Am I Just Coasting As A Software Engineer?

Transcript is auto-generated and may contain errors.

all right it's Monday the 6th nice um got a topic that was submitted to me uh on Instagram and it's actually someone who had submitted a previous topic which is cool but this one's unrelated um funny story that's not so funny for me um I I had a little bit of extra time last night and I was recording Dev leader YouTube videos and uh I was like oh I'm not ready to kind of jump into the next programming video so I'll I I might as well answer this code commute question and I recorded a video and I forgot to actually turn on the uh uh the microphone so I recorded this like almost 30 minute video like an idiot with no sound um anyway uh we'll jump into that just a reminder for folks if you want questions answered either leave them in the comments

or uh send them on social media just look for Dev leader or Nick centino on LinkedIn uh even this morning I had another question com in on LinkedIn which is awesome uh you know people actually write uh a lot more descriptive uh scenarios that I can try to answer for them so uh I'll be answering that one on the way back from Crossfit um yeah okay so this one is kind of interesting um I I was trying to take a few different perspectives on it so it's about the coasting and and it's kind of funny because I think that people will have either some like when they think about what coting means to them they'll probably have some aspects that feel like very similar from person to person and maybe some aspects will feel different and when I started talking about this in the first

attempt uh the way that I was thinking about this was from two different angles one is from your own personal perspective like do you feel that you're coasting and then the other is going to be from your manager's perspective or this perception of you like is the perception that you are coasting so for some added context uh this person was that submitted the question was saying you know their goal is that they want to be productive they want to feel uh or they their sort of career growth goal is that they want to work towards engineering leadership so like I so they want to feel productive and what's currently happening and they didn't say that they don't feel productive I don't think but what they're saying is they have extra time so they're saying in their current Sprint planning the way that things are looking

like they'll get a couple of smaller things to work on and then as a result it seems like they're getting uh a little bit of downtime and so that's the framing that I want you to have as we're going through this um and what I'm going to try to do in the beginning of this talk is talk about like sort of a I don't know maybe like a mental framework or just some some things to consider uh that you can apply for yourself I just passed my wife boom um we have to drive to CrossFit separately cuz she works near the gym and I don't so okay from the personal perspective there's a few different things that I think we probably want to consider and like I said you may weigh these differently you may have others uh I think a common one from a

coasting perspective is like work capacity though so if you feel like hey I'm not doing a whole lot so the amount of work your throughput is actually like doesn't feel like a lot to you like you have downtime that might be an indicator that you're coasting um I think that this is something that it's important to talk about that like I I like thinking about these things and almost most things I talk about like on a spectrum so it's not just like binary onoff or black and white kind of thing but more of a a sliding window and certainly like your throughput your work capacity is something like this um when I talk about throughput or your work capacity my suggestion here like and is like not that I want you to interpret this as oh Nick is saying like we got to feel like

we're we're busy busy busy um that's not the case uh and in fact from Individual to individual when we talk about work life balance like that's something to consider right like that will vary dramatically and even from Individual to individual that can vary dramatically um the example I gave when I first tried recording this was like when I think about my uh time at a startup before Microsoft uh single guy you know not in a relationship I'm not living with anyone uh I kind of just like worked as much as I could that that's what I did um but that's not like number one that's not really sustainable number two I'm married uh you know I have other responsibilities I cannot just be doing that so the amount of throughput I have will look dramatically different as a result um and that's just for me

so throughput I think is one thing to consider um I also wanted to talk through like coasting from the perspective of technical challenges in terms of like what programming languages or text Stacks are you using um this is like a almost like a comfort or complacency kind of thing and it's again it's not necessarily bad um but this is just another factor to consider so when I think about my own career before Microsoft like especially when I was writing codes still at work every day uh and managing teams on top of that uh like I've done a ton of Windows desktop development like that is my my area of expertise even though it's been a few years now um so by the time I left the startup I was at like I had like almost my entire career was building Wind forms or WPF applications

so you know a lot of experience in C A lot of experience in those Tech stacks and like in terms of technical challenges in that regard like I had built up expertise like I didn't feel like I was learning much at all anymore uh with those two things um so like kind of interesting right in hindsight maybe maybe it would have been good to focus on some other Tech stacks and things like that for different challenges um so it's I don't like necessarily regret that I think that allowed me to operate very effectively in other ways but in terms of like growth that's something to consider I think uh that you might have a different opinion about how much uh newer technology or like the the variance in technology um from like a coasting perspective you might say like I need more of that like

I don't feel fulfilled unless I'm learning more of that right so you might dictate that it's coasting for you if you're not having new challenges like that and then the third one I want wanted to talk about similar but not necessarily from like a programming or Tech stack perspective um but from the domain so I worked in digital forensics before Microsoft and uh that domain has a ton a ton of stuff and I feel like I could have probably spent my entire career there and always had uh like new domain challenges to sort through uh which is which is a good problem to have right so for content when I started in digital forensics it was like computer digital forensics and then I managed a team for most of my time there on uh mobile acquisition right so being able to take information off of

phones we also dabbled in Cloud forensics I wrote uh I wrote code for being able to do um like remote Acquisitions for like cyber security so there's so much stuff that could be done in digital forensics and I fortunately had the ability to move around uh within that domain and even right before leaving one of the things that uh I was looking at doing was I was going to be leading a team that did uh prototyping so I had done that already but they were formalizing another team to make it like uh like a real a real thing so the um the point of this is saying like in that bace I had a lot of opportunities for being in different domains and uh if you're finding that you're sort of maybe like stuck in the same domain and you built up expertise there you

might feel like I'm not learning a lot anymore and again it's not necessarily a problem it can be really valuable to feel like you're an expert and to truly be an expert in a space but uh you might consider at some point like you're feeling complacent or you're feeling stagnant and then that might affect your coasting so the three things that I talked about there were um your throughput and this is from your own perspective your throughput your your text stack or programming like the tools that you're using and then the third part was the domain that you're actively working in and those are three things that I think about when it comes to coasting that you could self-reflect on but again just a reminder you might have other things that you're thinking of and you're like hey like these are factors for me and

that's totally cool that's actually the goal of me talking through this is that I hope you come up with your own this person's tailgating me like an absolute there car is directly in front of me and beside me you can't go anywhere I don't know what you're trying to do but it's stupid um so right giving you a framework uh just different perspective to try and and think through so that you can come up with your own view on this um the other part that we need to talk through here is like from your manager's perspective and the reason this is important is because there's two people that promote you right there's one you promote yourself potentially when you switch companies um and that's in your well I mean it's in your your recruiter's control I suppose but the other person primarily that's promoting you

as your manager they will put you up for promotion they will you know vouch for you they'll defend the you know their position on getting you promoted um but that's going to be based on their perspective on your performance so I think again from a manager's perspective one of the things that probably sticks out is throughput but it's not just like number of tickets you get done like stories or bugs that you fix um this is a lot of the time going to be more measured by impact so you might get one thing done in a period but it's a very impactful bit of work so it's a really big project or something you worked on um but you're through put or your impact will be a similar factor that gets considered um you could argue well I like to think that a good manager

is going to look at the other two things we discussed as well maybe not the domain so much but if you had conversations with your manager about Spa like uh about technology or like things that you wanted to work with like in my opinion a good manager will be open to hearing like the directions and Tech technology you want to work with and try to help align opportunities to those interests you can't guarantee it like as a manager I worked on the deployment team we had in Office 365 and we do all backend work and I had some team members that were like hey it would be really cool like I am interested in trying to get some front-end skills and I'm like we don't do that on our team but I was able to work with them to find Opportunities on on our like

other sub teams and they could help out and get some work carved out for that so like in my opinion a good manager will try to help you find those opportunity so you can practice other skills okay and so when it comes to coasting if someone's saying like hey I want to push the boundaries on what I'm learning and being exposed to like that's quite the opposite of of coasting to me but if someone's not focused like this is where I can backfire right if someone's like I can't even get my own work done but I want to go dabble and all these other things and like that's more distracting than coasting and that's going to be sort of uh oh that's a cop slow down it's too late oh they're not pulling me over nice um so one sec I got to move over

Lanes one more actually two more now it's one more um don't want to lose my train of thought okay last Lane okay so what we're talking about how this actually looks in practice for this individual the and sorry there's probably I'm trying to do like a time check here cuz I'm getting off the highway for cross but there's probably a bunch more I could talk about from the manager's perspective from coasting but um I think priority number one if you're ever curious is like you can probably guess what I'm going to say right if you want to know what your manager's thinking what should you do talk to your manager um I know it gets old to hear but uh I I have to repeat it a lot because it's it's truly the case that most people will not talk to their manager and it's

unfortunate um I I hope that people can work on you know their working relationships with their manager so that they can have conversations more easily but it's uh it's really important to do because they're the ones who have the expectation and if you're not talking with them you may never understand their expectations and then you will be frustrated so for this individual okay so they are saying I have downtime in the Sprint because I'm having smaller work items I think a couple of things that could be done that I might suggest starting to do are one having a conversation with the engineering manager or product owner I don't know the Dynamics of the team um and how things are organized but having a conversation about either picking up more items and the other alternative is uh fewer but more impactful items and again this is

going to depend on a lot of stuff like where I'm at right now we don't have Sprint boundaries affecting like we don't say like oh we can't fit this into a Sprint therefore we don't do it um and in the past I was a lot more adamant about us trying to break things up so we could land things but we have a different shipping Cadence so it just looks different my point here that I want to focus on is you could ask for more things and if you're more Junior being able to get through more things could be nice and if you're more senior instead of just doing more volume of things it might be a better opportunity to do fewer things but more impactful so they do basically in both cases take up more of your time right they are filling more of your

Sprint time with actual work to be done so these are conversations that I would start to have if and this is all based on the fact that you feel that you have extra capacity because the statement is I have downtime okay so going back to what I said at the beginning right if you're observing I have more capacity what could be done here this is one of those things okay turn right um the next thing is why am I forgetting the next thing after turning just like that I turn right my brain goes blank um talking about oh so let's say that you got to have that conversation with a product owner or your engineering manager like hey like i' like to pick up either more or more impactful things like I think I can handle it I have I have extra time it seems

I'd like to be able to squeeze more of this in if they go hey based on the planning and stuff right now we don't really have like capacity to be able to fit more into the Sprint either because how the backlogs looking or whatever other reason okay uh it might be interesting to say okay well you know and again I like personally I like asking for permission on this stuff or at least communicating and that's to help avoid cuz I've seen this happen many times avoid situations where people think that they have aligned expectations on what to do but instead they just go off into outer space working on whatever they want and then the side effect is that someone goes man this person's so distracted I wish they were doing the things that we need to get done okay so I like communicating this

stuff for that reason but what I would recommend that you can start to look at is if you have downtime start looking at where your team needs help so so are there individuals on the team that you could be uh pairing up with to tackle work with them are there opportunities in the team where like the build system or the test infrastructure needs some help because it's a bit of a pain point so try looking for these opportunities that you can improve what's going on man this person was sitting at the lights for forever and didn't turn oh this absolute Jackass has parked in like four spots what an idiot I can't believe that they have a trailer and they're parked across like four spots horizontally I'm furious that's so stupid my mind is blown I can't believe someone would do that um anyway my

god um yeah I would say like looking for those opportunities having a conversation about them and then trying to leverage your extra time to fill in like doing good things uh there's my wife she's like probably why the hell is he pulled over here yeah you're about to have the same surprise um she'll park on the other side of the street I wasn't ready for that um you can use the extra time to do like helpful things for your team team and I think that that way you're staying productive you're doing meaningful things but I do recommend communicating that kind of stuff like I said it's just an like I like overc communicating it's just an opportunity for miscommunication and for misalignment so some other people say oh you don't need to ask for permission like yeah you don't but like can you take two

seconds and just say like here's my plan and here's why and that way if your manager is like actually I got other stuff that's more important for you to do you go do that right so hopefully that's helpful I really appreciate the question being submitted that's my perspective on coasting I do think it comes from yourself and perhaps from uh some external factors from your manager and both are important for you to think through and that's that so thanks again I'll see you next time