How Do You Do The Job Of A Senior Software Engineer?

Transcript is auto-generated and may contain errors.

all right folks I'm headed home from the office on Monday going to Reddit for a topic how do you do the job of a senior software engineer and um I'm going to read through a couple of points here my overall thought though is there's not enough context about how this person operates just a bit of a spoiler so it's hard to draw a helpful conclusion um so I want to take a couple of different perspectives because the way this is written is makes it very much feel like um their manager is sort of the one at fault and that very well might be the case so if you're familiar with my style of videos I like to be able to address multiple sides um so I'm going to talk through their points and talk about how that could be potentially the manager's fault or something

this person's omitting because they don't realize that they should be doing this and they're not being coached effectively on it so ultimately this could fall back on the manager they could do a better job but um there might be some things here that we could talk about from different angles so if you want your question answered leave it below in the comments and otherwise you can find Dev leader on social media that's what I use for my personal branding and it's my main YouTube channel send me a message let me know I'll keep it Anonymous and I'm happy to try and help with your software engineering questions so this person's saying um you know their manager pushing them to be senior but they're like I don't know what to do it's kind of nebulous I don't really I just want to focus on you know

writing code and like it seems like there's just too much other stuff going on here and they say um some some of the points that make them frustrated are number one lacking Direction their boss wants them to do uh some vague thing like do something with AI but doesn't provide a clear description of the goals uh just tells him to figure it out and that's kind of it so that's one thing judgment uh the the judgment not trusted uh so they'll put some effort into something uh into analysis and then it really gets dismissed and they're like feels like I need to have a prototype to demonstrate an idea okay no Authority whenever I made a team lead inevitably someone else hijacks the project takes the lead away from me overriding my decisions I don't know why this always happens interesting and not allowed to

identify problems um software developers are supposed to be uh a software doers we are in the business of solving problems to solve them we have to identify them my boss doesn't like hearing about problems just thinks they negativity so I think this is super interesting I have a lot of thoughts on this this is going to be tricky because I need to be able to refer back to this as I'm chatting um and I don't want to be distracted so um let's start off lacking Direction okay so this the way that this person's framed it I could absolutely understand why that would be totally awkward would be a crappy situation to be like okay um you know there's the business wants you to do something with AI like go figure out how to do something with AI and this person's like look man like where

do you even want me to start with that right like it's just so open ended and um I could absolutely imagine situations where you have a manager like this where they're like look what's being told of uh to me based on you know some part of the leadership team however your business is structured you guys need to go figure this out we need more AI like put the AI into the things and you're like okay like I don't know what the heck's going on here but as a manager you're like got to tell the team to go do it so I could see that happening um and I'm going to take the one side and then the right so as we navigate this I I'll try to chat through both perspectives that I have on this and so I could see that being the case

where this person has a manager that's just kind of like you know passing down like business says we got to do this we got to do this and you're like okay but like where where are the constraints what are the like the pieces of guidance here what do you mean just Jam AI into this and you can pick any technology fad right we have to go to microservices is and it's like well why what do what do you mean where do we start what's the reason but I think the key word I said there is why right because I think if you understand why I can't wait for it to not be cold because I can't stand this thing beeping at me if you understand why you can often try to frame up um a bit more understanding right why alone is still pretty lightweight

but being told to do things and not having a why is really challenging because in my opinion the why gives you a direction to look in that's probably how I would frame that it doesn't tell you what right essentially you are being tasked to figure out the what and the how but if someone's telling you we need AI integrated well why and why doesn't have to be a challenging question like I disagree with you I don't think we need AI why can be a very curious question and I think it can be a very helpful question to ask and I have found historically if I'm working even with my own team members if they don't understand why it can actually leave gaps in like how they're approaching things and I've certainly had conversations I've shared this before uh when I joined my current team that

I'm on I had a team member that was already working on a project and I called a meeting and we were talking through something and I said hey look I realized some of you this might be kind of redundant but like I think we should chat about this and unfortunately the takeaway here might be like for my learning and otherwise maybe there's some learning for others kind of get on the same page right and um I remember talking to one of my my senior Engineers after and I said hey like how did you think that went like what are your thoughts and he thanked me he said oh thanks so much like I actually now understand why we're doing this I understood what we had to do but like the Y really helps me to know and basically like the customer impact because it wasn't

clear to him before so anyway just a side note like asking why can be very helpful so I can totally see in this person's case they have an engineering manager they might be pawning some stuff on them and not giving them clear guidance and not telling them why again just saying why is not necessarily sufficient guidance especially for someone who's not quite at senior even for someone at senior it's like okay well like what are the constraints what are the goals right um but to kind of flip the script around a little bit generally and I've talked about this before as well in other videos If you poke around on my channel um when you're moving up in level the type of work you're doing will be become more and more nebulous and what I mean by that is like the requirements or the understanding

of how to solve the problem are less and less defined the way this person has described it is challenging right because I think we want to and I'm not I'm not trying to dismiss them and say like their perspective is not real I have to kind of keep putting this disclaimer in as I go I am purposefully going to try and take two sides to this on every point they made CU I want us to think about this from both sides I think it's important to do they're saying my manager is giving me these open-ended things don't really understand them doesn't make sense just go put AI into stuff now what could be happening is that they're not they are actually getting some direction from their manager and they're not understanding it another thing that could be happening is that they don't understand the expectation

is that they are trying to solve some more open-ended problems and they're not used to doing it so they don't know how to do it and that's okay right I'm not saying that they need to be expected to do that but it sounds like their manager is trying to put them into a situation where this is becoming more of an expectation so what I'm thinking about this I'm trying to imagine myself giving some C coaching or some mentorship to someone like this they're reporting to another engineering manager and they're saying hey Nick it seems like my manager gives me tasks like this and I don't like it it's frustrating and one of the things that I would love to kind of put back to them as a challenge is really around like like walk me through what they're actually telling you like how does this

actually come up because when people write a post like this and I wouldn't blame someone they're definitely framing it in a way that's sharing their frustration right of course but what we don't get to see is the other side of it which is you know they might be missing some pieces here maybe the the their manager whoever is giving them guidance and they're just not quite getting it so that's one way to look at it we talked about the other way my recommendation here for this person would be if you're getting stuff like this and you're not understanding the direction that you need to moving in I would see Clarity on it right easier said than done I get it but you'll hear that like 99% of my advice that I I give to software Engineers it's like talk to your manager um and if

it doesn't work I would say maybe you need a new manager and um hopefully at some point you'll find a manager that will try to help you through stuff but uh honestly talking with your manager can clear up a lot of stuff and in this case if a manager is saying something like hey go integrate AI it's up to you go figure it out um you know what are the questions okay well what are my constraints what goals are we trying to solve why are we doing this I think those are totally fair questions um you know I would be happy to try and answer that for someone on my team if they were curious come on truck let me in one second I just got to switch a couple Lanes here someone tried to merge I've had a day of driving let me tell

you that's the second car that tried to merge into me without a a signal but we survived um so yeah conversation with your manager I would be happy to try and clarify this for people again if it's true that this person's manager is just not giving them any detail even when they're asking for clarity I would say like yeah you probably got set up with a manager like and I think you can try to work on that relationship you can try to make it better but ultimately you have to ask yourself this question of like how much energy do you put into that versus uh looking for Alternatives this person doesn't have any tail lights their car is completely black from the back but they have headlights on so that's better than half the drivers I see that's nice um okay let's talk about the

next piece I need a moment cuz I need to glance on my phone judgment okay so here's another one uh let's take the let's be on the side of this person for this first pass so they're saying that when they're doing analysis they are putting in a lot of effort they're collecting data doing the analysis and it feels like basically um you know their point is not getting across they end up having to prototype things or they're basically just being outright rejected on it and they're like this sucks like why am I it's frustrating why am I putting in all this effort now it could be it could be that they're working with right and people that are like it doesn't really matter how much work or effort you're doing or what data you're presenting I already have an opinion on this and like you're

kind of just doing the step so we can check the boxes but at the end of the day I don't really care I'm just going to kind of go the way that I think based on my experiences so thank you for putting the effort in but like doesn't really matter because either I'm interpreting the data a different way and I don't agree with you or I never actually cared in the first place and this was just a box checking exercise this is absolutely possible I don't want to rule that um it could be that the way that this person has been set up to work through some of these things like hey go do an analysis report back it could be that they were set up uh without clear guidelines right and what they're trying to analyze is actually something that's a little bit different

than what the goal was and then there's misalignment when they're presenting those results so someone's like no I don't agree with your analysis because you were looking at this you know the wrong way or you missed collecting this data and that's really critical and as a result like you better go Proto prototype something to prove it um so it could be all sorts of things like this and I'm not here to to say that this person's lying about it um so I think that's possible uh something that I think might be happening though if we take the other side of this is like uh they may need to work on how they're communicating things it very well might be that they did a good analysis so they did good data collection good analysis but perhaps how they're communicating the analysis in terms of weighing out

the pros and cons it very well just could be a communication thing and people are really not grasping what the um what the result of That's supposed to be as in to the person who did the work like the author in this case maybe they're like I have it in my head it makes sense here's the path we should go based on this data and they feel like based on what they've done it makes a lot of sense to them and they're saying like this always happens I put in all this this is one of the key things that's kind of making me like doubt them a little bit when people use language like this always happens it always happens like you're one of the variables in this if it's always happening it could so be you so that's why I like looking at these

things from different angles but what could be happening is that this person's not clearly communicating the the results of what they think so they're saying I wrote it down they're saying I I told them right I I gave them the outcome the results and they're still not buying it but communication requires multiple people so again I'm not trying to blame this person they may need to work on how they're communicating things I had a very Reas this I've been you know an engineering manager for 12 and a half years now and I just had to you know to give you an example of me not trying to on this person I very recently had an example where I tried to communicate something to Executives and the result was like the start of the meeting was I'm they said to me I'm going to be very

blunt and honest with you but like I'm not seeing it here and essentially said like the way that I conveyed all of the information totally missed the mark that is feedback I recently had and that tells me I need to do a better job at communicating information like that's my responsibility I need to own that what I think could be happening here with this person because again they're not at senior their boss is trying to get them to work towards that and they're finding it frustrating what could be happening is that they need to work on their communication another thing that kind of suggests that that might be happening is like I need to prove it with prototypes yeah because what you're trying to communicate is not coming across people are like man it's not we can't see the conclusion you're trying to draw it's

not obvious or the data you picked actually isn't helpful so go make a prototype because that's going to be something that we think you know if you invest a little bit more time that's going to give us a clear signal as to whether or not this is feasible or give us the results we're looking for so again they're saying the way that you're currently communicating is not effective we need this other way a prototype now that doesn't mean again I got to back bounce back and forth here I'm I'm thinking through people watching this getting triggered by me taking one side or the other so I want to keep going back and forth so you don't get too angry with me but um you know it could be on the other uh like the manager side or the other like seniors on the team like

maybe how they communicate it's not very effective maybe this person's doing an awesome job and uh the people on the receiving end are um unfortunately not able to kind of either recognize what's going on um they're having their own challenges with respect to communication like they're not keeping an open mind or or whatever it happens to be they have too much bias the can't see past it's possible I'm not saying it's not um but I think in general um personally I don't see anything wrong with doing prototypes to prove things uh I would be I'm trying to think of advice for this person so let's put our our mentorship hats on this person is saying hey Nick this keeps happening to me it's frustrating I would say okay if you're if you're getting feedback like this where people aren't trusting your judgment uh I would

ask for more feedback on it so try to ask for specific feedback if you said based on my results I think we should take path a and everyone's saying no either it's definitely path b or path C or not conclusive we need a prototype um I would try to get feedback so if everyone's saying take path b instead ask them like hey based on my analysis I think we should take path a what like what parts am I missing here are you you guys prioritizing or valuing these other aspects higher than I am so for example maybe you were um picking the direction that was going to optimize for latency I'm just making up right you're trying to optimize for latency and everyone else is like no man like we can deal with a little bit of latency memory is the thing we need to

optimize for here or you were like this is definitely the path forward because customers are going to be the most happy with this and everyone else is like n man we can't do that in 6 months we need to have it out the door in 2 weeks so like not going to work like are you missing some of the you know the alignment in terms of values this is a very common thing especially when people are disagreeing on things it's not like one solution is the only right solution it's that for our situation this solution happens to be more right or this solution happens to be less wrong so that could be something that's happening try to ask for specific feedback in these scenarios to learn from it at the end of the day some situations do help by having prototypes you'll what's the there's

a phrase it's like uh I don't know basically like code it like don't use your words just code it because the code will be the proof my brain's fried right now so I'm not doing it justice but anyway there's a saying that's something like that um um so I might recommend that as some advice try to get some uh clear feedback and see if you're missing some alignment or ask for ways that you could better communicate some of your thoughts if you're finding that um you know what you're trying to relay is never really making it through I think that could be helpful okay no Authority so this was something that they were saying when they finally get put into like lead a project every single time and they don't know why someone else happens to come take over the project interesting now I have

worked with people in the past where I have mentored them and I've had this kind of thing happened and the result after some investigation was understanding that they are working in a bit of a toxic team environment so I you know to start things off let's take this person's side it's entirely possible that the way that a team is incentivized is that hey look the only way that you're going to get promoted is if you're leading projects so you better find a project to lead and then what happens is that people start to be a little bit too competitive and instead of working as a team which is the goal of the team they start to become a little bit selfish and it's like hey look I need to get ahead the way for me to get ahead is I need to lead the project

here's a project that I think I could do even though someone else is already doing it if I just kind of butt my way in there this could be mine I could demonstrate with a little bit more um I don't know what the right word an aggressive stance on it like being more proactive more aggressive and trying to drive things like I can kind of just like I don't want to say weasel my way in but that's all that's coming to mind I can kind of make myself The prominent driver here and oust them from doing that position and like I said I've worked with someone where we kind of realized their team is truly incentivized this way and um kind of an unfortunate reality of the Team Dynamics and if that if that's this person's case or this is your case I would say

like that's not a great team environment to work on I wouldn't want to promote that um personally if I ever found myself in a team like that I would be actively searching for a different team I never want to work in a team where I feel like I'm eting against my my peers like not happening um because we need to be working together towards a common goal or else I don't want to be part of that so that's one thing now what could be happening again some of the the language us here this always happens it always happens to me okay so like I said earlier you are one of the common variables so is it perhaps that your ability to lead these types of projects is not meeting the mark are you doing a subpar job and ultimately someone else has to step in

the way that this is written we cannot tell that for sure I don't know this person they could be an awesome Rockstar engineer and they're not yet senior but they're on their way and that's great or they could be someone that is truly lacking some clarity on this stuff and they're feeling frustrated but they're not yet at the point where they can do these things effectively and as a result it feels a little bit like they're the victim in the situation perhaps that's what's happening so um you know the side effect that they would see is they they're put into a position hey like need you to lead this project and they're going okay they don't really know how to do a good job for that and then as some time's going on it's pretty clear that there's no you know leadership taking place someone's

not helping organize the project not keeping track of things not keeping people on task not getting people unblocked not driving any technical conversations like all these things that are going to be expected of a senior software engineer they're just not doing so then what ultimately ownership needs to be taken this person was tasked with having ownership over the area if it's not happening generally it falls back to the manager to take ownership or or sometimes people step in in my career I've absolutely stepped into positions where I was not the owner and needed to drive it needed to get done and so I took on a support role and just kept doing it until basically it was like okay the person who supposed to be taking ownership were clear like it's very apparent to everyone now it's not happening right um please stop thank you

cuz I have a green like back to that should I get a 360 camera question should I get a 360 camera today would have been a perfect day for it um so I found myself in situations like that I found myself in situations in my career where I need to raise visibility about lack of ownership so that the the next owner can take more responsibility and and recognize hey look the person you put in charge of that to take ownership not happening like you need more visibility on this here's your heads up now you can go be proactive on it either you need a new owner or you have to coach the owner that's currently in place to do a better job so I genuinely Wonder in this person's case maybe they're not doing a good job of taking ownership which is entirely likely and

that's okay because if you haven't done it before and you don't know how to do it you need to learn and that's like I said it's okay so it could be a again could be a Miss on the manager's part because if this person's not taking ownership they should get that feedback it's not just like manager sitting behind the scenes and being like okay person a they suck we got to bring in person B now they got to go lead this just uh just kind of push them out and don't let them know and then we can avoid all the difficult conversations like if that's I'm obviously exaggerating right but if that's the theme of what's Happening Here manager has to do a way better job at at communicating this stuff right hey look um either I was coaching you giving you some tips on

how to do better at at owning this kind of thing and uh and that's not happening so at this point like thank you for trying on this uh we'll try to look for a different project in the future where we can uh try to get you to to focus on these things for next time but I'm not seeing it and this project is falling behind now I need someone else to start driving this if it gets to that point right because ultimately again ownership it's going to Cascade so they might bring in someone else in but they owe that in my opinion they owe that to the person to say hey look this is why this is happening you need the feedback I want you to grow and do better that's why I'm telling you this feedback it's a difficult conversation but thank you for

you know you know uh trusting in me that I I want the best for your growth we're not there yet we'll try again this road is an absolute mess I wish you could see it there's a construction thing and there's all these like sheets of metal across the street and it's like sticky uh like as I'm driving I can just hear all the Rocks kicking up um okay now I'm stop for a second not allowed to identify problems okay this is the last one and I'm almost I did pretty good on timing for this surprisingly um okay I absolutely agree that Engineers should be empowered to identify problems this person saying hey look I identify problems my manager just doesn't want to hear them he's basically like telling me one thing and uh meaning another right I don't want to hear your problems you know

we got enough work to do all you're doing is talking about problems and that obviously can be very confusing um so yeah I could you know benefit of the doubt for this person that absolutely could be happening where their managers giving them mixed signals and they're like look like yes Engineers should look for problems I get it but like we're so busy I don't want to hear about your problems like don't want to deal with it um could be anything like that and and I would I would say for sure that's going to be confusing misleading cuz you're like should I be doing this or even even worse is like if that's never been um articulated to you right like you should feel empowered to do that and you're observing things and you're like man like we really should do a better job about this

and you're trying to raise that to your manager and they're just like not interested I would say that's like an even worse kind of thing cuz you're like I see all this happening around me and like literally no one wants to help make it better okay like why should I even care right that's a that's a really crummy spot to be in because when you stop caring or like feel like you should stop caring cu no one else does like I don't know kind of erods your engagement so that could absolutely be happening here however what I think could also be happening is how they're communicating the problems because despite how this was said to them you know Engineers should be finding problems CU that's how you solve problems is what people really want is people want Solutions we don't know how this person's actually

communicating some of the things that they're talking about which makes this challenging um what they could be doing is essentially what's called whining or complaining man the builds are so slow I hate the build system the build system's so crappy and in their head they're going look I'm identifying problems why doesn't my manager want to hear about this oh our code base is so crappy we have no test coverage on anything I wish we had unit tests like it's so crappy we can't everything's always broken because there's no tests and then the code has to be refactored so we can even write the test oh man like this is like you know it's so bad and you're going look I'm identifying problems and you're right you are but I said those in an exaggerated way so you'd see hopefully see my point like people don't

want to hear they want to hear your solutions to the problems so let's go through those again hey look the build system is so slow oh I hate using it so I wonder if we could try caching some of the things that we're building I wonder if that's an option maybe we're copying to many files we should go investigate and see if we can do less copying or um these things we actually have like pre-built components for why are we rebuilding these things every time maybe we should go investigate if we can do something about that or at least prove if that's happening I just made up off the top of my head three different things that you could go do as actions instead of just complaining and again I don't know if this person's actually complaining I'm just making stuff up I'm trying to

give you both sides of this um what was the other thing I wanted to say oh I had an example for testing there but I think you get my point like propose Solutions propose next steps and I think that you'll often get a lot more success out of if you want to complain about something or whine about something do it with the next step demonstrate a little bit of leadership there doesn't mean you have to be the person to do it but maybe you're some who could take the lead on it maybe or at least raise awareness so anyway hope that helps thought that was an interesting one I hope you can appreciate the multiple angles to it and I'll see you next time take care