Engineering Surveys And Audi TT RS Reveal!

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all right time to head home it's a good day at the office was a little short if you watched the previous video so I had to had to pick up this SUV from the the shop earlier some AC problems not fixed that's okay but we're going to drive home now um let's see what's going on so no so I should mention cuz I haven't mentioned this yet on video so I work at the building um that is some people don't know this but there's um there are tree houses at Microsoft and this building that I work at has the tree houses which is pretty cool so there's some Treehouse offices I don't use them but they're they're kind of neat I think some people get a lot of use out of them but not this guy what do I want to talk about today um

um sorry this guy this guy was like running towards the crosswalk and I had this weird hesitation where I'm like I don't know if he's just going to keep running or if he's going to stop and I'm not in a I'm not in a good spot to to slam on The Brak so good news is he stopped um um yeah I think today I'll talk about um we have like feedback surveys so this might sound kind of boring but I think it's very very helpful uh and I want to I think it's good to talk about um because this type of thing is like really important uh for being able to have like high performing teams and making sure that we can get feedback and improve and uh it's just like this idea I guess and I don't know if every team feels like this

if it's just a kind of the a way of life for software engineers and maybe even outside of software engineering but we have surveys that go out periodically and they're it's not like just our team that does like a survey or something it's uh it's done by our org and I'm I'm assuming even outside like I don't know if it's a Microsoft wide thing um I should probably know that it probably is Microsoft wide anyway um the way that this looks is that we have this survey that goes out and it's Anonymous and people get to to answer questions about like sort of what it's like to work at Microsoft and that way um that way we can go through the results and try to drive positive change so we're able to see how our teams are doing relative to uh to our org and

to I guess it's company y too so it must be it must be for the whole company I'm sort of piecing this together as I explain it I'm not looking at it directly right now right so I'm trying to just like kind of uh recap what it looks like anyway um I feel like people don't like spending time on these things cuz it's one more thing to do it's just a dumb survey like whatever like what's the value in doing it who cares but like I'm really sorry if you've had experiences where you've worked where no one gives a crap about that stuff and you just feel like okay anytime I do this it's a waste of time like I'm like it's pointless right I'm genuinely I'm sorry if you had that kind of experience because I don't blame you then for having future experiences

and you're like why would I do that I've seen that this doesn't get used it is just a waste of my time like that sucks um you know like I I I can I can understand like I said why you would not want to do that again in the future but the problem is like like I talk about feedback in general being like super valuable not just for me to give to employees but like for me to get for my direct reports um like not anonymously it's really helpful for people to let me know like how to help uh coach them and stuff so I value that but like this is this is super valuable too it's a different type of feedback and it's to let us know how we're doing in terms of managing the team and it is anonymous like so it's a

different style of question different type of feedback for us but the the point that I want to get across here is like we we as managers so like myself uh my manager like and his manager like his manager like messaged us today to say hey like without getting into detail like basically like checking into make sure people are like actually doing this and we're like yeah um so we genuinely go through the feedback and we have conversations with the entire team about it and it's critical because we we need to be able to understand that feedback and try to drive change so why that's challenging is like obviously we want surveys to be anonymous right like we we want to make sure that people feel comfortable they can answer things genuinely because if it's not they might feel like self-conscious they might feel like they're

getting judged for it like there might be repercussions and you know obviously we don't we don't have that we don't want any of that we don't want people to feel that way so Anonymous is the way to go but what's tricky is when and you could argue just make better surveys but I feel like some surveys uh the questions are set up in a way where you could you could have slightly different interpretations of them so to give you an example if you asked a question where the goal was to try and understand if people on a team feel like they're able to learn on the job depending on how you ask that some you could answer it in different ways right like some people I don't have a good example of the exact question wording but depending on how it's done some people might

interpret it like I don't have time to do it some people might interpret it as like I'm literally given time it's carved out for me but I don't know what to go learn about some people might say uh time is carved out I know what to go learn about but I don't have a chance to apply what I'm learning and all of these different things they're valuable feedback right we want to try and drive improvements regardless of that but the challenge is like when it's Anonymous and we can't literally hear people explain their thought process behind it which one of those things do we address do we try to address all of them maybe maybe all three of the things I just suggested aren't actually the problem and it's something else so come on buddy you better drive someone's blocking the the road on this

turn that's okay we're good personent front of me is going under the highway and just like completely under the speed limit so it's no fun they're ruining the best part so anyway yeah the when we try to talk to the team about this like it's it's important to understand like for folks that answered it like like what was your interpretation so that we can try and address the thing to go improve it but then you create this funky situation where it's like okay we're talking as a group and are you suddenly like I don't want to say forcing but do people feel like their anonity is going away because now they're expressing an opinion about about the survey results like I get it like that makes it challenging so it's a it's a really difficult thing to navigate so uh I think one of the

things is kind of before my time on the team it sounds like um it's kind of interesting they're they're making sure there's a space for more Junior Engineers to to be able to also talk about the results without the managers being present and without the principal Engineers being present which I think is very interesting I think it's a step in the right direction to to make sure people have a safe place to talk about stuff um you could argue like okay well isn't your culture broken then if um if people don't feel safe to do it and it's like like I don't I wouldn't say broken right like are there improvements sure there's always going to be improvements and one of them might just be that when you start putting more experienced Engineers on the call by definition they might happen to be more vocal

people might have stronger opinions they want to express and it just so happens that you know when people see their hands going up in the meeting to talk they're like well I'm going to sit back and listen obviously not not ideal because we want to make sure everyone can talk so I think it's cool that they've carved that out um that doesn't mean we have to or we have to or we should stop trying to be inclusive generally for these feedback sessions so yeah I couple things I'm trying to get out here is like if you have these types of opportunities where where there is feedback like you please like please uh take the time to go to share that um it's really difficult to guess at what types of improvements people want I hate this part of the highway come on get that out

of the way Jesus you get someone in front of me coming in from the the right coming left and there's someone behind them who can't decide if she's going to also come in front of me or go behind me and then the person behind me is like well screw that I'm going to also move to the right where I'm trying to go it's hard to explain unless you see it but basically when someone's being very slow and indecisive they're kind of screwing me over from being able to change lanes and I don't know if you can see it might be hard to tell from this video but the lane to my left is a different exit and it backs up like crazy so there's tons of cars lined up to my left they go way back and if you're stuck in that line you're waiting

for literally nothing like I'm in a different line for a different exit and now it's long here like I'm stuck in traffic here but um it's even worse if you're backed up way back there in the wrong line and then you go oh crap I got to now sit in this long line you wait twice as long for no reason so then I got this guy coming up you can probably see him if I move my head maybe maybe not um it's a single Lane here and this guy's coming up behind me and just like I don't know what he's thinking he's doing like you're not going to go any faster we're literally all stuck in this line of cars man um but anyway enough about the traffic that's not why you're here is it it's part of the name it's a code commute you're

stuck with me you get to enjoy my frustration the other thing that you might not have clued into is I did mention that this car was supposed to be in for AC Service and they couldn't fix it right it's really hot in here it's extremely hot in here the sun is cooking my face and I can put the windows down but then you can't hear me and I can't turn the air on because it just turns on hot air so not a good time for anyone um but you can't tell that just from from watching this and listening to me so I'm letting you know I'm really curious what this guy behind me is doing though it's ridiculous I almost want to turn the camera so you can see it but I don't want to putts around with trying to put it back on my

head so tldr he's stupid but that's okay as long as he doesn't cut me off when he's trying to merge into traffic here too um coming up and I should mention this before I start rambling about the next thing is if you watch these videos this is the part in the traffic uh where I have to merge over from the far right lane which is just backed up with traffic right now across all of the lanes of traffic so 1 2 3 I have to get across three into the fourth or fifth Lane in a very short span of time because the fourth and fifth Lane are the express lanes they're the ones that move the other ones are up ahead going as slow as I'm going right now you can see the car beside me look how fast it's going not very so I

have like in coming up in a sec I'm going to have to go do this merge that I hate it's like I feel like someone designed the roads and they were like this will work and like they're not wrong it works but it sucks it really sucks so I get to live with that and so does everyone else here that's nice but yeah survey feedback coming back to that you like my tangents coming back to the survey feedback I really like I take it seriously and I'm not just saying that like I'm I'm literally talking to a camera right now and saying that right so I have no reason to like lie about that oh come on man what is this person doing they weren't letting me merge in but then they oh they're a little bit older maybe that's why they kind of had

to stop themselves from cutting me off um yeah I take the survey feedback really seriously because my whole goal as an engineering manager is I say this all the time it's to enable my team to do their best work possible there's going to be things that people for whatever reason maybe it doesn't come up naturally whatever they're not thinking about it but they're not going to tell me that feedback necessarily so having a survey and having more opportunities to drive improvements like I need that it helps me do my job um so I take it seriously right um now going back to something I said earlier about like uh response rates like please yeah if you have opportunities for stuff like this please take it seriously because it might seem like oh whatever it's boring I don't want to do it you know it's just

more time spent on something silly uh and like I said I apologize if you've had bad experiences with that but please like if you if you have a manager that happens to be like me in the future and they need the feedback they want the feedback like this is how they get it we're almost over one more lane and then we're cooking cooking my wife doesn't like when I do that but that's okay sorry Leah okay we're in the fast lane so it should only take us not a full hour to get home now the estimated time when I got in the car was 55 minutes so we'll see how long this video is if it's not 55 minutes it's cuz I beat all of this traffic to my right that you can't see which is ridiculous it's just a wall of cars so I

used to hate the idea of driving in the fast L cuz you're paying for it right like feels like I'm getting ripped off but then I realize at some point and I realize not everyone is in the same situation so I don't mean to to frame it that way but like it is 100% worth it for me to sit in this fast lane and pay money to do it you can't I'm still you can see the the stuff going on beside me I assume right might be kind of hard to see cuz it's in the the background of the video but since I merged over it's been a solid wall of cars to my right solid wall so just ridiculous there's so much traffic on this highway because there's like basically one highway to go north from from Redmond so it's awful okay so that

might be all I wanted to say about survey results um maybe the kind of to to finish that off is like I'm happy that Microsoft does it I'm happy that they take it seriously I'm happy that I have a manager and his manager they also take it seriously it's not like hey Microsoft does this but like but we don't care so like whatever like they take it seriously and I think there's a handful of things in like Microsoft culture that are done like that where it's taken seriously it's not like like diversity and inclusion for example it's not like oh we just say it like it's literally in the we call them connects which are like our our multi uh point in the year check-ins it's literally baked into that that there's elements of diversity and inclusion that we have to talk about uh it's

literally part of being able to uh focus on promotions and things like that we have to be able to speak to uh how individuals uh basically have an element of diversity and inclusion like it's in there so I think that's awesome some and I know like some people are like oh whatever like diversity inclusion doesn't matter like I don't agree with that I think it I think it's important how much you hyper index on it different story don't know don't want to get into that but I I I like that Microsoft says things like we care about diversity and inclusion and then they do it I like that they say we care about employee feed back and we literally through the different levels of leadership make sure that it's happening so that kind of stuff I really value um you know I haven't worked at

other big tech companies so I'm not here to say oh Microsoft does it better or worse or whatever I just appreciate that we do it CU helps makes me feel valued it makes me feel like my my job as a manager would be a lot more difficult if I didn't feel that way and then I had to convince my employees like oh no like we do care about that but I like you know literally don't see that anyone does like that's a bad spot to be in but it makes it very easy for me as a manager when people are like oh do we really have to do these surveys as anyone care I can say how much I care and I can tell them how much leadership honestly does care about this stuff so it's cool but I think that's it for surveys please

fill them out when you get this type of stuff and if you can be part of driving positive change where you're working do it like if you're not seeing it happen try to see if you can be part of it okay what else do I got to talk about today I don't know I didn't think this far ahead that's okay um let's see maybe there's some stuff outside of work cuz I've been talking about work I wanted these to kind of focus on General software engineering it doesn't necessarily have to be work but I think more recently that's been an easy Focus um cuz I think some of the other stuff that I was working on today like probably not I don't want to say like not can't put it on camera like it's top secret but it's like it's not going to be it's

not a it's not a helpful thing or maybe could have some like IP related stuff that's not able to put on the internet so I just won't um let me talk about some other pieces so I I'm kind of shared out that I'm working on uh some software that's called brand ghost it's my my social media sort of content creation distribution platform so the the tldr is it's a glorified content scheduler right um the idea is that we don't have to schedule content ever you create content and it posts it at the Cadence that you said so the the the idea behind the platform itself like the very first sort of layer of value that it adds is it just lets you focus on content creation and you don't have to think about posting or scheduling that's the idea so I know some people will

say they carve out you know their Sundays to go schedule content like some time on a Sunday I don't schedule content ever because I don't have to and I really really like that like I don't have that as a thing that I have to go do um you know if you're posting to one platform say you're just posting to LinkedIn that's not so bad whatever but I I post to like 12 social media platforms every day so I wouldn't have time to go schedule all that some of them don't even support scheduling so so I'm not here to like pit you on brand G I want to talk about some of the software development of it so we're kind of in this phase where we're doing betas for it um like onboarding people and you know we have scheduling that works uh we want to

get PE like early feedback obviously so um we're kind of going through this process my experience with doing this kind of thing before was with the nutrition platform I was building called meal coach and as a group of like primarily Engineers we found it like extremely hard to to sell people on the idea and I don't like when I talk about selling I mean yes at some point money like if you're not getting paid money for the things that you're doing like can you argue that it's really valuable like it's hard to right if no one's willing to pay is it valuable but when I say selling in this context I just mean like selling people on the idea so we found it really difficult with the nutrition platform as Engineers to be able to to get people interested in it and what would happen

is number one we didn't seem to have a good channel for it which is hard so like we need to be able to let people know you can't just make a website and hope that it gets discovered um yes you can go posting your website on forums and on social media post like of other people and like trying to get people to click your links but like there's product hunt and things like that so there's ways to do it but the other thing is like we need to make sure that we're in a a position where we can have conversations with users so we struggled a lot it was like how do we like we basically have to go find people and talk to them and I'm personally I'm super introverted so like that's a difficult thing for me but one of the things that

worked was that we could go talk to like people at the gym so myself uh other individuals that was working on this he was like we both go to the gym so like we'll see if we can kind of network this way and what would happened is like we could have people that were like that sounds like super helpful I could totally see the value in it but we could never get them to like to give it a shot if that makes sense like they might sign up for it and never do anything with it so it's weird it's like people they were telling us how much the value prop resonated with them so the idea with this other product was that if you're making meal plans and things like that which not everyone does but for the target audience that likes that kind of

thing takes time and yes you can go ask chat gbt to do it but uh it's like it's like having chat GPT right code might look good is it right you don't have a compiler for your meal plan right so um I can tell you I've asked Chachi PT to do this kind of thing and it will make something you can tell it to make adjustments it'll do it how accurate are the macros if you're not familiar like macronutrients like carbs protein fat cuz that will dictate how many calories are in there and ultimately that's going to determine how much you're consuming so when that's not accurate or it's not consistent you're basically just guessing so we were using a nutritional database with all this food in it we were having recipes like Anyway the people liked the idea but we couldn't get them to

convert and it was like it was really frustrating so ultimately like that that didn't work but with brand ghost what's cool is like we have we have a handful of users on there and we're already seeing people get value out of it so today like the and the why I wanted to bring this up today had the first post from a user we didn't tell them to go post it and they said I'm using brand ghost it's helping me like they it was a little testimonial right and um I thought that was super cool that we first had our we had our first like kind of testimonial go out and um and someone was happy to share that they're using our s software for it so finally right getting people to start using something and like there's value it's not just on the surface there's

value and they they they won't take any action but this is still something like I need a lot of a lot of work um to get better at this and I think why I wanted to talk about this is like I think a lot of the the time when I'm talking about software engineering and things like that it's like how to do well at a company CU that's where I spend a lot of my time is at work and I think most people working as software Engineers work at companies but if you want to do something on the side if you're trying to make some software like um how do you get people to use the stuff you're building the like the easiest way is like if you're literally someone has a problem and you build something for them and give it to them to

use like then you have a user right um it's really difficult if you're building software guessing that there's a problem can it work yes absolutely but that you're unless you're really good at like marketing and pitching people on it and getting users on board which I'm not um you might even have an amazing idea but it's really difficult for you get any traction with it so I like kind of thinking through this as I gone through it once and it was a it felt like a really bad experience uh I have a I have yet another YouTube channel uh which has I do weekly Vlogs and I've been doing them at this point if you're watching this for 20 20 months now I've done a weekly Vlog there's a couple I've missed but it's a it's a weekly check-in it's almost like a little diary

entry and I do it to kind of share some of the things I'm working on and the decision making or why it's difficult and if you listen to those you can see like the the roller coaster ride that was a meal coach where it was like oh my God we finally got to talk to these people oh my God they think it's cool and then like you know a couple of weeks later being like everything sucks because like no one's using it and we don't know how to approach more people like it's really really difficult um some people are good at this kind of thing and I want to be careful about my the way I talk about myself now because I've learned that what I don't want to say is like I suck at selling right because I have a lot more of a

firm belief around negative selft talk being detrimental and I don't want to say I suck at selling um what I want to say is I don't have experience doing it yet yet I am not skilled at it yet but I don't want to say I'm bad at it I don't want to say like I hate doing it I like I don't want to say like I'm not capable of it because if I keep saying it I'll talk myself out of doing it more and like I did that for a long time with public speaking for example kept saying I'm terrible at it I'm bad at it it scares me and then I would never public speak and then anytime the thought of speaking in front of an audience came up it was like oh I don't want to do that but like why you're not

actually scared of it you just don't do it um and I think that's the same thing with like selling here I don't sell things that's not part of what I regularly do so of course I shouldn't expect that I'm going going to be like amazing at it that's fine that's totally cool and I I'm saying this all out loud because if you're a software developer and you're like I want to try making like whether it's sites or apps or whatever you want and you're like I want to try to get users but like I don't know what to do like I'm bad at it I can't talk to people like you you cannot expect that magically you will just be good at something if you don't do it and guess what if you want to get good at it you got to go do it

so um I'm I'm telling you this and I'm also saying it out loud for myself to remind myself myself like it's going to keep being awkward and uncomfortable until I do more of it and that's okay so that's been a struggle for me I'm with a little bit of momentum now and having like we've had some user feedback like raid away uh we had like I said this kind of first testimonial which is good and I feel like I want to ride on that momentum and like see like look it's not so bad like you can talk to these people you can get you more feedback um and even on the feedback part I think this is really important too because when I'm build I've I've noticed this about myself when I'm building stuff for a company take a I always take a lot of

pride in what I'm building always because I don't want to deliver crappy code I don't want to have a crappy user experience I want people to walk away from the stuff that I've built and they're like hell yeah like that did what I needed and I feel like when I'm building stuff at a it's easier for me to feel confident about what I'm building like it's good to go people are going to be happy with that when it's my own thing it's the exact opposite it's like a fear it's like a it's like a fear of rejection I think is the best way I would put it um I'm I feel so afraid that someone will try it and be like I hate it this is the dumbest thing this is broken it doesn't work and it's it's a it scares the crap out of

me and it's funny because part of me the logical part of me knows like dude obviously the first time you go to release something it's not going to be perfect even if it was exactly what I wanted to build there's going to be people that say that doesn't work for me that's not what I want like I know that's the case and the best part about that is even like the negative feedback tells you what to go improve on literally the first person that gave us feedback on brand ghost was awesome they had like six or seven points written down and they said basically they came out of the gate saying I see a lot of potential in this this is really cool I'm excited and here's six things to go fix or improve so even if they didn't say they were excited about it

right say they left that part out and they gave us the six or seven things to go improve the first within the first 24 hours it was less like first 12 hours we had all of those things on that list fixed and like one of them I think like addressed as like don't know um like we don't know how we want to address it this is kind of weird here what's this person doing there's two lanes and they're driving in the middle of it I think they're confused um so yeah like the negative feedback thing scares the crap out of me but it's I think it's just honestly like I have a fear of rejection in general um kind of had this like my whole life I think it's pretty common for people but uh I've joked around that it's the same feeling and I

don't know depending on your upbringing and stuff I think about it being like going to ask your crush out on a date it's the same it's literally the exact same feeling different scenario but that feeling of like oh I don't want to go ask them cuz I'm afraid they're going to say no literally the same so for me when I'm like okay like I know the next step is we got to put this in front of people part of me inside goes no like you got to do a couple more things like it's not ready yet but it's me kind of like tricking myself into being like you're just afraid oh that sun is so bright and it's you know I can I can literally say this out loud and admit it to myself but it doesn't change my behavior which is kind of funny

so I think it's going to take more work oh man uh to be able to like be honest with myself about that kind of thing like dude it doesn't matter like people are going to have feedback no matter what so the sooner you can get the feedback literally the better and uh yeah I think again I didn't have to try so hard this time with brand ghost to start getting that and that's really cool so I'm pumped about that I'm I'm hopeful that if you're listening to this or uh or watching right um if you if hope maybe that might resonate with you where you're like something never feels ready to release you're nervous about the feedback or like anything like that I'm I just want to say all this out loud to remind you like like who cares right it's not it's software it's

never going to be perfect if your goal is to get people using it get it in front of them let them use it you know unless you've built something where you're you somehow know it's the perfect thing which I'd love to know your secret um then your goal is like it's feedback initially right because you're trying to prove that you have something that's of value I'm pretty confident we do and I'm pretty confident we do because we built what I use to post all of my social media so to give you an example the fact that you're watching this right now is only and I'm not like I'm not exaggerating when I say this it's only because brand ghost it's because I've been able to create content the way that I do and the only way that I could ever sustain that I work a

9 to-5 job and I'm doing other stuff on top of all of this so the fact that you're watching this is because I've been able to sustain my content creation using the system that brand ghost has so I know that it has value I'm not saying it's the perfect fit for everyone CU that would be a ridiculous thing to claim but I know it has value and now my mission with that is to be able to find the people that also have the same perceived value of it so it's going to be a fun ride um it's nice I already have a couple of people that are trying it that are using it um literally so what time is it so uh in 40 minutes I have a call with uh the first person that kind of on boarded to Brand ghost uh he has

a real estate company has a roofing company and he he's he's really good with h photography and cinematography I actually know him I met him through like uh through car stuff go figure right full circle and um you know from Instagram and stuff seeing what he was posting like man like this guy's got really good stuff like when you you've probably seen like real estate walkthroughs and stuff they'll take a drone and it's kind of just or whatever you have someone walking through and taking pictures you see all like sorts of different levels of quality with this stuff but his is like a it it feels like a like a cinematic experience and I'm not just trying to talk them up um like I think they're cool like even if I not interested in the house I think he does a good job with his

filming and the way that he edits all of it together so for him he knows and cuz he's experienced this he knows that when he's posting on social media for his business it literally drives people to contact him like it drives sales so he's no stranger to it but the thing is he also knows like he's got to take care of business and if you're spending all of your time focused on trying to post to these different platforms that's time you could be spending on your business so I think you know for him it was really cool that we had this interaction early and I was like hey dude like if you if you can change not to not to replace your content strategy but if you can change the basis of your content strategy right you don't need to post try and do like

a viral video every day or something cuz you'd burn out but I said if you can try making more content that is like educational that you could share regularly repost if you need to because it is Evergreen um then I said I think you can use the system that I'm that I'm using so he saw the value right away and like I said he's basically doing at least two of his businesses to start with um on branos which is super exciting I got to move over you might see the TT cuz I'm driving the the wife's SUV so she's got to park in the other spot but we'll get beside the ET here you can see it in all of its Glory Maybe not maybe I'll take the camera out and show you yeah let's do that let me turn this thing off okay you're

coming for a not a ride with me a a a walk a walk that's what we'll call it let me unlock my front door here because I'm gonna forget okay door is unlocked so it says okay is this car off wasn't off okay let's go how do we take this thing off I don't know how this is going to work you're technically upside down right now it's weird to explain because this thing was hanging off the ceiling of the car so I'll show you the fun car one sec but there it is see I don't know if I flip my screen around if it's going to invert the video so I don't want to try but it's got to get cleaned we'll do a little little walk around down it's got a wing it's got wheels it's got a flat tire it's very flat yeah

that's the TT it's fun times but thanks folks I will see you next time