HELP! Software Engineers Stagnating In Their Career Progress

Transcript is auto-generated and may contain errors.

all right it is time to head back from work it's Wednesday October 30th almost Halloween which is cool um yeah it was a good day uh it's real crappy outside though um good thing I work inside all day but uh yeah good day um I had mentioned couple weeks ago now um that I got assign this uh this project to lead so um because I went on vacation last week I missed the very first sync meeting I'm supposed to run for it which is like terrible timing but I had someone for my team kind of Step In which I'm super thankful for um we kind of acknowledg in the beginning of kicking off this project it's going to be a little bit rough like we got to get in the groove but already not because I'm back um I think just cuz they've already gone

through one sync meeting and then we had today but today it was already feeling um significantly better so that's good um so I'm feeling positive about that and I think it's only going to be better for momentum so it's good stuff okay this morning I had mentioned that a couple people had contacted me about topics they wanted me to talk through so this is just another friendly reminder maybe I'll start these videos off by reminding people like if you have have topics that you'd like me to talk about um that are related to software engineering not just anything I guess um maybe who cares maybe I can talk about other stuff but uh let me know uh you can put it in the comments or if you you know follow me on different social platforms just message me and I'll see if I can think

about a topic or a fit for it um yeah just let me know but one of them that came up was that uh someone wanted to talk about uh sort of managing SLG guiding Engineers that uh are kind of like kind of like stuck in their level and especially like layering on this uh this complication that they might be getting signals from from other individuals or other parts of the organization that they're um that they're doing a good job so um because this is essentially Anonymous like I don't even have enough details to identify individuals so I'm going to talk more specifically about the example if I can recall it correctly my apologies if I end up missing some of the details uh that you thought were important in this but my understanding of this situation there's a little bit there's couple unique things going

on is one um if I understood correctly this this individual is almost like a like a floating engineering manager which I think is a very interesting type of role um my personal opinion on that alone is that I don't think that sets you up for Success very well uh not and I don't mean to suggest that someone that you know the person that sent me this message I don't think I'm not trying to say that I don't think they can do their job well I mean that that situation I don't think sets you up for success and what I mean by that is that if you are floating and you don't have individuals assigned to you as direct reports I don't know the period that you are working with individuals and building up that trust and respect in like that relationship because that makes a

huge difference in terms of uh your ability to be successful so number one I think that's just an interesting challenge to layer on here um but the other part that I thought was really interesting about this scenario is that when there's different signals from the business the organization or other stakeholders that lead this individual to believe that they're doing the right things so ultimately um engineering managers are going to be the ones that are trying to help ensure that their employees are able to um get promoted receive proper rewards and things like that like that's one of the responsibilities in general of an engineering manager is to help support the individual ual on their team for that type of growth so um it's a one of the reasons why I suggest like if you're not having conversations with your engineering manager about career growth and

things like that like that's a really big missed opportunity and if that's something that your engineering manager is like constantly avoiding for some reason like to me that's a huge red flag like I think that's an expectation that engineering managers should have they're they're routinely having conversations like that so the point of me saying that is that like your engineering manager is going to be the one that is giving you the guidance around their expectations for how to grow in your career so number one if that's not happening like try to have conversations about making sure that happens and number two if it is happening and then someone's just blatantly ignoring it like I would say that they should not be surprised if they're finding that they're not growing in their career so this example the question or like you know the context was about

like individuals kind of stagnating right they're they're at a level whatever it happens to be let's assume for this conversation someone's at a midlevel going for senior engineer right I'm just trying to be a little bit more generic here so there they're not super junior um and they're also not like they haven't been programming for like 400 years and they're you know like distinguished engineer somewhere kind of just in the middle which is probably the bulk of Engineers right so if you have an individual that is in this position and they're they're stagnating to me this like the the framing here is that they're there's either not a I mean there likely is not alignment with their engineering manager so why that's the case you know we can dig into that uh because it could be could be the individual's fault it could be the

engineering manager's fault it could be both um and I probably shouldn't say fault but I mean like some responsibility played by which party here right so there's some lack of alignment and the reason that's a problem here is because like I said the engineering manager is going to be the one that's putting the person up for promotion and if they're finding that that individual is not making the progress that they've been trying to articulate to them then that person's not going to progress in their career in that position that doesn't mean that I got to move over here um that doesn't mean that going elsewhere they won't or it doesn't mean that they're like a bad engineer but it does mean in that position they're going to feel like they're stalled and no one wants that like the individual obviously doesn't want that and an

engineering manager doesn't want that for any employee they have like they want their employees to be able to grow and be successful so um sorry I got to switch lanes um so it's not about like an engineering manager just trying a gatekeep um you know a promotion and like haha like I'll never promote you it's it's quite the opposite engineering manag engineering managers want to promote they want to see their employees be successful so we have the scenario where an engineer is stalled and this is if I understood correctly and maybe I missed this I don't know if the engineer feels like they're stalled because this is an interesting Dynamic and we'll talk about both let's say so maybe the engineer feels like they're stalled and they're getting feedback from other parts of the business that they're doing a really good job so the detail

on the good job part was that this person is able to make progress on tickets they're they were defined as a ticket machine so they're able to fix bugs and get things done and and to them there's a positive feedback loop happening because look look look how much stuff I'm getting done um but if we take the other perspective too like what could be happening is maybe the engineer doesn't even think that there's maybe they think that they're progressing at a totally okay pace and they're not even concerned about it but their engineering manager is going hey like this person should be concerned like they're they're they are stalled and they don't know it yet so I don't know the detail there regardless the engineering manager believes that this engineer is stalled because they're not aligning with what they want to be seen okay so

the reason or the information that was provided to me at least is from the engineering manager they're perceiving that the individual the engineer is focused sort of on the wrong things so for example they um I'm trying to remember that some of the details here like they're they're not making like informed engineering decisions they're kind of just like either taking a lot of shortcuts um or they're maybe like they're just kind of doing like busy work but not really important things uh there was something else that this individual brought up and I don't want to pull up my phone even though I'm parked in traffic um if literally if I come to a dead stop I'll check but um might have to come back to that but the point is that there are expectations of this engineer that they're not meeting from their engineering manager

so this is a very wordy way of me saying this individual has positive input from other stakeholders for example look at all the tickets you're doing good job but from their engineering manager they're focused on the wrong things so how do you go navigate this um I have I have seen this type of thing happened before um but the the difference that I would say is that um the engineering manager I also feel like was out of touch so there were other people like other stakeholders a lot of them were like like what the hell is happening here like why is all this stuff getting derailed blah blah blah and then the engineering manager was kind of complacent and then there were product owners um kind of like that were also pushovers so you had a lot of complacency around this individual and it allowed

them to not on purpose but it caused a lot of havoc and then when it came time for like promotion discussions it was like look how much work this person does and other people were like yeah but like do you realize how incredibly disruptive this is like it's not something we want to have emulated it's a very big problem so the difference in my example is that I feel like the engineering manager in particular was not taking responsibility and because they were being very complacent it meant that they were they were kind of sitting back going like look look how many tickets get done look how much code gets touched and like that's not a good metric for for progression so in this case it sounds like the engineering manager actually really cares um now I want to look at this from a couple of

angles and I would say you know I don't know this engineering manager and I want to assume the best but we need to kind of look at both sides here because I think that's only fair so I want to start by saying you know we want to assume the engineering man is doing the right things here but but truthfully like what do the conversations look like with the individual so we want to make sure that we have concrete examples to share with the individual about the expected behavior and they need to be timely because for example if you do a performance review and that's once a year right and then you tell this individual by the way like um it's it seems like you're not focused on the right priority work or it feels like you're you're not doing like what we would consider like

quality engineering practices like you're kind of focused on um details that don't really matter and or you're neglecting things like feedback like that when it's not timely not specific is completely ridiculous I know this sounds exaggerated so I'm not I'm not trying to like pick on this person right I want to be helpful here but I'm putting it this way because it truthfully needs to be very timely and specific because what's happening is that they're getting positive reinforcement from other areas so if they're getting that positive reinforcement regularly and it's timely they're going to keep leaning into that so as the engineering manager like hopefully you're doing one-on On's uh hopefully something like weekly maybe it's bi-weekly but if you're noticing these patterns where you're like hey this scenario just happened like you don't even wait for your oneon-one you got have a conversation with

someone and just say hey like um you know uh this work got pushed through but it looks like we didn't have a a design for it like it looks like that ended up getting rushed through like can you talk can you walk me through what happened here and you're absolutely able to give this person the benefit of the doubt right maybe you miss something maybe this engineering manager is missing some of these conversations happening you you know I who am I to say so giving this person the opportunity to talk through it hear their perspective and if that's still not aligned with what you value as the engineering manager and what you're trying to have your engineers push for have a conversation about that right and it's one of the reasons earlier I said like I feel like you're not set up for Success if

you're a floating engineering manager that rotates through people and teams is like when you when you need to have a hard conversation with someone about this stuff um it makes it really damn hard to have a conversation and not have someone get defensive um people have probably heard about radical cander um I really like the concept I think that uh some people think it's easy to achieve and I think for the people that think it's easy to achieve it's uh more likely that you're just an uh and otherwise it's difficult to achieve because it takes a lot of time and effort to build up that trust and respect so that you you can be direct with people and tell them what they need to hear it's the kind of thing that you would want to hear from your best friend because you need to hear

it not because you want to hear it and that's like in my opinion what you want to strive for as an engineering manager is to have radical cander so that when people are off track you can have a conversation be like look Johnny like um I want to talk through this because what I observed is not something that um I think is a good practice that we want to we want to strive for I want to hear your side of it talk through it and then give them what you're hoping to see going forward and that you can be direct about it because if you end up having to be wishy-washy because you're like man this person's just completely defensive immediately you're not going to get anywhere so I don't know if this engineering manager is in a position where they can have direct conversations

like that I don't know if they're in a position where they can do them um timely and specific because I think that those things are important um so that's one part right like I don't know if that's happening I think it needs to be happening if it's not um another thing is like it should be documented because it's something that if it happens again you can say hey remember that we talked about this this is the same type of thing or it's a similar thing we talked about um and we left the conversation being aligned on it we agreed that this is an understanding between us that this is how we want to see you know work being delivered or um the depth of or the focus that we have in our design docs whatever it happens to be it's not for me to to

dictate other engineering orgs um so you want to have it documented so you have something to refer to um because if it keeps happening you still have this evidence that's mounting that's like look like we got a problem here there's a lot of directions I want to take this by the way so um and as I'm trying to figure out which way I want to go I'm looking at the amount of traffic since I'm going to get home at 7 o' and I'm not enthused about that because I have more connects to do for work and they take me a couple of hours each so the documenting Parts I think is important I think the conversations being timely and specific is important um something else to to try and navigate that I think is really important is these other channels where if someone is getting

positive reinforcement from other stakeholders um is to think about those working relation ship you have with those stakeholders and see if there's a way that they're not uh positively reinforcing the wrong Behavior so in the example that I was giving from some of my experience when I observed complacency is that like it was basically like trying to Enlighten the engineering manager or the the product owners like what you're observing is harmful to other parts of the or and it's almost like there was there wasn't awareness so we needed to let them know like in my opinions the the manager's manager probably should have been having conversations with the manager about this but we needed to let them know like uh framing it in a better way than what I'm about to say but like your complacency with this person is causing problems elsewhere and kind

of like I said bringing awareness to them that like the type of behavior that they're either rewarding or just being complacent about needs to look different we need other Behavior emulated by people at this level so that's one sort of tactic or Direction you can go with this is like it's not a matter of like crapping on the person and saying like hey like you know Johnny that you're always talking with and saying like good job on all the work they're doing like no we hate Johnny like it's not it's not like that but you have to think about this situationally so if if Johnny in this example is sorry if your name's Johnny I'm not trying to pick on you um if Johnny in this example is like they're the ticket machine and they keep having a product owner or tech support or someone

being like hey like yeah keep getting these work items done like so good um it's like letting that that that stakeholder know like hey by the way like it seems like you're like you're the one doing the prioritization work for Johnny like we actually we actually have a bit of a process on our team or we we do something where we're trying to make sure the work is split up properly and um you could in in the example that I'm thinking through with the complacency thing was we we needed to let them like we could tell the engineering manager that you can structure this in a positive way so if we think about a different example um I've seen engineers get stuck or I shouldn't say stuck that's too too exaggerated I've seen engineers in their position feel like they're not making the progress they

want and they're doing a lot of work and then we go yeah but you're doing a lot of low impact work and it's not adding up the way that you think it is and even if they're like their hearts in the right place they're like trying to do the right thing what's not happening especially if they're more and more senior is they're not working on big impactful work they're working on stuff that they can get more volume of like small tickets done that maybe more Junior people on the team could be spending time doing while they're working on bigger more important things I shouldn't say more important that's a kind of a crappy way to put it but bigger more impactful things that need their expertise at their level yeah more important poor choice um more more aligned to their level I guess is how

I should phrase that oh man there's so much traffic and I have to keep moving over Lanes here please let me in okay one more to go this guy doesn't have his lights on cuz he's an absolute that happens a lot here um there's a lot of people that drive with other lights on and it boggles my mind I should have went I should have went again this guy also doesn't have his lights on it's a wall of black darkness just approaching it's so dangerous I can't comprehend how people do this okay we're in the fast lane one of them but it's also a parking lot so let me get back on track here so finding ways that you can talk to these other stakeholders and like again situationally letting them know that some of the um some of the the direction that they're providing

is actually causing some challenges um I say you have to approach a situ situationally because there there's so many different circumstances and how you want to approach this but the goal is that you're not trying to like talk poorly about someone behind their back because as an engineering manager like I said you're trying to help this person grow you're trying to help them do the right thing so it's not a matter of like stop enabling this person to be bad like that's not the conversation you're having but it's like finding ways that you can constructively let other people know like hey like I'm trying to help this person um you know level up in in their role and um I need to try and help them prioritize some some larger scale work items like uh I'm really trying to make sure they can spend some

time doing uh architecture design documents and things like that I'm just making this up for this example um so um I I know that they've been really helpful like getting some work done for you but I need to kind of get things back on track for their Career Development so um if you're finding that you have requests coming in and you want to direct them to this person because they've been your your go-getter like I think we need to have a a conversation about that so I can help prioritize more effectively for them as an example right I'm just I'm just making up as I'm talking here but I think approaching other stakeholders to try and um like mitigate some of that that positive reinforcement that shouldn't be happening is helpful so talking about a couple things here so far one is like timely specific

responses the other one is um making sure that you can talk to other stakeholders that might be influencing this um but like I think I don't know a good way to put this but like I'd be I'd be really curious what's happening in the one-on ones with this individual and the reason I'm I'm kind of thinking through this is like I I want to assume that everyone's doing sort of the right thing they're doing the best effort thing that they can so I want to assume that the engineering manager is having conversations about this I want to assume that the engineer is being receptive to these things but I feel like when this happens it's because there's a bit of a breakdown in what's going on so if these conversations are happening like is the engineer checked out during the 101 conversations um is the

engineering manager do they think that they're conveying this information clearly um but that's not actually happening like the the person is perceiving what the manager is saying in a different way way like hey that would be a nice thing to do but it's not really that important like do they understand the the impact of this I don't know the answer to these things but it makes me curious about oh my God so dangerous someone just pulled out into the the Fast Lanes two lanes someone just pulled out over the quadruple line which is uh technically illegal to do um and the person beside me had to slam on their brakes and hold their horn down to let that idiot know that they're an idiot um the person behind me now is driving without lights on so to give you an example if if it's not

totally clear why this is so dangerous if I'm looking ahead of me and someone Slams on their brakes and I go oh crap I need to do the same thing usually you want to slam on your brakes but you want to make sure the person behind you is is totally going to rearend you and and annihilate you um I literally can't see anything behind me because there's a black wall of nothingness so if I am trying to make sure that it's truly safe for me to hit the brakes literally no idea um if that person decides to switch lanes without putting a signal on I'll have no idea um it's so dangerous it's crazy uh I I just wish that I could take the camera and show you how it looks like there's a void behind me it almost it makes it look like there's

no cars at all behind me but it's because there's one car blocking all of the light it's crazy anyway okay so more let's see if we can come up with more feedback in this situation right so again with an engineer they're not really getting traction to level up and kind of feels like they're stagnating whether or not the engineer recognizes this or not um maybe something else to talk through and this looks different at different companies at Microsoft we have um well I should say in the organization that I'm in within Microsoft I can't speak for the whole company we have what are called Talent guides and a talent guide for us is just a rubric and it breaks down by level the expectations so this is a good alignment mechanism for both the engineering manager and the engineer so to give you an example

something I didn't really talk about is like and I again I I try to play Devil's Advocate a little bit so we can hear or we can think about both sides of this because I think it's helpful to have just different perspectives on these things do we actually know that the engineering manager is being justifiable in their expectations and what I mean by that is like is it just a I I'm saying this and I truly don't believe it but I need to say it right like are they is it just a really subjective thing and they're they're actually a little bit at a line with their expectations if you have something like a talent guide or a rubric that helps align the expectations across that role for the different levels it makes it less subjective so that that engineering manager can say like this

is the established expectation for your role at this level right and they have something concrete to refer to and that way it removes some of that the hell was that soone just kicked up a rock like it was a rock that like didn't bounce off my windshield it hit the windshield and like landed on the car so it's probably somewhere up there still so it removes or reduces the subjectivity to be able to talk about like what it is that this engineering manager feels like is not going right and especially if there's a bunch of these things because again I can't remember all the details but it sounds like there was at least a few things where the engineering manager gave his examples like you know this person's they're doing this here's the behavior I would expect so like where is that in the talent

guide where is that in your rubric that you're using if it doesn't exist um like it's not I wouldn't say that's the fault of the engineering manager but that's an opportunity your organization to be able to try and create something like that so that you can be more uniform across promotions and rewards for employees because it makes it very difficult if everyone has a different measuring stick so if that doesn't exist try to have some conversations about it um even if you don't have it for your organization let's say it's something that you can at least put some effort into to document your expectations um you could work with your peers on this uh at least to start things off like I just think it's important to have written expectations and then have conversations with people about it so in the example I was providing

earlier it was like Hey when you're having these conversations like you know kind of document that you had the conversation but this is a bit of a step further because it's a it's almost like a visual there's literally a rock where my wipers are my wipers just kicked on and like flung a rock to the other side but it's stuck up here so this visual indicator if you haven't seen a rubric before and I I realize as I'm saying this I'm sure lots of people have some people might not call it a rubric and they have a different word or they don't know what I'm talking about it's literally like a table okay so in the rows every row would have sort of like some uh core competency that you care about for that role and then every column would have something like the level

that you're you're trying to write the competency for and then every cell in that table would say like this is the expectation of this role at this level for this competency so for example um in terms of you could talk about like a competency around like the level of uh business impact that's being delivered and you could describe like the expectation at this level going to the next level is that you're having impact that looks like and then would describe it right so from mid-level to senior it might be like you're starting to have impact that's outside of the direct team you're starting to partner with other team members sorry other members of other teams you're starting to have interactions with other stakeholders that aren't just Engineers right like you you literally Define what the expectations are in a written way in a table format

and the really nice thing about this is that it starts to make it seem less like oh there was this one-off conversation we had and it starts to paint a full picture around all of the expectations holistically so instead of it feeling like there's a one-off situation where it's like oh my manager's being a jerk to me because uh they didn't like this thing I did it's like no that's like a that's a defined expectation and the next time something different happens instead you feeling like your manager's piling on you like it happens to be another cell that you're not meeting the expectations for and you can have a conversation around it so I think it's a really good visual indicator personally uh I like using rubrics like this uh even to not to even structure like problem areas but the the exact opposite is

like hey you're doing all this awesome work and like these are the areas that I think will have the most impact for you if you continue to focus on them cuz a lot of times people are doing this stuff and it's in progress right they're demonstrating this stuff over time so you can use a rubric to like to reinforce really positive things too and that could be a great opportunity for this individual right it's like hey look these things that you are doing these are really good things and you could list them out in the rubric and show them how that looks and then you could say but these other things are literally holding you back it just so happens in this case for this individual they're truly things that the engineering manager is like they're holding them back like these are negatives um but

you could have other situations with other individuals where you're like these things aren't negatives like they're not literally pulling you down but these things are areas that I need to see more demonstration of consistency I need to see that you you are demonstrating this characteristic this trait this expectation so I think rubrics are super powerful tools um I want to add some context here that I don't feel like I'm totally speaking out of my ass when I say this because at Microsoft we have um we have what's called a connect which is almost like writing a resume like you're talking about your accomplishments you have a conversation with your manager about it but we also have the talent guide that I've been describing like it's a rubric for different levels for software engineers and the reason I have a decent amount of confidence in what

I'm talking about here is every single time I leave a conversation with employees about going through the talent guide so this rubric every single time people go thank you it was so helpful to actually have this stuff broken out in a way that I can understand and in fact it's pretty common that people will feel like the connect itself sort of this let me talk about my accomplishments my impact they feel like that's less valuable for them don't get me wrong it's very valuable to have it documented but for them the the feeling that they get back from going through it they're kind of like whatever it's not helpful in the moment but the talent guide the rubric conversation about where they need to focus they find tremendously helpful um I want to think if I can come up with numbers at least at Microsoft

over 20 people have told me this for feedback in in four years so it's not it's not zero it's not a million people but that's my um that's my measure and like what that means like from a a percentage perspective I don't know what the percentage is but like it's almost every single person has had positive feedback about that experience so um I'm trying to think if there's some other angles to try and provide some insight here CU I don't want to get out of the car and then this person listens to this and they're like hey that wasn't really helpful uh I want to see if there's maybe some more actionable things um we talked about being timely right I think that's important so if that's not happening try to make sure that it is happening try to have something that you could can

refer back to like a talent guide or previous conversations at a minimum to be able to say hey we talked about this kind of focus talked about um having conversations with other stakeholders I think that's important um something that you could lean into um is is this discussion around impact I think there's sometimes uh potential gaps around that so for example I've worked with individuals where I I already kind of talked about more senior people that happen to take on a bunch of small items but I've had conversations with individuals where they feel that to progress they need to be doing more things okay and it's not their fault for thinking this way I'm not I'm not blaming them but the the the literal sort of response I've got from them is around like well am I doing enough how do I do more and

it's kind of funny because I I don't mean funny like haha at them I mean like it's kind of interesting because their perception is like well in order for me to to be better I need to do more and in some cases it's it's just not true it's not more in fact maybe less maybe less maybe it's less but higher quality higher quality more consistency fewer bugs um better communication better consistency like there's just better quality around what they're doing instead of more things and on that it's not just the quality if we again I don't know the exact circumstances for this individual but if their time and effort is spent on on smaller things that aren't as important from a business impact perspective like that's a it's really important to try and explain that right it's not just about volume of work because that's

the positive reinforcement they're getting otherwise it's not just about more things you can flip this around and say hey like as someone who is more senior on the team like my expectation of you is that you're working on these high impact things I know that there's a lot of smaller things that need to get done but hey you know how we have um Billy and Sally on the team they're a little bit more Junior like we should actually be having conversations about how to get them working on this stuff because this could be really good work for them you could actually help them uh grow in their role by helping them navigate some of these these different work streams because we know you know know how to do it and we know that you can do it effectively but giving them this opportunity is actually

an opportunity for you toold one is that you get to help them and like kind of provide some mentorship and two is like it frees up your time from carrying out that work directly and now you can go focus on some bigger impact areas so that could be something to think about uh the in the back of my head I I have this bad feeling that like that the the setup for this this manager that I described about being like a floating manager I just have a really bad feeling that that's like going to make it difficult for some of these conversations um and I say that because I'm trying to put myself in their shoes and and think about if I haven't had an opportunity to really feel like I've built a good relationship um it's going to make me feel like I want

to like you know tiptoe around things so I don't know how comfortable this individual is I don't know if they have a really good working relationship with this engineer my assumption is is probably not uh probably feels like the working relationship is maybe um maybe tense uh maybe maybe it's not tense maybe it's kind of like distant and then how do you get people bought in into feeling like um you know you're you're looking out for their best interest versus just being an ass right like it's going to be hard so that's in the back of my head so maybe the final piece of advice I have for this person is like given your setup as a manager um I don't know how much time you're spending building relationships with people but uh I I feel like you need to work extra hard at at

building those relationships uh it's already a difficult thing to do it takes time takes consistency demonstrating to people that you care about their interests that you're looking out for them um there's a lot that goes into it and I feel like if there's a bit of a rotation here or floating management kind of role you're going to have to work harder at that unfortunately so uh I'll wrap that up there I hope that was helpful um by all means you know this video is coming so uh CU we've talked about it if you feel like I missed the Mark or you have other thoughts like maybe what I said wasn't clear or I missed some context anything like that uh hopefully you know like I'm happy to to kind of talk about different details on this so yeah I I I say the same thing

on live streams right when people ask me questions I'm like I'll try to answer what I think I know that you're asking about and uh if it's helpful great if it's not let me know right like I'm not my goal is to be helpful and if I'm missing it just just let me know and I'll try a different way um this kind of stuff's hard um if you're not a manager and you're listening to this like I I hope that you don't hear it and feel resentful I hope you don't hear it and you're thinking like look at look at these managers talking about this kind of stuff like thinking they're just controlling everything like I don't know it's not it's just not just not the reality maybe maybe for some managers but like um I hope it's not a feeling of like resentment or

you know feeling feeling like we're trying to control things like the any any good manager that I've talked to um I absolutely feel like they want the best for their employees so if it's not coming across that way either you have a bad manager or there's a misunderstanding and I based on what I know about people interactions I feel like misunderstandings happen uh a lot so um I don't know I guess I'm just trying to say like please please try to assume best intentions like uh I'm not making excuses for bad managers but you know sometimes sometimes people are trying to do the right thing and it feels like friction but they're just trying to help so um try to keep an open mind I guess if your manager is giving you some direction in some way uh you know hopefully hopefully you're in a

spot where you can comfortably assume like hey look I know based on our interactions my manager wants the best for me um and honestly if you're in an environment where you don't feel that way and you don't feel like you're supported um you know even if you've had conversations about it like I I don't know I'm of the mindset where if I try to make positive change and uh I'm not supported by my manager or I feel like the environment is not conducive to it it's time to go right um there's only you can have the best intentions and there's only so much time and effort you can put into something before you're like I got to be in a different spot so something to think about I'm trying to turn and there's an infinite stream of traffic and a bus yeah okay um so

I'll probably what's today Wednesday I got to to CrossFit this week I haven't been to CrossFit yet man when I was on vacation I was like so for context uh I realiz I'm sitting in a car and otherwise if you're watching my other YouTube videos you see a talking head um one of my hobbies has been bodybuilding for a long time and uh I kind of uh I'm not like a professional by any means but I you know I've been on a stage before I was uh I withdrew from a competition um two competitions earlier this year so you know Fitness bodybuilding nutrition like it's all it's all a hobby and a like a lifestyle interest for me and when I was on vacation so I kind of I withdrew from bodybuilding the uh the day after Valentine's Day because I felt like I was

not being a good partner to my wife and I think that was the right decision I have absolutely no regrets there and so it's been what since February mid-February and it's uh November now so like almost like eight and a half months kind of thing if my math is right maybe and like when I was in Hawaii I was like I was back to the point where I'm like I don't I don't want to take off my shirt like I felt that uncomfortable in my own body um this is obviously like a a body dysmorphia kind of thing like I would I would wager that probably every single person who's into bodybuilding has some level of body dysmorphia whether or not they admit it to themselves um but yeah this is like a bit of a wakeup call for me where I was like okay

like I've been I've been coasting a little bit too long uh I have all the tools the experience to like to not feel like I'm too fat and right now I feel like I'm too fat so uh it's hard because I'm going to the gym L consciously because I'm trying to make time for other things but I also need to make sure like I'm not just totally not going so got to get to CrossFit this week and I've been trying to use my walking pad since I've got home so um try to cut like 10 to 15 lbs over the next I'm in no rush to do it but over the next little bit it's probably going to take take me a few months if I'm just like slowly chipping away but uh yeah I just wanted to share that because man I just remember

seeing myself in the mirror I was like okay uh I had a could feel like my my belly hanging over my shorts and I'm like oh nope like we're not okay with that especially because it's not like I'm way stronger I'm like weaker and fatter so a dangerous combination but anyway that's my fat update so um yeah that's that I'll see I'll probably get a couple trips to CrossFit and gets maybe two more videos this week but we'll see how it goes anyway that's the update I'll see you later