so it's kind of weird um because it's so like how do you balance that right like you're like hey I want to help help this person be effective I want to help coach them but it's not like

you have the say in the end like if they're getting promoted or not right so it's uh I I understand that that can put people in a tricky situation like how much time how much time do you go spend on that kind of thing if someone's not really receptive to it um so I wanted to talk a little bit about this this topic from a different angle and I talked about it in another video and the tricky thing with stuff like this is that like no matter what I say here it has to be a generalization I don't really like generalizing things because um I don't know it's I don't know if it's my personality or what but I if someone makes a generalization I like trying to pick it apart and saying well here's like in this situation here's something more specific in this

situation it's a bit of a different angle so anytime I hear a generalization I'm like yeah but like what about this or what about that and so when I make generalizations it feels kind of weird to me cuz I'm like I want to acknowledge all of the all of the nuances as much as possible so I'm not going to be able to do that in a video as I'm driving to work I just wanted to have that disclaimer that what I'm about to say I think is very much a generalization and I encourage you as the viewer The Listener to to kind of do the thought experiment and see like how how might this look from different angles okay so in other videos uh I've talked about this idea idea that you know I think for many of us as software Engineers um I think

a lot of personality types and software engineering where people are like hey I want to do awesome work I want to get promoted I want to it's like it's all about like doing more doing better and kind of going up the ladder in our careers and um certainly not for everyone right certainly not for everyone but I think a lot of people and it's I mean it's not specific to software engineering I just I personally see it a lot my bias is obviously I work in the software engineering industry but I think like part of that is really good where people are like hey I want to grow and do better which is awesome right but when it's consuming you that's where things like aren't so great of course uh everything needs some type of balance now what I've noticed is that more at least

from my perspective my experience isn't more often than not people are leaning towards the hey like what do I do for promotion how do I focus on growth that kind of thing and because that ends up being the majority of what we see and I'm again I'm generalizing you might not have the same observation but because that's the majority when we have outliers to this it feels kind of weird right so not everyone is hellbent on more more more promotion promotion promotion some people get to a point in their career and they're like this is pretty good right I'm content with my pay like if someone paid me more money sure that would be nice I don't think anyone's going to cry about getting handed more money um but they're like I have a good work life balance I'm working on interesting enough problems I'm

content and like it's almost weird to it's almost weird to say that it sounds weird because what's wrong with that right like nothing nothing should be wrong with someone being like hey I've gotten to a point in my career like this is good I'm doing my job right and that's why the person that wrote in is like it's not like this these this person or these types of people are like bad Engineers it's not like holy crap we got this person on the team and they're terrible what do we do to get them off it's like yeah they're okay but they don't seem to have an interest in growth or they don't seem to have uh you know they're not receptive to mentorship uh because in my opinion A lot of the time it's just about being content and like is that actually such a

bad thing as as an engineering manager and again that that so that was my generalization I'm not saying that that is the case for everyone my disclaimer again but I've seen that happen a lot I've actually had people that report to me in my career where they're like yeah I'm just no things are good and I have talked to people about hey like to get toward senior here's what needs to happen and they're like no it's like that's okay like you know I'm things are good and then we would talk about it more and it's like Y no understood like that's clear like I you know kind of working in general towards that but like you know things are good almost like if it happens it happens like the opportunities are there sure but like otherwise I'm going to keep doing like you're telling me

I'm doing good work my compensation's there I'm doing okay thanks and again it's not it's not that it's wrong but also as an engineering manager like part of my responsibility is like trying to help people grow in their career so um I've had to balance this thing a lot because get in here buddy um because when I see that happen I go hm is it is it something on my side where I'm I'm failing to do my job uh effectively right um we're supposed to have growth plans with everyone making sure that everyone understands like their their trajectory making sure people are aligned on expectation like um and then you have someone who's like no like things are good like this is great I'm happy right here and I will keep taking more work that's like what you're giving me and that's all goodness and

they are just content so the the tricky thing here is like what this person wrote in and it's like so I maybe to wrap up that thought I don't think that there's anything wrong with that okay I wanted to acknowledge that based on everything else we generally see it feels it feels like it's a weird uncommon thing but I don't think there is anything wrong with that um I mentioned in one of the other videos and I still can't remember the phrase for it something like a a Terminus level or something like that but many companies will have a level where they again sorry if the word is wrong but the idea is that people will reach that level and should uh from like the perspective of HR manager and that kind of thing people should be totally okay to just like hang out at

that level like that is very uh acceptable like they've achieved you know they've done well in their career to like hang out at that level so probably not like as a junior software developer like you're probably not hanging out there for your career and even as a mid-level probably not for your career but like getting to like senior like that's if you were to hang out there for you know the overwhelming majority of your career that could be totally good and and that's like I'm G to use like the word acceptable but I don't know if that's the right word it's like uh to to push people beyond that isn't necessarily the expectation and this this will look different at different companies some places might not even be formalized but it's a concept okay so just to close off on that thought now let's go

back to the implications of this on a team so as an engineering manager like I always talk about balance of things on teams right um if I were to build a team of uh software Engineers what I wouldn't do is say okay where are the highest level principal software Engineers I can find I'm getting a team of seven of them and we're going to go build stuff um I wouldn't do that because the type of work that you need to do on a team is going to include stuff that people at a principal level aren't going to be interested in and and odds are that if we have work that is at the principal level we're not going to have probably not enough of it that's uh that we need like seven principal Engineers to go do in parallel so in general it makes a

lot of sense to have a sort of like spectrum of different levels this car with the beeping like why why are you beeping uh so having Juniors is helpful having midlevel senior and like you know and above is all helpful but that also means that you have different personality types you might have people that gravitate towards more towards mentoring you might have some people that shy away from mentoring but they're really good technically so it's not that they're totally closed off but they're like look like I am more effective at this and I'm like and is my strength and so instead of like I don't know um taking away their ability to do something effective it's like you leverage it so you compensate by having maybe someone else on the team who's really strong at mentoring and wants to spend more time doing that right

so balance how do we take advantage of people's strengths and minimize their weaknesses and balance that out on the team so when you have someone who seems to be kind of like uh at this content state where they're like I am not you know my my view is like I'm not really planning on growing much from from the level I'm at I'm not interested in taking on more responsibilities or more difficult things I'm just good where I'm at as a manager that makes it tricky because it's almost like uh removing some flexibility right there might be individuals on the team that I know have career growth plans to go in some direction and I know over time the mid levels s like the Juniors will go to mid-level mid- level to senior so like things are kind of flowing that way but when you add

in someone who's kind of just like at that level it's for me it's not like a it's not a problem it's just that it removes some flexibility that's kind of how I would look at that um and having awareness of it is just really important because it's like you you kind of know what you're getting into with someone who's kind of like I'm I'm I'm just content with where I'm at so my my comment back to the person that wrote this in terms of like you know is manager aware of it are they going to catch on should I tell them um I would say like as a team lead it's probably worth having a conversation about it right and I know that this based on how they wrote this I know this person's coming from a good spot they're not like I'm going to

go rat on this person cuz they're not an All-Star like that's not that's not what's happening uh and I know based on other conversations I'm I feel like they have a pretty good head on their shoulders so I think it's more about like you know is this worth raising awareness is it something that I kind of Step Back From and the manager just figures out but I think it's worth having a conversation um especially because it sounds like the way their their team is structured their manager pretty removed so maybe the manager doesn't have as much visibility into this and that would be helpful again it's not like from my understanding this person's not trying to like tattle or like be a problem it's mostly to raise awareness like hey just so you know like we have a team staffed this way it's pretty small

and like usually you're like finding ways to uh I don't know a good way to say this like in a healthy way like stretch people a little bit out of their comfort zone right that's how you grow you work on some things that are less comfortable you get good at them and you have growth opportunities so they don't have that with this person right so I think that is a helpful thing to discuss with the manager to bring awareness to it and say hey look like Casino um so and so on the team you can even lead in with like hey they are doing good work at this level right we give them these types of tasks they're getting through it it's all good um but when it comes to stretching beyond that um either either there's no interest or it's a lot more effort

because we have to give them support right so I think the awareness part is helpful manager might be totally aware already and they're like thanks yeah like we can you know just kind of close off on alignment there or it's like it's news to the manager and they might say okay my understanding of like the team's growth trajectory would have looked like X before now it looks like this variation of that that like okay interesting uh either they're adjusting their expectations for what the team's able to do or they're going H maybe we need to have conversations about bringing in more help scaling the team depends on on the scenario right but I think it opens up the door for conversation so step one in my opinion is raise awareness of it uh in a in a constructive way right which I like I said

I feel like this person is approaching it that way um number two is like I wouldn't I wouldn't necessarily get hung up on it I think like I was saying it's uh it's important to acknowledge it and and have awareness because part of it too is like how much energy should you be putting into that because if you're like I'm going to keep putting in energy to do this and the person legitimately is just like no I'm good and you're also acknowledging they're doing okay work like it's not a problem at some point like is it worth it and I think at some point it's not worth it right like you're you're trying to you're trying to move things in a direction that aren't really going to happen now what I would add in just as a side note because and this is more of

like a I guess like a personal thing for me is um part of me doesn't like to and it's it's my own bias because what I'm describing with individuals like that it's not how my brain works right uh I'm not of the like I don't like being content so I don't want to say it's right of me to like encourage people to go beyond that but that's kind like based on who I am it's kind of what I end up doing at some point right so uh I don't like just kind of rendering to that that mindset where someone's like no no I'm just good I I do try to explore a little bit more because often what I wonder when people say they're just content um again nothing wrong with that it makes me question are you are you just content and like everything's

okayish or like do you actually really enjoy what you're doing because that's the next step for me right if it sorry if this sounds like cliche or weird or dumb I don't know I haven't a lot of these videos it's like sometimes the first time I'm putting these thoughts together so if I if I could do like what I Envision is like a perfect job as an engineering manager I would want to make sure that I'm finding you know helping people find what they love to do ideally they love to do the work with me on the team that we're on and like that's all awesomeness but also if that's not how things pan out like that's okay too but part of me wants to make sure that people are able to find in their career what they love to do so if someone's telling

me no like I'm content things are okay here like it's good part of me wonders like maybe you don't love what you're doing though and is there something we should be exploring together where I could help you find other things that you might love to do right so to make up a really dumb contrived example it's like uh when you know before I was building desktop software just to make a more clear example maybe I have someone who's doing a lot of uh the user interface development and they're like hey like I've been getting similar work like this it's all good I'm content right this is okay you know good work life balance know what I'm doing cool um but maybe they don't love it and part of me would want to like have the conversation with them like hey if this looked different if

you got to work on other things like would you love that more I'm using a strong word like love on Purpose By the way um because my goal with saying that is like to to put someone beyond the just I'm okay with it uh and I say that because I don't know for me I don't think I want to go my entire career and reflect on it and say yeah that was my career was okay like I it's it's literally a large part of your life so I would love to find ways to uh to say like I loved what I was doing maybe not every moment of it but I arrived at something that I love to do and that's what I would want for my employees right so that's what I said I realized it probably cliche corny I don't know um but

that's that's on my mind I don't necessarily expect that of team leads or anything like that I don't even expect that of other managers my manager but like something from me like that's something that I would want to try and do now if I explore that with someone and it's not really going anywhere I'm not going to like I'm not pushing on them I'm not you know like like kind of like this person that rode in if uh someone is not really receptive to that kind of stuff I can try changing my strategy a little bit but um at the end of the day if they're like I'm just okay like don't uh you know Don't Rock the Boat too much it's like okay like that's it's what it is I just don't want to um I feel like I'm not doing my full duty

if I if I don't explore that so okay um so that was the other part right was like how much effort should someone put in I hope that makes more sense especially she as a team lead and um I think sort of the last part to to talk through from my point here or my perspective is um okay so you got some like someone like this on the team manager not making dramatic changes it's like you know you can't just like immediately go hire someone or you know you're not going to terminate this person because just because they're not interested in in more growth and they're already doing good so you have this person on the team like how do you navigate this kind of stuff to me this comes back to what we talked about which is awareness so when it comes to planning

and capacity for a team like factoring this kind of thing in because I think one of the reasons you get some friction is that we start looking at people's abilities their roles and levels and we go well you know this person's you know we've seen they're capable of X but like this would be actually a good growth opportunity for them to stretch beyond that um having awareness that someone is like they're probably not investing much time and effort and or and they don't care to to have those growth opportunities um you may not want to keep trying to force that because you may keep finding that you're in this position where you're like we had to hand hold a lot and even though you do that because they're not receptive to the mentoring and the coaching around that kind of stuff it's like you end

up having to do the same thing next time um I don't want to I don't want to say that like people in that position never get better or never learn that's like totally unfair to say um but if people aren't receptive to it like like an honest question to ask yourself can you think of a time where you wanted to learn something versus a time where you were like you know air quotes you're like forced to learn something because I would say if you're forced to go learn something and you don't give a about it you're probably not going to learn it very effectively come on buddy let me in here nice um but if you're like I really want to learn about this like you're going to your mind is going to be open you're probably going to be like a sponge or try

to be right so the effectiveness is in my opinion going to be much much higher when you're really interested in learning something so when you have people that are kind of just content and they're like I don't I don't care enough for lack of better word even I feel bad saying that I don't I don't mean to suggest they don't care like it's yeah maybe maybe don't care sounds too strong but like there's just not an interest in in going further um then the learning is not it's not going to be as effective it's not zero it's just not going to be as effective so overall I would say my recommendation there is like the awareness is important try to factor that in when you're planning and if that's becoming a problem because in this case like the team is small then continuing to highlight

that with the manager around resourcing I think is important right because there was probably an expectation of the team and how they can perform with an assumption that everyone kind of has this growth path and if that's not the case which is not necessarily a problem it's not the end of the world in any like I would say statistically in in like most teams you're probably going to have a person that kind of fits into this okay like it's I think that it's not like a super rare thing it's just like we don't talk about it a lot so not the end of the world but raising awareness so that the manager can understand the capacity uh and you know team scaling and stuff like that I think is very helpful um yeah I'm trying to think if there's anything else like from a team

lead perspective that I might recommend um yeah I don't know like part of me always comes back to like you know is the person genuinely interested in what they're working on and if there's ways to align that better then maybe they they'll be more effective at those things so as a team L that might be something you can dig into a little bit more I don't know the type of work the team is doing so it's hard to hard to say but if you notice that someone gravitates towards a certain type of work is it are they doing it just because it's comfortable or are they doing it because they like to do it that might be something to try and and tease apart a little bit right um because it perhaps it's not about perhaps it's not about growing someone in these other areas

that we're trying to dictate for them but um being like hey like if we can help you find the thing or help you focus on the thing that you enjoy more the the growth will come sort of naturally because you're interested in it right you don't need as much external mentoring and guidance and help and all that it's like your interest is driving it but if you're not set up to go work on that stuff then you don't really get that chance right so as a team lead like I was saying maybe that's something you could help tease apart to help that understanding um again I'm not saying that becomes your responsibility but it might be something that you can contribute towards and then again work with the manager kind of circle back with that kind of information and say hey like again if the

manager's uh as far removed as it sounds like then you as a team lead might be having significantly more interaction with the person to to be understanding that right so that might be my recommendation on that um I don't think I have any other thoughts so if I say anything more on that it's probably just me repeating myself so probably probably end that thought there uh I'm just getting off the highway so how how do we do for time 30 it's going to be 40 minutes by the time I park it's pretty crappy Drive um well I guess a couple things to go over for folks uh resume reviews I've been doing resume reviews on my main Channel Dev leader um kind of inspired from this channel where people were asking about it so um if you are interested in having a resume reviewed check

out my main Channel Dev leader uh just look for the playlist or you know find one of the videos that's posted on the channel that's a resume review uh you don't have to watch the whole thing uh I highly recommend you do because I would appreciate that uh but if you um if you want your resume reviewed if you watch the beginning of one of those videos it explains how to submit it I just don't post the information in uh you know in comments and stuff so that Bots don't crawl and and spam me so you can check that out uh also live streams so my main Channel Dev leader like I said has the polished edited videos but on Monday nights at 700 p.m.

Pacific I I do a live stream and how I've been doing this more recently is generally take a topic from code commute because this channel lets me have like a stream of Consciousness and how I'm answering things it's either stuff from Reddit or questions that you guys are asking so I know that at least one other person cares about it and so I I will usually take uh whatever has been watched the most or sort of has the best engagement from comments and stuff like that the discussion and I write a newsletter on it so that goes out on Saturday mornings that's weekly. deev leader.com stream on my main Channel Dev leader and that's the Monday night at 7:00 p.m.

Pacific and so I use the newsletter content as the sort of as the topic but it's an AMA right so if you're like hey code commutes fun I like the topics and I want to ask Nick a question but I don't want to write it in uh it would be cool to just have a you know chat back and forth like join the live stream please join the live stream um I would much rather dedicate the entire live stream just to answering questions in the chat right it's a far better use of time um than me just talking through a newsletter so um I would love to see more of you folks there I know there's been a handful of people from code commute that have uh been joining regularly which is super cool to see um I appreciate you being there I I hope

it's a helpful discussion so we'll wrap it up there thanks so much folks and I'll see you next time take care