WHAT TO FOCUS ON?! Starting On A New Dev Team In Big Tech

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all right it is time to head to work it's Wednesday morning December 18th uh got a topic submitted from a commenter so this is from Cameron 2027 apparently also has a vlog kind of like this like a commuting one which is cool um but he has a career question and this is how it goes so I'm an engineer moving to a new team and I want to be able to come in and make an impact rate away at the early stages I think expectations from management are somewhat low so I can ramp up so maybe my are best focus on getting small wins for my teammates question mark improving operational load through automation Etc or is my time simply best spent by just focusing on onboarding learning the code base and the lay of the land stakeholders dependencies Etc so I can just jump uh

so I can just jump right in when it's time and have have it be like I've always been there and uh add it in it's for big Tech I see big Tech and parentheses at the end so I'm assuming that's what that means uh so I think this is a great question um I love this one uh we will get into it I'm just punching in work here um says 40 minutes uh but what did I just see on the map that did not look good ah yes 40 minutes but the entire highway is terrible cool we'll see um a friendly reminder to folks uh if you want stuff disgust at it in the comments you literally just watch me read one out um so I do go through them I try to like if it's worth a conversation whatever I'll reply and uh if

you just want me to talk through a topic I will do that as well there's a couple that are like coming in right now that are like pretty small like I don't know if they warrant a whole a whole like Drive video um so I just wanted to mention to a couple people like if you're leaving comments and if they're kind of like just small questions right now like follow-ups and stuff I might not do a whole video uh or I might try to grab a couple of them and just toss them together and do like a little uh mini entry someone's honking at someone cuz they're just trying to turn left idiots this guy oh man stopped in the middle of a left turn it's all we just got on the road here we just got on the road um and then the other

thing I wanted to mention is that if you have something you want me to talk through and you don't want to leave a comment because it's maybe to get into detail it's kind of like it's private or you don't want to like throw one1 under the bus that kind of thing send me a message look for Dev leader on social media I'm happy to uh you know you can write as much as you want I've had people send me in pretty long emails uh which is awesome uh I'm not going to be upset by that more detail helps me answer questions and for the individual that apologize for not providing enough detail that's totally okay don't feel bad about that it's actually I feel like a good lesson that like if you you know the less detail that you add the more generic the answer

you get so um yeah don't feel bad about that just something to try and think about as you're asking questions okay and final note is obviously my voice is completely shot um so I apologize for that I shouldn't be coughing anymore though I think we're mostly past that it's mostly like throat clears and stuff like that so I think we're at the tail end of it but it's uh kind of garbage because clearly I sound like trash um which is made like I haven't been able to film YouTube videos uh not that I don't value you folks as much but for me to go do like a a paid for edited YouTube video and then sound like this like nah um I don't want that on my main Channel just because this is way more normal right this is way more casual and the final

thing that I thought was kind of funny is over the past couple days I've had people at work making jokes about my voice because I'm clearly like getting over a cold here and I've had two people say something along the lines of like oh too much podcasting or too much vlogging so I think uh I think more people are from work are catching on that I have this channel which is kind of funny not that it's a secret or anything like that but I think it's always funny when people stumble upon this stuff okay so switching to a new team it's big Tech you want to feel productive right away I'll share like I switch teams I know I'm a manager that's not the case for this person um I switch teams at the beginning of this year and I will uh kind of share

what my strategy was and maybe how that might change or look different depending on your style your situation and manager obviously versus a individual contributor but um I think there's still a bunch of like relevant things at least in the thought process but of course like every individual is going to be different right so oh man these people driving today every individual is going to be different um so you know I I would much rather try to give you things to think about and then you can weigh them out for yourself situations specifically because as someone that doesn't know you very well doesn't know your situation very well uh it's not really fair for me to try and give you like you know follow this step-by-step process and in fact I hope that's not what you're after I hope that you can appreciate like you

know General perspective and then trying to to apply that for yourself I think that's a better uh you know thing to be able to leverage so when I was switching teams at the beginning of this year I uh you know still at Microsoft still in the same area but just uh different responsibilities for a different set of services and functional areas of Microsoft 365 still managing so the r is the same got to turn this bloody thing off stop um but kind of moving into a space where it's like I don't know this stuff and not only do I not have the experience like at Microsoft with it but like I actually don't have a technical background in the space that I moved into which is uh I've talked about this before for me at least that's really challenging because when I was managing teams

before Microsoft I had a lot of the technical background I mean I had to build it up over the years but like I was managing teams but I knew the whole code base so that helped like that felt like a superpower for me because I could always jump in and help and explain things um and having that removed makes it very difficult for me but I still kind of approach things at three sort of different either phases or like Focus areas I guess I might say and um one is going to be around people and I think as a manager this is something that I prioritize is number one that may not be the exact same for you as an individual contributor it's not that you should ignore this I still think it's important but for me people are first I need to start um

forming relationships on the team I I need to start making sure I understand people what they're working on what gets them motivated what you know everything building the trust and building the respect from day one making sure that people know that from day one even though if I don't know stuff I'm going to be there to try and help however I can um and that means if I don't know it I'm going to go help to find who does and if I can't then you know I'm sitting down with someone and working on it together with them but I need to be able to build that kind of trust from the beginning uh and that and that's because you know the other things I'm going to talk about if I don't have these two other things at least I can go back and start talking

with people on the team and saying like hey like I'm here to work with you like I'm your manager now and let's go figure this stuff out so the other two areas are going to be about uh like tactical things to focus on and the other is more like strategic and or what I might call like a system level and like domain level kind of thing so for example let's start off with the system and domain level kind of approach for me this is about understanding our um like what is our team responsible for which sounds I mean like you could answer that very succinctly like we are the routing plane okay done like answered um but like cool that's nice what does that mean like what does it mean to be the routing plane oh we we wrote requests whoa you dummy I shouldn't

swear this per there's two left turn lanes and the person to the right of me just m just turned in front of me well whatever this Channel's not monetized I apologize for swearing God not safe my God okay I don't even know what I was talking about now cuz that was totally caught me off guard um strategy domain so get out of here pal um I think these things like when we're talk like for me in this case like talking about the routing plane what does that mean it's like we actually have to start understanding some of the areas not the not the nitty-gritty details I don't need to know the lines of code um it's nothing like that it's more about for example what services do we own is it just one service is it multiple and then start to decompose these things a

little bit right so understanding how things are laid out what are we interfacing with what are these responsibilities are there partner teams that we're you know actively kind of like coordinating with um do people depend on us do we depend on other people so this is very much like a like 30,000 foot View and then trying to start understanding these Pockets a little bit better but it's funny cuz when you get into it you don't even know the individual areas that you have to start looking at right so I get into this space and I'm like okay it's the routing plane I don't know like I don't know number one I don't know like high level how things flow so I have to learn that um and even then like some of that discussion it's like you need to hear it like five times before

you're like okay like I heard what you said the first time but the second time it's making a little more sense and by the time you hear it a handful of times you actually start to feel like you could repeat it to someone else okay so that's part of it but the the idea about understanding these different areas um is invaluable so for me especially as a manager knowing the people first and prioritizing that that's my my number one number two is that I have this sort of strategic or domain sort of understanding um as this might not even be second it kind of has to happen in parallel and I need to like capitalize on when there's opportunities for people to explain this stuff to me for sure but it's kind of always ongoing in the background and I would say now that it's

been it hasn't quite been a year yet but I I think I can say most areas I understand high level most um at least to the the point of someone was like Hey like tell me what what this is like what's the point of this I probably could talk about all of those pieces now but if someone tried to go into more detail I would say maybe at least the feature Crews that I'm responsible for those areas I could talk about okay so that's sort of this ongoing strategic perspective it's a very broad I would I would call it like the breadth approach okay cuz the next part we're going to talk about is depth and that's going to be more tactical and this is where in my opinion for an individual contributor this is where you're going to start to feel like oh I'm

having impact because it's the more tactical things that you can start to realize um the benefits of much more quickly okay so for example I was talking about like understanding the uh the domain that we're working in I'm talking about understanding the different Services we might be responsible for at a high level if you were I'm just going to make this up right as an example if you spent a month doing that and just trying to learn this stuff at the end of one month depending on like how you are as a person you might feel like either wow I accomplished a lot because I learned a lot or you might feel like oh man like I got nothing done like I literally added no value to the team whoa what a morning man this is crazy someone in the person that's in front of

me the person that was in in front of them decided very last minute cuz we're in the fast lane they just slammed on their brakes and like moved over into you can't see it but there's a pile of cars that aren't moving to my right no one's moving at all and this person was like I guess it's time to go over here so they slammed on their brakes to move over I can't I don't know it's just it's a it's a Wednesday I guess it's almost it's almost Christmas we we're almost there um but the Tactical stuff is going to be where I think that um I I imagine and I I don't know this maybe everyone's different but I imagine this is where most people want to start focusing because they want to start feeling productive but I wanted to mention that I think

that like all of these things that I'm talking about whether it's the people on the team learning about them as an IC like I said maybe you pay less attention to this or you invest less time less time into this because um you know if you understand different people on the team their areas of expertise maybe you're like cool like I guess we'll talk more when I start working more closely with you or as I have questions and that's I feel like that might be totally fine but as the em I have to make sure that I'm like I'm forming relationships and investing a lot of time the Strategic part like I said I think that's going to be super helpful for understanding things it will help and enable you to be effective across areas and just general understanding of the domain you're in is

going to be critical but you could get away with having not a full understanding of the domain or not a broad understanding and maybe just a shallow understanding of one small part and you could start to deliver value tactically so I think a lot of people gravitate towards this part um this is probably like it's pretty common I would say where you join a team as a as a software engineer and you'll have people say great like here's here's a small bug to fix here's a small feature to implement and it's just so that you can literally get this momentum going for these tactical things it's small enough it's scoped down right it's probably not urgent or critical but it's probably nice to have okay so probably nice to have and it's that way like what you're doing is still valuable sorry I see messages

coming up on my phone and I'm trying not to read them as I'm talking but it makes my brain stop because my brain is trying to be like don't read it and I'm like but you're still talking so make the words come out of your mouth so a lot of teams do structure onboarding activities like this and I think for a good reason right it's like it's it's probably going to be the I don't know like the the way to get the most Effectiveness out of you right away and probably the most I don't know if I can say like the most learning but you're going to be Hands-On doing stuff right so you're going to be kind of forced to learn what you're doing it's just that it's going to be focused in a small area so back to I wanted to like kind

of give the lay of the land some of my experience like with a recent transition to teams and then and talk about maybe some advice for this person okay so hopefully those three areas kind of make sense now number one thing that I would recommend to this person because they kind of hint at it in their comment and I think it's very good is they say something I don't have it pulled up right now but something along the lines of like I think that the manager probably has you know is probably okay with me ramping up and taking my time on it kind of thing and I would say like my guess is probably yeah but we can do better than that right we can do better than my guess is probably and go confirm this right start from the beginning start from the beginning

get on the same page as your manager stay on the same page as your manager what are their expectations every manager is going to be different this is why it's a funny thing for me to talk about because I will say oh as a manager I like to do this Here's My Philosophy here's how I navigate things if you watch the videos I make and you're like hey that sounds good I'm going to take Nick's advice and do it if you go try it you might come back and say Nick that was a disaster that didn't work at all but the that's because I feel like the only advice that I can give you that's going to be consistent across every manager is go get on the same page as them use that as your foundation okay because I could tell you as a manager

I would want to make sure that you are taking your time to ramp up don't rush through your rampup tasks go a little slower you have to learn what's going on I understand that your teammates are going to understand that generally speaking that's what I have to say now you might have a manager that's at a startup because I have another question that I want to respond to and that manager is like look man we ain't got time for many questions we need you to get started right now you know my expectation is that you are productive right away um that's why we hired you right because you were able to demonstrate that to us so and whether this is good or bad doesn't matter I'm just saying that is their expectation so instead of assuming anything just ask them and get what was that

someone was trying to be cool under the bridge when we're in the TT we can do that I don't want to like try to manually shift down gears and in here to make noise under a a tunnel but in the TT we can it's really cool um so yeah that's number one I would say is like we can just move away from assumptions get on the same page very easy quick to do and you can repeat it okay so number one number two is with let's make some assumptions here cuz we kind of have to uh cuz we haven't talked to the manager of the team I got to find a way to position this visor isn't that is that going to do it something like that so I would recommend uh if I had to split up my time around those three areas I

was talking about as an individual contributor I would probably do like a a a 50 to 60% focus on tactical and the other 50 or 40% on uh like domain SL strategy and people you can actually group those other two things together okay so for example I'm just going to everything that I have to talk through is obviously hypothetical unless I'm giving you a real lived experience but as an example say you join the team and the team's like hey great your environment set up blah blah blah um we we wanted to carve out a couple things for you to start with so here's um this bug fix to go work on okay here's a couple pointers but like you know go you know kind of go learn go explore and and see if you can make sense of this and come up with the

solution for it and ask questions great so you go to do that and as you're navigating that you might have questions about the code base and like things that are going on and I would say this is a great opportunity start asking questions reach out to a teammate and say hey like I'm working through this uh do you think that you could you know I don't know if you depending on the situation you might be like hey could you could you maybe take some time to explain some of this to me at a higher level like maybe it's not specifically about what this line of code does but like why is our product or service doing this in the first place like what's the use case around here and just see if you can ask a couple of questions like this to people on the

team and maybe you reach out to someone they're like hey like I'm not a good person for that but like um but like so and so on the team is so you should reach out to them great so now you're starting to build build up this network of understanding kind of who's a subject matter expert so that's that's great and number two you're forming relationship so even though you're reaching out to someone like you're getting more comfortable reaching out to people on the team number three when you go to reach out to this new person they're going to start to teach you some of this domain knowledge and it might be very high level that's fine maybe you borrow 30 minutes from this person uh on one day and you get 30 minutes from another person another day you kind of spread this out and

start to pick up on different areas of the product or service area um and you might even find like there is value in asking questions outside of your direct immediate like project area so for example I manage a few feature Crews the things that we work on interact together but they are separate services but there's value in understanding the other pieces so once you start to pick up on that and you say oh I know this person works on this other piece it's not directly what I'm working on but it might be good to understand that go reach out to them and say hey can I get like you know can I get half an hour of your time to walk through some of this stuff maybe virtual or inperson whiteboarding could you refer me to uh refer me to some documentation to read through

um stuff like that right come on sq8 move up the license PL says XX 28xx what does it mean should say too slow um man that van is hauling that's not a van that's a Prius is hul in that's a van is that one cough we got one cough in the video it's an improvement um so that's kind of on the on the people side on the sort of domain or like strategic side and I I think like don't rush that stuff chip away at it right make sure you're spending some time in the week doing it and that way it's not like you get six months into the job and you're like man I don't even know anything about what the rest of the team does cuz I've had my head down right um it's not the end of the world if that happens

but like you can actively prevent that from happening just by carving out a little bit of time here and there whether it's reading documentation whether it's meeting with people or doing both right you read the docs ahead of time and then go meet with them to ask more questions I think these are great things but uh I I do think the Tactical part is probably where to spend the majority of your time this is where you can build momentum for yourself and try to like you know navigating the code base is going to be super helpful right I don't know about other people but I find like sometimes I'll jump into a code base if it's new and I'm like I'm never going to understand this this is nuts and then a couple weeks go by and like it's almost like I don't know I

never even had that that thought in the first place there another Mercedes that was trying to drive too fast so we had to we had to sort that out um so I I think there's a ton of value in making sure that you can get comfortable in the code base quickly and that doesn't mean that like you understand every like Legacy piece of code that might be there but like understanding the general layout which which things are responsible for what like getting familiar right you don't have to have it memorized but trying to understand things like oh I know that if we want to start looking at stuff that's for reporting we have to jump over to this area of the code right and if and if I have more questions about that I have to go talk to Jimmy because Jimmy knows the reporting

stuff but at least I know there's an area in the code for reporting cool like starting to kind of uh map that kind of stuff out I think is really important um I wanted to before I get off the highway here I wanted to touch on a couple of things that this person mentioned which was like you know things like automation like hey can I can I start adding value by basically chipping away at some pain points for people on the team um I would say like the answer is maybe but um and like I think that would be appreciated like that's I don't think anyone would be like no that sucks like we don't want your help um but I I think what might be this is me kind of putting my manager hat on is like if those aren't priorities already like if

they have not been prioritized then maybe it's not the most important thing to work on although it might be worth bringing up because if you're ramping up and someone's like hey the only other things we have that are higher priority they require more experience and uh Jimmy's new to the team here and Jimmy doesn't have that experience but remember that thing we talked about that's been a bit of a pain in the butt like maybe Jimmy can go look at you know spending a week in their onboarding to go automate that like that might be a good conversation to have but the point is have a conversation about it that's I mean you know two meta points here talk to your manager and then have conversations about what you're doing so that it's not you're not making assumptions at any point cuz could you imagine

the first say you're doing sprints the first Sprint goes by and people are like hey like you know congrats on finishing your first Sprint and you're like yes I worked on and you say things and then people are like what are those like like where did that come from from um you know it's I think just making sure that you're on the same page is important um and it's such an easy thing to like to do to have conversations about it so might as well um yeah I don't know I I had another video I put out about like how long like what's the expectation for people to ramp up and in that video video I tried to basically say like man it can depend on so many factors generally I would say the expectation is at smaller companies the expectation is higher that you're

ramped up faster and that's because generally again can't make rules for everything generally startups are and small companies are when they're hiring they're like we need this person to be working right away um like we need the value right away because because we're a startup we don't have like you know infinite resources and stuff like that um in fact we have probably negative resources so we need the productivity ASAP and bigger companies again not a rule generally will have uh a little bit more luxury in terms of not feeling like they're going to go under if someone's taking a little bit longer to ramp up um and actually build in some of that buffer where they're like look you know we know that it's going to take a while to ramp up we we factor that in that's part of how we're hiring I hear

the sirens I don't see I don't know if you can hear sirens I might be too quiet oh there they are behind me go go go they're pretty far back let's see if they come through oh oh there yeah they turned nice nice it was an ambulance anyway it's not like the police were chasing me not today wouldn't that be wild for a vlog just kidding I'm too nerdy for that I don't drive that fast they pull me over for saying sir you're driving too slow in your sports car um no but I think I I hope that kind of like is helpful in terms of onboarding and getting started with the team um again my split is kind of like 50 to 60% like get in there um and try focusing on tactical things like the deliverables that you're being assigned and then 50

to 40% on like understanding domain strategic kind of stuff and um and people as well your mileage will vary this this says full this parking garage says full I can literally see everything open there's one car here this thing's there's no one there one car here can you see in here you see those spots that are open how about this spot am mote to back into ready this is the parking garage is full maybe someone needs to update their software I should move over it's not a it's maybe a little bit too generous let's do that again there's not even any cars around me cool okay I hope that was kind of helpful um feel like that drive was quicker than I thought thought say 31 minutes okay um yeah I wish you success in joining the new team you're going to would love to

hear back about how things go after a little while I'm sure you'll do great I think people obviously again it's not a rule but I think for people that are kind of like thinking about this stuff ahead of time like hey how can I be successful doing it the fact that you're thinking about this kind of stuff and like you want to do a better job like I think that speaks volumes cuz I think sometimes people are like hey I'm joining a team I guess we'll figure it out yeah and I mean you will and the team will that's fine nothing wrong with that I just think when people are being proactive about this stuff they're they're consciously trying to like find ways to improve so uh shout out to that person I think it was Cameron 2027 um awesome for thinking through that so

hope that was helpful I will see you on the drive home take care