Chinese Food, Cookies, And Cross Functional Team Challenges

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all right folks stayed a little longer at the office today um so we'll see what traffic's like but so it's uh just after 6:00 so this is a little over an hour than I normally leave so totally unpredictable with respect to traffic I guess but probably going to be pretty bad which is fine um now we have a some meetings that we do with our uh counterparts in China and we got to find a good time to meet obviously right so when you have stuff that's literally completely opposite time zones you got to do what you can so that was today so I could have I guess I could have probably you know jumped the car and taking the call uh but I thought it'd be good cuz there's folks in the office to you know to be present for that and I I think

it was a good decision it was good to talk through some of the stuff that was uh brought up so yeah a little later than usual uh so felt like a pretty long day as a result but um I definitely experienced the this uh effect when you don't have as many people in the office normally and then you bring in a whole bunch of people you might have experienced this yourself if you work mostly remote and you go into the office periodically but kind of like uh all of the water cooler talk so to speak that never happens because everyone is uh remote suddenly when you bring a bunch of people and it's like that happens nonstop so it's good don't get me wrong I'm I'm happy to be able to have conversations with people that um in like a casual kind of way like

it's not not necessarily like a structured meeting so it's good but at the same time like it takes up a lot of time it's just part of it so not the end of the world um and last year when I experienced the same type of thing and I kind of talked about this the other day right but uh when I experienced this before I just had to remind myself like it's okay um cuz it feels like oh no like my day is totally screwed like you know I'm rushing between meetings or basically having to cancel some meetings because conversations are going over and uh the reality is like a lot of the times the conversations that are happening on the spot you're not getting this type of opportunity regularly so I think it's important to like lean into it I got some some guy in

an Acura that's like tailgating me between the light it's like he's trying to accelerate at the exact same time as me so that he keeps the same you know 2T of distance like an idiot he passing me now good get out of here um so silly when people do that um in the S sometimes I I know my wife has has noticed this uh i' I drive well my other car is currently black at the TT uh but it was like a purple color before and it has a really big wing on it so um and it's loud so all of the time I would have people pulling up beside me and like uh you know revving their engine and stuff I once had um back home I had a a van full of University kids like it was like overflowing with with dudes and

they pulled up beside me as we were driving like on a street not the highway or anything and they're like revving the van's engine and it's like some old beater like Dodge Caravan like overflowing with kids and I'm like man this is crazy um and you're like revving at me yeah bizarre but uh sometimes like either driving a loud car or this car I guess uh got some people looking so you you always seem to have people that are like oh like we must we must race B I guess I don't know people are ridiculous but anyway that guy's gone so today was like it was pretty pretty much a whirlwind um really good conversation so I'm happy about that um what did we do we went to um so on Microsoft campus there's a handful of buildings that have like a like a cafeteria

or a cafe right so I'm at the the headquarters so like the red campus and uh by our building there's you know the next building over is a cafeteria so they got uh different stands for lunch and stuff but there's a couple of other buildings that are newly renovated and uh they're a little bit of a walk away so like a 10-minute walk or so and they have way different like food selection so uh sometimes we make a trek out there so today we uh we took the the PM that work closely with a couple of us went for uh went for lunch with him today so he made the Trek um and it's funny like as soon as I walked and I saw Chinese food and I'm like oh man I'm not even looking at anything else I want Chinese food so I did

that don't regret that at all that was awesome and then uh one of our guys wanted to get coffee on the way out so they got this this coffee I'm not a coffee drinker so I don't know anything about it but there's this coffee spot but there's also like a bakery right beside it so I have course can't resist cookies and they had like uh crumble cookie size cookies and if you're not familiar with crumble cookie it's like this uh this cookie store that makes these gigantic cookies and all of the cookies seem like they're almost like half bed like they're super big super soft and they rotate through different flavors every week so they'll have like a a handful of different flavors that they switch through so when they announce the flavors it's like hey it's only limited time before you're going to see

this thing again so it kind of makes you like oh crap I guess I better get in and get get one of these cookies but you'd have if you haven't seen them before you'd have to see them they're huge I think each each cook like 800 calories or something ridiculous so this Bakery had a bunch of stuff but they had some cookies that look like crumble cookie style like huge lot of frosting on them you know you shouldn't be eating it but I saw it and I'm like there's no way I'm not getting that so I had a crumble cookie which is well the equivalent to a crumble cookie so I had like a red velvet kind of thing so good um so we did that for lunch but today yeah it was a lot of meetings we had um meeting with a a partner

team kind of like a with two partners so it's kind of like an interesting challenge where we're working on projects cross team and like trying to get everyone on the same page like this is in my opinion like the most challenging type of thing to work on in software engineering for my own experience like literally you take technical challenges and you like put a team on it like we're gon to we're going to figure it out right like software Engineers are great at solving problems I always say this but we're not good at working cross team it just it's just what happens time and time again it's really challenging so uh making sure that you can have teams understand the requirements and challenges of other teams oh man this Lane is awful you can see everyone passing me right this is the spot this is

a weird part of the highway to explain I'm going to try my best if I stay in this Lane okay so if I don't move at all two exits from now there is a sorry two yeah two exits from now is an exit and the people in this lane from where I am are it's like I can't even it's probably 200 Cars away we're lined up this far to get off the highway now my exit is actually before this one but I have to move over one lane to my right I know this is kind of weird to explain but the lane I need to move over in is also an on-ramp so I'm sitting here in traffic I have a lane that's about to show up on my right where all these people are trying to merge over to the left and I need

to get over to the right so I'm literally sitting in this lineup of cars for no reason and if I stay here it's for no reason I need to get over to this right lane uh I also have a guy on a motorcycle right behind me and no offense against Motorcycle drivers but I I feel like feel like people on motorcycles don't realize that while I understand you have a lot of visibility on your motorcycle I don't want your motorcycle attached to the trunk of my car this person's honking to get in but they didn't have their signal on now it's on come on in buddy okay I got to I got to think for a second CU I got to get over there we go problem solved okay now I'm in my other stupid Lane and just as I predicted I'm going to be

getting home at 7:00 according to this so I really hope my my fast Ling opens up this is why I started this started this little Vlog thing because you got to hang out with me on my stupid drive home I can't stand sitting in traffic I can't stand it it's the it's like arguably like the most unproductive thing you could possibly do I don't mean like the the most like has the most negative consequences I just mean like literally it's a complete waste of time it's so dumb so dumb I think like I'm happy to make exceptions during this week when we have people traveling in because I think it's important to to be able to capitalize on that because it's it's not common but man do I hate this it's no good um so yeah we're working today we had one of these meetings

where we're you know working cross functionally across these different teams different orgs as well so that's the other thing like so kind of picture this right if you have if you have a team you have people working together in a team you can generally understand your team's requirements pretty easily or at least more easily than if you start having multiple teams so now you have to understand more than one team so two three four teams you have to understand those circumstances those scenarios and try to move forward together right if if those teams are at least in the same organization and facing similar sets of challenges you can at least start to align around that where you're like okay I get that we're not the same team but at least we all kind of see these common challenges these common ways forward you know we're

going to disagree on some things here and there that's cool but like you got something common right the further away that these teams are across orgs whatever it happens to be like the less close uh relationship you have just from like proximity of the areas that you work in this problem of getting on the same page just gets complet completely ridiculous it's nuts and it's no one's fault like I'm not I I genuinely like the people that I'm collaborating with uh obviously very smart people they know their areas very well but it's like it just feels slow that's like the the best way I can explain it is like we all want to be making progress and making sure that we can get start like like you know solving the problems we can start contributing to the features and building things out but it seems

so slow and the reason it seems slow is because in our own heads we already understand what we want we've all talked about it within our teams we know what we want to build we know like it if we have these plans in our mind like that's going to solve our problems like we're all like let us go build the things like let us go do it but the challenge is that we need to build it together so now we have to come up with solutions that were solving problems for all of us so it just it just makes it incredibly difficult when you have to try and factor in the priorities of other teams and uh I thought this is important to like to kind of chat through because if you haven't experienced this like it's not easy it's uh I like I said

I think it's the hardest one of the hardest things in software engineering is scenarios like this and the reason I say this right is like let's say for example I was saying in this particular case our individual teams might all feel like we know the technical solution for our problems like we feel like we could come up with a a path forward and just start executing on it so if we just forgot the other teams existed we could be making progress like we could be building these things and they can make the same argument right if our team wasn't present they're like yeah we could be going and getting all this stuff done but when you add in these other requirements you have to get everyone bought in you have to get everyone aligned it it makes it challenging now don't get me wrong I

don't want you to misinterpret that that I'm complaining that uh the thing that we're going to build in the end is not good I think it will be better than anything we could build on our own so that's my point is not to say oh it's a waste of time it's not going to be a good thing in fact I think it's going to be amazing I think we are coming up with a solution that's going to work for all of us it's just that that process is is difficult it's so difficult um you know you if we think about an Ideal World right like we have our own beliefs about the things we want to go build the challenges that we're going to face the solutions that we want to have like what are we trying to solell for all of our different teams

have that and in an Ideal World were able to say look everyone is going to have their needs met everyone's things are going to be prioritized as like p0o they're going to get done right away like that's what we all want I don't think anyone's out there to say like no screw you other team like we don't care about you like only us at all costs like no one's like that so ideally we would all get everything we need with priority but it's just not reality so then it starts to be like okay how do we compromise well okay like if we have this end goal where that's good for all of us okay well in the short term what's good for us right you know we want our stuff first at least um I think we all like naturally we kind of want to

go that way but we all have to kind of look at what's being done and and just make informed decisions that are going to benefit everyone really so it's just not easy I think this kind of thing is like man this guy's a look at this guy coming up beside me like who do you think you are dummies anyway people don't know how to zipper merge he's like trying to get ahead by by moving over Lanes but if you just wait your turn we all get to go um I think this is the kind of project though where like it takes a long time it's it's difficult to navigate but like you know once we hit our stride and once we like once it's done like you know in like a steady state I think this is the kind of thing that feels so rewarding

um because truly the solutions you come up with you're like hell yeah yeah like we did that together and like you acknowledge that it wasn't easy so that's cool so this is the fun part of the highway where I merge over all of the lanes to the fast lane and I have like 10 ft to do it so wish me luck one lane down okay how do we get over two lanes down almost there three lanes and now somehow have to get up to speed we did it yay I hate this it's weird too there's a couple parts of this highway where or highways that we have around here the left lane is a fast lane I've seen some other spots where they have the express lane or like a carpool lane on the far right lane and that makes it really weird because you're

trying to merge onto the highway but like it's also the fast lane and then you're in the fast lane and then you have to like let people like slowly merging on get in front of you it's super dumb and then here given that you only have a short distance to be able to merge like to get into the fast lane before it's like closed off I mean you can literally drive over it you can't see it but it's like uh two two double solid lines it's illegal to cross it but like nothing stopping you so the distance that you have to get into this spot is so short that it's like you kind of have to drive like a a bit of a jerk to get over but anyway um that's that now we're here and now it's only only 30 minutes to get home

but we'll see hopefully this time drops remember it was going to take 52 or 55 minutes or something 7:00 was the target uh 656 now was the target so we'll see um something else that was super cool today and we'll see so um I I was talking with my pm and then someone walked up and caught me off guard and I was like like who the heck is this person like why are they familiar and then I realized who it was I'm not going to say anyone's names just cuz it doesn't matter but um so different different PM from a different team came up and uh you know was saying hey and we're just catching up briefly so uh this is like um this is just like a really cool thing to hear for myself but uh he was saying you know he said Hi

and then was introducing himself to my my PM I'm assuming they know each other cuz they were talking like they know each other maybe not but um he was saying like yeah I worked with Nick on this project and uh he said like I don't know exactly how we framed it but it was along the lines of like like if it weren't for Nick we would have been we would have been stuck like Nick really stood up for our team made sure that things were progressing um and it was cool because like he didn't have to say that um obviously like I didn't ask him to say that or anything so it felt good to like to hear someone else kind of recognize that I was trying to do this type of work and I'll talk about this briefly cuz this is another kind of

the theme of I guess this conversation will be like you know cross functional projects and this was just another example of a bunch of teams working on a common goal and when I I spent a lot of time at startups right so I had like eight years at a company before Microsoft that my My ultimate goal was just like I don't know if I can swear on YouTube but I think I can say I think is okay to say but for me it's like a get done mentality like a bias for Action let's keep going and this all comes from the fact that when we were a small startup you don't have the luxury of not having a bias for Action you can't sit around forever and just like hope kind of like this person in the fast lane who's not driving fast there's literally

no one in front of you buddy okay get that out of the way um so yeah I had I just realized I don't know probably seem like a total when I'm driving like this but this guy is driving like under the speed limit in the fast lane so um yeah so being at a startup it's like always a bias for Action because you don't have the luxury of just like you can't wait for Perfection right you have to get stuff shipped you have to get it in front of users you obviously don't want it to be broken and busted but like you have to you have to keep moving so you do this and anytime you're hitting these roadblocks where it's like oh we can't do anything it's like that's just not an option it's not an option to say oh like we have to

wait for forever to get an answer or we can't reach a consensus it's like guess what you can't reach a consensus doesn't mean you're not taking an action something's got to happen so this was always the mindset right hey like our team doesn't own this it's like yeah that's too bad like you wear all the hats when you're at of startup and I could tell by the time that I left working on a startup especially newer people coming into the company as it was growing like I was like employee number eight it was like over 250 people when I left so you start to have people that don't understand what it's like to be at a tiny startup so I could see this kind of thing happening all the time where hey like not really our responsibility like that's another teams kind of thing and

like it just doesn't work with me like I I don't I think it's just an excuse like that's just not okay and don't get me wrong I think you need to balance your team's priorities but at the end of the day there needs to be a bias for Action so sometimes it's going to mean like yeah our team is doing stuff that like we don't own it but it's ultimately moving the needle in the right direction for the company and I think that that's important when when managers or teams are like no we can't we don't own it we want nothing to do with it like that's you know Hot Potato pass it to the next person and then they do the same thing like not a good spot to be um the flip side of course if you're listening to this and you disagree

with that logic I get that you don't just want to be a pushover and say okay we'll do anything that people give us you have to prioritize things don't get me wrong but I think um constantly putting your hands up and saying like not us like too bad it's a problem so in this team situation that I want to kind of through was like there's a lot of that going on and I think part of the the challenge was like every team had a piece a piece of the the puzzle to own okay so every team's got some responsibility and this is already like an additional load on the teams so it's kind of like a virtual team if I can call it that right so all of these teams have a couple of Representatives that are contributing to this big project and trying to

make any progress on it at all was already like extra overhead like we're already being stretched too thin to go work on this now you layer on especially because there's a lot of platform teams you layer on a team going well like we need we need this team like we need your team to help and you guys got to do this and I totally get why every team is like no not our problem it's like we don't even want to be here in the first place and I don't mean that to suggest that people didn't believe in the project I mean that people felt like they had too much stuff to do right like there's a lot of things going on and it's easy to have this feeling of like oh you're like you need help with this project like so do we like go

go figure it out basically we're too busy figuring out her own stuff so I get why people are like that so for me I was just so sick of going to meetings and feeling like I was sitting around for an hour and then having this conversation with people where it's like yeah like I think we get it but like you know not our problem and or yeah we think we get it but like we it's we're not going to get to that it's not a priority and just like not having like a like a unified view of what the goal needs to be for all of us to make progress because each team is so focused on their own deliverables right like that's that's the challenge and um yeah so in this particular case like I said I I was kind of getting sick of

it so I had to basically put my hand up for my team and say look like this other team uh from without getting into the details of everything I'm like based on my understanding of what's going on here like this is a partner team we have we are absolutely going to like stand up for what they need and selfishly the things that we are trying to do and deliver on we can use them as like guinea pigs so to speak because they want our support they want us to go build the things they're eager to be the first ones to use it like this is going to be selfishly a good relationship for us as well so we can literally help them and they will be helping us in return the other thing that we can do is now we have uh it's not just

our opinion when we're going to other partners and asking for help we don't just say hey can you guys do this for us because like we want it no we say we need you guys to do this because it's blocking us from being able to deliver for another partner so instead of it just being like we we want this thing from you it's like we need this and we will need to escalate it because we can't deliver on our promises so we can start to illustrate more of like a call it like a chain reaction or like a you know like a dependency graph of like what's got to happen so it just makes negotiating a little bit more tangible where people would say like hey like we have priorities too and like we think this is more important cuz now I can say look

like if we don't get this stuff done that's also going to block this other team and here's how important their stuff is you got two teams who if you just help unblock something you have two teams that can make progress so that's kind of how I was approaching things and really just trying to make people like stop making the excuses of like like like corporate Hot Potato right like not for us to worry about go find someone else to help hated that um I say hated that like I still I still hate it uh but I you know I I say past tense in this case because I I truly think that we made a lot of progress on that and developed a really good partnership that way so in in this case for me it was uh just a really feel-good moment to have

someone kind of like they recognize that as part of our working relationship so that was cool so he did say he was going to subscribe to my YouTube channel so I think uh he's subscribed to the main one I have no idea if he'll ever watch this one he might not even know this channel exists um but I wanted to you know I I just wanted to kind of say out loud like I appreciated hearing that because it's not the kind of thing like I need my manager to give me a pat on the back and say good job for helping navigate conversations like that it's just part of my job I got to do that um but I think it was just for me it felt good because that is part of my role I have to get it done but I don't know

if people see it happening if that makes sense uh so it's kind of cool that someone acknowledges like thank you for stepping up to do that because I saw it as a problem and I saw what you did as a positive uh step in the right direction so that was cool um but yeah I think so he was we were talking about content creation because he was laughing he like oh I see your stuff on LinkedIn I was like sorry if it's feels spammy to you CU I get that like I post a lot but uh he was like no no like tell me your YouTube channel so told them and then we had this funny moment because he was saying like from content creation he was like hey did you see did you see this guy who posted this thing on on Twitter or

LinkedIn and I I as soon as he said it I knew exactly who he was talking about he didn't say anything besides that before I knew who he was talking about and um he then went in to go explain what the post was about and it starts off by saying something along the lines of I used to work for a CEO who seduced my wife and I was like dude dude dude I said I know who it is I said in fact I know today so today's Tuesday I was kind of thinking I'm like today's Tuesday I said Thursday said you just subscribed to my YouTube channel so um Thursday is the day where you'll see I have uh I actually interviewed him and I had scheduled the interview with him well before um that happened like two a week two weeks before and and

um so his name's Ethan Evans and like I didn't I didn't bring it up in the interview because I I think he really got as you might expect he got like he got a lot of people like saying really mean stuff to him and and things like that but as a content creator like people got to realize that first line that's your opportunity to catch people's attention and oh boy did he catch people's attention so I didn't want to like you know I didn't want to start the interview and being like so like tell us all about that um cuz I feel like that was probably uh he was probably done talking about that but uh I thought it was really funny so anyway that interview I really enjoyed that interview Ethan was awesome to talk to um you know it was really cool to

hear his journey he went into uh a bunch of like but cool conversations about like stuff that he's done done in his career and uh sorry just try to turn right here and had to watch a couple directions um but yeah like you kind of get to hear high level from him about how he worked at some startups and how he went through and started working in Amazon and kind of just I don't want to say it was all luck like that's terrible to say cuz obviously he had to work for what he was doing but um kind of like had some forunate situations that he was able to capitalize on and it's awesome so um super cool like career journey I I thought so um and yeah I just really enjoyed the conversation so that the goal that we set out for in that

interview cuz I always like having a couple topics that I want people to like be able to to focus on like I want to know what you're all about when you come on and speak to me on my podcast because I want to focus on that stuff with you I don't want to like Grill you with questions and it's really weird I I want you to be able to talk about the stuff that you're excited about right so uh he was uh saying we should talk about like from the perspective of Executives and Senior leadership like what are what are we looking for in in software Engineers especially like more senior software Engineers so we got into some of that which is super cool um I don't think you'll hear anything that's like super Sur surprising there like I think the the things that he

was focused on at least from my perspective I was like that all makes sense like I align with that it wasn't like some some super secret thing like all the all the executives and Senior leadership have secret things they look for to in Engineers maybe I shouldn't be telling you that maybe I should tell you it's full of full of secrets you should go watch that podcast on my other channel um no I don't lie so um no it's a good conversation though uh I like I said I really enjoyed talking with him and uh I do recommend you check it out so on that note I got I had like a huge backlog of these podcasts to get published and just felt terrible that like I was falling behind so I think some people might have had to wait like a month to get

their podcast up and usually I like I was doing it for the next week but I had so many podcasts that I hadn't edited um and had to send them all over to my editor and we we kind of had uh we talked about it we had a bit of an agreement that like they don't need to be heavily edited like you know slap the intro on it's like it's stuff I can do uh but I just said like I don't want to have to worry about it it's just more work for me to do and uh and he does an awesome job and his rates I'm very happy with so uh so kind of delegated that work to him this this light green there's a big van in front of me I can't see so seems like he's waiting um so yeah I think

I've already talked about the other day I talked about the the interview I did with Rita uh who was an actress and organized a theater uh for like 8 years like I think that's a I really like that conversation that was super cool um I got a couple more lined up but now I'm kind of getting to the point again where I got to start scheduling more of them so um so I'll be doing that I got a reach back out to uh David Fowler so um some of the some people might not know like the different net and like sort of Microsoft celebrity people but like I interviewed uh Scott Hanselman uh really love that conversation but I had also had David Fowler agreed to do a chat and uh I remember when I was talking with Scott because he was apologizing about the

scheduling and stuff because it's he's super busy guy um so he was like hey sorry he's like I actually am usually very uh prompt with getting these things scheduled and there was a couple things that were going on so he was like I do apologize cuz that's not that's actually not normal for me and I said no worries and I was mentioning like I you know wanted to coordinate with uh David Fowler who also agreed and he gave me he was like oh like by the way like here's probably why uh if he seemed a little bit Mia like pretty good reason so uh I think probably Tye I reach back out to David and see if he's cool to do a chat um so if I'm not mistaken David Fowler basically is the author of nougat so if you're a net developer you probably

know what nougat is for all of your package management and I think he's also the creator of signal R which is pretty cool uh and he is also I don't when I say the author by the way I don't know like other people that were involved they don't mean to say that there was no one else it's not fair but I think the same thing for Aspire so doet Aspire David Fowler is the um sort of the creator of that or at least the person who's leading it so all all like super ridiculously impressive things uh in the CP and.net ecosystem but that will bring to parking at home so going to back up the wife is home she's probably like where the hell were you cuz I'm usually home by now so I don't blame her for that it's a very late one for

me but that's that thanks folks I will see you next time take care