Why Are Software Engineering Roles SO COMPETITIVE?!

Transcript is auto-generated and may contain errors.

all right it is Wednesday December it's clearly December 11th it's freezing in here but I also have this bad feeling that I'm getting sick and starting to get a fever um cuz I feel like my body is a lot colder than it should be I had a bit of a a tiny bit of a hunch that I might be getting sick um man this thing's got to stop beeping it's been beeping all day stop it God that's annoying I guess I can turn it off but it's literally behind the camera okay let's get out of here holy crap um I turned it off there's no more there's no more parking sensor the lights literally enabled to God okay anyway rough start um yeah I think I think I'm starting to get sick um usually when I'm sick it's like my my sinuses and stuff and

I I feel great that way but I thought I could feel maybe something in my chest almost and I was like ah I think I'm just making it up I don't know but now that I'm sitting in the car like like I can and it's like it's not it's not that cold outside but my whole body is like not feeling it do got a topic for today um I know people don't want me rambling too much but you're stuck with me for apparently about an hour and 9 minutes so let's hope the fast Lane's open cuz this topic ain't going to take an hour and 9 minutes I don't think and if it does I don't know I don't want to be on the highway for that long that's terrible um the topic was submitted and it's like comment someone was asking about uh I

guess this is from their perspective why it seems like job postings are I guess like nowadays I'm assuming this is what they're implying nowadays it seems like job postings are combining like front end back end and or like dat like basically these expectations are shifting and it seems like more of like a not only like full I guess you'd call it full stack but like but truly like touching everything um so I wanted to talk about that oh my goodness um I think yeah I guess before diving into that if you have other uh questions and stuff you want to answer let me know uh leave them in the comments I'll be saying this on every video if I can remember right so um you can leave a question in the comments or message me on social media just look for Dev leader um Dev

leader is my main you YouTube channel so if you if you're like hey this guy Rambles too much um yeah cuz you're watching me in a car it's a vlog that's what to expect on this channel if you want more concise um either advice if you want programming tutorials and stuff just check out Dev leader and uh if you're curious about um nonv video content as well just look for Dev leader on on different social media platforms I post stuff every day so with that said um yeah let's talk about this I I think my perspective on this is that um I cannot say if there's been more of a like call it a shift to be doing this more and more so certainly not something I've observed personally it's also not something I've heard other people talking about this is the first time I've

had someone bring it up and say I happen to be observing that there's this shift in job postings where the expectation is not just like a front end developer a backend developer but it's sort of like seemingly an expert in all of these uh things so I wanted to kind of break this down into a couple of thoughts and one was around this idea that um it seems like job postings are asking for focus in multiple areas that's one part and then the the other sort of undertone that I got in this one is that it seems like they're suggesting that the I don't know they call it like the level of expertise that's expected is greater and this one is actually something that I heard more people saying um now I hear it being said but I don't really think that that's changed and

that's that's my opinion you might disagree with it uh I've been in the industry for what 14 years 12 years as an engineering manager and I like throughout that entire that entire time I seen like regularly job positions being posted where it's like entry level it needs 5 years of experience like I don't that's not new that's not new from a job posting perspective so I wanted to touch on this part first because I actually like I don't know I think it's quicker quicker to talk through um and I always want to try and offer like some type of advice that's actionable so that it's not totally just a ranting video and you're like I want to watch this guy to see yell at cars in traffic and uh maybe he'll mention something about software engineering I'd rather give you something where you're like I

want to stick around to hear some perspective and see if I can do something about it so um so to start I don't think that like I said I don't think it's something that's new where you have things like entry level positions asking for years and years of experience um I know I've had people message me um or talk to me on like in comments and stuff and say like because cuz I work at Microsoft they're like oh well you know you're talking about boot camp grads or you're talking about self-learners but like Microsoft doesn't even hire people without a degree and I'm like it's not I mean it's not true there's literally programs through Microsoft that are for people uh that do not have a degree so like it's wrong um but like kind of like pointing at Big Tech or larger companies in

general and saying like why is it that these ianes are saying like entry-level jobs and they're only you know only advertising to people with degrees and uh and somehow it's entry level with like 10 years of experience and um the the thing that I wanted to kind of start by talking about is like maybe like this um call it like tough love kind of perspective and like I like working at Microsoft but I'm not like I will I will share with you if there's things that I like don't like about big Tech right uh because I think a lot of them will be generalized um so in this case right like Microsoft or not some big tech company or just some some non startup in general if you think about it like let's think about what's been happening over the past few years right especially

with a lot more remote work and something that like has been true for a a long time but is more true now is that people from all over the world if the position's remote you can apply for it right now what might have happened before is like you might have a company and some of the positions are remote or you're like okay well I'm going to relocate or or whatever it happens to be right so for example for me I applied to a position at Microsoft while I was still living in Canada and it was for a US position so it was contingent on the fact that I moved to the US so I did not get like hired into stay at Microsoft Canada I got hired and I started at Microsoft Canada because I was living there but this is also during uh the

lockdown a few years back so um the idea was like you know when it's safe to travel cuz they weren't going to rush me they're like we don't you know no one knows what's going on right now so it was contingent so they're saying we know it's not safe to travel now we're not trying to rush you but when you feel comfortable you know the expectation is that you're moving down to the US and you will be working out of the US and and that's what happened so you know we waited my my girlfriend at the time my wife now we waited for a good time she got her her um Visa stuff sorted out we moved down uh transfer to the US West part but like this is an option that's been around it's not like it's brand new there were places that would

say We'll hire you and we're going to relocate you uh I know uh I know friends and friends of friends that have gone to say Google or Amazon and uh they were relocated from Canada and so like that's a thing but remote work opens tons of doors okay now if we think about what that means from a competition perspect perspective let's imagine let's imagine company a and Once Upon a Time company a said hey we are based in I'm just going to pick Seattle because I'm near Seattle we're based in Seattle we're going to hire developers and this is a point in time where you know remote work's not really popular so we have a job posting we're located in Seattle we got office space we'll see you in Seattle so who's going to apply to this job people that will relocate to Seattle and

physically be there or people that are nearby Seattle either living there so they don't have to commute very far or living outside of Seattle and they're willing to commute but what happens is that um people are doing this aren't they okay sorry uh a shitty part of the highway for traffic merging both ways um but what happens when that like when things open up to be fully remote is that the competition is going to go through the roof right you have now you're opening up a potential job to many more people that will apply now many of them will be very qualified right that's great many of them will be qualified that's super awesome now other people have these opportunities that may not have existed before I think this is a very positive thing right I think I think having the ability to work remotely

is great uh I don't think that there's necessarily anything wrong with in person I think forcing people to be in person is kind of weird uh especially if a job can be done remote uh I'm doing hybrid right now not because I'm forced but because especially as an engineering manager I enjoy face Toof face time with people um so hybrid's great fully remote's great uh and if you're someone that enjoys being in the office that's great too but there's some really cool benefits that come with remote work and that's that there are more opportunities for jobs now again one job instead of just if we take company a in Seattle they go hey we're going to open this up for remote workers now instead of just having people that could apply that are living in Seattle willing to move to Seattle now all of a

sudden it's open up to anyone in the world and if there's enough visibility into their job posting I mean what do you think is going to happen right it's it's going to have more people it's going to have more people applying so what's the side effect and I'm talking about this because I I want you to think through it in a way that's not like the world is against me because unfortunately I hear a lot of people talking about this kind of thing and please don't get me wrong I understand it feels like okay like I'm not here to tell you like oh like stop whining like whatever like I get it if you're if you've been trying to apply to jobs and it's not working I'm I'm not trying to to minimize how you're feeling it's not my intention but I want you to

try and reframe some of these things because when all you do is focus on the world is against me your life's going to suck you're going to feel like powerless like you have no control and everything is just going to suck so let's instead understand what's happening and again I'm not an expert on this I'm just sharing some observations about sort of like the I don't know if I can call it like the economy of of of job availability so we have these positions that are now open up to many more people more people are going to apply I did mention that's great if there's lots of people that are um qualified for the role but also what's going to happen is that you're going to have people that have been struggling to get jobs because there's a lot more competitions so you're going to

have people that are unqualified applying cuz they're like I'm going to try for anything so there's people that are out there and I don't blame them so this is not a negative thing they're like I need a job there's a job opening the work sounds interesting I'm applying so the volume of applications just keeps going up that's a bit of a vicious cycle there so again this is not me saying hey this is this is a good thing or like I I don't know like there there's tradeoffs for this but what is a company to do when they used to have I'm just making up numbers here for for Simplicity they used to have up to 50 applicant apply and now they have over a thousand what is a company to do and I understand that you might be there saying well they better go

through every resume and every application and pick the best candidate I hear you but guess what I can tell you what's not going to happen because it's not feasible for them to do it's not about you unfortunately right this is the tough love part I'm sorry to say it but it's not about you what's going to happen is they're going to find ways to try and reduce the volume it ends up being a supply and demand type of thing so what will happen is that when there's more volume coming in if someone can keep up with that application volume great if they're able to go through it and they can start looking for the best candidates great like they're still going through everything this is awesome but likely what's going to happen is they will just set the bar higher and this is again you're

going to say like well what how are they setting the bar higher they're going to say yeah it's a junior position and it's going to take a few years of experience you're going to say that's not fair but like they don't care because they have enough applications where someone is going to be interested it might not be you because and I get it like I'm not I'm not trying to side with them I'm just trying to explain what's happening they don't care because if they have enough volume they're going to say great you you were the junior that didn't have the three years of experience but there's a junior um that happened to have two that applied and you only had one or zero they're going to go that person's more qualified in this hypothetical scenario right so they set the bar higher and it

feels unfair and I totally get it the same thing will happen when they start saying you need to have a University degree right because and again I'm not saying that people that don't have a University degree are not as good it's I'm not saying that at all I know tons of people that have been very successful and never went to University okay so I am not saying that but it's very easy for someone to say we want to set a bar High higher why don't we just like conceptually figure out that hm if we happen to set the bar Higher by requiring a university education that should imply that someone has more education that should imply that they are better and I'm not saying that that's true but I do believe that this is a thought process going on so they can keep raising the

bar to reduce the volume to a comfortable amount this is very in my opinion this is very much a supply and demand type of thing and unfortunately it's not even like there's no jobs in my opinion I think that there's plenty of jobs there's plenty of people that are still hiring my team's not hiring but I've been doing interviews for other teams this year there's there's there are people hiring but there's a lot more competition and my opinion on this is because it's now a global approach but what's happening I feel like is there's more eyes on these companies that stand out like big tech companies like larger companies that are household names they might not be in like the Fang or whatever groups but you know there's still going to be huge companies they're listing High salaries great those ones stand out they're going

to have a lot more competition so the bar keeps increasing I get that it does not feel fair to you I'm not trying to say that I think it is fair I'm trying to get you to think about from my expectations what's actually happening here so the sooner we get past like it's not fair like again I really hate to say it but like life just isn't fair we don't have full control over everything in life so instead of being pissed off and upset about all these things that we can't control why don't we try to understand them and then try to figure out what things we do control right if we can figure out what we control we can try putting our energy and effort into other things to move forward actually making progress okay so my whole point of talking about that was

not to try and make you feel bad it's to try and get you to think through these things in a different way so that we can get you back on track to feeling like you have some control over what's going on because when you I I totally get it when it feels like you have no control over a situation every day sucks unless you have no control over a situation and it happens to be the most awesome situation but um if you have a situation like that I'd love to hear about it and I'd love to know how to to be in the powerless situation where everything's great I just I feel like that's probably non-existent but hey Never Say Never okay so competitions way up we have these job postings that are going up and just continually raising the bar again maybe not by

your definition but they're doing it in a way to help filter candidates so that it's more manageable and in theory they get better candidates in theory whether or not you agree with that or not by their bar different story you're not controlling their hiring process this is a person beside me that does not understand zipper merging but let's see if they figure it out maybe they will oh I think they get it I think they get it unlike the Range Rover driver the other day right nice excellent we love people like this we're all stuck in traffic palet it's okay we're all going to make it nice um in Canada we wave a lot when we do this and say thank you but sometimes I feel like especially when it's dark if I put my hand out and make it look like I'm trying to

wave that might think I'm flipping them off or something so I'm like holding back my inner Canadian I just want to say thank you so much but like I don't know I guess we don't do that here um so to this person's you know they had like a two-part question in my opinion I'm trying to cover that second part which is like why why does it seem like the expectations are so high and honestly I think it's because the volume of application coming in so I've had some people say like because I've talked about this with John vanir who runs the latterly io uh he has he's really good at collecting data on this stuff so if you want like you might not agree with my opinion and that's totally cool uh if you listen to John vvir you might not agree with his opinion

that's totally cool like these are just my opinions and my observations and how I'm thinking through stuff but John will actually collect data so his analysis might not agree with but um it's really difficult to disagree with data right like if it's just raw data points like um it's not impossible but okay let's get over let's get over this fast Lane's coming up this guy's going the wrong way we want the fast lane buddy you're trying to leave oh he's ruining everything your Signal's still on no okay nice one more one more I don't know if this part of my drive is like entertaining for people or if you're like this freaking sucks like get on with it but I hate this part of my drive so I'm trying to make it enjoyable I got one more Lane good thing is this car accelerates bad

thing is it's hard to see cuz I have to watch in front of me if the guy in front of me is going to break but I also need to make sure that I can have some room to to slam on the gas if I need to come on oh couple people moving over let's go let's go cool um so on the like I was saying John has data on this I've had people say to me like what was I talking about I wanted to talk about numbers of things oh job applications people were saying like I disagree that you should be applying to lots of jobs like that shouldn't be the norm and I'm like look I'm not here to tell you what should be normal or not what I am here to tell you is like if you're applying to a couple of

jobs every week and going oh man I'm not getting a job what I want to say is there are people out there applying to orders of magnitude more jobs than you every week again this is one of those things you don't have control over how many jobs other people are applying to right you can't just say hey everyone stop applying or max out at two jobs per week you can't do that obviously it sounds stupid for me to say that right you're like Nick what the hell are you talking about let's get out of there holy crap a stupid truck was in front of me trying to merge over for like 10 years um by the way I'm not even speeding so um that's how slow we were going I'm going the speed limit so you can't control how many job applications other people are

sending out so if it feels unfair or you don't like the fact that you have to apply to more jobs because you shouldn't have to do that again I get it that sucks I don't like that idea either that's a lot more work that definitely feels like it's unfair I could understand that would be frustrating the problem is that you have a choice and that's that you can remain frustrated and say that's unfair I'm not doing it in which case I would say no problem but whatever your success rate is in terms of like a percentage you're just taking fewer opportunities and that could be if you're cool with that that's great but I would say like I don't know like stop complaining then like it's crappy but you have a choice so if you can't control other people and surprised you cannot I would

say think about what you can control if you're saying I'm trying everything with my resume trying these different things and I'm applying to jobs but I'm applying to two a week 3 a week whatever there's people doing you know 20 50 100 a week and they're just taking more opportunities people don't like this and I understand but to say that like therefore I'm not going to do it that's totally cool but the only person that's going to be upset about that is probably you okay so I understand that people don't want to hear me say that and it's very easy to then assume that I'm am trying to make it sound like haha like sucks to be you you have to go apply to a lot of jobs I'm not trying to say that I'm just trying to say that like you have to do

what's in your control and if you don't want to apply to lots of jobs that's totally okay but then I would say to you what are your thoughts around improving your success rate if you're not taking more chances I.E more job applications how are you increasing your success rate cuz then I would imagine people are saying well I'm improving my resume or I'm trying new things great that's awesome how is it working for you right something else people might say is well okay well I think I have a pretty good resume I've tried a couple things out but like maybe I should be networking again great idea there are other things you can be doing so it's not to say the only thing is more job applications but it's certainly something that's in your control okay so I think that's a lot of talk on

sort of my belief on why you're seeing and I I don't even have data to prove this but why I would imagine that the bar seems to be set higher for job applications okay so a lot more competition with a global Workforce and many remote positions okay second part to this or I guess maybe was the first part in his question or her question I'm not sure um but the second part we're going to talk through is around this idea of like front end back end full stack um and then expertise across these different areas so a segue is still going to be around the competition part okay so if we and I'm going to I'm going to try to Pivot this so I'm not just repeating the same things but let me segue into this part of the conversation which is like say you're

hiring for a frontend developer okay and if you had I'm just making this up it's definitely contrived and arbitrary so just hear me out you have two individuals all of their other experiences are equal and you're hiring for a front-end position and all of someone's front-end experience compared to someone else is the same both amazing candidates but then one of the candidates is able to say oh and by the way I also happen to have a lot of experience building stuff in the back end I I understand it's a good drive scenario I understand that but like what what do we think is going to happen here if everything else is equal personality behavioral interview everything's the same but one person happens to have a lot more experience than the other in a diff a different additional area assuming the front end stuff was the

exact same you would suspect that they're probably going to hire the person with even more experience in something that may not seem directly related but could still be beneficial right we need a front end Dev but if you're a front end Dev that understands a lot of backend that could be really helpful when we're building stuff they might not have put it on their the job application initially but they're interviewing and they're like man yeah like that's that's actually pretty helpful now what can happen over time again thinking about competition is there just like well we keep trying to hire frontend devs but like we are getting a lot of frontend devs applying why don't we like why don't we start upping the bar by by asking for some more backend development experience we've hired one or two people like that and they're awesome right

like we know we want them to focus on the front end but like if we can get this extra experience then they can be more versatile the company like we're in this position we got a lot of people applying like why don't we just do that and very easily the bar is now set higher so again it may not feel fair but this is something that could very easily happen okay now the way I wanted to shift this a little bit too is like this also might depend on the jobs that you're applying to and I have experience at startups and I have experience at Microsoft so I haven't been to other big tech companies Microsoft though for the past four and a half years and my understanding my observations is that at larger companies they can afford to pay for specialization okay so what

I mean by that is that they're able to get more heads and they can pay them more for their specialty and how can they do that they got loads of cash in comparison look at this idiot that lane ends see this person coming up beside me they're zipper merging that makes sense the person who shot ahead was behind me they were already merged in they unmerged like an absolute idiot to try and get past a couple more cars it's people like this that suck you're literally two cars ahead of me now I hope it was worth it hope you had a great time because what ends up happening is you could be like these people pulled over on the side cuz they had a fender bender cuz you were trying to get two cars ahead like an absolute jackass but there we have it so

we have these situations where we're seeing that in big tech companies companies with more cash that they can afford specialization something else to mention is depending on what's being built like to give you an example I work in Office 365 I work on the substrate platform which is what all of The Office 365 services are built on top of substrate is a very big part of Microsoft if you were to guess at the type of work that's being done it's all infrastructure services for the substrate platform how much front-end work do you think there is there's not a ton at least in my areas right so it makes sense that in my areas they're hiring for specialization in back end in databases in certain Technologies even right like Microsoft can afford to do that and strategically and tactically it can make a lot of sense

for them to bring in someone that has expertise in an area and pay a premium for it because from their perspective they're taking some cash and I can't obviously I can't speak on behalf of Microsoft specifically for this this is just an example right because I I'm not the one who's running the ship but if they have the cash to be able to do it the risk is actually about delivering things and delivering them effectively so if they have cash to mitigate that risk like why would you not go spend it on bringing in an expert that's a good fit for the team let's contrast this though let's talk about startups and I'm not talking about startups that have millions of dollars in investment uh spoiler alert many startups that have millions of dollars in investment and don't have any income do this thing where

they try to hire a bunch of people rapidly and they blow through all the money and they don't have paying customers it's not a good spot to be in so yes it's great if you're a startup and you have investors and things are going well and you're scaling properly excellent that's exciting good news but it's not the normal case it's not the normal case that startups just have millions and millions of dollars of investment most of the time startups are small companies right it might be a Founder trying to just scale up and get a few people together they might not even have income yet maybe they have no income and the founders paying people's salaries out of his pocket his or her pocket they might even say hey we can't even afford to pay salaries right now but here's Equity right there's there's many

situations like this with startups that they're not in a good spot financially so if they don't have the cash to go pay for specialization and also big surprise they need people that can do everything because at a startup you don't really have a choice a lot of the time you might be on the front end team at a startup but it's a startup you got to wear different hats a lot of the time the build's broken one day cool guess what you're on the infer team today cool there's a bug with database stuff great you're going to be working on database stuff even though you only know JavaScript like too bad it's got to happen because if it doesn't the company doesn't survive so startups are often not in a spot where they have this luxury of being able to pay um for specialization so

what I would say and there's a spectrum here right because and I realize when I talk about this stuff it's so easy for one person to say that's not true that's not been my experience and what I want to tell you if you're feeling this way when I talk about anything is that when I talk about this stuff you need to understand that both of us can be right because I'm making a statement that from my experience this is how startups have behaved here's how big Tech looks you might have worked at a startup that was very different or a big tech company that was very different and your experience could be totally different and still very true so I'm not here to tell you that your experience is wrong and on that same token if you want to tell me my experience is wrong

it's so um the idea here going back to this person's original question I think is like this might be heavily skewed on what types of jobs they're applying for so I and I don't know I don't have the context given this question so if they're just applying to smaller companies and stuff um perhaps there's a lot more looking for uh generalists um perhaps given the the competition comment I made earlier perhaps what's happening is companies are setting the bar higher and they're saying hey instead of just expecting a front-end developer Let's go ask for other things as well that way we can get someone who's good at a bunch of stuff so it could be could be a bunch of different factors so like I said at the beginning of this rambling how long have we been doing this now it's going to be about

an hour to get home in total it's a long one folks thanks for hanging out but like I said near the beginning of this what are things we can action in the previous part I was talking about some things that are like let's focus on what's in your control oh my goodness this traffic is absolute balls so what's in your control in this situation you have a spe specific skill set and you're noticing that companies that you're applying to are asking for um a broader skill set it's sometimes not even broader but maybe broader but also looking for expertise across this breadth um something that's in your control is to try creating some of that other experience as an example that might not mean that you get that work experience necessarily right so if you're a frontend developer and you've been building stuff in the

front end and you're like yeah like I know my JavaScript I know my typescript I know my HTML I know my CSS great awesome stuff but you're like yeah I don't have any backend development experience and now it doesn't feel fair that I'm applying to these jobs and everyone is asking for someone who's more General well maybe it's time to start building some full stack stuff now that might not give you um like right away give you like this real world practical experience of Building Systems like this where you're building full stack but it's a starting point right like you could be going to build this stuff learn about it um there's ways that you can start to transition this stuff to look like experience on a resume whether that's projects right maybe you're building in public talking about this stuff I need water um

you could I've heard people talk about like I don't necessarily agree with this cuz it feels like a bit of a cheat code um I've heard people talk about like hey go go form an LLC right and now you're building whatever your random side project was and that's for your LLC like you could you could do that that feels a little bit deceptive to me but then you could list it under work experience but um to me that feels like it feels like gets kind of scammy uh and I I want to be careful about how I say this it feels kind of scammy to me even though it might work to get someone's attention which I would agree like that feels like maybe it's a weird bar to set but it feels kind of scammy to me and I think that you're going to

have to explain it anyway in an interview or be prepared to tell me about this thing you've been building tell me about that company you worked for oh it's my company oh how long's the company been around for uh a month pardon me that was a good timing for for a cough yeah it's been around for a month oh okay like so now you're kind of catching yourself in this weird spot where it's like yeah I just made an LLC so I could list it as work experience I don't know like it feels weird to me now I get that I am not every recruiter SL hiring manager but I would be fine with seeing projects and stuff that you're working on just under projects right if especially if you're going for like Junior jobs great like if you're a frontend developer and you're exploring

this other stuff like tell me about the stuff you're building put it on your resume worked on this project tell me about why you pick different Technologies tell me about how you refactored code rewrote it extended it it's all cool stuff because that's building real software yes don't get me wrong someone having on their resume that they also worked in back ended company and you know saved millions of dollars and stuff and demonstrated really big impact across teams like yeah that stands out but that's not everyone you don't have to compete against necessarily people like this some yes but having some experience that you can create for your own resume can help so um whether you want to go the LLC route doesn't feel great to me personally I've seen people let me say this people that I admire and respect I've seen them suggest

this and I don't think that they're wrong in terms of how it can work I just it's not really something I agree with that's how I would frame it um the other thing that you could do so say you're junior um if you're employed already this is less applicable for people that have not yet been hired but if you're employed already something that you could be doing is asking at work where you're currently at for different opportunities that might be a little bit outside of your um your current scope now I want to use this example um from from real life at Microsoft because I mentioned that I worked in substrate well I still work in substrate the team before I'm on a team that's uh like a routing plane before working on the routing plane I worked on a deployment team the deployment team

is purely backend infrastructure for deploying Services um so I had a lot of people on my team that were focused on backend Tech now some of them are very new in their career very new in their career and they're entering their career going like hey this is great I get to work at Microsoft it is an awesome opportunity nothing bad about that that's great but they're realizing hey I'm I'm only focused in backend technology and they're starting to wonder hm is this going to be something long term that like I'm going to fall behind in these other areas so I've absolutely had conversations with my employees cuz I try to make sure I'm staying in touch with what's keeping them engaged and I've had multiple employees literally talk to me about hey like I love working on this team it's interesting space love the people

I work with but like are there any opportunities where I could be trying out some of this other stuff like does that opportunity exist here and to me this is a really interesting spot as an engineering manager I've talked about this in previous videos if I got the hunch that whoever I was talking to on my team was not engaged and what would keep them engaged and where their career where they're trying to go in their career is working in a different space to me it doesn't make sense to not try and support them I feel like that will only backfire if I was just like n forget it like the backend stuff this is the best you don't got to worry about anything else come on like what's going to happen if that's not where their interest lies is that their engagement will drop

over time and they will go from being a good employee to not and as long as they're not scared they will leave they will leave to go work somewhere else whether it's a different team different company where they're feeling like they're going to grow in their career so I believe as an engineering manager again I may not be your engineering manager but I believe it's my responsibility to help people grow in their career and I would much rather try to support someone even if it's not something that I have direct responsibility over so I didn't have any frontend development work but I had a partner team that reported to my manager and I said hey can some of my employees do some of this work part-time they're still contributing to business value that's a high priority can they do that because it's an engagement opportunity

for them it's a learning opportunity it's going to keep them engaged the answer yep no problem let's make sure we're specking this out in our commitments by the way maybe there's an opportunity for someone on that team to be helping out on our side so depending on your team setup your organization these are things that can exist and in my opinion I fully support them uh they do come with some challenges of course so yes there is overhead to doing this kind of thing um you know it it keeps a team a little bit less cohesive it's sometimes difficult to plan around but if if I feel confident that I can make the opportunity for someone I like to do this so that might be something you can talk with your manager about maybe that's something that your organization supports where you can say like

I feel like I'm not getting these other experiences I would like to try and level up in these other areas so that's something I recommend trying okay I talked about this for way longer than I thought the drive was pretty crap um but I feel like we got through it I'm a few minutes away from home my throat is my throat doesn't hurt but I can feel like I'm uh as I'm talking I feel like there's something in my throat which is not a great spot for anything I don't want anything there food on the way down and that's it but yeah today was good um I'll close out here I'm going to I'm going to ramble a little bit more that's what I do so if you want to hang out still that's awesome I appreciate it um I'm going to go into work

again tomorrow with do have a little holiday thing so that'll be 3 days this week for me um did I go on Monday yeah I did I went on Monday um yeah I'm man I'm hoping that what if I have something starting that I'm over it I kind of I feel a little bit feverish but like my hands are cold too so I can't just touch my head but uh I kind of have like chills um which isn't a good sign got chill the the seat heater is still on actually it's off but I I know it's warm enough in here uh but I have some chills so I'm hoping sleep it off or something we have a little gift exchange at work tomorrow that'll be fun uh I miss this kind of stuff like on my previous team no no one's fault but like

um everyone like everyone was remote and I still have remote employees on this team but there's some that are around so it's nice to be able to meet up uh and and the greater team there's a lot of people that are local as well so it's pretty cool um what else we got going on so I mentioned in the previous video I have a soft skills course that's launching on dome train this is created with Ryan Murphy who's an engineering manager at Yelp um I think right when I was leaving work I was giving Nick chopis who runs Dome train I was giving him the curriculum uh I believe he's going to be posting that right away which is cool I think that's like seven courses on dome train now so it's uh yeah feels good I like that I like that um you know

this kind of stuff for me like what I'm doing right now this is fun I enjoy this uh my main Channel Dev leader I enjoy being able like the fact that it helps people like I like that what I don't like about Dev leader is that it's very structured cont content cuz that puts a pressure on me I realize like tutorials are a helpful kind of thing but uh I don't like I feel like I'm not a good Entertainer is how I would put it so when I'm making tutorials or educational content that's polished I don't feel like I'm a good Entertainer I feel like people watch code commute because you're seeing me literally being as natural as I could be if my wife would listen to me blab about software engineering bull crap Non-Stop and she was sitting in the car beside me this

is what I would be doing but she would say Nick that's enough shut up and I don't blame her cuz I ramble a lot so um so this is fun for me to do cuz it it feels like it's natural um and I get that added bonus where people are like in the comments are saying thanks I've had people people from code join my Dev leader live streams I do those on uh try to do them every Monday 700 p.m. Pacific and you can see that on Twitch YouTube LinkedIn Tik Tok Twitter kick did I say kick already Facebook Instagram like basically every platform um and I had people that were joining that and saying like hey I've been watching Code commute I really like it like that feels good um you know it's nice to be able to do something that kind of feels

like it's a natural thing um this is free for me to do I'm sitting I'm sitting in the car on my drive to work so it's free for me to do it's kind of fun CU it's what I talk about and people are saying they enjoy it so um I like this stuff the courses are a lot of work um it's a lot of work um and it's it feels crappy because compared to a YouTube video like I do a YouTube video I get it edited and we can release it where the course it's like there's you know six hours of material and you have to wait for all of it to be done then you can release it um so it can be a bit of a slog right where you're like working on this stuff and you're like but there's no there's no

feedback loop right there's no like am I am I doing a good job like I hope I'm doing a good job uh I'm getting tired of doing this because I feel like I've been talking about the same thing things but like really want to get this done like you have to just kind of trust that you're going to get it done and and that people hopefully are going to love it so courses are a lot of work but oh come on let's go um but I've gotten feedback on courses right like I I get the feedback directly um for people that submit it it's anonymized I can't see the names of people saying mean stuff but it's great to hear people that have had good experiences with the the material so um I talked about this one of the previous videos but for this this

kind of stuff for me is a feel-good thing talked about this like Microsoft pays me well I don't I don't need to take my my primary YouTube channel makes me $3 a day after two years of making videos I get $3 a day and it cost me $500 do $1,000 a month in editing and thumbnails so it's uh it's not a good mix to make money but I enjoy it right so I'm thankful that I'm in a position where I can afford to do that um the uh the comments and stuff like when people message Me or Leave comments and they say thank you like uh really help me understand something like that it I know it sounds like kind of easy but like that's actually the best part it would be nice if I didn't have to pay money out of my pocket for

the editing and stuff but like that's it's kind of part of it so I do appreciate everyone being here um I'm just coming up to my road now so like I said a little earlier um you can find me on different social media platforms just look for Dev leader I'm on everything except Snapchat because I don't know what the heck I would be doing there um and yeah I you know if you if you like this kind of content uh maybe you want other modes of delivery oh this is awkward to pull in someone's coming on the street oh my wife's not home there's a car going by and a car coming up behind me so I had to figure my out great um yeah no I appreciate you being here and if you like the topics at least and you want different modes of

how that's delivered just check it out on different platforms so I will see you next time and thanks for being here take care