How To Manage Developers - Transitioning From Engineer To Manager

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all right I'm headed home from Crossfit I'm going to go to Reddit for a question that I think is pretty good and someone was essentially asking something that I have some experience with um and the question is how did you learn to manage people as a software engineer so I'm a software engineer and my next job I could also manage people I did it a bit in my previous role but I never learned I'd like to learn how to manage properly how did you learn the skill did you read books listen to podcasts or learn by doing um so I think I'll talk through that I'm just going to back out of the spot I'm going to have to get gas but I think I will wait until the end of the drive I need to put it in reverse not neutral there we go

that's how we drive a car um yeah if you want your questions answered leave in the comments I'm happy to respond to them uh and if you have stuff that you want to send in a little bit more detail and keep Anonymous look for Dev leader on social media it's my main YouTube channel as well as my main uh like my personal brand that I use or Nick centino on LinkedIn my profile should be open to send messages to okay with that said how do we learn how to manage people um I think I want to start this off by saying there's like different different styles of doing this stuff I turn this thing off to stop beeping and it still beeps it's so annoying and I'm realizing now that I might not have enough gas to get home but I don't want to go

to this gas station before the highway I might have to um want to start this off by saying that there's different styles of how people manage uh oh man there's a sorry there I'm at an intersection and I see a fire truck on the way and this light's about to turn green and it's going to be this awkward weight I can't move um anyway different styles of leadership and management and it's not necessarily that one is like right wrong better worse than the other but you kind of have to find what works for you and I guess I have General ideas about characteristics that I would like to see in good managers good leaders but how you like your implementation may look different so the question this person said like how do you learn I would say the number one thing for me was like

the experience and trying to figure out like how I how I can try to drive some of those things that like the good qualities or characteristics that I want to manage or a leader like how do I how do I do that myself like what are the things that um I can stay on top of that align with me that give me those results but that took a lot of practice so if I back up a little bit my for those of you that don't know CU if you're new to the channel or haven't watched the video of mine where I explain this I currently a principal engineering manager at Microsoft I've uh been doing this for at Microsoft for just under five years but I've been managing teams for about 12 and a half years now uh before Microsoft I managed a startup but

the unique thing about my journey I would say is that right when I had graduated University I was only working for a couple of months at this startup and then they said do you want to basically lead teams and uh you know I I I always say like I would love to tell people it's because I was so awesome at doing this kind of stuff but uh the reality is like I had no idea what I was doing and I remember they said like you seem to be able like literally maybe not an exact quote but like you seem to be able to talk to the engineers well like you communicate well you seem to be able to get on the same page as people do you want to try this like that was the bar that I had to meet small company you know

uh low bar but it was just like you seem to communicate well um so I tried it but for me I was a individual contributor and manager for eight years so I was still writing code every day so my journey is a little bit unique in that regard uh not to say it's better or worse just that's sort of the unique spin on it and um that meant that like I was truly just taking a lot of time to try and learn how to do this stuff effectively um so I'm about to pull into the gas station here but uh just before I cut the video cuz this will be the only part that I edit um I'll talk about some things I tried early on and um and kind of explain how it evolve but the long story short is essentially going to be

that a lot of it was trial and error so let me get parked here and I will cut the video as soon as I back into the spot and I said I would never come back here in one of the videos but going to be pumping gas for like 15 minutes okay 10 years later we're done pumping gas at this terrible gas station um one sec let's get pulled out of here um okay so where I left off was essentially was going to give you a bit of a a brief on kind of how I started with this stuff and I would say in the very beginning um it was it started with like a pardon me like a lack of understanding of what do managers actually do right and I knew like part of me knew that I had more responsibilities but the other

part was like like what what is actually the goal so you know my first step was like okay I set up one-on ones with team members but like I don't really know what I'm supposed to do with these things like I just know that's what you do um and then because there's like team lead and Project Lead aspects to it it's like okay I know I have some responsibilities over making sure these areas go but the other thing that I need to mention here is like this is literally a startup where we're just figuring out everything um you know the founder uh was a police officer uh he had a bit of a technical background to start building the product but like it's not like it was founded by software Engineers that had like run previous companies and stuff before like we're just figuring stuff

out so it was cool because I got to figure stuff out too but it meant that it's hard because you have to figure stuff out I don't want to say completely on your own but it's not like there's a an obvious template to follow but um one of the core pieces of advice that I received that I shaped basically all of my management and Leadership around is uh my HR leader that I had at the time uh amazing amazing person and uh the one of the very first things that she kind of told me was situational leadership and essentially instilled upon me that the the idea that like every single person that you manage is going to be different even if you have two Junior people you may have to you know work with them differently you might have two people that are very experienced

you may have to work with them differently so just this idea that as you're navigating management and Leadership you will like to be effective you're constantly going to need to try and figure out how to work with the individual and not a cookie cutter approach so she had told me this early on and I think like the concept made sense but I'm like I don't I don't have enough experience to like see this in practice right because to me everything is new everything is different I can't have a cookie cutter approach because I don't even know what I'm supposed to be copying and pasting so what I realized early on was that I'm not doing an effective job um for me like splitting my time between programming and managing the teams and I I've said this before on videos but like I would kind of

flip-flop back and forth for like you know two weeks I would program really hard and then another two weeks I would manage uh and then felt like I wasn't programming much and um at one point I said okay and this is actually for those of you that don't know how my Channel Dev leader came to be it actually is my started as my blog and I said I need to spend more time learning about this stuff and so to this person's question like was it books like what resources for me it was uh just articles online and a couple of books and that's how I started and I said I'm going to try to create this blog where I document the things that I'm trying to learn and it's called Dev leader because if you think about what those two words are I I am

a developer getting into leadership it's also intended for developers and leader like people doing both like development and Leadership uh could also imply that you are a developer leading others uh so the whole idea behind it was like I'm going to learn in public and document what I'm learning so that maybe others can get a benefit from it but it started off with both um articles and books and I don't know the specific ones off the top of my head um in terms of books um but the the interesting thing is when it comes to management at least when it comes to like the leadership aspects of management I would say you don't need to find a specific software engineering one like leadership is a a thing that you can look at across different uh domains organizations and stuff like that so um you don't

have to go look like I'm just trying to if you're looking for a book you don't have to like try to hyperfocus on a software engineering one for leadership um in terms of management and organization of work and things like that you may find I don't know any off the top of my head like software engineering specific ones but I think a lot of these things that we talk about leadership management principles you could probably take from uh other domains as well and apply the concepts effectively but what I learned going through that was a couple of things one is that um I did find it very effective to write about the things I was learning which is why I've made videos and stuff encouraging others to try it um it's not going to be great for everyone for me it ended up failing at

one point because I couldn't I felt like I couldn't keep up right but the I think the act of writing about it was helpful for me to digest what I was learning but um on its own uh I said this the other day when I was talking about learning how I learn which sounds kind of funny but I do not learn by reading and I do not learn by watching or listening I learn by doing and the fact that I was writing the stuff that I was trying to read from articles and stuff I think that actually helped so it was another level of like being able to not quite practice this stuff but like digest it I think that helped me learn but uh nothing is ultimately going to beat the experience so my bias as I talk to all of you about like

you know I'm sitting here I'm not going to tell you the best way to go learn this stuff because I I can't answer that for you it's going to be situational but uh for me what worked was you know being exposed to Concepts so if someone just said for example like hey there's this concept called radical cander and some of you might know what that phrase means others might not it's this uh this idea where if you are trying to um coach others right you're trying to give feedback to others that if you have a really strong um trust and respect relationship with that person like imagine your best friend right this guy's got something hanging off his car like a huge zip tie what is going on here um if you have if you have a really good trust relationship um um a lot

of respect you can actually be very direct with people so again if you imagine your best friend came up to you and they were like hey so hey Nick like just wanted to let you know that when you when you you know in your presentation when you say words like that it actually makes you sound stupid if your best friend said that to you you would likely I mean you might be taken back for a second but you would likely believe that they're trying to help you and now if you replace that with not your best friend but a colleague that you've never talked to you would probably be like dude what the hell are you talking about like if you basically what I'm saying is if you change the dynamic between the relationship Dynamic of the relationship between people sorry um you can have

a dramatically different effect so when we talk about giving feedback it's challenging because a lot of times we're trying not to hurt people's feelings or how do we deliver this but if you've built up like a really good relationship you can actually be more direct and it can be a lot more effective um and it's because people have a lot of trust and respect so for me someone told me about this concept and there's a book called radical cander and I think that like for me I read the book but it wasn't like when I read the book I like absorbed everything from it it was more just like okay someone's explained this concept to me and I think like it took a while like I think the concept made sense but it took a while to think about um the other flavors of uh

radical cander what I mean by that is like there's something called ruinous empathy and I can't remember the other ones but it's basically on a matrix explaining the the other pieces that are not radical cander and to kind of map that all out and make it make sense in my mind like I think that just took time and it took seeing it in practice for it to kind of solidify so the idea of radical cander and concept made sense especially after reading the book but in terms of like okay like how do I go put this into practice to me the like a book doesn't help me do that personally so I'm not saying again I don't want to advise like that therefore none of you should read books not what I'm saying um but I I feel like for me it's not the effect

Ive thing it's like I need toim that stuff get Concepts and then I need to practice them put them into action experiment with them and I think honestly that's what worked for me over my my eight years at Magnet forensics managing people was was trying things out uh I tried things early on like okay I want to make sure that my team knows I'm like I want to build trust and respect with them right so they already know from a programming perspective this is one of the things that that's always been kind of helpful for me is that my teams know I can program I don't have to like at Microsoft for 5 years now I don't program at work but my team knows that I program in C all the time outside of work so they can put me on code reviews and I

can critique their code they can ask me how to go build certain things and talk about code and can I can walk through that with them like one of my principal Engineers is working on a very big design right now and I I mentioned this the other week but I was saying like hey in 101 sometimes we start going down a bit of a rabbit hole and we're talking about code implementations on his design so my generally I think that my teams can have some respect for me and trust in me that I can be relatable as a developer like I understand some of the things that they're going through but this is all stuff that I had to experiment with so one of the things I tried early on was like doing surveys with my team so periodic surveys was like Hey like I

can't remember how I structured them but it was to get a pulse right like let me know um you know how you're how you're feeling about work am I doing a good job supporting you uh and then I would take action on those things so just trying to demonstrate to people like look I am I am paying attention I am trying to do this I want you to know I'm listening I am here to support you because as I said early on one of the things I struggled with was balancing between I'm just programming versus I'm managing teams so that was one of the actions I experimented with to try and demonstrate to my team look I'm being proactive and trying so did I keep that up for long no I don't think that it was an experiment that was at the time the way

it was implemented wasn't worth the effort um maybe it helped maybe it served a purpose for a period of time so I'm not disregarding that but uh I don't think that it was something longterm where it was like I don't know maybe the Cadence was kind of weird or whatever else but I'm like hey I tried it I learned some things cool let's keep going um but over time like how you I think how you're leading teams how you're managing groups of people it sometimes takes having different people on the team or managing different teams to to have more exposure to different personality types different challenges to navigate which is another reason when I talk about this stuff I'm like the the time spent in the role like the being Hands-On with stuff um that for me is where I'm learning so I know at

Magnet forensics and I can say this confidently like I was very fortunate I had really strong Engineers that uh reported to me and um even though at the time they would would have been Junior I mean not to say that I wasn't right like I I'm new to the industry at the time but uh like I can say like with hindsight too like to back in up like extremely strong engineers and I know that because they're leading teams now they're directors now they they've they've been very successful uh leading people I've had there's two people in particular that I had conversations with and I was like while I manag them and I was like in to individually like I think that you're like incredible with working with people mentoring people like do you have an interest in this and it was always no no no

like I just want to focus on code and uh you know as we grew in our careers like as I went to Microsoft and stuff uh even one of them before I left um had moved into a management role and it was like I knew it like I knew they have uh they just have it in them uh they're very very good at it naturally so I was just lucky um and I don't want to downplay that like I'm not trying to say like I I Can't Be an Effective manager but I think I got very lucky early that I had such strong Engineers to lead and that meant that I could build some momentum in what I was doing it didn't constantly feel like I'm drowning trying to manage people it was like I got a good team and I Contin to have a

good team throughout all of my time at Magnet um I mean I would say in general I've been very lucky in my entire career to have very strong Engineers um and it's only been sprinkled my God thing is the most annoying when it's cold I've only had a few like in my 12 12 plus years a few instances of like challenging employees um yeah just like incredibly fortunate that way so again that's a blessing and a curse right like the blessing is that it felt like I could build momentum I could focus on trying things out um because if it was constantly like oh man I got a challenging employee uh I don't know like maybe that would have dissuaded me and I would have been like I don't want to be a manager screw this like I'd rather just code but um it it

proved to me that I had the ability to to kind of have a multiplier effect and and I really like that the uh the curse part that I'm kind of half kidding about is um when you're exposed to challenging employees a lot you're going to learn a lot about those types of scenarios like I would for sure because I'm a Hands-On person so if I was constantly dealing with like I don't know having to help skill people up because they're underperforming or um having difficult conversations with people because they're being an to team members and stuff like that um I think that yeah that would be hard but if I stuck with it then I would have a lot of experience doing that and at this point in my career I have experience doing that but I also and I don't know if it ever

changes like I dread to do that but perhaps if I spent even more time handson with it it would just be more comfortable second nature so uh I think the I'm trying to I want to try translating what I'm saying into like a recommendation for folks but it's hard because um you know you might learn differently than me so I think there are tons of Articles books podcast videos whatever there's tons of resources on leadership and I think what I would recommend personally is get exposed to different concepts in leadership and management um you know my My Philosophy when it comes to leading and managing people is that my role is all about enabling my team to do their best work possible so I have like everything I do is like grounded in that you might end up forming a different opinion about that right

you might say I don't believe in that uh I I believe that everything must be purely a business value and I'm sorry I had to switch laner um I was focused on that so and that's not wrong like if you have a different opinion and that's how you want to structure like how you're going to lead and manage like that's that's totally fine right but like I ground everything in in that approach that I mentioned because that's my my framing of everything I do it keeps me sort of aligned to that when I'm trying to make decisions so if you have something like that for yourself it could be very valuable but you might not it might be difficult for you to figure that out if you're just getting started so what I'm saying is like you might leverage resources and stuff to to be

exposed to Concepts but what I wouldn't recommend and this is advice in general is just because one person says it or just because it's a thing that exists does not make it the right thing or the right thing for you I'll give you a completely tangential example to try and illustrate a point and I for those of you that don't know I used to bodybuild for a long time so a lot of my examples are like from the gym or nutrition and stuff but um I think a really good example of what I'm trying to say here is take diets right intermittent fasting you you could be a carnivore diet you could be vegan you could be whatever you want Atkins diet anything you want uh and you'll always have people saying this is the diet that rules the all it is the thing that

works I lost so much weight or I gained so much muscle or I fixed everything in my life this is the diet the problem with this is that in all of these cases it's not that a diet was better or worse universally it's that someone was able to adhere to it and the things that drive an individual to adhere to a particular diet because a lot of the time statistically a lot of the time people improve all of their health markers because they've lost weight so what happens is they go hey look I lost weight I lost 10 20 80 lbs doing this diet this is the thing it solved everything in my life you should do it but it's not going to work for you if you can't adhere to it and it doesn't mean that it's wrong it doesn't mean that it's right

either it's just not right for you and that's okay and I would say the same thing happens with leadership management any types of things like this I think get exposed to the different ideas understand them understand the perspective about them understand the goals of them and then try to try them out like see what sticks for you in my own experience I have found that if I can get people to trust me that I'm I'm going to be there to support them like that is my goal and they build respect for me because they see that I'm accountable to those things that what happens is that they're very transparent with me which I really value I find it very difficult to do my job and lead people if people are uh are not transparent um just to give you a brief example like I have

and I I love this I don't require it but it's like I love the openness that comes with this I'll have employees that will they are very comfortable to tell me like what's going on in their life if they're having challenges and I'm not I'm not a therapist my wife is I'm not but the fact my point here is the fact that I have built enough trust and respect with my team members that they they actually feel comfortable that they can tell me things to be like hey like look I'm I'm struggling with this and it's because I got something going on outside of work and like it's uh this thing with my family whatever and they're just open enough to me that's pretty incredible but I find that it's like I lean into my particular leadership style that seems to be one of the

results and then as a side effect of that I find that I can I can work with the teams I have very effectively because when there are problems they talk to me about them and then I can work with them on them that approach may not work at all for you and that's okay so that's I think my number one recommendation is don't uh like you know if I can impart the wisdom that my my HR leader imparted on me situational leadership it's also going to be situational leaders things are going to work different for different people so I hope that helps give some perspective I have tons of stuff to talk about on this topic but I figured I'd go down this path so thanks for watching I'll see you next time