My Advice For Early In Career Software Engineers

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All right. Well, that's embarrassing. I just filmed the first bit of this video, uh, and forgot to turn on the audio. So, um, stupid me. Um, now I got to start it all over again. So, welcome to this video. Um, I'm going to be talking about a conversation I was having today at work for early and career mentorship. And um so the context is that I have an employee who is in the early and career mentorship circle in terms of being a mentor. This is also a program I participate in and it's super cool. I think it's really a ton of value ad for for people that are early in their career and uh so I haven't been in it for a little bit just because of the big project I was running. So I do have to get back into it because I do really enjoy it.

But uh my employee is in one of the circles as a mentor and asked me to come speak which is awesome. Um you know flattered to do it. It's cool. I get to share my experience as a manager with the individuals there because when you're in these mentorship circles you'll have people that are uh product managers, engineers, different levels and stuff. So all sorts of different perspective. But I get to kind of bring my own as a manager. So for context, these folks are not at the beginning of their circle, which runs about 12 months. I think they're towards the end, and they've already been through what's called one connect period at Microsoft. Uh a connect is a like a career conversation that you document with your manager, talk about your accomplishments, um you know, level set expectations and stuff. It's all, like I said, it's documented though, which is great.

They've been through one of those, which is your first one, you're kind of like, I don't know what the heck I'm doing. And they have another one coming up. And so, we talked about career conversations and how to navigate those with your manager. So, I figured I would talk about that in this video because the advice is applicable to not just Microsoft. And in fact, my opening slide said, you know, career conversations uh at Microsoft and beyond, right? Like because this stuff is going to be applicable outside of that. So, if you're new to the channel, friendly reminder that if you want questions answered on software development or career stuff, leave them below in the comments. Happy to try and answer. Otherwise, you can send them into Dev Leader on social media. Dev leader is also my main YouTube channel. That's where I have my C tutorials.

I have uh some software engineering generalized content. I have a podcast where I interview other software developers and hear about how they got to where they're at. And then a live stream every Monday at 700 p.m. Pacific. And it's super awesome to see folks there from Code Commute engaging in the chat and stuff. Uh honestly makes my day. It's really cool that, you know, I'll get people from the comments on these videos joining the chat. So, love to see it. But yeah, um that's the main channel. Otherwise, you can message Nick Cosantino on LinkedIn and happy to try and answer what you got going on. So, I do have the Insta 360 going. Um so, you get to see all this traffic piling up. But, uh, oh man, the beginning of the last video, I was trying to show that there's a Tesla. I'm gonna I'll edit it.

I'll put it in. So, you've already seen it. Or maybe I'll You know what I'll do? I'm going to I'm going to edit this one. I'm going to splice it in. Oh, I should have moved up. Okay. Ain't nobody got time for that. So the uh conversation today was about how to have career conversations with your manager. And these folks have already been through this material once, but the difference is now they're going to have a chance to hear it from my perspective as a manager. And even when I was telling uh my employee, you know, like I'm not going to I'm not going into this being like I'm going to discredit the things that you were talking about. I'm like obviously, you know, you have perspective on this stuff. I trust that you were telling them, you know, things that I also believe, but at least um if there's additional perspective that I can provide, like that's my goal in going through this.

Plus, if they have questions that they want to ask that they weren't sure if they could ask or get a good answer from the other engineers, then I could try to fill that blank. Um, okay. So, if I kind of flow through how the conversation went, I started by talking about my my two most important reminders, and that's going to be that you are in the driver's seat of your career, right? So you should not just wait for things to happen. I think waiting for things to happen in terms of promotions and stuff is like probably the best way to be disappointed and frustrated. And if we lived in a perfect world, your manager would be fully supporting you, proactively doing all this stuff, giving you opportunities, getting you promoted. But like we don't live in a perfect world. And not only that, I do think that there's some element anyway that you should take some responsibility in your career.

So, you're in the driver's seat. Be proactive. Take charge. I think it's easier said than done. So, I don't mean to trivialize it. I just think that you need to kind of start believing that and then, you know, take some action on it. Next part is that no one cares more about your career than you do. And that's not said to be like demotivating or something. It's just the reality of the situation. And it kind of goes hand inhand with the first point. So you care about your career. I'm sure your manager cares about your career. I'm sure your significant other, if you have one, cares about your career. But no one will care more about it than you will. So it's another reason that you should be trying to be proactive about this stuff. Don't just wait for a career conversation to happen. Don't just wait to hope that you have a, you know, your performance review and cross your fingers that promotion's there even though you haven't talked about it for 2 years.

Don't do that. You will be disappointed probably a lot more frequently. So, that's how I started framing things up to say, you know, you're in the driver's seat. From there, my next important ingredient with career conversations is making sure that you're having regular one-on- ons. So, this is a little fun exercise to do. Um, and generally, you know, I'm not going to force anyone to talk about stuff, but generally like to try and get people sharing, kind of warmed up to to have conversations because in these forums, it's a small group. I don't know how many people there. There are like eight, nine, 10 people in total, including me. Um, but I want to make sure people are comfortable to ask questions, right? The whole goal of me being there is that I can help try to get them answers to things that they're curious about.

So, I got to warm them up a little bit. And so, we kind of did like a little round table of like, hey, who's having like who has regular 101 ones? Like, what cadence are they at? Um, do you feel that's a good cadence? Right? So starting to get people questioning like sure okay I do have a 101 but like is it even good? Um you know someone was saying like a couple people were like I joined a new team or a new manager and like we don't have regular one on's yet. Okay like what are you doing about that? So getting people to again not like put them on the spot necessarily, let them know they don't have to answer if they don't want to, but um get them to realize like, hey, yeah, like you do have one ones, that's good, but you don't even find them useful, but you're also not doing anything about it, right?

Like why? What, you know, what's up with that? Is it that you're not comfortable talking to your manager? um like you know I'm a I'm a stranger to you like you might feel more comfortable talking to me about it because there's no like direct power dynamic or something but let's chat right and I find it's a really good way because if you can warm people up to talk about it the more you go around the room more people are comfortable sharing more details and you'll see patterns and stuff come up too right so um one was or I mean one pattern is kind of like I don't know what to talk about, right? That's a common thing. Another is they're I mean I already said like they're not having one-on- ones. So, we chatted through that. There was questions around uh cuz one of the things that I said was how how many people having career conversations, right?

So, there's a couple people that said their manager was proactively doing them. So, that's great, right? That's really good news. And I mean, I would I don't want to say I expect that. I want to expect that of managers, but I feel like some just don't. It's like it's easier to just not do it, but it also means you're not doing your job. Um, so back to being proactive, it's like, okay, how many people are comfortable having career conversations with their manager, right? You're having them. Are you the one initiating it? Is your is your manager? So, I was trying to demonstrate there's probably some folks in the room that are like, "Yes, I do have career conversations with my manager." And when we drill into it, it's like, and I have to bring them up, right? Because if you don't, it's not going to happen.

So, you know, if you're also in the same boat and someone, you know, you're with your manager and they're not ever having career conversations with you, you probably need to bring them up. You need to be the one to initiate it. So, we spent time talking about one-on ones. I shared some details about like how to use your one-on-one time, which I've shared in my perspective on on this in different videos I have on Code Commute, but I I think you don't have to have the same one-on-one every week. I think mixing in career stuff is good. um mixing in like asking for feedback that's directed is good, right? If you ask general questions, how am I doing? Do you have any feedback for me? You're going to get very generic shitty answers and then you're going to be left disappointed going man like my manager just says keep doing what you're doing and it feels bad.

It does feel bad. They're probably like that's not wrong feedback though. It's just that it's generic because it was probably asked for in a generic way. What we want is targeted feedback. That's why we're always disappointed when someone says just keep doing the thing cuz what you really want is either that thing you did is awesome or here's a thing that we can target that you should improve on. That's helpful. So, how do you get directed feedback? You ask for specific feedback on specific things. So I give a couple of examples and you know you can think of a million once you start going down this path right but it's like hey manager like you've been on a couple of my code reviews recently I don't know how many people have their managers on code reviews or whatever but as an example like how have

you like over the last couple of uh code reviews I've been doing you have any feedback for me do you think that I've been improving how how is uh you know you had comments before about my testing and how I've written my test. Do you feel like that's improved or any more feedback to offer there? Like make it timely so that it's relevant and then make it specific so that you can actually get some useful feedback, right? Just design documents. Hey, like I just did a design doc and you were one of the reviewers for it. Like how did you feel about how I organized it or how I presented the pros and cons analysis? you were in the presentation where I was doing the design dock and we were going through and uh you know kind of debating the pros and cons on these things.

you know, how do you have any feedback on how I was able to navigate that? Like, just be specific. People, I get it. Like, you want to just ask, I want feedback, and then hope you get specific feedback, but I mean, surprise. If you feel like you're constantly disappointed when you ask for feedback and get just ask for something more specific. So, we'll focus on that. Um, what was next? Talked about um like career conversations, I guess. So, you've people know where this is going. If you've watched other videos of mine, like the number one thing I talk about on this channel is like level set expectations. cuz I need t-shirts with that. Um, new code commute merch with level set expectation shirts that no one will wear. Um, the idea being that a couple things we have at Microsoft at least in like our organization we have talent guides which are basically just rubrics.

So I was saying one if you don't know where to start or how to start there's literally these rubrics managers use them in the past 5 yearsish that I've been at Microsoft just under 5 years now across different you know having different leadership different managers the reality is that when it comes to career conversations and promotions we are expected to be using those rubrics. It's not the only thing, but like when there's debates about things going on, people will go back to those rubrics, right? So, people will challenge me and say like, "Hey, yeah, I understand you want to put this person up for promotion. A lot of great evidence. What areas of improvement do you think that they need?" And like, we're expected to be able to go to the talent guide and talk about them because that's how we're measuring people.

It's based on those So was bringing up the talent guide and saying you can use this as a basis for your career conversations but the level set expectations part is the is like the primary goal with your career conversations. So yes your managers can give you guidance and hopefully they do give you guidance in your career progression. Maybe that's more long-term, whatever it happens to be, but um one of the most foundational parts is that you have these conversations about your career progression, what you should be focused on, and then you leave those conversations being on the same page, understanding. Now, I said leave the conversation. If you leave the conversation and you're not on the same page, I just urged people like keep making sure that you're trying to drive towards clarity. Perhaps the way things are being explained, you need multiple conversations on it.

No problem. From my perspective, because one of the common things that came up that people were saying was like, I don't want to have surprises. Yeah, no one wants a surprise, right? The surprise you want is the here's a promotion in a million bucks, right? Here's a lot more money and here's a title. That sounds cool. That's a nice surprise. But like imagine just having the nice surprise and then like for a year or two years straight you're like feel like you're walking on eggshells having no idea if you're even on the right track. Like you probably don't want that. So, like use your time when you're talking with your manager to get on the same page. I actually like my manager is very proactive in telling me stuff in terms of like what I need to focus on. So, that works very well, right? And I I have a manager that does support me, but like I can't just rely on that.

I can't like if he wasn't doing that or bringing it up in one ones, I can't just let you know 12 months go by and like not say anything about, hey, like I'm trying to work towards my promotion. Like what should I focus on? He's telling me and then he's putting opportunities in front of me. So I go execute on the opportunities. Now, is it panning out so far? Absolutely not. But he has given me updated expectations. So, we're driving towards those. And no, I'm not saying that as in it's like his fault or something. I believe that he got additional feedback and is trying to now guide me on where that additional feedback came from. So, we talked about that. Um, I tried to explain how like the role of your manager in this is that if you have a good manager, your good manager is not a gatekeeper of promotions.

A good manager should be trying to support you towards getting a promotion, but your manager needs evidence. Okay? So, a manager is not just going to be like, "Obviously, I want to promote you, so I'm just going to like I'm just going to randomly put you out for promotion and hope someone says yes and doesn't question me on it, or they're going to question me and I'm just going to make some up." Like, no. Your manager needs the evidence so that they can make a good case for your promotion. So, in my opinion, like it would be ideal to team up on that so that you can get good evidence. I mean, when I'm saying this, like as a manager, I want to be able to bring good evidence for someone's promotion case. That's what I want. So, I'm doing my best to try and observe, trying to make sure that I'm collecting evidence to be able to do that.

But like if I have employees that are like, "Hey, like this is another highlighter. You might not have had visibility into this. Here's a thing I did." Great. Like tell me because I want to go represent you. Now, the other thing I added though was that having your manager like your manager's buy in to promote you is necessary. of course, but it's not sufficient all the time. This is obviously going to be very dependent on your organizational structure, but like in my case or like sorry at Microsoft, even for someone more junior, your manager is necessary and your skip is going to have to make sure they're bought in and then it like has to get approved by finance and everything, right? HR like it has to go through the steps but your manager is necessary to make that happen. Generally for more junior people a skip level is not going to like challenge it much unless there's like budget issues or something.

But the skit manager is going to be in a similar position where they're like I want to feel confident about that but they're very junior and I trust you as a manager have seen the growth and stuff that we want to see. So like great it's fine right? As the person becomes more senior there's more scrutiny and then the um the skip level will start to basically question it more and say hey like do we need more evidence on this or can you explain more about that blah blah blah and then you're just doing a lot more you know offering up of examples to demonstrate that case. Now at some point, so at least for me, like at level 65 at Microsoft, it's not even enough. It's necessary, but not sufficient for my manager and my skip level to want to promote me. It has to go to the CVP's directs or some group.

So necessary, but not sufficient. So the um that was one part of the conversation talked about like timing. So at Microsoft there's promotions. Oh, don't switch lanes. You almost you almost died. I watched it. Almost switch lanes without a signal. Um, we have promotions every quarter, but there's like a major one, an off cycle, and then two like much smaller ones. And people were saying like, how does budget tie into that? And I was saying by the time we're in that like that last quarter promotions. I'm like, generally there's there isn't budget for that. People have will have used up the budget before that. Generally, it's pretty rare otherwise. Um, but tried to explain like for the main promotion cycle, there's a very big delay between when the decisions made and when you get the news like a significantly bigger delay than the other uh promotion cycles.

So, if you were to get promoted for this main promotion cycle, you would receive the promotion at the beginning of like it would take effect in the beginning of September. You would hear about it mid August but the decision is made in June. Okay. So, like there's months in between these things and I think that's important because I mean it was it's demonstrated by a question that someone had and I think it's a totally fair and good question but going back to the connects where people are documenting the things they've done. They were trying to ask like, "Hey, there's usually about, you know, a few weeks to get our connects written and submitted, but they were trying to ask like if I um if I take longer to write my connect and I can basically get like a few more weeks of work done to add it onto the connect, am I going to be at an advantage or if other people are doing that, am I at a disadvantage of like being promoted?

And I was like, in my opinion, no. Because most of the time I'm on like I have a pretty good idea already. Like I don't the next like couple weeks of work that you're going to try and squeeze in or something. That's not really going to make a big difference for me. I've never seen that be a thing. And even if you have like I don't have people that are like I don't do this with people. go complete this project because, you know, finishing this project is going to be the thing that gets you promoted. And then people are like, "Oh, I got to rush it at the end here or else I'm not going to get promoted." Like, it's not not how it works. Um, not for me. You might have a manager that thinks differently. So, what's Nick going to say about that? Have a conversation with your manager and level set expectations.

That's right. Oh, the sheriff. No cherries turning on. We're safe. Okay. You never know. No, you get that feeling every time you drive by a police officer, you're like, "What am I doing that's illegal?" I always joke with my wife about that because it's like whether it's police or like border crossing in particular, it's like it's always like this really like why is it so scary? I don't understand. Like it makes you think like I must be committing a crime, right? So we're always like, "Oh, like sorry." Like I have Yes, I'm carrying stolen goods. Oh god. Like it always feels that way. But no, I don't have stolen goods on me. Um timing. What else? budget. Oh, a question around budget. People were asking, um, say you have two people that are like up for promotion and there's not enough budget. Like what happens?

And I was just trying to say like it's not a it it basically goes back to the the managers that are able to have the sign off on it, right? If they have to make a decision, then they'll make a decision. Um so I have I have been in situations where people have been put up for promotion and um there wasn't budget which is unfortunate and so either I'm just told like hey like you know there was a decision already made and these people didn't make it but it's not just like finance has some budget and then they just go well these people didn't so like boop, they're just dropped off and forgotten. It's more like, hey, there isn't enough budget. It has to go back to uh like the skip level or whoever to go have a conversation and figure that out and balance things.

So, if the skip wasn't comfortable making the decision based on the evidence that was provided, then like they'd probably bring in managers to discuss and get it sorted out. So it's not just like a drops off the the edge of the earth. Look at that dog. A um I don't know. Overall it's really good. I think there's a lot of good questions. I'm trying to I can't really think of anything else off the top of my head. If I blab a little bit more, it'll probably come to mind. But happy to do stuff like that. felt like a a code commute session in person. I also think it's good I have to practice stuff like that because it's a good um litmus test for me. I people don't know this, but I'm very introverted. Maybe this is one of those things I've been telling myself and I'm not.

But I'm pretty sure I'm very introverted because uh like I need to sleep after talking to people. On days where I have like one-on- ones and stuff, I'm exhausted like physically and mentally. I just have to sleep. So I think it's good. I have to put myself in situations where I'm talking to people and like presenting because talked about this before. I'm like I'm introverted and I've said for like many years like oh I'm bad at public speaking. I'm afraid of public speaking but like I was only those things because I didn't practice public speaking because I would avoid public speaking, right? And if you don't practice it, you're not going to get better. So you're going to be bad at it. And then by being bad at it, you're not going to want to do it because you suck at it. So, just got to do it.

So, I've been trying to do it a little bit more. The um live streams and stuff absolutely help. Talking like this on Code Commute helps because I realize there's no um there's no like audience in my car. It's like a clown car and there's like like five people sitting on the seat next to me or something. It's not what's happening here. Um, but I still have to think like what I'm saying is going to be, you know, shared with people. So, it's it's an interesting dynamic for these videos because I know that people will watch them. So, there will be an audience, but while it's happening, I don't have the audience. So it gives me what's a good way to say this? Like I give myself permission to screw things up. So for example, what I just did there were I said what's a good way to say this?

before when I was younger and like this isn't even many years ago, but before like doing more YouTube and stuff, I would think like it would be so devastating if I was presenting and I had to stop and think about something. If I had to stop in the middle of my presentation and say, "hm, I need to think for a second. What's a good way to say this?" That would be the worst thing that could ever happen. But from live streaming more, from doing these types of videos, I'm like, look, it's just a natural way that I talk. And the more natural you can be when you're presenting stuff, like the better it is, right? Like I don't want to go present something and then pretend I'm being a completely different person. That's a lot more pressure that shouldn't have to be there. Instead, I'd like to just talk like like I'm doing, right?

Why would I make more pressure for myself? So, it gives me a little bit more, I don't know, freedom and like I said, permission to myself to like you can screw up. It's okay. It happens on live streams a lot. Happens on code commute a ton. And then if I'm actually presenting to a live audience in person, if I screw up, I got to cry about it. Maybe a little, but fewer tears than before. And that's all we can ask for, right? Every day, fewer tears. Anyway, look at the TT soon. No, it needs a lot of work. I got to get the battery out of that thing. There's bird poop on it now. Oh my god, man. Someday I got it. No, I'll do it. It'll be this year. Okay, I'll see you next time. Thanks for being here.