BURN OUT as an Engineering Manager: What's Still Energizing Me

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hey folks I am headed home from work it is 7:45 p.m. so it's been a long day um and I am greeted by this continuously beeping car yeah long day uh I was kind of walking to my car from uh the office doors and I was like I'll probably not record anything because I don't really I don't have any questions that I've checked to answer yet today unfortunately I've been at work and I've been busy um and then it's kind of feeling like did a quick scan through some stuff on Reddit just not feeling it um so I was like whatever like I won't record um and then I was like wait a second like you know what like I've been talking a lot about how I've been burnt out and probably sound like a bit of a downer um which I don't like being

in a state like this and I I thought like you know might be actually fun is just to talk about stuff that I'm enjoying doing because I think when I talk about burnout and like you'll see me get in the car and I'm like sorry like I'm just feel like um run down you know uh no energy for stuff there is actually still stuff I'm doing that is energizing me and I I just felt like hey like I I do like over 10 of these videos a week why not randomly throw in one that's just not answering question questions and it's just about stuff I'm working on that uh that's exciting for me and it might not be exciting for you and that's okay uh but I realize sometimes people turn these videos on and they're just like cleaning their house or they're commuting and

it's kind of background noise so maybe that's cool um so I figured I'm just going to talk about stuff I'm building in brand ghost right now because that's the thing that I'm working on after hours that I'm enjoying um because when I talk about being burnt out I'm not like I never want to see a computer again or I hate code it's like no I'm just there's stuff I'm got to work on that is is draining but that means that there are things that I still get to put my time and attention into that I'm enjoying so um I figured let's chat through that now a reminder because I put it in every video right if you want questions answered leave them in the comments sorry I wanted to get through that light um leave your questions in the comments uh or uh send me

a message to Dev leader which is my main YouTube channel and also the social media handle that I use on every site um otherwise it's Nick centino on LinkedIn you can send me a message profile should be open but for those of you that don't know me um I work at Microsoft as a principal engineering manager in substrate I work on the routing plane team currently I've been at Microsoft for just under 5 years and been an engineering manager for uh just under 13 years which is most of my career um but I love to code I love building stuff in c.net and uh so I've been working on this project and the if you haven't heard me talk about it before um because I started taking content creation a lot more seriously in the start of 2023 um I and I had done this

before by the way like had an attempt at it 10 years prior uh I I said hey if I'm going to start taking content creation more seriously I like need to systemize what I'm doing right because content creation is it's a lot of work and I don't want to be spending time and energy on stuff that like uh oh boy figure out how to change your lanes pal um I don't want to spend time and energy on stuff that like needs to get done but is totally draining and like is going to keep me uninterested so if you're not you know if you if you're not a content creator and you haven't really thought through like what's involved and stuff um like I try to put out helpful educational content right so if this is your first video on my channel that you're watching then

you might say well that sounds like because I've never seen you say anything helpful or educational and that's because this your first video here uh but I've done I think almost 500 videos on YouTube now definitely over 450 uh probably close to 500 now if not more and uh blog articles but I had to take a break from blogging uh I post a social media every day um but my goal is just like to to share helpful information for my experience right but the the reality is when it comes to social media um like it doesn't what's a good way to say this even I'm not saying that I am the most helpful person in the world or anything like that but even if I was your content just doesn't show up in front of people right you have to put in a lot of

time and effort to get content in front of people to consume and it's just the the reality of it right so different social media platforms there's different strategies for getting visibility um but it's a ton of work man like you know on YouTube you'll know like you'll notice if you go anywhere on YouTube Every YouTube video has a ridiculous thumbnail a stupid clickbait title and this is just what you need to do on YouTube to get views it's just how it works um you know blog articles and stuff it's like either you're searching for a tutorial or there's like a clickbait title you know like it again there's there's patterns you'll see um social media posts right like if you want to get impressions on LinkedIn and other other social media sites generally you have to have something that's like um like polarizing right so

you have to make you basically make a claim or pit people against each other so they're engaging in the comments and stuff and then you get visibility but like part of me gets super drained by that because I'm like look I just want to just want to put out helpful information and um I just don't want to spend my time in like the what I consider like the parts of social media and content creation right like any time for me on social media that's not actually creating the helpful content is is wasted time so I I realized this at the start of 2023 when I said hey it's been 10 years since I started my blog that was a failure like if I want to do this I know that I have to systemize what I'm doing it's the only way that I can scale

up it's the only way that I can focus on creating content without getting bogged down so uh basically what I do at a high level is like I try to create what is called Evergreen content and if you're not familiar with the Evergreen content is like the concept is like for example a lot of the videos that I create or articles that I write it's information that should be considered ideally I'm hoping it's helpful today it's helpful next week it's helpful a month from now a year from now in X years from now right um obviously some of the videos on this channel that I talk like about Ai and and careers and stuff like in 10 years like the landscape might look very different and someone will say that's very dated but you know tutorials or just like General things about how to approach

your career this is stuff that I would consider is like Evergreen right the the advice I try to give or the lessons are are things that I feel like I could repeat later now with Evergreen content for social media you can you basically can repurpose it you can repost the same thing I could share a Blog link today that I wrote last year right and to give you an example of this I haven't written a Blog article aside from my newsletter since like April of last year and every single day on social media I share a Blog article that I've written so I'm I'm Rel leveraging the content I've already created to post again so in order to get to this kind of scale where I can do this across every single social media platform is that I had to build automation tools and I

when I say automation tools I'm not like automating the creation of my content like it's still me but the posting the scheduling all of this is been systemized I built automation that does all this for me and this automation is through something called brand ghost and so I started building this and then I had uh a couple of friends that I said hey like this is what been working on and like I actually think that we could turn this into into a platform it could help other people so they build it with me now and um so that's high level kind of what led to the creation of brand ghost and um so we have trying to think recently kind of I think we've crossed like 400 people that have signed up for it um it's not like there's a free version of it so

it's not like I have 400 paid users and I'm going to go retire or something like that um but I think there's 400 people that have signed up there's a drop off rate there's a conversion rate to paid users all this stuff um and this is like it's a thing right like it's it's no longer just I made brand ghost and used brand ghost to help with my social media content it's now actually a product that other people can use and they do use and it's super cool because we get feedback from people especially like new content creators where they're like holy like I didn't even realize I almost like I didn't realize I had these problems until like now that I'm using it I feel unblocked like I can try creating other types of content um so like yeah it's it's been it's been

a fun Journey so far and so now it's like we got stuff to build we have user feedback it's like it's no longer I'm building something cuz we had we had this previous product we were building called meal coach and we really struggled to get people to on board right we'd talk to people about it they'd say hey it sounds awesome and then they wouldn't use it so then we were like okay well we don't know what to to build because you said it sounded good but you also won't try it so like we can't iterate now we have people using our product and it's like now we can iterate based on the feedback it's a great spot um so like the stuff that I am currently looking at and this is why it's like you know uh something that's keeping my interest um one

of the things I have to do is look into building a notification system So currently there are spots like because it's social media posting because we have to integrate with a lot of third party apis um because there's a lot of different variations of what kind of data is supported right just to give you an example you want to post a picture to Facebook okay well what are Facebook's constraints on the image size in terms of file size what are there constraints on the aspect ratio what are there constraints on the type of image that it can be and now you take these um these variables these constraints now multiply it across Facebook Instagram Tik Tok LinkedIn Twitter Pinterest Tumblr Blue Sky uh Mastadon like threads right there's there all Discord there's so many of these platforms and everyone's going to have a slight variation

of their constraints now the post length what about videos what about multi- uh media type posts like there's so many different things that can that can be different and then you have things like your authentication runs out it needs to be refreshed like there's there's a lot that can go wrong so what I'm looking at doing is hooking into the different parts of the system we have where we can have these types of issues and I'm going to build in a notification system now um so the interesting thing is that there actually is an existing notification system built into the the ser that we have but it was only designed as a super quick way to get me to get me emails when my posts were not working like it's very specific to me and at some point when we started having other users come

on board I said okay like let me turn this thing off because like the emails that it was generating are they're like they're not okay for end users they're just like data points for me to consume um so like okay there's email support in the server that would be helpful for notifications but the S the design around this is not uh appropriate for for end users so I've been thinking about how tools I use like or even social media platforms the way that they give me notifications right um given given how much I post to social media if every time I posted if there was ever an issue I might be getting like in a day I could be getting tens of emails that are like hey you know on one of these social accounts your your post didn't go out but because I post

like I don't know over at least over 10 times a day across social holy cow like personal Brands business Brands I don't have the 360 CA camera going that person was probably going like 120 130 mph crazy like weaving in out of the cars um that's why it caught me off guard but um what was I saying holy crap notifications oh the the number like of of these failures that I could get they would be so distracting that I'm like there's no way that I want to build that as a as a notification system right to give you an example you make one social media post um another person going like just insane man like I'm already going like I'm not going to say how fast I'm going I'm going fast these people are flying they're going to cause an accident um don't even think

about it don't you dare oh you drive like an absolute you're going to cause an accident so if I were to post to social media based on how it fans out I might take one post and it might go to 10 social media accounts okay now those don't all instantly post at the same time right it's just it it's not how it works I could do them sequentially I could do them in parallel but but it's not going to be the exact same time it's not Atomic it literally cannot be Atomic because I have to go talk to all of these apis that I don't own it's out of my control so the idea is that we make a post and what I could do is every time one of those fails so let's say all 10 fail I don't want to send 10 notifications

out right obviously not that would be terrible so I could aggregate the on a per posting attempt basis I could do that that wouldn't be so bad I would still get a lot of emails in a day if every time I posted one thing failed right like I could still get a lot of emails in a day so then I was thinking maybe what I want to build is something that does notifications that aggregate over time so I'm playing around with this idea where let's say um and I don't know what the intervals are I haven't really thought this through but let's say I have a failure type of event instead of sending the notification right away what I might do is try to have like a window of time that's let's say 10 minutes 5 minutes 10 minutes whatever and in a let's start

with 5 minutes in a 5minute interval I would go check and see how many errors there are and that way I could like group them together to notify as a group right and then that way what I could do is have a back off that says hey look we notified and group together errors once in a 5minute window but maybe the next window is 30 minutes so that it's not like every 5 minutes you're getting potentially some other error it's like doing a back off policy so that you're not getting spammed more and more because if something was really wrong right like if your off expired and we couldn't refresh it it's not like if you had a bunch of posts that were going out you're not getting these notifications like like way too heavy because the other thing is not only do we post

but like we can if you want to build like comment threads on your post we don't Auto comment on other people's stuff like uh generating AI comments but if you wanted to have like a thread built on Twitter or you wanted to like post links in the comments to some of your posts um we can go add the comments on but that's another opportunity for it to fail so the idea like I'm saying is to have a back off policy to aggregate the um the notification so I'm trying to think about the design of this um and the high Lev thing that I'm thinking is that we already have like a a posting history table right so every post that's created at we track the the success of that or if there's an error what the error is what I might do is build another

table that's like a notification table and the I would focus on one type of notification which would be like a post failure so it would look like similar information across those two tables to start with but I'd be putting in like you know we want to have a notification for post failure that way I could build other notification types as well and and um a Tim stamp whatever information associated with it some category and um then I would probably have another process that runs and actually does that um that interval check and again I don't know exactly how that's going to look but it's funny because brand ghost itself has schedulers already like I already have scheduling services and I feel like what I'm what I'm probably going to end up designing is like yet another scheduling service um so I got to give that

some thought there's already like like job engines I use courts.net for a bunch of stuff in brand ghost so maybe I'll make like a uh a quartz.net scheduling engine and that way you can go look across the notifications table and see okay like do we have to batch some of these notifications and send them out like I said I already have the email configuration or yeah to to be able to email out come on buddy there's no stop here you don't have to go so slow um and what I might do is the first step instead of generating emails at all is just uh to like our our development Channel I'll probably just forward notifications into our development Channel and that way I can actually like uh if I realized some people haven't heard this term so it sounds funny I can dog food it

with the team um if you haven't heard of dog fooding like eat your own dog food uh apparently I didn't realiz this apparently it said that at Microsoft this term was coined because I had to explain it to an employee because I hadn't heard about it and then when I looked it up on the internet it said that it's believed that it was point at Microsoft at some point um but the idea is that you're using the product or the service that you're building right so if we can try having the notifications come to our development channel uh instead of being emailed then we can see like does this feel too noisy or is that like a good a good Cadence for seeing this kind of information um I might scrap the whole idea of actually doing the batching and the back off policy see

I don't know um I'm trying to think like I've used zapier before zapier to me feels way too noisy um buffer to me for social media posting when there's errors feels like too almost like too useless I don't and I don't mean that to sound insulting to buffer but like it's like oh no like something didn't work and you're like okay well like what what didn't work what do you want me to do about it like what should I do about it so like the zapier stuff is too noisy buffer just seemed kind of useless um and I just want to make sure that I do a good job with this so I want to make sure I post a ton already and I know there's certain types of posts I do where things aren't configured perfectly and like it totally will fail sporadically on

on some things right because I didn't you know um I didn't optimize all of my content to be the right aspect ratio so it might fail on Instagram cool but like it's posting so much for me so to give you an idea um I told this story before like I went to Hawaii with my wife last October and um was running brand ghost and it made over 150 social media posts for me in the week so like that's a lot of content to go it's only increased since then in terms of the number of like uh sort of posting vectors that I have so there's a lot of opportunity for things to potentially go wrong that I can measure this with so I think that's going to be my strategy but yeah in a nutshell trying to look at doing a notification system I think

that sort of you call them like a sync for the notifications right like the the different ways that you could be notified I'm not hyper focused on that I think email will be the the easy one um we could do like I don't know like some type of websocket thing for people that are on the site but I just don't feel like it's our service our service isn't the type of thing that you're going to be sitting on your phone or at your desktop like I think for the most part sending stuff and like waiting to see the result in your browser like I scheduled a post for next week and I'm going to keep my browser open to see if it fails um probably not so I think email's probably pretty good but we can look at other Integrations and stuff um so that's

why I'm not I'm not hyper focused on like how we send the notification but more about like the the scheduling mechanism for it uh the other thing that I'm trying to be very very aware of is like if we're using email um so if we're using Azure for sending email they already have mechanisms for you know not um like they handle email failures and that sort of uh integration but what I don't want to do is have our notification system say oh here's a notification we have to send and then like erroneously say here's a notification we have to send and it's the same thing like you know what I mean so I don't want our system to tell Azure to go send more notifications that aren't needed um so I need to make sure there's like d duplication that kind of stuff and that's

always like a a fun thing I guess we've already had to do it with our scheduling system I had uh the other part to the Hawaii story that I forgot to mention I've made videos on this if you watch some of the early code commute videos if you haven't I recommend you go back it's I think it's somewhere in like somewhere in the first 30 episodes um I I brought my camera and everything to Hawaii and there was a couple nights where basically we had this incident and our Schuler was busted and we realized that azure was automatically scaling up our backend server which is it's cool that it can do it automatically but like we didn't we didn't explicitly configure it to happen and I just assumed it's going to be a single instance like I designed it that way for now on purpose

I was like I don't have to worry about like ridiculous concurrency things because we're not doing that yet I'm not trying to go make like a you know scalable micr service kind of thing so I'm like I'm going to make you know I can simplify the assumptions I'm making no because by default it was automatically scaling things up and that meant that the single instance scheduler was no longer single instance and so it was scheduling a bunch of stuff so I would have like a social media post go out four times and I was like oh my God this is a nightmare um I can't remember why I was bringing up this part it's been a long day but there was a reason it was a good tangent and now now I'm lost but this person's in the middle of the godamn intersection I tried

to turn around them oh no there's a car behind me everything about this is terrible okay anyway I'm home I'm going to go work on brand ghost for the next little bit before I have to go to sleep cuz that was way uh way more time working today than I anticipated but good news is I got to work with people that I enjoy working with so that's nice you know it's a makes a world of difference when you're working with people that you enjoy so I can't complain about that but man I'm so burnt out so I'm going to work on brand ghost because that makes me happy and I'll see you folks later take care