New Manager Woes... How To Deal With The Friend-of-the-Execs

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Hey folks, I'm just headed to the office here. It's Monday morning. Says it's going to take me 10 years to get to work, which is lovely to get to hang out with me as soon as it's raining just a little bit, which is all the time. Uh, no one knows how to drive, so we'll uh we'll see how this goes. Um, I'm going to go to experience devs today for the topic. Um the scenario for this one is someone's on a team, their manager just gave their two weeks notice and in the same time frame uh the executives have been able to bring in a new manager. So basically old one leaves, new one comes in the same time period. I'm assuming there's basically no overlap or extremely minimal. And um the individuals also making a point that it seems like the executives are telling the manager that's coming in that there are some things that they're going to be doing or that the team has already been doing, but it's not really the reality.

Um things like, you know, counting merge requests, um engineering scorecards and stuff like that. And so they're a little bit uneasy about that because that just isn't what's been happening. They also noted that the manager that's coming in seems to be a friend of the executives. So um I think that kind of relationship can make people uneasy whether that's warranted or not. Um, I'm sure, you know, maybe people have had bad experiences where, uh, someone comes in, they're like, I don't feel this person's qualified for whatever reason, and they're only here because they're so and so's friend. Um, so there's that kind of dynamic that can come into play. The person also pointed out that the manager doesn't have any experience in this particular domain. I don't actually know what the domain is. Um, and I'm assuming they mean not in technology, but they mean whatever product or service, you know, domain they're building in.

So, you know, just to make it up, if it was healthcare or finance or agriculture, they're making software for it, right? Like that domain. I'm assuming that's what they mean. So, there's a lot of uncertainty for this individual and they were curious if other people have gone through this. Um, so I wanted to kind of chat through um I don't have like I don't have this fully thought out like is the case for most videos, but um I did kind of poke through the comments. Um most people at least that I scanned were immediately like, "Hey, time to time to pack up and like get out of there because um because of this mention of like the engineering scorecards and counting things and like I guess when I read stuff like this, like a you know, a Reddit post like this, I'm like I get I get why there's a fear of that.

Like absolutely, cuz I don't believe in a lot of that I think that, you know, I think metrics are good, but I also think that like you get what you measure. So like you're counting, you know, the poll requests that get merged in. Like cool. Okay. like you're just going to have people that create more stuff and like merge more things. Merging more things doesn't mean more value at all. Like you know what I mean? Like so if like people are going to find ways to to make number go up. So if you pick things like it's like saying like the number of lines of code that get written are going to be the metric for how well the team's doing and like I think by now we all know that's So you get what you measure. So I don't think that metrics themselves are bad but I I do think that like having the wrong metrics can can really screw things up.

Now, the reason I get kind of skeptical with posts like this and then people's reactions to them is like we actually don't know what's going to happen in this situation, right? We hear one person talking about this. None of us are actually present for the conversations. None of us are, you know, we're we don't have all of this information. We might have similar experiences we've gone through and those ended up like And maybe there's a majority of people who have been through something similar and it ended up poorly, in which case I'm not here to say like statistically it's going to be good or bad. I have no clue. But um I I just think that people get a little bit too eager to jump in and be like, "Oh, you're you're screwed." kind of thing. So the reason I say that just I like playing devil's advocate and kind of thinking about things from different angles.

Not to say that this is the right perspective or the wrong perspective. We don't know. But for example, maybe the executives are like trying to, you know, help this new manager get started, right? So they're like, "Hey, you know, this other manager's out. Uh, okay, you need to onboard. Like maybe here's a starting point." And like maybe those are the wrong metrics, but like maybe they're just trying to be helpful to give that person a starting point. I don't know. The other thing I forgot to mention, my apologies. I think this one is important, is that the individual that posted this says that the manager claims they um you know, lean on the team for like the direction that the team wants to move in in terms of like how the team is organized and things like that, which I think is I think that's a great quality of a manager.

I have absolutely seen managers come in and just they're trying to be helpful and they kind of impose what they believe is right and that ends up being a complete disaster. And it's a disaster not necessarily because you know the choices they make are wrong, but you you're telling a team what to do without getting the team's buy in. People resist this kind of stuff like crazy. Um so it's interesting, right? We have this manager making the claim, hey, when I when I join, you know, team gets a lot of say in how things go, but they're also hearing from executives like what's going to be happening is that there's going to be these metrics and things in place for engineering scores and all of that. So, rightfully so, they're kind of like, well, which one is it, man? Um, and maybe it's both. That's what I'm trying to say.

Maybe it's like maybe leadership is kind of like hey here's a starting point you know and they're trying to be helpful. Maybe that man I don't know maybe that manager will say like hey thanks for the suggestion but no I'll start with whatever the team has like I don't really know for sure based on what was posted here. I don't know if this person's saying hey look no it already happened this way or not. So, I'm kind of looking at this like we actually don't know, but I think it's helpful to kind of to think through these things. Um, one of my biggest thoughts here is like you have a new manager coming on board. If you've watched my other videos, you probably have an idea what I'm going to say already, right? And I want to give you this moment to kind of think about this.

If you've watched Nick's other videos and there's a new manager that you have no working relationship yet with, what what is Nick probably going to recommend that you do with respect to your working relationship with this manager? Did you figure it out? It's going to be that I think that you should spend some time trying to get to know your new manager and figure things out with your new manager. Get on the same page as your new manager. get aligned with them, understand their perspective, make sure that you're building up sort of again that working relationship so they know about you, they can trust you, they can respect you. If you immediately go into this situation like resenting that it's happening and you avoid conversations with your manager, you're like, "Who's this coming in here? I've heard bad things." Like if you go into it like that, in my opinion, you're kind of setting yourself up for failure.

That's not to say that they're going to be awesome and they're going to be the best. Like, we don't know that. But that's kind of the point. If you just assume that they're going to be crap or they're going to be a jerk or they're going to change everything and ruin everything. If you assume that, like, I don't think that you're setting yourself up for success. I would much rather suggest to you that you go figure this out with your manager if you get the feeling like hey that's the direction that they're moving things in like they make the claim that they're listening to the team and all of their actions point in the other direction then like I don't know it depends how much time you want and effort you want to invest do you talk to this manager and say like hey I'm

just going to give you an example like hey like you know welcome to the team and like I know one of the things you said early on is that you know you really look to the team for driving the direction that the team wants to work in and like so far based on X Y and Z I feel like that's not really happening and I just wanted to talk to you about that like you know is there a reason that we're doing X because it kind of seems at odds with what the team is actually interested in doing like this is causing a lot of friction or this is creating more work or or whatever, right? But I can speak from my own experience when I was a lot more junior, especially as an engineering manager and having people come in to, you know, to lead above me and making changes that I didn't agree with and being a little bit too quiet for a little bit too long.

And some of this was imposttor syndrome. Some of this was like, hey, my my leadership, you know, I have to trust a decision they made until I got to the point where there was enough evidence and I'm like, this ain't this ain't working so well, right? Like giving that person the opportunity and being like, okay, like something's got to change here. And um to be honest, I think that if I could go back in time, I think it was fair to give that person some opportunity and some chance, but at the same time, like I should have been probably like I should have been more forthcoming with them and been like, "Hey, like I see that you're trying to do this and like here's the impact it's having on the team that's not positive." And the goal of a conversation like that isn't to be like, "Hey man, like screw off.

We don't like you. It's to be like, "Hey, look, like I know that your intentions are good, and I know that you're trying to do thing X because you believe it will have a positive impact, but thing X is having a very negative impact. So, can we revisit the goal of what X is, and perhaps there's another way that we can try arriving at that goal? something that isn't disrupting us. Or maybe there's too much change all at once. And maybe it's like you're not even opposed to those things or like it's not that all those things are bad, but it's just too much change at once. And as a result, people are like, we can't like we're all over the place. It feels too chaotic, right? Again, if this manager's coming in being like, I'm not going to, you know, lay down the law and change everything, but I want to, you know, kind of listen and have the team kind of have input on that.

That might be what they say, but their actions might not be that way, right? I I would think that if someone comes in and that's their belief system where they're like let's and I say this as someone that uh almost I would say to a fault does that uh because I've seen so many times where engineering managers or some type of leadership role comes in makes changes and wrecks everything. Not because they're malicious but like just because they're not in touch with what's going on. Right? It's all good intentions. But so if someone is making that claim, what need like what happens when they join in terms of change? Nothing. Nothing changes. That's the whole point. Nothing changes at all. But what they do is they start listening. They start trying to learn how the team's operating.

And I would say I would expect this unless unless the team themselves were like, "Hey, look, like shit's on fire and like we are absolutely falling apart." If a team if I joined a team and they were like, "Hey, look, Nick, like everything right now is chaos and like it's really hard to function." I would look to start making changes sooner rather than later based on their feedback, right? They're telling me it's not working right now. Um, but I would still want them to be part of that. So, I might be a little bit more forthcoming with some of my suggestions. I would still want to learn like I would really in all cases want to learn how the team is working, what is working well, what's not working well. If nothing seems like it's going right, okay, like what's one thing we can start changing?

Right? If everyone's like, "Dude, everything's on fire. this sucks. Like we can't get anything done. No one knows what the priorities are. We hate coming into work. Cool. Like what's one thing? If we're doing like sprints and it's the next two weeks or something, what's one thing we can try changing and seeing if that makes some improvement? Then what's another thing? And when I say one thing, maybe it's one or two things, I don't know. The point is something that's not changing things dramatically. Because when you change everything all at once, how do you know what parts are working? Right? It's like uh same same thing if you're like debugging software, right? And you're like, I don't know where the problem is. Stuff's not working. I don't know where the problem is. You don't go into your code and go, okay, well, let me change everything and try again.

You'd say, well, I think it's this part after some analysis. Let me go change that. Oh, that's not working. Okay. Now, either that is a notable improvement and you're like, I need to keep that there because, you know, I did catch that there is something wrong with that. It didn't fix the root cause, but you know, something wrong with it. Or you go, okay, well, that didn't fix it. I would perhaps if it's not a genuine notable improvement, put it back. Now, go touch one other thing. Right? And if you touch everything all at once, it's really hard to figure out like what's having a positive impact. So again, we don't we don't actually know this about this manager coming in, right? It's one thing to say things. It's one thing to hear like the rumors, right, about like what's happening with the engineering scorecards and stuff like that.

But my opinion on this kind of stuff is like you actually like Personally, I would think through like what are some different scenarios? My wife would say, "Don't do that." That's how my brain works. Um, I would think through some different scenarios so I could try and prepare myself, not because I'm trying to anticipate every possible scenario, but to think through some potentially different outcomes and see how I feel about them. Right? My wife does not recommend doing that because uh I think her belief and I'm not saying that you know she's allowed to kind of she's a therapist she can think through this probably better than I can but I'm just talking about what works for me. Um, if you are going through that process and every option you're like, "Oh, this is terrible. I hate my life." kind of thing. Then I think that's where she's like, "Hey, don't do that." Because you're sort of like mentally living out the stress of all of these scenarios and none of them are actually real.

Like you fabricated all of them. So you live through the pain multiple times. But the reason I like to do something like that is not to to dwell on it, but it's to actually kind of think through like what what are some possible outcomes? How do I feel about these? Right? Some some I might feel better or worse than others. And for the ones that feel bad, like what does that mean for me? Is that something where I'm like, hey, this is a crappy outcome. If this new manager coming on actually is starting to impose changes, okay, that's something that I would not want, what would I do about that? Right? It's not to go, "Oh, that sucks." Like, "Oh, my life is going to" And but it's to go, "What what would I do about that?

Do I like what I'm doing enough where I would want to, you know, invest time and energy to have a conversation to say like, hey, I don't think that this is uh, you know, effective and, you know, kind of work with your manager to be like, I think we want to try a different strategy here. Are you willing to have a conversation like that because you care enough? By the way, and there's no wrong or right answer. This is all personal. Or are you like, "That's not like I don't I don't give a enough about that. That sounds too stressful." You might feel kind of betrayed by whatever's going on. Like all of these are whatever you want to decide. But the point is that maybe there's an outcome where you're like, if this happens, I need to be honest with myself that I probably want to go looking for another team or even another company or something like that.

So I like going through this kind of stuff not to catastrophize it but and again that's where my wife would say that's what I am doing. Maybe it's how I talk about things. I don't know but for me it would be more to understand like possible outcomes and and what I might want to do in those scenarios. So I I personally do recommend that because that's what works for me. If that's not what works for you, don't do it. Okay. So, so far meta points are I would recommend um thinking through different possible outcomes and what that means for you. I would try to see like how much you how much time and effort you want to invest in a manager that seems like they're challenging to work with. Personally, I would, you know, for for most people, I would recommend like actually putting some effort into that.

That's for you to decide how much time and effort, but like I wouldn't uh I just don't really recommend writing people off right away. Sir, you're in the fast lane, not not doing the fast. Going below the speed limit in the fast lane. This bus is going faster than you, buddy. Maybe the bus is not going faster. I might have spoke too soon. Bus is going pretty slow. Um, but it's a bus. It's an exception. Um, yeah, I think based on my experience, I've had, you know, when I reflect on this, actually, I I feel like when I've had people come in that were crappy, where I'm like, this is not working well. Uh, probably a couple things going on. One is that my leadership was probably too new to it. What I mean by that is that they hired on someone and they were like, "This person should be able to do it, right?

Like, here you go. We trust in you to go do it, but like they also haven't done it before." And that's not me blaming them or anything like that, but they had not had the experience of bringing on people and like trying to coach them and navigate things like this with them. They were probably bringing them in going, "Great, this person is going to take care of this kind of stuff for us." And based on their leadership style, they were probably like, "We want to give you the freedom and flexibility to do so." So they had that from one side and then from the other side there were people like me that probably weren't doing a good job at that point in time giving them that feedback to be like hey man like this ain't working right too much change all at once or you know things things were going well and you made a change to them and now we've kind of lost that good thing.

So, you know, they didn't have a good feedback loop bottom up. And honestly, probably not a great feedback loop top down. And what they were probably doing is reporting things up to, you know, their manager going, you know, looks good to me kind of thing, right? Like, I'm doing the things I think I need to be doing. They're in place and like whatever. Like in the end, the developers are trying as best as possible to get done. And as if that was working, it's kind of like as long as the the end result was being met, it was probably pretty easy to go under the radar. But this is the kind of thing that over time it's like look like people are people are falling apart trying to to support this working model. It's not effective. So that that kind of thing in my opinion takes a little bit more time to kind of show through unless you're actively providing feedback.

So you know I've had situations like that. Um I had you know I had a manager come in before and they took a lot of time like not in a bad way took a lot of time to try and learn what the team was doing. like I felt like that was a really good um you know onboarding of a new manager you know a lot of respect for someone that was willing to do that taking genuine interest in the technology as well cuz that's the thing right for some some management roles like including my own right now I'm not coding but I still really have to understand the products and services that I'm responsible for I can code. Fortunately, I can do code reviews and things like that. Uh, for this other manager I was just referring to, I and I don't mean this in like a, you know, condescending way or anything.

I don't know if they if they can code. And like to be honest, I don't give a because I thought that they were doing all of the right things to try and pick up on the technology at least because they were spending a lot of time learning about the system design, the architecture, how the different pieces fit together to a point where I felt like they could have the right conversations, the conversations that I would hope to have with my own manager about this kind of stuff. So like that was a good example of someone coming in. Um I had a manager kind of come in from a different part of the organization before and did not have you know they weren't a software developer. They could not write code and they were one of the the best people that I've ever reported to. All right.

for everyone that's like, oh, like you got to have a manager that their hands are still in the code. No, this guy maybe he could write code. I don't know. But I don't I suspect not. And again, that's not that's not uh you know a knock on him. But he was he was a very very good manager. He was good with people and he didn't need to understand all of the technical details, but he could have a conversation to get to where he needed to on the technical level. But again, he came in and he didn't try to change everything, right? Like that's one of the key ingredients is like people coming in and not trying to change everything all at once. Listening to what's going on, seeing where improvements can be made and being part of that change with the team, I think, is one of the best recipes for success.

So if this manager claims from this Reddit post, right? If this manager claims that they are coming in and that is their strategy is to kind of like to listen to people, get their, you know, make the team part of the change. If that's their strategy, like I think that's great. And if you're hearing mixed signals from what executives are saying or what you're hearing through the grapevine about executives, I just I don't know if that's fair. And maybe it pans out that way, right? Maybe manager comes in, that's not their philosophy, but their their friends are the executives and they're like, "You got to do it this way." And this person's like, "Okay, I guess so." And they do it, like, "Yeah, maybe it sucks." But like I said earlier, if you went through the thought experiment of like, "What are some possible different outcomes?

What do you think about that?" You know, are you are you invested enough where you're at to be like, "Hey, I want to have this conversation with my new manager, or are you like, "Yeah, this sucks." And like, I'm fed up with it and I don't want to put up with it anymore. In which case, what's your strategy? Different team, you know, different different company. I I just think that some of the the responses on the thread that I saw at least were maybe a little bit too like too polarizing. And I would much rather take the the perspective of talking through a scenario like this and looking at different sides of it because I can see many possible outcomes, but I feel like you don't really know until you're into it a little bit. So anyway, I'll keep repeating myself if I talk anymore. So I'll wrap this up.

I hope that you found that helpful. If you have questions about software engineering, career development, stuff like that, please just leave them below in the comments or you can go to codecommute.com. You can submit questions anonymously, uh, very helpful when people do that because you can write as much context as you want. The more context, the more it helps me try to think through the the problem that you have. Uh, but of course up to you. It is totally anonymous. So, I joked the other day when I recorded one that uh if I'm not answering things how this person expects I actually don't know how to um I don't know how to contact them to get more detail or whatever. They kind of have to write back in um which is just how it is. But that's it's truly anonymous. Um what else? I got other YouTube channels if you're interested.

So I got Dev Leader which is my main YouTube channel. I have C programming tutorials and using AI tools to build software. There is Dev Leader Path to Tech where I do resume reviews. I had someone from the conference I just went to submitted a resume for me to review. Come on buddy, move over. So, got one of those pending. Um, I should have two going up this week on the channel. And uh then I have the Devleer podcast as well. That's another YouTube channel. So that's where I interview other software engineers. There's a bunch of people I met at the conference recently that I just went to that I'm hoping to have on the podcast. And then every Monday at 700 p.m. Pacific, which is tonight, but depending on when you're watching this, maybe not tonight for you. Um that's where I take topics from code commute that had done really well for the previous week.

I write a newsletter on them and then I do a live stream. But tonight's is going to be the talk that I gave at the conference I just went to. So that way uh I can spend a little bit more time going through material. Conference talk was only pardon me only 25 minutes. So spend a little bit more time. This one is going to be on plug-in architecture in C. So yes, it is C specific, but you might see some patterns and you know different approaches or like the philosophy behind it that you can apply to different programming languages and maybe that's uh still helpful for you. So lots of material, lots of free stuff. I hope that you find it helpful. Thank you so much for being here and I will see you in the next video. Take care.