How To Scale A Software Engineering Team With No Resources

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Hey folks, I'm just leaving CrossFit. We are going back to this email that was sent into me around engineering management topics. Um, like I said in the last video, if uh you're not an engineering manager, I still think this is uh very relevant to a lot of people. Um, especially when you're trying to have some insights as to like what the heck's going on because I feel like a lot of the time, you know, people people kind of just like observe the the end result of what's happening in the environment around them and they're not I don't know like you can speculate about what's happening but sometimes if you haven't been going through what middle management is trying to do to help make things work then you don't really have the same insights. So I always feel like this kind of stuff is helpful to talk through.

Uh I very much appreciate having transparency with my teams and you know if they have questions I want to make sure that I can try and answer. So I feel like this is a good thing to go through. But um this individual has sent in a list of questions. Uh the background is that they're a new engineering manager. So they've been I think they said for like over a decade like 13 years or something as a software engineer and now they're an engineering manager at a startup and this is a very new thing for them. So they have a bunch of questions that are around like how do I how do I do this effectively right? So, um definitely a unique transition when it comes to roles, but the question that we're going to focus on is around sort of um the staffing of the team and the I don't have it pulled up in front of me cuz I'm driving, but the breakdown of the team.

It was like I think they had two graphics designers. They had one or two QA. They had a uh two front end two front-end developers and one backend developer, something like that. Um the ratios are there's something like that. I might be off by by one here and there. Um so they have a team that has a composition of different roles that aren't just, you know, a team of developers kind of thing. Um which I don't think is that uncommon. Uh I think maybe the ratio of non-developer roles to developer roles overall is a little um skewed perhaps like two like just as an example, right? Two UX designers on the team. Is that totally necessary? Not sure. Um I like in my experience that's that sounds like overkill to me, but I don't know what they're building. It's not really fair for me to say.

Anyway, they're in this situation where they're like, "Okay, I feel like we need more help on the team. They don't have senior developers." So, they said everyone's kind of like junior to midle. There's no like senior strong tech talent. So, that's one thing. Um, there's no budget to hire. So, that's another thing. They said it feels like the founders keep trying to like find I don't know if if I'm going to phrase this right, but it's almost like find their friends or find friendlies at least where they are trying to to hire them in, but the manager is like, man, like I have to pay attention to this because the the quality of the candidates is like not okay. So, it's like there's no budget to hire except when the leaders are trying to like basically say like, "Hey, like bring this person onto your team." Which feels a little weird.

So, they're in this, you know, classic situation. I got to honk at this person. Come on. Come on. It's a green light. You're on your phone, dummy. I can see them holding their phone up. My green light was green for like eternity. Um, so yeah, they're in this position like at a startup, right? There's tons of stuff to do. There's tons of stuff to do all the time. And um, can't scale the team. They don't feel like they have strong talent. Like basically, how the heck do you try to manage a team and, you know, look at resourcing? And I realize some people don't like that word when it comes to people, but like you know staffing a team to be effective and productive when you can't really hire people. So um this is basically the story of a middle manager's life. So welcome to the party.

The um the reality is like couple things, right? I think of course you want to continue to raise awareness about the need for staff if that's if that's your um sort of analysis of where your team's at, right? If you're like, "Hey, we need either more people or we need more experienced people or we need a particular type of role." I I think even if there's no budget, like I think that it makes sense to continue sharing that analysis. Okay, the you have to level set your expectations with your manager, right? right? It goes both ways and um you need to make sure that like you understand if there is no budget there's no budget but I don't think it's a good idea to drop awareness of that that you need you know different staffing needs that you have different staffing needs I think you

need to continue to raise awareness to it but it's like you know you also acknowledge no budget okay just raising awareness um the reason I think this is important is because Um, in startups, especially when things are more chaotic, this is the same at any company really, but especially in startups where there's a lot less structure. Um, everything is on fire, everything is the highest priority. And when you have basically leaders in place that are like, you know, piling on different work streams and stuff because like I said, it's chaotic. Um, one sec. Let me get a lean over here. Um, when you have all of that going on, the reality is you cannot do it all. It's obvious, right? Like no, no one no one thinks that it's possible, but it seems like no matter what, we we continue to operate in ways like this.

And it means that you need to be able to say no. And people get worried about this, right? Because imagine saying to your boss, "No, right?" Like, "No, you got to tell your boss, yes, you're supposed to make your boss's life easy. You're supposed to be delivering value to the customers. You're always supposed to be pushing forward." But sometimes that means you have to say no. But I always like giving options when I say no. So, this is my strategy at least. Um, if we're jam-packed, we're, you know, understaffed, we are overloaded with work, everything's the highest priority possible, which is a pretty common scenario as a middle manager. This is just how it seems to be all of the time. Okay. So, I have someone that comes to me and they say, "No, this this thing right here, highest priority thing. We got to get that done now." I go, it's either no because I disagree and then I give them evidence or you can do it this way.

You say, "Sure thing. If that's the absolute highest priority, no problem. We will uh we'll pivot people over to work on that." So, um here are your options for what you can trade for that. Right? So, you can either we can get this work done, but you don't get this or you don't get this or we delay this other thing. or some other combination, right? You give them options because a lot of the times what happens is that the people who are introducing the new highest priority thing, that's the top of mind for them, right? That's all they're thinking about. So, you have to kind of put in front of them like look there's not enough people for this. So, that means we have to trade the work we're doing. So, to this person's question in the email, like how like for staffing a team, you know, you can't hire, how are you going to do this?

I think one of the things you really have to get good at doing is being able to put in front of people making prioritization decisions, their options. Because the option that doesn't exist is do it all. And unfortunately for you as an engineering manager, you have to be able to get good at explaining that. Now there are periods of time where cuz I have worked at a startup. I worked at a startup for 8 years. There are absolutely times where you're like look this is supposed to be out of the ordinary. We really need more for this short period of time. I realize we're at capacity, but we need to dig deep. We have to get this done. If you're managing a team and they are constantly in that state, there is absolutely no way in hell that you can sustain that. So, when something actually comes up that actually needs people to dig a little bit deeper, no chance, right?

They're already exhausted. They're already burnt out. You can't get more out of them. They're going to be disengaged. Like you drive them into the ground. You know, it's just it's not a good recipe. If you're able to find a good healthy balance for the majority of time and people if you built trust and respect with the team what you are able to do is when there is some should be very exceptional case we need extra help then you'll have people that can get rallied behind you right this is like what I would say when that works it's because you are leading the team right People are following you because when you say something like that, they trust you and they believe in you and they respect you. They believe you that it's not going to be every time. They believe that it's an exceptional case. It's a really nice BMW there, a Z4.

Or do we call them I'm in the US. Do we call them Z4s? That sounds wrong, but it's nice. Hard top. Oh, yeah. Looks good. Um, so yeah, like the the sort of the the ant or the the inverse strategy is not like hiring more people. It's getting better at saying what your tradeoffs are. So I think that's a really important skill to build up. The first thing I said though was raising awareness constantly. Next thing that I want to talk about is like you have people on the team, okay? And what's happening is that you're acknowledging that there's gaps and like seniority and that kind of thing. So I think you need to play into people's strengths. This is what I would recommend at least is like create those opportunities for people that are on the team to shine in different areas. So there's a a term that I really like that I was coached on early in my management career called situational leadership.

Right? Everyone is unique. Everyone's different. You cannot use a cookie cutter to lead every individual on the team, to manage every individual on the team. So if you understand at an individual level people's strengths, weaknesses, what gets them engaged, right? All this stuff, try to draw out the strengths of the people that aren't senior because you don't have senior people. Try to create opportunities for the people that are hungry. You have to find out what gets them engaged and motivated though, right? If you don't, how do you create those opportunities? You don't know what you're creating opportunities for, but basically building that understanding of the team, creating those opportunities. People will rise to the occasion, right? Not everyone, not everyone will. Some people are very content in their role, and that's totally fine.

But I would wager that many people if you give them a challenge that's exciting for them plays into their skill set or plays into their like the growth opportunity they want plays into something that gets them really engaged like leverage that put that opportunity in front of them. Let them step up and take ownership and drive something. You will create people that operate at a more senior level. Right? the the thing that like I reflect on and I was thinking about this when this person and I was reading their email talking about not having senior people on the team that kind of stuff. I uh when I worked at this digital forensics company early on, right? Um we had one person on the team that I would say was like a senior engineer. Everyone else is just like fresh out of school or interns. And we had a guy on the team that was a senior engineer.

And um you know I'm not when I talk through this I want to be very clear. I'm not intending to speak ill of this person by any stretch of the imagination. My point is that we were a very very very junior team and we had one guy that was more senior and we were building stuff all together. This guy ended up um leaving. So we are still like an like and as the company is growing right there's more people coming in some have you know a couple years of experience outside of uh of our company but overall like a you know very junior team and we did just fine. We did just fine right? You had people that were motivated to go solve hard problems. Did we make mistakes? Hell yeah. But it was also the right set of people that when we're making mistakes, we learn from them.

Could you shortcut some of the years? Sure. But some of those lessons, like honestly, some of those lessons you kind of have to learn the hard way, unfortunately. The other thing that would happen that I observed is we would bring in more senior people. And people like to think that this is like a, you know, I'll kind of speak to the um the CEO where I used to work. And again, both the founder and the uh CEO, so that's the CTO and CEO. I've said this in other videos, I will say it every time I talk about working there. I love these guys. I think they're amazing and I owe a lot of my like my entire young adult life was dedicated to working for these guys. Okay, like could I have nothing against them at all?

I want to talk about the mindset of the CEO uh during you know working for them though around hiring and I he would always uh use this phrase of like we got to build our bench strength and um I think maybe at the time I was thinking like bench pressing because that's really what I would care about. But he's talking about it's a sports analogy which I don't know anything about sports. So um we have to build our roster. we have to bring in the strong players. This was his idea, right? We we're a growing company. We got to bring in A players. But what was happening was that we would often as a company we would not identify a players internally and give them opportunities for things and instead we would try to bring in air quotes a players and we would miss so many times.

So many times someone was an industry expert someone was a professional. someone had a great track record, they'd bring them in. And what that person would start to do every single time would start saying, you know, have this mindset, great, I'm the A player that's brought in. I'm the senior engineer. I am the I am the architect. I'm the master salesperson. I'm the expert marketer. every single time almost. There's a few exceptions would start driving change and that change would backfire almost every single time. the leaders that came in and were the most effective and I'm talking about leaders here but I think this applies to same concept of bringing in senior engineers is like the people that were most successful coming in were the ones that like took a step back observed and then tried to drive influence and drive change over time not

to say great now that I'm in here's how we work it would fail every time and it would fail Because we were already doing awesome And when I say we, I mean like as a company, like I worked in engineering, of course, but you know, sales, marketing, like everything was working really well. It was it was it was all moving forward and you would bring in these external people who thought that they had to make change and really if they just would have not been hired, things would have been better. So my point with saying all of this is that when you're thinking like we need to bring in seniors, we need to bring in seniors. It might help, but like I don't necessarily think that's the answer. I would say create the opportunities for people, right? It means more work on you as an engineering manager cuz you have to go do work to figure those things out to create those opportunities to really help people get their to the next level.

But um I would say like if your goal is like like why do you want a senior engineer? Like it's a it's a question that I would ask. I understand that you want to round out the team cuz I would think that having um you know sort of a spectrum of levels for software engineers like that would be ideal on a team you know from interns or juniors up to you know more like whatever however you want to level your engineers principal staff whatever at the top. Um having coverage would be great but like what problem are you trying to solve right now? Do you want a senior engineer because they're going to do more work? Do you need architectural guidance? Like what what problem are you trying to solve? Because I would say I I wonder if you're using a senior software engineer as the wrong tool to solve that problem.

Maybe you just need a different tool. So I'm about to pull in at home here. Um just to recap, uh keep raising awareness, right? Because as things change with budget and stuff, you don't want to be starting that conversation from the beginning or doing your analysis from the beginning. Make sure you're staying on top of how you think that team should grow and scale. Second part was around um you don't have more uh people, you can't staff up. Great. Okay. You have a capacity for the amount of work that can get done. How are you going to push back? How are you going to communicate trade-offs? Because guess what? You're a middle manager and that's what you get to do. That's the the fun part, right? Is all the So, get good at that because that's going to carry you. And then the last part was really just around like what does it mean to bring in more senior people?

Why do you need those roles? What problem are you actually trying to solve? because I think that you might want to reflect on that. But uh overall it's uh these are great questions. I love them. So I hope you found that helpful. You know if you're not an engineering manager would also be curious to hear your perspective and a friendly reminder to everyone that uh this question is driven by your this question this channel is driven by your question. So if you have questions about software engineering career development send them in at the comments or do as this person did. reach out to me on social media, you can send me an email, you can contact dev leader on any channel you want. Um, and the code commute website at code commute.com is very soon going to have the um, the question submission form. So, you can check that out there.

And on my main channel, Devle, I'll show you all the YouTube videos for how I vibe coded the whole thing, which was uh, it's a pain in the ass. So, I'll see you next time.