Struggling To Meet Senior Engineer Expectations (Or Is It Just Ramp Up?)

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all right it is Friday the 3rd of January 2025 um I am using a bit of I guess it's a a lunch break um I don't know it's a little bit after lunch and I haven't eaten so it's probably a good reminder that I should get something um but I had a question that was submitted to me um this is on LinkedIn which is great super thankful that someone you know felt like that I would be able to help with this kind of thing so I'll answer that I didn't get to go to CrossFit this morning cuz I am getting sick again I think it's like the same thing that's like coming back so I apologize if I have to cough and stuff but um I think this is a really cool um it's a when I say a cool question I don't mean because

someone's facing a challenge I think it's interesting and I think this will resonate with some folks actually so um let me dive into the question and then I'll talk about a few different angles that I want to approach here so um someone submitted this they have uh you know between four and 5 years of professional experience so they're uh at the point where they were brought in as a senior as an individual contributor so they're working at a tech company and they're they're saying that the work itself is challenging but also like manageable right so it's a good amount of challenging it's not like oh crap I have no idea what's going on or so easy where they're like whatever this is this is Trivial so I feel like that's a good spot to be in and then they said that they've um they're kind

of getting the impression that they're not they're not really meeting the expectation of a senior and and their manager was actually transparent with them when they they asked about it and they and the manager said like no but the manager did say um you are still ramping up and I think I have to scroll through this to find uh I think it's been a couple of months it probably says in here sorry I I might be missing that but it's been the even the manager is saying they're still ramping up and the manager said but I can see that you are on the right track and this is like you know I'll jump in right now and say like I've I've absolutely had situations like this with individuals on teams where it's like their initial ramp up period is going to feel like yeah they

might be operating sort of at like a junior level in terms of output productivity or whatever else because they are ramping up and you know I've had those conversations and set those expectations for people to say hey look like yeah the expectation is much higher but that's not a problem at this point because I can see the progress so I just wanted to kind of jump in right from the beginning and mention that so um okay and I and I can see there's a it's not a number of months but I guess it's been yeah like two three months or so let's say so um what else are they adding in here so this is great when people write in they provide a lot more context so I'm I'm guessing less at like what things to touch on here so um they're kind of talking

about some of the things they've been working on um and a couple of like even from reading this it's been a couple of months and they're doing some experiments they're prototyping things trying things out um some things aren't working which by the way like when you go to do this type of stuff that's going to be expected sometimes it's not like hey go deliver this feature by a certain date have it done it's like it's an experiment a prototype of Spike sometimes it'll be called you should expect that sometimes these things will fail but there's like all this learning that goes along the way and uh that's not uh you know not a waste of time necessarily if these things are time boxed so they had a couple things like that they were working on um and then they're kind of saying that they're reaching

a point where they're one of these projects that's coming up is potentially bigger okay and that means that they're potentially going to need to recruit some people to go to work with them on this I don't necessarily understand the scope in terms of cross team or uh just within the team but looks like they're going to need some support with going to build out whatever this Project's going to be so this is one part of it because the question that they have is kind of like what can they be doing to get more on the senior path so they're talking about some projects and where they're at and then the other thing that I wanted to to bring into this because this is really important and I feel like a lot of the time people forget this kind of stuff unfortunately um but the other

thing that they're mentioning is sort of this work life balance is going on so so um their family has expanded so congratulations that's really awesome to hear um and you know I don't have kids but I know I know that because I have a niece and nephew so I get to to see it sort of remotely when I'm uh Skyping my family and doing check-ins over the past you know 10 years um I know it's a lot of work I can't imagine exactly how much work cuz I don't have the kids but um I know it's a lot of work and that's going to mean uh different you know stressors pressure in life like all these like your life changes right so I understand that um and then they're also mentioning that there is a really significant time difference and that's important so it's almost

uh I think they say 9 hours here so 9 hour time difference from the rest of their team okay so we have time zone differences we have work life Balan things to consider and then we have this ramp up period where they're trying to feel or senior so three different elements I think this is super cool we're going to dive into it and this is my reminder to you that if you want questions answered leave them in the comments or like this person did find me on social media look for Dev leader or on LinkedIn it's just Nick centino I think this person was able to message me my my uh profile is premium so you should be able to reach out um and then leave you know as much detail as you want obviously this is super Anonymous I'm not giving any other Det

detail about this person um and I want to walk through this cuz I'm hoping it's going to be valuable um second reminder here too is just that if you like this type of stuff uh my main Channel Dev leader on Mondays at 700 p.m. Pacific I do have a live stream so if you want to tune into that be awesome to see you there you can like the goal of that is that I'm engaging with the chat so that we can have conversations like this and because I'm not in the car I literally sit right here when I'm doing the live stream so pretty convenient and it won't over my lunch break at work so um okay where to start with this I think the first thing that's really good is that this person had a conversation with their manager and I wouldn't end it

there okay so they reached out they kind of brought it up with their manager hey I feel like I'm not really meeting expectations this is good to be able to have this conversation okay but just don't let it end there it's not a one-time thing this is a regular type of thing you should be doing uh doesn't necessarily mean that it needs to be every day every week or whatever but if you're feeling like you have this well if you have this feeling that you aren't meeting expectations try to level set on them it's great that their manager was transparent and said no not meeting senior expectations right now but right and this is the really positive part which is like I know that you're ramping up and I actually think that you are on a good pace for this so this is all very

reassuring the part that's missing in my opinion is like well what else needs to be done so the manager acknowledges that there's some ramp up going on great they say that things are on the right track great but what are the you know if when we're looking for feedback we should try to be specific as much as possible and I will even say as an engineering manager like this is it's difficult for me to do this sometimes so I'm not trying to you know poke at their engineering manager and say oh they should have done this better but um like what specifically are they noticing that's going well in the ramp up right is it um sort of enough throughput is it the right Focus areas is it um you know productivity and code reviews like whatever it happens to be by whatever metric like

what is the manager seeing that looks good and what are the things that the manager we need a little bit more work there or or even maybe it's across the board that everything is sort of uh you know level set but like we just need to keep ramping it up but I think more detail and more clarity on that would be very uh beneficial and uh this individual um should keep having that conversation right so great okay cool good in my opinion that is good feedback it might not uh sound like it on the surface like oh you're not meeting expectations but it it could just be the way that this is communicated because like I said I have had this very same type of conversation where I have told someone no like you aren't meeting the expectations of a a fully onboarded senior right

and that's and that's actually okay that is my expectation right now you are ramping up so another thing that they could touch on perhaps is like what is the manager's expectation in terms of ramp up period I've told this story before but um as an engineering manager at Microsoft I remember when I joined my the first team at Microsoft my manager told me and was serious about this and he was right he said it's going to take you about a year until you feel comfortable he was right it took me a year um when I switched teams earlier this year at Microsoft um it was to a different sort of Technology space but still within uh Office 365 or what we call substrate for all the platforms for Office 365 it took me probably between four to 5 months before I started feeling more confident

about the things I was speaking about so half the time which is i that's a great Improvement but that's still that's still a significant amount of time so in the first instance my manager did give me that expectation like it's going to take you a while and he was very transparent about it and and that was great and I made sure that along the way I had that feedback loop with him like Hey like you know are these areas that you expect me to be working in paying more attention to or does that look like it's going well so that's something um that I I honestly cannot recommend enough to people is to try to make make sure as much as possible that you're in uh in a situation with your manager where you can have these conversations if you don't feel that way like

it's either something you need to work on with your manager um every manager is going to be different some it's it's unfortunate but like sometimes managers like aren't aren't great at peopling and in my opinion that's their number one job so if you have a manager that's like this you try you try to acknowledge that right understand that that's where they're coming from so you might have to bring this kind of stuff up with them because they're not being proactive about it um but ultimately the goal is not uh to create some weird pressure on your manager the goal is for transparency right you just want to make sure that you can uh understand their expectations and work towards them so that's thing number one I think this person has started doing that which is awesome please continue doing that please try to work towards

specific things and again full acknowledgement that sometimes those specific things are hard for a manager to pinpoint but again I will say that if I I've had people come say to me like hey can I get feedback on whatever and my feedback kind of feels General and now that they've seated it in my head the next time we have conversations what's what makes it a little bit easier um is that now I'm kind of like a little bit more proactively thinking about it so some things might stand out and I go oh yeah next time I talk to to Johnny on the team I'm going to make sure that I can say like hey like I noticed that you've been doing this stuff and that's going really well so could just be something that needs some iteration which is another reason please keep having the

conversation um something else that this person mentioned in terms of project scope and stuff like that um the the stuff that they were talking through I feel like is a good fit for senior type roles um so you know I kind of said that when they're doing prototyping and stuff like that it's it's not like a it's not like a I don't know like a strike against you if you're prototyping something and it's an experiment and it doesn't work out right um if it was time boxed and like your manager and the product owner and the team agreed that this is the right time box and you stuck to that and you know you weren't like oh oops we said it was going to be a week or two weeks of trying it and hey it's 2 months later and I'm still just like off

in outer space doing this if that's not you great like you don't want to be in that kind of position but it is an experiment you might go through the process and learn all these things and ultimately go this isn't going to be a good fit no we shouldn't do this this maybe isn't a good path for now let's document the learnings and move on right um that's it's a normal thing I spent a lot of my career before Microsoft prototyping things literally including like almost every internship I had had some amount of like prototyping things and then when I worked in a digital forensics company Not only was I prototyping stuff kind of just because we needed to start building things but I ended up leading a prototyping team and right before I left and they still have it to this day uh I

was about to be managing or like potentially directing this uh this prototyping team so like that's what I did and you should expect that they're going to fail a lot of the time failures will mean learning though so I don't hold that against this person I actually think that if they're in a SP where they can be doing these experiments that's going to really help with domain knowledge in my opinion they're going to have to be talking with people on the team as well learning about this stuff so I think that's a great type of activity but I think the next thing they called out is even better so or when I say even better I don't mean the type of work is better but I think in terms of like uh sort of flexing your senior muscle that's a really weird phrase um that

this is a a pretty good fit which is going to be uh a feature delivery or a project scope that will require extra people to jump in so they didn't say and I can't just make assumptions but this is something that I would definitely recommend like have a conversation with your manager about it so um I don't know what the process is at their company or their um the or their team I should say uh how how do they approach this kind of stuff right so do they need to put a design dog together a proposal and go through it with the team and and suggest I'm going to need these resources to help do they need to work with a project manager product manager their manager whoever to make that happen I don't know the details on that do they have to wait for

planning Cycles I don't know the details on that but it's good conversation I have with the manager um because they should be able to clear that up and then this type of work though because that was some of their question which is like what should I be focusing on this I think this is a great example as long as it's align with the business needs and they're not just kind of like making it up so that's going to be one of the tricky things I would say for sort of senior expectations when you're new in a space is that when you don't have the domain knowledge yet it's really difficult to to be able to sort of uh do this like thinking outside of the box kind of future looking if you're new to the whole Space right like um I'll give you an examples

like I I at Microsoft I came in at principal level and I started managing a deployment team when I started at Microsoft I've never done that before so for me to have you know from from the get-go have insights about oh like we we should really think about doing this for deployment this is going to be transformative that's not an expectation of me because I don't know the area that's part of the rampup process that's why my manager said it would take me a year before I have that amount of confidence and so by the time you know I I built built up that confidence then yes I was able to think about things at a more principal level to say here's how we do things but if we zoom out and we start looking like at the bigger picture what could we be doing

here that's an expectation for seniors as well at most places to be able to kind of have that um that sort of like strategic thinking or like thinking outside of the box a little bit more and um it's just it's hard to do from the beginning but even for me that wouldn't be an expectation of seeing your team members but again have that conversation with your manager so it might be something where you're like hey I'm aware that I need to be doing this but you could be saying I don't feel like I know the domain yet or maybe in this person's case maybe they are starting to pick up on these things and they're like hey and I think they're kind of touching on a little bit of that in here right so I didn't I didn't read the full message to you guys

obviously but um I think they're kind of saying like they can see some of these opportunities and stuff which is great um so this is again one of those reasons why like okay if you're seeing opportunities for Change and Improvement have that conversation with your manager and the product owner maybe it's the same person I don't know and uh if it's aligned with the business what could you be doing going forward because if this is a good fit for a project it can get prioritized and scoped for whatever you know period of delivery being able to say okay I'm going to be the one leading this I'm going to be helping some other juniors on the team even if they have more you know tenure on the team this is something I'm going to try to have accountability and responsibility for delivering that's a huge

opportunity for a senior that is what I would be expecting seniors to do but let's think about it it's really difficult to do that as someone coming into a completely new space and just having no experience in the team and the the only time I've ever really seen that be successful is if a team is being freshly put together right so everyone is kind of new in the space and it's like okay we got to start doing stuff so whoever has seniority here like please help organize and uh and move things forward but it's going to be a little awkward and that's fine because we're all finding our footing totally normal but if they're coming into an established team and then like right from day one it's like okay you're going to lead a project I feel like that's a recipe for disaster it's really

difficult to do that and like as a manager when I come into a team like I feel like that expectation is isn't even put on me or it hasn't been historically it's like hey you're coming into a team you have like principal Engineers you have senior Engineers they are already leading these projects go work with them try to support them try to make sure that going forward when we're planning these things then you're getting involved in the next wave of things it's what I would recommend to this person as well right if you can't start leading this project it's not like it's going to be the end of the world uh depending on the scope of work and the projects that are ongoing it might not be a good opportunity to spin up a whole new project to lead that's fine right so okay how

do you get jumping into a project or something that's existing where you can start building up some more of that experience and then you're surfacing these ideas and that way when the time Rises you can say Hey you know we talked about this is this a priority now maybe that's something I can lead and if there's a different project that up maybe that's something you could lead at that point but point is it's not always a good time to go start up a new project and that doesn't mean that's the end of the opportunities for you but I personally thought that was a great one to mention in terms of a direction to head in okay time management we're about 20 minutes in um time management wise this one's tricky um and I wanted to talk about two different aspects here the remote nature um

the fact that this person's 9 hours off and they're already talking about doing this kind of stuff with the team I think that's great honestly um I have seen people on boarding remotely like guess like at Microsoft because we have Global teams and it's challenging I've seen some people really really struggle with this and it takes them a lot longer before they're comfortable then they start getting that momentum and they rock it and I've seen other people get this right away but it's way more rare um and I've been talking about this a little bit more over the past like six months or so that this is like a I don't know like it is a problem I think and unfortunately like I don't have really good solutions to this kind of stuff right now but the biggest thing that I noticed that the biggest

sort of difference where people are very successful at this is that they don't let themselves stay blocked and that's challenging because of personality types sometimes people are like oh I don't want to bother people um sometimes people are reaching out for help and then like the person's not responding and they're like okay well I tried I guess that's it but it's almost like the people that do well at this they're kind of pushy sounds funny but they're like this is this is the work I'm responsible for someone's not responding cool okay I'm going to message him again and then I'm going to find the other person that I can reach out to like I'm not going to give up trying to get unblocked tried a couple people cool I'm going to ask my manager and while I'm doing that I'm going to ask in the

team chat like I'm not going to give up just waiting same thing with their PLL requests and stuff it's like it's not like oh it's done and I'm just going to wait for someone to stumble upon it nope it's done here you go team like these and these are Team Dynamics you have to kind of feel out too but I think the people that I've seen be very successful at this kind of stuff given uh time differences I'm not even talking about the time differences I guess yet but the the the geography differences being very proactive and leaning into that to the point where you're like I might feel a little bit pushy I think you kind of have to be because it's going to be your productivity and honestly at least when I'm I'm kind of looking up and trying to like picture all

these times I have never seen someone in a remote position like this where they're trying to get themselves unblocked and people are like oh man like Sally is so annoying always asking for help and asking questions and always having code to rev like no like it's almost the opposite where people like holy crap like Sally's doing so awesome even though like she's remote right I have never seen it go the other way in my experience I'm not saying it's impossible I'm just trying to remind people like please lean into this get yourself unblocked if you are struggling to get yourself unblocked please talk with your manager about different strategies for this please again I talk about this kind of stuff where I'm saying talk to your manager that's because that's my leadership style if you were having if on my team and having any kind

of challenge if I didn't have full visibility into that come talk to me that's literally my job come talk to me let's get you unblocked um so the the time difference though is really difficult and I think that that means um you you got some you got some options here right you probably want to find some core working hours and I'm going to start mixing in the the the point about you know sort of the family's expanded now there's a new child you might find that like you're up at weird hours all of the time for a while now unfortunately I don't know in this person's situation maybe they're their child sleeps perfectly through the night and they kind of have a normal schedule I doubt it um but it might be possible but I think one thing is kind of figuring out what your

core work hours are and trying to trying to stick to that when I say stick to that I mean in terms of communicating that to your team like hey these are the hours I plan to be working now given that you have a new child odds are there's going to be a little bit of hectic stuff going on and your schedule's not going to remain totally consistent so this might be an opportunity where you can lean into some flexibility there where you're like okay my my day is going to be disrupted um I have to you know plan like in terms of time with my my wife in this case like to who's taking care of the kid when they get up to cry at this time or whatever um I don't know all the details for how this stuff works but my point here

is that you might have to do some coordination and maybe that means that your day is broken up in different ways than you're used to maybe you can take advantage of that and say hey I know I'm going to have to be up and uh you know wait like watching the baby monitor or something for this period of time while like while my wife is sleeping or something maybe that's an opportunity where you're like cool like I got this hour of dedicated time on these nights or something like maybe that's a a point where you have some interesting overlap with your team or you can queue up and this is kind of where I wanted to go with this thought process again I'm trying to give you some ideas of having done this myself but uh you can ceue up some things like you need

to get uh sort of answers for teammates uh in other time zones so maybe maybe that's like okay you were working during your day you had a few things that you needed to reach out to to Bob on the team so you're like okay here's my three questions for Bob I'm going to get these ready to get sent over to him oh and Steve on the team has a poll request like if I you know if I have a 30 minutes now I can go jump in and and maybe go review that um and that way when Steve comes online like he's already got my review comments and stuff like that so you might be able to lean into sort of the chaos here a little bit and try carving out some time that's like hey I'm already up let me go do this the

work life balance thing is tricky though because if you don't balance this properly you might feel like okay so what hours am I working like basically around the clock now because Nick's saying just do it when you have some availability like if that's not going to work for you then don't do it I'm just saying like with a flex with flexibility you have some options if if you find that you can't manage that properly restrict them right I've worked with people where like I have seen where they're like okay well I'm up and like I'll do this and I'm like I know that's not good for your work life balance because I see how much you're online and how much you're working like I know so um maybe don't do that um if they're not complaining and they're happy whatever maybe that's a good balance

for them and they are content with it but if this person's asking me about work life balance especially given that they have a new child this is just something they need to think about for themselves how much flexibility do they want to have in their schedule and what does that look like if they're unable to manage that properly in terms of the flexibility then I would try to again set some boundaries around that communicate that to the team and then given those boundaries try to think about okay I'm reaching the end of my workday what do I need to make sure that I'm setting up for people coming online so that when I sign in I can be most effective and what can I do in terms of getting them set up cuz these are your teammates that you want to be supporting as you're

becoming more and more like at your senior level expectations how can you support them right so when they come online they get that same benefit of oh awesome like I don't know this I'm not going to say this person's name I was going to say I don't know it but I can literally see it um what can this person do so that Sally and Steve and Bob on their team when they come online they're like hell yeah like I'm good to go thanks so much for for getting me unblocked so my recommendation here like I said is um just think about your sort of the time window that you're able to work within and how how effectively you can balance your own time if there's flexibility so um I know for myself just I like being able to give some examples because then it's like

oh Nick has done something like this when I worked in Canada on the East Coast um with Microsoft though uh right when I started sort of the beginning of the the lockdown my team was all in Pacific time so I just I was like okay I'll just adjust my hours so I started work at noon eastern time okay it meant that I was working later but I could start later it was weird but I knew it was temporary too because my goal was to move down here to Seattle okay so that's something I adjusted my schedule it worked for me totally fine now that I'm out here and I live in uh in in Pacific Time most of my team is here but I also have team members that are in China there are also partner teams that I have to work with that are

in in India or the UK and that might mean where I'm having conversations and I'm like okay the only way to make this work effectively is I got to wake up early for a meeting okay but if I'm going to do that I need to make sure for me I need to have a few days of notice so I can plan for it so if someone if I woke up at 5: in the morning to go to CrossFit and I saw a meeting that was for 6: a.m. and I just saw it that morning because someone just sent it to me overnight I'm not going to that nope that's crossing my boundaries so I would decline it and I would say I need more notice that's it that's it that's all it is and I have I have accidentally done the same thing to people in China or I'm not really paying attention on schedule a meeting and then they're like hey like that's like 8:00 a.m.

my time and like I just woke up and saw this and I'm like okay sorry like I will reschedule that's my my bad so I have to pay attention to that kind of stuff but I try to set those boundaries also if I'm going to wake up early or stay late to have meetings with people in China I will make sure that I'm trying to take some time for myself so if I'm spending an hour early in the morning or spending an hour at night I will try to make sure that somewhere in the week I'm going to have some flexibility for myself I might wrap up the day earlier take a longer lunch whatever like oh I have to go run out to do an errand that's okay like I I already had like you know an extra two hours of work between a

few meetings that we're outside of my work hours I'm not going to feel guilty about it and I will say it in the chat like hey I'm stepping out to do errands and I encourage my team to do that too so setting these boundaries I think is important communicating them I don't know I hope all that's kind of helpful but I think that this person from what I'm hearing from the amount of feedback from their manager and just kind of what they're walking through I feel like they are on on the right track I'm not concerned about what they're saying frequent conversations with the manager for expectations try to line up that big project if it's not going to work out in the short term don't stress try to work on something else as you're getting ramped up and look for those opportunities and then

balance your time set your balance boundaries properly so hope that helps um that's what I got and I would say again you know if you want your questions answered leave them in the comments or do as this person did find me on social media Dev leader and uh I'm happy to answer what you got take care see you next time