Answering Your Questions: Technical AND People Centric Roles in Tech

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all right it is Wednesday morning um back from vacation in Hawaii which was awesome um had had some fun brand ghost things to fix which I obviously documented in the the previous videos so if you haven't checked those out you can see how I spent some of my vacation um overall everything uh is fine in the end it's just like some stuff I really don't want to have to think about while on vacation um I'm just trying to get ahead of my phone trying to play YouTube videos not a good thing to do while driving um but I had a couple requests come in for for topics and I thought this was a just checking the audio is working uh thought it was a good opportunity to remind people like if you're watching these and you're like hey this is cool like could you talk

about some other topic that I'm interested in like happy to do that um so I had a couple come in uh on Twitter and and directly on YouTube so um I'm going to spend this drive and the drive home talking about these topics so the first one and I'll I'll kind of talk about high level what both are so if you're interested in the next video just make sure to check it out but uh this drive I'm going to talk about uh Tech roles uh that maybe aren't just uh coding um but the perspective on this was someone was asking about tech roles where there's people involved and uh I think they specifically asked about Canada I'm not going to talk specifically about Canada because uh I don't live in Canada anymore and I think that I can talk about this generally so I'm going

to talk about that on this drive and the other request that came in which I think will be uh super interesting to talk about is from uh like a management perspective being able to help navigate scenarios where basically people that you're managing uh or responsible for in some capacity are uh kind of stuck and what compounds this is that they're kind of stuck in terms of growth but they're also getting certain signals from different parts of the organization that uh that kind of perpetuate the behavior so I think this is an interesting one to talk through I'll do that on the drive home but this drive like I said is going to be about tech rolls um so the framing for this was really around being able to want to make sure I have a drink here being able to have Tech roles where you're

interacting with people right I'm going to start off by talking about software engineering because I think that's the obvious one and uh and and I guess maybe it's not obvious for some people and that's why I want to talk about it so um Tech rolles like software engineering is very very people Centric and I don't think a lot of people realize this and it's because there's a lot of stereotypes around software Engineers right like stereotypically software Engineers are socially awkward we're introverted people we don't like people we're happy to be locked up in our our computer caves and just code and play video games and never associate with anyone um and I mean maybe that does ring true for a lot of people uh I know that I'm very introverted uh my social battery drains pretty quickly I'm very content to be left alone to

go code or play video games that kind of stuff so like I kind of fit that um now the reality is though in a software engineering career very early on you can kind of get away with just like being quiet and sticking to yourself and I think there's probably many organizations that allow that to kind of perpetuate even if you're there for a long time but uh I would say in the general sense that's like a a path to stagnation and it's a path for uh really not being able to develop software effectively You could argue and I want to talk about this a little bit more You could argue that like you could be a solo Dev and then you don't have to go deal with other developers and like see how easy it is you can just kind of be introverted all day

and every day and not have to worry about it but I'm going to go back to I think the majority of people as software Engineers are working in this field at companies in teams so even if you're working on a feature that doesn't involve other Engineers directly right like there's going to be circumstances where you need to talk about the design of something you need people reviewing your code or you're reviewing other people's code you're reviewing design documents um there's going to be times where even if your project is mostly solo that you you know you need help from someone else or you need to go jump in to help other people uh you're discussing you know prior like if you're becoming more senior you're talking about you know how priorities and alignment for like the technology versus the business needs like these are things

that come up and it's not rare um they're not rare things to happen so while the majority of your day so say on a regular basis maybe you're very fortunate and the majority of your day is dedicated time to go create software that's great like you know if you're not uh blasted with meetings every single day uh for like 80% of your day that's awesome right you have dedicated time to go build software but if we break down building software building software is not just writing code it might be great if even out of that majority of your day you have a few hours blocked out where you can go put your head down and crank out code awesome right like that is great but there's still going to be these circumstances I descri where you're working with other Engineers to have your code reviewed

you're reviewing code um this the amount of people interactions you have as a software engineer increases more and more the more senior you become so if you get into software engineering feeling like this is a great spot because I don't have to work with other people like it's going to be a very limiting factor uh like I said there's going to be places where what I'm saying isn't true that's fine uh I'm kind of sharing my perspective as someone who manages Engineers I've worked at uh small companies I work at Microsoft now so I've seen this at both big and small companies um it will become limiting because if you're if we think about what it means to be progressing as an engineer the types of the type of work you're going to be doing is having more impact bigger impact and in order to

do that effectively you need to be working with other people it's very difficult to start having extremely large impact when you're doing it in isolation Okay so that's something I want to call out is that and I and I hope that makes it more obvious is that if you're working purely in isolation it's really difficult to get big done and it's not that it's impossible like you could be the solo Dev responsible for you know an optim a that saves a company a ton of time or you know you you truly do architect something big and awesome and you did it without involving any other Engineers like it's totally possible but it's not like a it's kind of like just missing out on this opportunity to have more brains involved to have something more sustainable so say you're the person who is responsible for architecting

this big awesome thing and you decided screw it I'm not going to get anyone else to put their input in like how is that going to be maintained like how are other people going to build on this like if you're doing this and doing it repeatedly like you're not actually working in a team you're just working in isolation and like it just doesn't scale well you don't have teams I mean there are a lot of places where it's just teams of individuals but it's not like it's not an effective way to operate but I want to go back to what I was saying about solo dance right so you might say well Nick like sure that makes sense like maybe you have a I know you said startups maybe you have a pure Microsoft lens on things now I don't buy it um I am

a solo Dev and I don't have to work with other Engineers so like you know Point proven but I would say like let's back up a second because it might be very much the case that you're not working with other engineers and maybe you find that great and I'm not saying that's good or bad like you know it's all about how you want to work ideally but like how are you getting business okay so if you're a solo Dev how are you getting business um are you the one doing the sales are you the one doing the sales are you the one working directly with the customer um or sorry there's a cop on a bike in front of me so I was like what the heck's going on here I it looked like he was waving at me but he's just signaling to change

lanes but the way that he was looking back uh I was like he's looking into my soul um anyway when you're a solo Dev even if someone's contracted you and they're the ones dealing with the customer directly and they just giving you the requirements like you are still interfacing with a human being that's giving you requirements it's like it's extremely rare that in software engineering you're just not ever dealing with people that's the point that I want to get across it might look different but you're still dealing with people now one more thing I want to talk about before I talk about some other roles is like I wanted to to consider that when someone asked about this they might not be talking about just like the peers that you're working with internally perhaps they were curious more about customers uh and I I thought

about this before I started talking and I'm glad I kind of brought myself back to it with this last example but if this person was curious about roles that are interfacing with customers it's true that some software Engineers might spend most or all of their career not actually interfacing with customers at all and to give you an example when I say customers to I mean like truly end users because you could argue partner teams if you're a platform team or you're customers but truly with end users and I will use my experience at Microsoft like I'm an I'm an em there but like I've worked on two different platform teams and our customers are the other partner teams we don't do or doesn't feel like we have direct impact on end users right ultimately like say on the deployment team that I was managing before

there's a huge impact on end users like it's just through like we're it's almost through proxy because you'll have a service that has a critical bug fixer feature like the deployment team is responsible for getting that stuff out there uh or now like I work on a routing team and you know one of the areas I'm responsible for is Dos protection so you could imagine that the work that we're doing on a regular basis it might not feel like oh I'm doing this for the end user but truly if we're putting dos protection in place stopping and things like that like it's the end user truly that will be impacted if things like a Dos attack can occur and now they're unable to use our service because we're being denied just because of the volume coming in so it doesn't there's a lot of situations

where it does not feel like you are directly interacting with an end user and I think for a lot of people that can be really demotivating because it feels like with that level of indirection it's not it's not as rewarding perhaps for some people and I I I I can say that even for myself right like I know in the area that I'm working in at Microsoft regardless of the previous team or my current team like it's it's literally planetary scale impact it it just is we're talking about like you know hundreds of thousands of machines across the planet we're talking about trillions of requests per day it's it's an enormous surface area but what's interesting is despite that enormous surf uh the enormous surface area like I used to work in a space in digital forensics where you would hear about say even one

customer using software that's either you know something that you help build maybe it was literally a feature you help build and they were able to like one customer could say I helped catch a pedophile to stop harming children or we you know a pedophile was caught and we could help like our software helped convict them and prove that they were guilty like now they can't cause any more harm to children in the world and when we talk about impact you can look at it from the perspective of like the volume of impact or you don't need a lot of volume but the significance of what you're doing really stands out to you and that could look very different for different people right uh for some individuals it might be climate related you might be able to say like our our company uh focuses on Green

Tech and we're able to move the needle so much on this and like that's really what gets you fulfilled I'm not here to say what's you know what's right wrong good bad what's better or worse in terms of impact but you I what I'm trying to say is you can look at impact and different ways the volume of it or perhaps it's the um you know the even on an individual basis the significance of like what that Rings true to you and if you can multiply those things like even even better right like that's way cooler so there are certainly times where software Engineers on teams may not have direct interactions with customers for sure um and I would say there's probably a lot of people like this but um there are also situations like there are plenty of companies uh and I would say

you know especially smaller companies if you're building applications of any kind and not just hosting a service that you might be on like a backend team for um or like an infrastructure team there are plenty of companies that have software roles where you are uh feeling that sort of engagement from from end users a lot more uh in in smaller companies as a software engineer you might be able to sit down with customers maybe you have a product owner you know that could be a product manager whatever the role is they might invite Engineers to go along you might uh like we'll talk about some other roles in just a moment but there could be these opportunities even as a software engineer where you are getting some of this interaction so software engineering can be Absolut abolutely filled with people interactions so I'll close on

software engineering in the people side for now but hopefully that helps hopefully that makes sense um my phone is absolutely blowing up with like a bunch of different work requests but I'm like driving on the highway I'm just checking my map for traffic and I can see all these notifications coming in just to add to the stress um I'm just kidding but that's software engineering now one role that I was thinking about as I was blabbing there as a sales engineer uh that could be very interesting where you know as a sales Ro and I don't have experience as a sales engineer so I don't want to um talk about this from like an expert standpoint or anything like that just being transparent but as a sales engineer you are literally going to be responsible for having a sales component of your role which is

truly a lot of peopling a lot of interacting with customers but uh as a sales engineer you're going to be responsible for having a deep technical understanding and it might not be as deep as say the engineer that worked on the feature right or someone that's embedded right in the team building out the product and service but sales Engineers are required to have a lot more technical understanding there's going to be stuff that they'll defer to the team on without a doubt but it's a technical role with a lot of people in so that's that's one you you can have uh rolles that are like uh almost like technical installs I can't I'm driving and I can't my mind's blanking on like the the role name uh it's like a Solutions provider right where uh on behalf of the customer uh you go in for

your company and you go set up the technology there so it could be like on Prem Services being stood up uh so say they have their own machines um and you go in I'm not going to change lades this guy moved um you go in and get things set up and like that's a very technical role and you're going to be interfacing with people because you have to go into their space and get things sorted out you have to understand their Tech setup their layout what they got going on there how that relates to what your requirements are uh and you're working often you know with the individuals their IT staff and carrying out an install so that's uh that's another you could have we could go into tech support So Tech support's an interesting one I wanted to be careful when I talked about

this because uh I'm confident whether or not someone comments about it someone's thinking it they're probably thinking hey Nick I know based on what I've seen from tech support these days it's all just going to be replaced by AI now I'm not here to say whether that's right or wrong or going to happen or not um but but um even if we take for examp let's assume that's the case okay let's assume that any type of like online support or phone support that you'd be doing for technical problems let's assume that is going to be replaced by AI let's just kind of go down this path I think that there are still plenty of tech support opportunities that require people physically and what I mean by that is like and it's probably because a lot of us don't have these types of interactions but like

um even let's use an example of like your your home internet okay um this is not what I had in mind to talk about but that's there might be situations where you have you call in or you go online and they like remote try to diagnose what's going on but if that doesn't work they might have to send out a tech support specialist to come investigate what's going on now if we want to talk about this less about from like a consumer perspective like a role like tech support like this you could think about this from a business perspective right I mentioned that there was uh like roles where people are going to do uh onsite installs and things like that like what happens in those situations where there is Tech support needed and it's not just remote diagnosis talking to a chatbot like someone

has to physically go in and look at how things are connected maybe there's Hardware that's messed up so this is something that happens in data centers Hardware goes bad right this this is stuff being blasted 24/7 with tons of requests tons of operations going on and eventually it's going to fail it's just it's just reality right like Hardware doesn't last for forever um and even let's pretend it does Let's Pretend Hardware does last for forever let's consider data centers where people are like we need new skews of Hardware right we we want to upgrade we only have so much room we're getting rid of these old servers they're still working perfectly but we want to upgrade them to be faster have more capacity for the same footprint like there are technical roles that are required for this now you might say well what's the people

interaction look like well I don't know in that role maybe maybe the actual work you're carrying out when you're uh you know removing hard drives and things like that uh taking out uh blades like maybe that actual Hands-On part of the job maybe that doesn't require much peopling but I would say it's like and I'm I'm making assumptions here because I have never done this role but uh I suspect that you are going to have to interact with people on site you're going to be having to talk to customers who have the issue uh or if you're doing this on behalf of your company uh you know the teams that are complaining about the stuff or eager to have the upgrades to give you an example on our deployment team that I was managing there would be times where like we can't deploy a machine

because the hardware is literally gone bad right like like I said it's statistically going to happen so there will be situations where like the machine can't come back online because the hardware is bad so there's a team dedicated to making that better not only detecting it but like getting The Replacements in so we we become the customer in that case and we're there complaining going we can't deploy like go fix this make it better like we become the customer not the end user and in that situation you if you're on the other team you're having an interaction with us people about making this better um so there's a couple more roles the other thing I wanted to talk about that's maybe less uh less like physical because some of these roles I was talking about are kind of like Hands-On going into to data centers

or doing tech support this way um if we even just talk about like uh project managers product managers uh I I'm going to describe the difference that I see in in the terminology for these roles uh there's lots of potential for overlap here I'm not here to dictate to you the ultimate definition I'm just going to Define it so that you understand what I'm talking about in this context um project managers and the definition that I'm going to use are a lot more about coordinating how things are being carried out carried out sorry so they'll be looking for U dependencies and things like that making sure that we can identify roadblocks uh keeping things progressing that kind of thing and a product manager is more focused on what customers want and prioritizing uh needs of customers and working with Engineers to figure out how to

get this stuff delivered technically so customers want this hey Engineers how do we make this happen let's try to like find that intersection so one is more about um the priority and the other one's more about uh like carrying out the execution again you can disagree I'm just giving you this framing for when I go to talk about these things in the project management example um you need to have a technical understanding of what's being built so that you can understand the road blocks like you need to be in a position where you can ask good questions you can challenge engineers right Engineers saying hey we're blocked on this it's like well okay um is this something that we can work around are we truly blocked like do we really need to be doing this can we have a different path here uh I'm I'm

obviously don't have concrete examples off the top of my head but if you are having conversations like this this is a technical role you need to be some amount of Technical and being able to converse with other people right so the engineers in this case um the other thing that like especially if you're a more senior project manager when you're working on big projects that span multiple teams there's other project managers involved there's other Engineers from different teams involved how are you going to interface with those individuals right a project manager is a very people focused role project managers are not responsible for managing people in the sense of like career growth unless you're a a a manager of project managers which is a thing um the the people part is about understanding how people are blocked and progressing and understanding status to be able

to communicate it to other stakeholders so there's a lot of ping involved in project management product management is also extremely heavily people focused uh and also technical so a product manager really has to work with user users uh to understand their needs now whether or not they're doing that directly versus through Telemetry and metrics and other things uh hopefully it's a combination uh right so they can have that FaceTime with customers to understand what's up uh but also like having having data in aggregate is helpful um like this is a very people Centric role because you need to understand the goals of individ ual and you need to understand their challenges but it's also very technical because you don't just stop there you don't just say great now I have a list of what people want and we just it just happens because now you

have to go interface with other stakeholders like Engineers like the project managers like the engineering managers that are responsible for trying to help staff the work that needs to get done based on people's uh strengths weaknesses career trajectories things like that uh sometimes engineering managers play uh the role of all of these pieces right where they're doing project management and product management depends on the team in the organization but my point is that as a product manager you need to be technical enough to be able to have meaningful conversations with the engineers I always talk about communication being like not a one-way responsibility uh if you have two people communicating there's responsibility on both ends to do it effectively um so again like product management is a a technical role with a lot of people involved uh I think those were the main ones I

wanted to make sure I could talk about you could we could argue Engineering Management right same like similar idea uh in that you need to have a strong enough technical background to know uh what your team is going to be working on to help with architectural Direction to help with prioritization uh and it's extremely heavy on the people side of things uh I I feel like a lot of people miss this when they talk about Engineering Management like it's just a very technical role it's like if you're doing Engineering Management and it's purely from a technical perspective uh I hate to break it to you but you're probably letting a lot of people down namely uh all of your employees um it's very much a people focused role and uh you need you need to be technical enough to work effectively with your team communicate

with your team and uh and other stakeholders that are helping work with you on business priorities now the original question was about roles that are available that look like this that have Technical and people side of things people are hiring for these roles all over the place and I don't want to minimize that like trying to go for jobs right now is difficult I I realize like I'm in a position where I am employed uh so it's like it's easy for me to just say that like I get it but I'm also like to give you an example I'm also doing interviews for other partner teams like I'm in their interview Loops I know that there are roles available for this kind of stuff because I'm in those conversations doing interviews and then people will say well you know like it's only the senior level

no like I've I've literally been on an interview uh in the past couple of months uh where we hired a very Junior person uh and been in a conversation where we said hey like this person is maybe more Junior than we thought like what we still consider them for this particular role um like it's absolutely the case there are junior positions open so um I'm not saying that to like to be like haha Told You So I want that to be encouraging to you because if you are more Junior trying to get into the industry there are roles they do exist um I get that the competition is fierce but like they do exist so um when you revert to well they're just aren't rolls I think that that's the wrong answer because it's a uh it's incorrect like it's factually incorrect to say there

are no roles so I want to I want to park that because like let's not focus on it because it's wrong there literally are roles now what you're probably facing is you're saying well I'm not getting my resume is not getting notied like I'm sending in applications and nothing's happening and like that I mean 100% I could I would say like I totally get that being the case or maybe you're in a situation where you're like I cannot find the roles can also understand that but I think that it might be that what you're looking for or how you're looking for it is not lined up um so I just you know I just want to remind you like the roles do exist uh yes it's Fierce I I I understand that it's challenging so again not trying to minimize that for anyone but um

the roles exist so if you're unable to find them if you're unable to find them then I would say you probably want to to consider how you're approaching looking for jobs if you're like I'm just going to make up an example right if you're like well I've been refreshing the careers page on meta and there just aren't these roles Nick you're full of like maybe stop looking at the meta careers page right like maybe maybe the options are more limited in big Tech than you initially perceived like maybe consider other companies there are lots of smaller companies that you could consider you can have an amazing career and never touch big Tech right so I just I just want you know I want people to be able to to get jobs successfully so um when we get into this situation of like being so negative

about the environment that we're unable to take steps forward we're almost like inhibiting ourselves that's kind of the point I wanted to get across there is like it's definitely challenging it's definitely hard there's a lot of competition so by by saying things like there just aren't jobs like you're you're already like starting to limit yourself so um I hope this was helpful in some capacity um lots of Technical and people related jobs out there so thanks and I'll see you later