My Manager Has NO IDEA About My Impact As A Developer [360 Video]

Transcript is auto-generated and may contain errors.

all right folks I'm just headed to CrossFit I got the insta 360 going it seems to have survived a couple of Journeys last week but then we had a ton of snow ton of snow for this area so it was kind of crappy for for driving even if you're someone who's comfortable driving when everyone else is not makes it kind of a a nightmare to get on the highway um I'm going to go to Reddit for the topic today once this person gets past here um and it's going to be something that I've actually had an experience with that maybe like wasn't good and that might be like kind of interesting for me to talk through but um the uh topic is around how to how to kind of work with the manager in terms of gauging your performance when uh they don't have like

either visibility or understanding so the scenario on Reddit that was I didn't like read every detail of it just the high level idea um but the scenario is essentially like someone has a new manager they're not like going to be fully up to speed and they just want to make sure that they can have visibility and make sure that like it's not like they're just being I don't know like zero progress during some time frame no one wants that so um with that said if you want your questions answered uh please leave them in the comments below look for Dev leader on social media send me a message more and more people have been doing that which is great um it's just uh I don't know you can write more and you can keep it Anonymous when you write me a message so happy to

try and help out that way Dev leader is also my main channel so if you're like hey this guy Rambles too much my main channel is all edited down videos these ones are uh well I don't know if I can say not edited anymore when I use this insta 360 but if there's nothing interesting on the drive then I I may not even use it uh like to edit I mean okay so let's talk about it right so you have a man manager that may not have visibility into what you're doing primarily because they're new they don't have an understanding this isn't totally uncommon especially if you are uh working at companies that uh may do reorgs and stuff um like so for me at Microsoft this is something that happened why is someone honking literally the light just wented F and there's a bus

going through the intersection someone could have died if they drove um but yeah like at Microsoft for me this actually happened like almost right away when I joined Microsoft I had a great manager uh that I was working for uh within Office 365 he ended up switching teams I don't know how far in but like it might have been within the first year maybe it was shortly after I don't know it seemed like it was still very early um I think it was within the first year and then I actually had a period of time where I didn't have like like technically my direct manager became my skip level manager before they brought in another one and then at that point it was like okay like I have someone uh my new manager who's great to work for but she wasn't going to have an

understanding of the space we're in so it's a very similar thing that I went through so um I think one of the things that's important is like and this is I think this is just good general advice is like you need to be vocal about impact you're having um as a as a manager for my employees I try to make sure that I'm raising visibility where possible so for example if I know someone's working on a big design for something it's like hey can you you know is there a forum that you could be talking about this more right have we you know this is something that your design does maybe we could talk to this other partner team and see if this is something that either affects them they could leverage like they might be if we talk with them they could become a

stakeholder in this right so kind of increasing the scope um of impact and visibility so there's a bunch of different things that I can try and do but the reality is like you will be your best sort of person to um do what's the word like evangelize like you you will be your best evangelist maybe is the way I want to say that so you want to make sure that you're talking about what you're doing now this can be uncomfortable for people because it doesn't have to feel like you're bragging but even like when I made videos on this idea before like this idea of like brag documents and stuff like the word brag is like kind of what people are suggesting you do but at the same time like brag has this really negative connotation so it's not I don't I wouldn't say brag

it's like promote what you're doing right like raise awareness to what you're doing so I think that's how I would recommend doing that it's like don't try not to think about like bragging so oh I thought there was more of a bus lane I hope I didn't actually cut that bus off sorry the um and there's there's many ways you can do that right so I think the the best one and this ties into the advice that I always try to give in videos when it comes up is like directly with your manager right like making sure that you are using that time with your manager in 101's to be able to create that space to talk about your impact now this can be challenging for people because I think often they confuse that with a status update which I mean they're very related right

you are providing status about the impact you're having but I think it's more about like what you're messaging so as developers generally we think like in terms of everything being super technical right and that's not you know I'm not saying like you should feel bad for doing that we're literally writing code building Technical Solutions for problems like that's it's what we do but um when it comes to sort of talking about the impact you're having you do need to to step back from that right so what I mean is uh if you're talking to your manager about you trying to convey the impact you're having well if you're talking and sharing like I wrote These unit test I I had these commits my my poll request went through like my my changes I don't know like being reviewed whatever um those types of things are

like that's truly just a granular status update and I'm not saying that you're not allowed to or it's wrong to provide a status update like it's not the case but what I'm saying is when it comes to talking about impact when when you get so granular and every time you're talking about what you're doing it's just these little tiny steps that does not really paint a big picture about the impact that's being had so I think that one of the best ways that you can do this is zooming out and thinking about and you need to understand too like why is the work you're doing important like what is the business impact that your that your work has and sometimes you may not know and sometimes that might might be hard to form up but I think that you should put effort into understanding that

this might be something that like you genuinely don't know and I'm not saying like again you shouldn't like you're bad and you should feel bad not the case but if you don't know you should try to get clarity on that talk to the product owner talk to your engineering manager and say like hey I know that I'm working on this thing but like I'm not actually sure that I understand like why this is significant for the customer or for our business right cuz maybe you're doing something that saves money like it could be any any reason that has business impact but if you're not sure I would highly recommend seeking that information out so that you do understand now when you do understand it and you're talking about the progress you're making maybe you're working on something where there's incremental deliveries on it ideally that's

you know structuring work this way is great because you're not waiting like 6 months and then finally you can flip a switch and all of the impact is felt but being able to land things along the way and saying like hey look our goal is a 50% performance Improvement I've I've now officially landed that first uh 5% of the of the game or I've now landed the infrastructure that allows the other people to build on top of that like that is that's an impactful thing right I have now unlocked the next phase of this project that is my contribution to this overall thing which is going to be increasing the performance by 50% so finding ways to talk about your work that way I think is really helpful it takes a lot of practice um you know I have many Engineers on my team that

will talk to me about things like almost purely from a granular status update and uh and I have had Engineers do this in the past too fortunately like I feel like I'm pretty in tune with what the business impact is so I can I can try my best to like to figure that out so it's different in this context of this question which is like my manager doesn't know right so if you're like they don't understand the business impact because they're new right they have to ramp up and stuff and then you're telling them yes like I've I've now completed this PLL request I'm moving on to the next work item they might be like dude I just don't know yet you're throwing acronyms at me you're telling me you're you're coding stuff and like that's all good but like I just don't know necessarily

what that's going to acre to from an impact perspective so you almost have to teach them in this case right so telling them about the impact and then telling like reminding them why so you may and this is I'm going to briefly talk about this a short drive because I'm almost at CrossFit I'll briefly talk about for myself one of the things that I was challenged with was that like sometimes I wasn't fully aware of the actual impact in the gr like the bigger scope of things so my team my feature crew was more aimed around performance optimizations so I understood in the context of my team what I was doing but if I had to zoom out and understand I think I struggled a little bit to convey that and it's because like truthfully I was just starting to find my footing and build

confidence and I would argue that between that and I was given a second team like so I started to understand my first team a lot better like with more confidence but when I was given the second team it was almost like it's going to be really difficult for because I have to reset on that team and and kind of understand what's going on um I found that it was difficult for me to try and like teach my manager about that and that made it hard to convey progress so it's definitely a challenge uh in my particular case I actually feel like I and I'm not blaming anyone um for how this happened except myself I guess like but I I feel like I had a period of time where my career progress has like absolutely halted in fact like even to this day like I've

been at Microsoft for just under five years and uh you know have been put up for promotion multiple times and still have not like been able to to break through that so on my part the feedback is always like there's not enough even beyond my manager not enough visibility into the impact and stuff that I'm having so it makes makes it very challenging but it becomes a very big part so my number one piece of advice here is that like you need to understand why and what the impact of uh your work is just want to make sure this mustang isn't riding my ass when I pull into here especially when I have someone like this who's in the middle of the damn like you got to be pretty stupid to sit in the middle anyway whatever we're here uh um let me collect my

thoughts as I try to park here oh they actually do have spots no one came to CrossFit today okay one sec I don't even I don't even see the lines on the ground I might have to like rep Park I don't know yeah let's readjust that I still don't see any lines oh on the other side I can see them okay um so yeah my main advice here is like you need to understand why you'll probably need to spend some time uh sort of teaching your manager about what these things are until they're ramped up which is unfortunate but I think that's a bit of a reality and then beyond that because depending on your level if it's if you're more Junior often it's uh your manager has a lot more direct say in your promotion so your manager's like always going to be the

one that puts you up for promotion but um if you're more Junior it's like there's less um like red tape so to speak um and then the more senior you get the more the the more difficult it is for your manager to just be able to say like yeah trust me on this bro like they end up that usually has to go like through like a more of a depending on the company you're at right I'm kind of talking for larger companies bit more of a panel of people to review that plus you'll have Finance HR blah blah blah but um it's not just like your manager signing off on it so um if that's the case you want to make sure that you are trying to find these opportunities to talk about your work the uh the impact that you're having outside of that

so I mentioned this in a previous video uh my pm and I for of the feature Crews I manage we're going to start doing a a newsletter more regularly so that we're sharing out with the organization like this is what we are doing you have to remember too as a manager like I'm not doing direct work so I want to make sure that I can raise visibility for what my team is doing number one number two that means that if I am talking about what my team is doing then the you can hopefully assume that by like proximity that I am also trying to help lead those initiatives I'm not just the person that writes the newsletter and says like by the way I didn't actually help with any of this so um those are you know like that's one strategy that we're trying but

think about that kind of opportunity like how do I share this so can I do Tech talks on this topic like there's there's many ways that you could do this and uh you might have to think about like what fits well for your organization and stuff so hope that helps I'll see you next time take care