FIRST TIME Leading Software Engineering Projects

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hey folks I'm just going to jump into the second question for this evening from LinkedIn so huge thanks to this person for sending it in friendly reminder if you want questions answered leave them in the comments I will try my best or look for Dev leader on social media that's my main YouTube channel in my personal brand or look for Nick centino on LinkedIn send me a message I'll try my absolute best I'll keep you Anonymous if you message me you leave it in the comments it's not Anonymous to begin with so um okay so the context here I'm not going to read the whole message just because um but we'll kind of call out some details here that I think are relevant so um this person is in a position where they have uh two developers that are the same level as them but

they're going to be leading a project and so that means that they're leading the project where these other two developers are joining the other two developers are new hires um I just want to see if this person mentions their experience U I think I think they're working towards senior so they they have um yeah we all have around two to three years of experience okay so like midlevel right um and so that's great so Junior to mid-level it's hard to like just know based on someone's years of experience and not know anything about that experience so let's say let's say mid-level um and what they're saying is my goal isn't to come across as superior but rather to support them good start um I think that's super important um support them the team and ensure we all succeed together yes yes and yes this is

I feel like one of those situations where I'm going to offer my perspective and advice this person doesn't even need it I think that they're probably going to do an excellent job based on what I've already read and what they were asking about so um let's keep going here uh I really admire my previous engineering manager and hope to embody the kind of leadership that he had so this is good um so what I want to call out is before I keep reading here is despite anything I say one takeaway that I would recommend is to whoever's watching this and to this individual um think about those characteristics think about the the interactions that you had with that engineering manager how they made you feel in certain situations why you admired those things right you might have been in a situation and you were like

they were talking about the progress on something I don't know giving an update to the team and you were like hell yeah like that's cool you were you were working through something and they made you feel like um I don't know like valued in what you were doing right like that they were recognizing you in a way where you were like okay I feel seen like I feel like someone's understanding me think about those types of interactions they could be very small things but I I think honestly that um and everyone has their own style but I think there's a lot of little things that we do right as as people that are trying to lead others there's a lot of little things we do and it's the culmination and the the sum of all those things that that kind of makes um your style

and so I would think about what those things are that you really liked and try to see how that how you can adapt that for yourself it might not be the exact same way that you do it but the outcome like try to think about those things but let's keep going here um so then they were saying I think I remember you mentioning this like on one of your co- commute videos that if you want to be a senior engineer you should start behaving like one or something like that yeah um that's right so here's what I've done so he said help them get set up they're both new hires you know sharing knowledge about the code Base projects contribution process awesome scheduled checkin calls at the end of the week gather feedback on the onboarding awesome see how they're doing assigned new higher friendly

tickets great so in general we want to try and find something that's going to help people build momentum you could be principal senior whatever level but when you're getting into a code base finding something where you're like like I want I just want to like see the process of like how we get some stuff going on and you build momentum from for the yeah build momentum from there words are hard um you might find that the more senior people get that momentum faster or maybe it takes them a while but then once they get it they're like Off to the Races but point is you start off that way I think it's a good way to do it and they said one challenge I face is that when uh is that I wasn't informed to ahead of time that I would be mentoring them and

be the lead developer okay so good um he said that caught him off guard and they they've actually shared feedback with the CTO on this I'm assuming it's a pretty flat structure because they say we don't have engineering managers yet so this person's manager I'm assuming is the CTO and personally I don't know their working relationship but um and I'm not a CTO but uh if I were a CTO and I had an employee um have a conv with me about that I would appreciate it as long as they weren't an about it and they said hey look like by the way like this caught me off guard I I wanted to prepare for this more effectively um just a heads up and had a had a conversation that was like telling me ways that would help them be more effective I would absolutely value

that that's my my own perspective so I like seeing that um then they said I'd really love to hear any advice you have on leading a project and being a good team lead how can I effectively guide them without making it seem like I'm trying to be above them and how do I ensure they feel supported while also pushing for success of the project these are all great questions this is going to be um it's going to be challenging but I think that this person is looking at things the right way so I like what they said about I don't want to seem like I am Superior to them I want to support them um so where to start on this um okay one thing like I personally like over index and I'm kind of calling it a bias here so if you're hearing my

advice you can kind of understand maybe where things are coming from I definitely have a little bit more of a bias to like be a support role I literally an engineering manager I've been doing this for like 12 plus years and when I was doing it for the first eight years I was an IC and an em at the same time but my bias is to help people now what that means is and if I were to suggest to this person like hey make yourself available to help people number one we have to understand what's an effective way to help people because it's not doing their work for them that's a trap and number two is that the more time you spend helping other people if you have your own things that you need to deliver that time like you still need to put that

time in somewhere my sort of a disclaimer is that when I was doing this kind of stuff before as an IC and an engineering manager I just worked a ton I'm not recommending that now they might be at a startup maybe that's kind of expected to be honest I have no idea how the startup I was at would have been successful if myself and other people weren't putting in tons of wild hours in the beginning I think we had to do that in the beginning so that later on people didn't have to do it is it possible we could have sustained it uh or like got as far as we did without without doing that sure I don't have a crystal ball but um I might I'm just saying I might expect that this person is putting in a little bit of extra effort and

that might be the case maybe because it's the first time they're doing it maybe the more experienced they get doing this the more they can kind of balance this stuff out but I would expect if you're leaning into being more of a support person to help them and make sure they're successful you will probably find it's challenging um to get your own tasks done so couple things like on that like strategy could be carving out time right so making sure that you can struct your calendar in different ways I'm not telling you to be super rigid on this stuff but you might want to actually block out some time where you're like I need to have my head down and work during these times and it's not that you just like tell the other guys to screw off but you just let them know like

hey like this is my heads down time I need to get some stuff done and uh if you have questions and things for me like please just like send them on chat or cue them up and send them in an email later whatever however you want to do it but just like put some boundaries up right especially if you're going to be leaning into helping them a lot put some boundaries up for yourself and make sure that you can get some some work done um I want to talk about helping people because I hinted at it I haven't said it explicitly in this video I've made other videos on this stuff but um you can get a feel for this from people sometimes you'll know like very quickly uh and people just do a good job of this I always say that when you're helping

people we're going to talk about this from the perspective of people coming to you for help in other videos I've talked about Junior Engineers asking for help and what I will say from the perspective of someone being asked for help is you want to ask one question right when someone comes to you for help you say what have you tried so far it's a very easy cue and um really what should happen is like you and you want to figure this out too if they're coming to you because say they they haven't tried anything they're like I haven't done anything the next question is like do you need me to clarify like what's being like what the goal is because I think there's two things that can happen there's always I'm oversimplifying it so please understand that but either someone doesn't have on what they

need to do in which Cas please just clarify for them and S them back off and they're Off to the Races um but if it's not a Clarity thing if people are saying well I haven't tried anything yet give them a little bit of space to try something this is a coaching opportunity in my opinion I've seen this work very well because I've seen the opposite happen and then two people get screwed over by this I'll explain in just a sec but let people know that you expect them to have tried something this helps for a couple reasons one is that it starts to teach them to be curious and to problem solve right say like that's an expectation like you're a software developer you should go be resourceful you should be curious you should try to poke around and understand things so try something

right I expect that of you the other thing is that it teaches people that uh it builds up the the pattern where like you are not doing their work for them and this isn't meant to be like a malicious thing sometimes people get into this habit of like I'm just going to ask for help as soon as I'm feeling a little bit blocked or unsure then you ask for help and someone's like no problem and then they kind of just do it for you and then you go great okay awesome uh and then you go to your next thing you have to do and you're like I don't really know you go ask for help and then someone kind of does it for you now it feels kind of good in the beginning and then for both people it ends up sucking a lot because

the person getting the help isn't getting any better and the person giving the help is basically doing two jobs so my advice is encourage people to try something so what have you tried so far if they tried some stuff great we can build on that from there but a lot of the time um if people haven't tried anything they need to have that encouragement if they have some options and they're like hey well I could go this way I could go this way or I tried five options or whatever it is and like none of them worked then then then spend the time right um but that's how I would approach that that's I feel like that's one of my best pieces of coaching advice for for helping helping others help others um I think something I wanted to talk about beyond that is like

is avoiding micromanagement and I feel like this person's already they haven't said it out loud out loud it's it's a LinkedIn message I haven't said it out loud they didn't write it to me um and it's to avoid micromanagement and I think that a way that you can navigate this is like if you're leading a project you're going to be responsible for telling whoever the other stakeholders are maybe that's the CTO maybe that's a product owner I don't know enough about the setup here maybe it's literally the customer I don't know um as the the team lead of this the Project Lead you're going to have to understand how you need to get information to stakeholders that's important that's going to look different in every situation so if you don't understand it or don't know how to do it that's totally cool you need to

figure it out though so maybe you have a conversation I guess not with your manager but with your CTO who is your manager um figure that out what that looks like get on the same page but then now that you understand that how are you going to get status from the others because what doesn't work very well and I see this backfire all the time and I have to even after 12 plus years of managing people I have to be very careful about this if you're constantly going after people and asking for status sometimes that can get depending on the person they can start to feel micromanage from that they're like dude like why is this guy asking again like didn't I just tell him they have a different concept of of like how that information's being used you might be getting asked like more

regularly for status updates and then what like if you're not sort of embedded in all the work you have to go ask so try to be transparent about this early so like hey like here's what we're thinking about doing for status updates by the way if I have to ask you out of band for this kind of stuff please just understand I'm trying to get an update to the other stakeholders um and if you know if you're feeling uncomfortable about that maybe like have this conversation with them right if you're feeling uncomfortable about that maybe we can come up with a strategy where there's a bit more of a push of status updates and that way I don't have to chase you so I'm currently leading a really big project right now across my larger team and some other teams and we have multiple status

updates per week and there's some people I have to chase down for status and I try to have conversations of like hey like by the way you know this is coming we've been doing it for months already like you know where to put the updates if you don't like me chasing you you like you know what to do otherwise I'm chasing you and like it's because I need to have ownership in in terms of making sure that I can be successful on these things so I have to do it but I have conversations with whoever I can about hey if that's not working like tell me the way that you want to provide the update we'll come to an agreement on it like I need you to help me but let me help let me help you help me I don't know if that's too

many helps but I think you get the idea and and that way it's like we're trying to minimize that feeling of like being micromanaged another thing is that um depends on your project situation and stuff some of the stuff that we're working on in terms of deadlines like we have a deadline for this overall thing that we're doing some of the stages don't necessarily have a hard deadline it's not like again it's not like a perfect Gant chart and we like hey we have to hit this exact Milestone across these you know 100 people and like it's going to be perfect like no it's not going to happen so um we have etas for things if people are about to miss them or things are lagging we when we're doing status updates we're not trying to create this scenario where we're making people feel bad

because what happens is when people they start to go oh well if I'm falling behind like I don't want to say anything I don't want to get getting for that so people start to be fearful then they start to hide status more and then it perpetuates this problem now they're dreading the interaction where you're asking for status updates because they're like I don't want to talk to this guy like I can't tell them that I'm like three days behind a week behind like so it starts to become like a sort of a vicious cycle or like a compounding problem so I like to remind people like if there isn't if there's a really hard deadline then I I need to I need to make that very C but um the general idea is like I need the status as early as possible if you think

that you're uh sort of ETA is slipping and that's not because I'm coming after you just like to scold you and make you feel bad about stuff I my entire job leading a project is to make sure that the project succeeds so if you are off Target I'm not there to like my job isn't to make you feel bad about it my job is to support support you in doing it right like you're blocked cool like please let what are you blocked on like you're not getting people on code reviews like they're not responding cool let me help you chase them down like let me go talk to them and say you understand the criticality of this and you understand the timeline please um depending on the project you're on like that might be something you can do um if you have partner teams that

aren't engaging or they have dependencies that are blocked maybe I've been in situations on projects where there's an entire team where they're like not prioritizing it and they're like yeah like it's just not really like important up through our leadership I have to escalate through my leadership to talk to their leadership because our departments are not on the same page like that's an awkward spot to be in but like that's the kind of thing that I end up having to do to make sure that we can move a project along so it's not me chasing the person down and saying you're behind like you should feel bad it's no thank you so much for raising awareness of that now let's go identify what's going on and how do we unblock it because as this person said it's about making sure that the the individuals pardon

me hiccup individuals succeed the team succeeds the project succeeds they all succeed together so you have to try and make sure that people feel comfortable to share status updates and not fearful if they're going to be off so try to you know find your own creative solution to that because I think that um that's going to look different for everyone um yeah I'm trying to think sorry I I mentioned in the last video I had a pretty long day it was like a just a lot um but I wanted to make sure I got to this question and another one so I'm just trying to see if there's anything else that I want to suggest talked about how to address helping people in terms of how they like asking them what have you tried so far status updates um um yeah I don't know like

this idea of I can really appreciate when someone's like I don't want to try to seem like I'm superior to someone so this is actually something that I try to make sure that I'm doing as an engineering manager and it's funny because when I started I don't know I think I was like 23 or 24 when I became an engineering manager so I was pretty young um and I feel like as a result and we have a lot of like um like interns and like like sort of uh early in Industry hires early in career hires um so I I kind of felt like I was just one of the people like you know it's easy to be relatable because I'm just I'm also fresh at of school and it's a startup and no one knows what's going on and now I'm realized I'm like

yeah I guess I'm getting older and I don't know if I'm as relatable anymore but something that I try to make sure that I'm doing I don't know like I can't tell you like like like state that I've been successful with it I try I think it's working but I try to make sure that I am relatable right that I'm not I'm not trying to put myself in a position that's like look I'm telling you to do this right I'm not like ordering people around I'm trying to like if people are stuck like I'll tell my team hey like because I my team uses C A lot of them and I program in C every day outside of work and I'll tell them hey you're stuck on something get let's get on a call like I'll debug it with you right like I am not

I'm not above you in that regard like above you right yes technically from a hierarchy I am but like I'll get my hands dirty right oh you're running you know queries to pull data and stuff and you don't know how it works I'm like I don't either like like sit down and debug it I'm happy to like to join you on this and and like show you that I will do the things with you so that it is like so that I am more relatable that I am not just like sounds like a you problem you better go figure it out while I go do my manager things over here um sometimes I have to do manager things but like you know what I mean like I'm trying to make sure that people understand that I I will I'll get my hands dirty with them

so um I think that the the way that this person has awareness of that's really important I will say that there may be situations and you have to be prepared for this if you're like me and you're trying to be very relatable all the time and like um you know letting the team try to make decisions and stuff and like give them that some of that autonomy there will be situations that like you can't just do that and assume that you'll never have to sort of uh be the adult so to speak um I always wonder like when am I going to feel like an adult I'm 36 what yeah going to be 36 in April I do not feel like an adult still but I'm bald now I got white in my beard so I guess I became an adult at some point but

um there's going to be situations where people are disagreeing on stuff you need to kind of get a path forward and it's like agree to disagree and we're going to uh take a bias for Action right if we make a decision and we agree on it together to move forward if it doesn't work that's totally cool we will own that together we can pivot we can adjust but we can't sit and do nothing so when you're owning projects like this you you might find yourself in situations where you're like we got to keep going and like as the owner of the project I'm gonna put the adult hat on and say okay like I'm making the call here's why here's what we're writing down and going forward with and I will own that responsibility if it's not the right thing own it up it's not

always going to be perfect and that's a whole other conversation about like you know having U having discussions when you have to own up to like failures and how we pivot how we learn so I would just say like be prepared that that might happen too um yeah otherwise you know listen to people I think that's important you want to I think this person is going to do a good job on this based on what I see that they wrote down but make sure people are being heard make sure that um they have a safe place to fail right psychological safety is the the phrase that's used for that um and when people are getting blocked help unblock them but just remember you're not doing their work for them that also means if you need to show them something like get them to drive do

screen sharing I'm assuming their remote I don't know um do screen sharing and get them to like click and go on the command prompt or whatever else use the tools if you're in person don't touch the keyboard don't touch the mouse they're driving it's probably going to feel slow that's okay because that slowness in the beginning will mean that they have more experience going forward so I think that's my recommendation I wish this person all the success I think they're going to do an awesome job um yeah I I'll send this over to them and then um I'm hopeful to hear back and see how things go after the project so I hope that was helpful for them and I hope that if you're not this person that there's some takeaways there that you can think about and maybe they're relatable for you so thanks

for watching sorry for being a little down um but yeah I just wanted to get to to the LinkedIn messages so I will see you next time take care