NON-STOP Randomization As A Software Engineer!

Transcript is auto-generated and may contain errors.

what's up it is Tuesday night there's my voice um I didn't get to drive today because I didn't go to CrossFit so I figured I'm going to try to crank one of these out before I go to bed um I'm also not going to CrossFit tomorrow so I missed some some video opportunities but I'm going to be driving tomorrow topic from today topic for today comes from Reddit uh it is about being overloaded with tasks so the title of the post and experience STS is how can I most effectively push back against management always trying to put more and more on my plate this might sound familiar for a lot of folks um if you are very new to software development this is a very common problem um it's not unique to Big Tech it's not unique to startups it's not just because you have

a bad manager like it's just like this is just is such a common thing um so I think it'll be good to talk through I did like a very brief scroll through the comments and interestingly enough like the very first one I read I was like man like that's actually pretty spot on to how I feel about this kind of thing so we'll go through that um pretty exciting news the channel just got monetized so I'm pretty um pretty proud of that um wasn't really expecting it to happen so fast uh or wasn't really on my mind until it it kind of uh was sneaking up there so um that's cool I will any proceeds I get from this I will use to to basically reinvest into the channel uh but I have two channels Dev leader and this one uh Dev leader has paid

for editing so to be totally transparent I will probably use whatever money I make from this channel to pay my editing on dev leader because I lose money on that channel um with that said though reminder to folks if you want questions answered please put them in the comments if you have questions that you want me to um answer sort of anonymously on your behalf and want to offer more detail please just look for Dev leader on social media or find Nick Cs and Tino on LinkedIn uh send me a message uh a bunch of people have their questions answered and it's sweet I feel uh happy to be able to do that so where do we start with this um let's maybe go through a couple of the details that they offer because that might might we'll see if that like resonates with you

right so this person is saying they're midlevel uh they're at Fang so kind of like this is pretty might be pretty common uh but I did call out at the beginning of this it's not specific to to Big Tech just to be totally transparent and a heads up there so they're saying every quarter they do their okr planning if you're not familiar with what okrs are it's objectives and key results it's a framework for being able to um sort of set goals that are aligned with um you know set goals and sort of a system to measure your progress against against those goals and what's really I actually do like okrs but I feel like okrs are one of those things it's kind of like agile and people just say they do okrs and now it's like they're not actually okrs um so slight tangent

okrs are actually like a hypers specific framework um so I can already tell you if you're like oh my company does okrs uh do they actually because I can't even remember the all the details that go into okrs I had okr training before and you supposed to I mean if going by the book you're supposed to like name them particular ways uh all of your key results need to have uh measurable sort of uh sliding window outcomes right so you can say you want to move some Metric from X to Y and then that way you can actually track if you're making progress against it um yeah it's uh I like the framework actually but um I do think that it's one of those things that when you try to really get into it and do it perfectly it's like there's there's diminishing returns at

some point and then a lot of places are like we we do it we set objectives and really all they're doing is saying that they set objectives I don't know there's a happy medium somewhere in there but anyway this person says they do okrs with their company um so they go through planning for that and they actually feel like they leave planning and they're like this is pretty good like the workload that I have coming up over the next period so in this case quarter for for them every 3 months like I feel pretty good about what's coming up okay awesome then they say the issue is that inevitably despite having already signed off all of their plans um they get pulled into some 101 and then basically here's a new high priority project um and they say usually this happens two-thirds of the way

through whatever large project they're working on um and they're like fortunately like most of the time I'm like I'm actually like pretty set on how the Project's going so it's not the end of the world but um it's like I think it's kind of frustrating and if you're thinking through this scenario having never been through it you can imagine like it's it feels kind of randomizing uh and perhaps if you're more experienced and you have encountered this a bunch you know that it's frustrating right so um they say I'm asked to put my project on hold um and then it say they say that it always creates a lot of stress for them so in instead of their work being done at a sustainable Pace I'm now pushing to work tight deadline so all of a sudden they had some trajectory to finish their project

and now it's like well you have to do this other super important thing so your other project it's not even like oh don't worry about it it's that other project like these things are important so like now you have uh in like injected work that you didn't plan for and accommodate right so um you can imagine what that kind of feels like in terms of stress levels um and what else do they say just because I think they add said I'm a hard worker one of the most productive on my team um if you ask me I was more certainly underleveled okay pretty happy with the projects I enjoy challenge but the stress added by having unplanned work thrown my way really kills my job satisfaction it's tragic really as I otherwise like everything else about my job okay so there's a there's a bunch

of stuff and I think um like I said I can already see the the first comment kind of scrolled into you but the just the opening part of this first comment I think is like it's it's a bit of a reality check and we're going to look at a couple of different angles to kind of walk through what this person's talking about um because like I said I think it's very relatable for a lot of people this person comments back and says uh I'm not going to read the whole thing but they start off by saying a priority change is a priority change something changed and you need to roll with that there is no winning in trying to convince your manager to reverse a priority decision so um the first sort of angle I want to talk through this is is kind of actually

related to what this commenter said back because um it is I think there's a lot of truth to it and the context that I want to add in here is like um even like this has happened at Microsoft but being at a startup before Microsoft this was the name of the game like all the time this was happening it wasn't like this person's talking about you know uh after their their quarterly planning like oh like you know things are changing man this was like not not quite on a daily basis but like a lot uh especially in the early days it was so difficult to actually plan anything but there's a bit of an interesting thing there right and I know this person's talking about Fang um I know everyone watching this is probably not necessarily at a startup but there's an interesting thing here

which was like the amount of planning that was occurring and the amount of priority changes that were happening were very like disproportionate so you would maybe try to do a lot of planning and you're like okay well the more we plan the better prepared we're going to be the better work we're going to do and then like the reality is that like you're not following the plan and there's a new priority here a new priority there and when I think back to Startup times this was actually like it's going to sound kind of silly but it was good that it was good that that happened and it it's because the plans were wrong or not entirely right so the way that I like to think about planning and we're going to kind of come back to specifically for this individual but the way that I

like to think about planning is like um the and frame this up a little bit so the longer the time Horizon that you're planning for the less accurate it's going to be the more you're sort of guessing um and I think the more that you have to think about that from like a um we call it like a North Star right like this is like this sounds like the direction we want want to be going in it's aspirational the further you out you are and if you like like I've said on other videos I like talking about things like a spectrum right so it's not just like on or off black or white so the further out you are the more um sort of aspirational it is and like you you really don't even know like how far out that work is because it's like

who who actually knows the further out it is but you know that it's at least in some Direction and the the sooner or the earlier or like the closer I don't know the right way to say this the the less far out the nearer it is it's late um the nearer it is in terms of planning the reality is that like you can start to uh project that a little bit better but we all know if we've done Sprint planning and stuff like we can't even estimate that properly but at least the amount that we're willing to sort of align to that seems to be more more accurate or more consistent the nearer term it is the further out more aspirational so when we were in a startup and if you're at a startup you might notice this but like you might have things where

the company your product owner the founder whatever they're they're kind of going like okay like we want to move in this direction but what ends up happening and it's it's actually a good thing is if you have a really good Fe tight feedback loop with customers you actually might be learning very very fast and all the things that you planning were six months out you have a couple of meetings with customers you go oh like it only took a couple of meetings with customers to realize we might be thinking about things maybe in the wrong direction depends on the size of your startup when I say a couple of customers but the point is that you might be having this feedback loop that's good right a good feedback loop getting new information and re-evaluating and going hm maybe we don't want to go exactly in

that direction Maybe we need to course correct or maybe that direction makes sense but the order that we want to do things should change and like I said I think that that's not it seems like a bad thing when you're on the receiving end of that which is why I want to come back to this individual seems like a bad thing on the receiving out of that but it actually can be a very good thing for the business to not go so far off course if you're actually re-evaluating new priorities now with that said there are absolutely situations where people chase shiny or they have knee-jerk reactions to things so what I'm not saying is hey look every rep prioritization or priority change that introduces randomization every time that's a good thing I'm not saying that what I am saying is that in my experience

being at a startup I think there were really good opportunities where we said hey thankfully We reprioritized There were also other times that we pivoted and it was because it was a distraction right it was a knee-jerk reaction to something um and in fact a lot of the knee-jerk reactions that I can think about were like hey we found a bug and then all of a sudden it was like hm if we found this bug we like everyone drop what you're doing like we have to make sure this class of bug can never come up again what about these other thing like it's almost like panic mode and then every gets derailed and I've seen that happen a ton I've actually seen that maybe not to the same degree but I've seen things like that happen even at Microsoft where it's like pardon me something

that we weren't expecting happened and then we go oh hm like maybe nothing's a priority except this okay so these types of things can happen and it's not necessarily good or bad right so a reprioritization can be good or bad but the impact that it can have on individuals I think is very um most of the time it's pretty negative and I know that as an engineering manager I've been in situations where I'm being told hey priorities are changing I hope I'm not getting sick again I just got over this uh I've been told priorities are changing and then it's a matter of like okay I've just work with my team to actually get them aligned on stuff people are are getting some momentum they're getting interested in the work they're doing and then priorities are changing and I'm like okay so one thing for

me as an engineering manager is like and I I would encourage anyone to be able to do this like have conversations about about those priority changes like if you're not understanding why ask right like I and this takes a good working relationship with your manager so if my manager came to me and said we got to go in this direction I would be curious right if he didn't tell me or she from before and they always have so I've never really had an issue with this but if they didn't I would say hey like I need to be able to explain this to my team like if it's not totally obvious to me when they tell me I would be asking like hey can you elaborate on like why the business wants to move in this direction like kind of where is this coming from

not so that I can sit there and be like oh screw you we're never doing that but most to be like look like I need to be aligned with you so that I can go convey this to my team and I can feel good being able to explain what's going on here and navigating the fact that I am going to be randomizing people a little bit so just to kind of share as an engineering manager I need to make sure I'm doing that um I've absolutely been through periods um even like on my most recent team and this isn't like a a knock on the team or anything we've had over the past year that I've been on this team we've had multiple rep prioritizations of different work streams and I have had situations with employees where I'm like hey you're going to work on

this and then like right away I'm like uh like sorry like and then I have conversations with them and I I need to make sure they understand why right and it's not like hey we have no idea what we're doing we're just kind of throwing stuff up in the air it's like hey no like this this conversation happened there was conversations with leaders ship or with other teams and as a team we have sort of reprioritized the value of something and in your case like you happen to be working on something that is deprioritized now Andor you happen to be a really good fit for this and anyway I have to navigate those conversations with individuals so it's not sharing this with you as an engineering manager because I don't just sit there and go oh someone told me and I'm like whatever cover my

eyes and pick someone at random and say hey drop what you're doing like forget it it's easy no one cares just do this new project woo no like it's it's still hard work on my side to make sure that I can navigate that with the team because if I am randomizing the team and that's disrupting them and that's over time something that keeps happening not going to keep them happy that's ultimately going to be a lower performing team lack of Engagement lack of trust in me because they're going to be like why is Nick always randomizing us it's a pretty bad negative spiral so I need to stay on top of that when it happens so this person what do we do right so I think in this case one of my go-to things is like if this is on a smaller scale so if

you're talking I know they're talking about like projects for like a a quarter in their case this kind of thing can happen on a smaller scale like with Sprints so you have a Sprint that's a week two weeks even three weeks whatever um when it's smaller scale like that what I generally like to remind people and I'm sharing this as an engineering manager but also when I was an engineering manager at the startup I was at I was also an individual contributor for the full eight years that I was there so did these in parallel and we had product owners so what would happen often is like product owners would come and say hey like no like this is the priority now or even the founder right would be like oh we got to shift gears and do this and this was a nonstop conver

and it's one of those things where it's like we don't try to avoid it or pretend it's never going to happen just embrace it and get ready to have this particular conversation which is cool if that's the new priority right that is your new P0 highest priority thing that can exist what from this list are you okay with not getting done and it's a really fun conversation to have right but the reality is that when you explain to individuals that there are literally insufficient human beings to just get more done it doesn't just happen out of nowhere um then there needs to be a priority check something needs to fall off now with that said there are Creative Solutions to this kind of stuff and depending on what needs to be injected there are sometimes situations where I'm like hey actually this person is freeing

up early maybe we can do something here maybe we can like kind of uh shift our capacity a little bit and make room for this like I'm not saying that it's like carved in stone that we can never be flexible but a lot of the time what ends up happening is that we're already over like uh over budget with the amount of work we have to do so it's a pretty common thing I think for many teams to kind of be riding that like we're almost always over budget with our commitments and if that's the case then it's literally like okay well if we're already over budget and you're injecting more work work not all of it can get done there will always be more work to do so who is setting the priorities and this person's case um their manager it sounds like right

um like I said I've worked in situations where you know I'm the one kind of setting the backlog I've had product owners setting the backlog for what's coming up and the reality is if we're putting in more work something else has to come out so uh I have personally had very good uh working relationships with product owners in my career very fortunate for that um but like this is the interesting thing as an engineering manager like I need to be able to defend my team right so I make sure that in our 101s I understand sort of everyone's working capacity depending on what if you're doing some type of agile software development you might have other metrics and stuff you can leverage for this kind of thing and be data driven in that sense but the point is that I understand that can't just like

overload people and go hey like this always works because it doesn't so we go back to the people making the request for the priorities and say well what needs to drop out and this works pretty well in my opinion on like a a Sprint level like on a smaller basis um and someone will say hey well I know that we said we were going to go work on this feature next or this bug that we were going to try to land like a fix for it but like actually this this thing is the priority now and sometimes the conversation goes the exact opposite way which is like now that I it's interesting putting some of that information in front of people sometimes I go oh I didn't realize all of those things were the like the current active priorities okay hm and then they go

you know what this one isn't but like right after this stuff I think it is so um I've had in the past year my previous manager and my current manager I've had conversations like this where they'll you know I work mostly remotely and I'll get a message and it's like hey like this thing came up do you think some and so could like look into this and I say absolutely they can like they're they're actually a good fit for it and then I'll say but here's what they're working on and then I'm kind to look thinking about what they're asking for and I'm like and here's what these other individuals are working on that's might be related they might also be a good fit and then I say like if we need to Pivot we can have that conversation but if you are the one

making the priorities as the product owner in this case or if it's my manager sort of like kind of having a little bit more authority over the work getting done I will say like how do you feel about one of these other things kind of dropping off for now and I have had both my previous manager my current manager over the past year or so have situations where they say oh I didn't realize that like that was the active set of priorities and then they go never mind for now quick conversation it's it's not like screw you like we're not doing your work or we're not listening to what you're saying it's just about getting on the same page and sometimes people don't realize like when they go to have to make that trade what's going to happen so that's one part um there's an

interesting Dynamic that kind of comes up in the comments of this particular post though that this person's trying to navigate and um what they're kind of bringing up is that the different from what I'm saying is like I'm talking about sort of people channeling requests through a common spot and how I've been navigating this conversation and explaining to you that I've had people coming to me and saying like hey priority change right so as the engineering manager I kind of sit in that spot where a lot of that's happening um and it gets funneled through me so a little bit of bias there obviously um so this person and this is probably going to feel even more relevant for many people watching this person is saying like hey look my manager says here's my priorities but now I have someone else coming to me right

might be another manager from a different team it might be some product manager from a different team someone's saying hey look this thing most important thing you got to do this this has to get done our team needs this this is a priority leadership um whatever the argument is this is P0 and then this person goes well like okay like what am I supposed to do and what they end up addressing is that they feel like their hands are tied like I have to do both of these things that's why it's very stressful and what gets pointed out to them in the comments is that someone's saying hey look like you might not realize it but like you need to be able to try and have the people that are giving you conflicting priorities if it's not being channeled through your manager or like a

product owner you kind of have a couple options one is to just say like hey look like hands up like I don't you know the only priorities I take are from my manager and it's not a matter of like trying to be a jackass about it right but but truthfully like my manager sets out my priorities on my work streams and like please like if if you think that this is a priority please just discuss with them like no it's not a hostility thing it's not a screw you it's just like a this is kind of how our team works and please just make sure you discuss the priority with them because sometimes people do this strategically because it's Sneaky and they go I'm pretty sure that person's not going to allocate resources from their team to go work on this right they only got

so many people everyone's already strapped for time not going to happen but if I go talk to that engineer and I make a case for it they'll proba probably kind of say okay sure like I'll try to work on this so sometimes this is done kind of like sneakily or strategically and sometimes it's not done maliciously at all or sneakily at all it's just that people see it as an opportunity and they're like hey we got to get done but point is one option is to say hey talk to my manager and you know I'll kind of sort if they say yep it's my next priority or drop what I'm doing happy to do it but ultimately they set my priority so that's one way another way and not that this is right or wrong to do it either of these ways or if you

have other options but I like this approach a little bit better where it's kind of like cool um and it can be situational too but if you have different people coming together um sorry coming to you and giving you different priorities I would encourage you like I would personally want to be on the call or the discussion with both of them to say hey look you have a priority you have a priority and like you guys need to discuss this I'm going to be present for it right and I think that's that might come with some seniority too because depending on what the work is you might be a subject matter expert that can kind of uh sort of accommodate that conversation um so I like that kind of thing um I also like it because I think that it helps build up some different

uh like sort of negotiation skills so a lot more soft skills and stuff involved there and uh it's a little bit more proactive so I'm not saying the other way is bad to say hey like that's up to my manager to set my priorities because a lot of the time it is and I don't think that's wrong to do but personally I think it would be a cool opportunity to say hey look like let's let's get the right stakeholders into a conversation to talk about this so I think those are two interesting approaches you can take I think what was not obvious for this person though is that they said I didn't really think about the fact that like um when these priorities and stuff are changing because let's kind of flip the script around a little bit say that um you're working on a

project okay and this is a project that is involving other teams so there's other teams external to yours other stakeholders that are expecting deliverables and they know that you're working on this for your your quarter right this is your priority and then happens is your manager goes hey new priority you got to work on this next and you got to listen to your manager they set the priorities right now what's interesting is because this is a bit of a a reversal thing um in this scenario it's not that the other stakeholder came to you and said hey here's a new priority it's your manager and what this person wasn't totally aware of or kind of thinking through is like they're making an assumption that their manager went to the other stakeholders and said hey that we were doing for youed for now it's no longer

the priority zero this other thing is so this person was like holy crap I never thought or never like thought about the fact that maybe my manager isn't doing that and I think that's a really good lesson and a really good learning opportunity because again it's not necessarily like your manager trying to be malicious they're out to get you they're trying to set you up for failure they might be saying like hey this is the next big priority and they might be thinking hey you're the you might be like the subject matter expert or the tech lead the owner of this project going on so now that I'm telling you that this isn't the priority like maybe they're expecting that you take some responsibility and communicate that to the other stakeholders depending on your level of expertise your level I really think I'm getting sick

again I have a tickle in my throat and I don't like the sounds of that um but um that this is going back to like having conversations with your manager and having those uh those level set expectations especially if this happens multiple times like the first time you might go oh crap like that caught me off guard like this is an awkward situation okay let's learn from it right so maybe your manager going forward has that expectation hey look we Chang priorities and you're sort of leading the project you need to go tell the other stakeholders and navigate that conversation if you need me pull me in but I'm expecting you go start it that might be their expectation I'm not I don't know um or maybe their expectation and maybe their actions are that they went and and did that on your behalf they

maybe they pulled you in and had that conversation but this individual from this Reddit thread was saying I never thought about the fact that maybe my manager is not doing that maybe they expected me to do it hm so uh I would air on the side of expect that you're supposed to do it right because we don't want to make assumptions about anything so expect that you're supposed to and then go seek Clarity right expect you're supposed to then go ask your manager hey if I'm shifting priorities um are you communicating that or am I communicating that and be like kind of mentally prepared that you might be the one doing that um I think that's a really good takeaway from this type of situation so to kind of recap on a few different things we talked about here one priorities are going to change

that's okay um priorities changing is not necessarily good or bad right it's the reality from a business perspective the reality is that changing priorities given new information could be extremely valuable okay it could also be a knee-jerk reaction or uh you know ill-informed whatever it happens to be and it's distracting that's also very possible which is why I'm saying they're not necessarily good or bad like universally it's situational from a business perspective but the thing that I would say here is that almost always priority changes to individuals like the engineers on the team carrying out the work almost always it's not necessarily a positive thing it's probably neutral to negative neutral if the person's indifferent maybe it's more interesting work whatever it happens to be right that might be kind of like okay cool context switch this kind of sucks but maybe this is interesting

that's exciting more often than not though what happens is someone's like I just spent a bunch of time getting into this making progress on this getting my head in the game and now you're saying change the priorities right randomization that's what's going on here more often than not and that's a negative outcome for individuals on the team so sort of that that was the beginning of the conversation then I tried to share a little bit of my experience as a manager and like how I like to navigate that um but the interesting part about explaining all of that is I'm explaining scenarios where it's being channeled through primarily one person me as the engineering manager in this case but I hope that kind of insight was helpful to see how I might try to go do that um because the reality is like as an

engineering manager I'm not trying to screw anyone over I'm not trying to be you know um ignorant of what the people on my team are you know hoping to focus on for career growth and skill and and anything else but at the end of the day like business priorities are business priorities and I need to align people to that it's part of my job so when priorities change I need to make sure I understand them I need to be aligned with my manager leadership the business and make sure that I'm positioning myself to work with my team and explain this stuff in a way where it might be randomizing and I need to do my best to minimize that but I need to make sure they understand the reason why get them behind that um and I would say so I'm telling you this as

a manager right so if you're on the receiving end of this so say you have a manager that is doing the same thing where they're like hey like we got to shift gears on stuff um if they're not going into the details as to why um I'm not like there it might not be like on purpose right they might just be like hey like this is the priority and like they're hoping you get it I I mean this seriously try to and don't do this in like a a factious way and like be sarcastic and and pissed off with them but genuinely like be curious and ask why I have had conversations with individual ual that I manage and more often than not this comes up at like the beginning of a project or say they were tasked with something and now I I end

up becoming their manager or something I've had conversations where people understood the work that needed to be done but they didn't or they weren't given the details as to why they didn't understand the impact of that no one told them that but they also didn't ask so I have literally had many different conversations um where like basically someone has an aha moment where it's like they were explained why and they're like oh man like interesting okay like now I see the reason why we're doing this it sounds like a very simple thing okay so you might say well I know why we're doing this we're trying to make uh performance faster I get it we're trying to reduce the size of this I get it trying to reduce memory footprint I get it but like why does the business care about that why does the

user care about that sometimes these things are obvious and other times they're not and then people are like I'm just doing work because I'm told to do work so honestly if it's not being explained to you try to take a moment to ask why and be curious not not challenging someone for it but be curious to understand it that way it might be a little bit more motivating last couple parts that we talked about though were around this idea of if you have people that are changing the priority around you trying to make sure that there's a conversation about what needs to drop out in terms of capacity right there needs to be a tradeoff if we're injecting work we don't just get time right we we don't have INF infinite capacity so what needs to be traded so that's a good conversation to have

but the other thing that came up here was this idea of either you if someone's coming to you that's not your manager and saying new priority you might say hey talk to my manager about that you can also take the approach of bringing the stakeholders together and the very last thing that we discussed was this idea if you flip the script on that that your manager might not be communicating to the other stakeholders that a project is no longer a priority so don't make assumptions that it's happening have an explicit conversation to ensure that it does happen so I hope that helps I know was a bunch of different angles on stuff there but I hope that was at least interesting uh if you have different thoughts on this stuff and different experiences that have worked for you be great to hear from you in

the comments um I think there's many different ways to navigate this so I hope that those are some different options for you to kind of think through and maybe some different perspectives so thanks for watching I will see you next time take care