My Engineering Role Feels Like Game of Thrones!

Transcript is auto-generated and may contain errors.

Hey folks, we're just driving to CrossFit here. Um going to Reddit for a topic. This one is kind of interesting. Um I think in particular how this person is looking at their situation, but this individual saying they feel like they messed up in their one-on-one with their manager because they said too much. So obviously right away I was like, "We got to go read this." Um what could you have possibly said too much about? And um the situation is apparently that they were talking with their manager and they were being candid that they find it very difficult to work with one of the leads on the team and uh obviously we don't have the details of the conversation but the manager was kind of saying like they're aware of that and kind of hinting at the fact that this person was brought on to effectively like eventually place this person's role.

Um, again, we don't know exactly how this was said, but this is the interpretation that this person gets from the conversation with their manager. So, again, this person has difficulty working with a team lead. Um, bring it up with their manager and their manager is kind of like, "Yep, I'm well aware of that." And like, we're actually trying to to move ahead and figure out like how we operate essentially without this person. So, I thought that would be an interesting one to talk through. And that's because not only on top of that, the person kind of says like now I feel like I'm in a corporate Game of Thrones and like all these politics and um oh boy, let me tell you, if you think that's politics, then you haven't been politicking yet. Uh no, but in all seriousness, it's it I understand that can feel like a bit of an awkward situation.

um manager probably, you know, riding a fine line there. We don't know how the conversation went, of course, but um as managers, this is a thing that happens, right? Like absolutely, we want to make sure that we have solid team members. We need to make sure that people are team players. And I have personally been in situations where I have individuals on the team or on peripheral teams who are not team players. And in fact, uh, you know, the archetype of, uh, intelligent comes up. And I've had this many times in my career where there's an individual like this and basically we don't know exactly what this person's like, but um you know it can be toxic to the entire team, cause the entire team to effectively hit like close to zero productivity because no one can get anything done unless this person's signing off or whatever, right?

So, we don't know in this case, but um just wanted to share that yes, as managers, if we're noticing this kind of thing, like we need to make team changes. If we have people that can't work well together and there's like an individual who ends up being someone that we're trying to coach and drive change and it's not changing honestly. Um I try not to look at people anymore as like you know this person's just good or this person's just bad. uh I generally find that like they may not be a good fit on the team and it's I've talked about you know stories before where I've had to let people go and come across their path later in life you know years later and they had said to me like you know sucked at the time but that was absolutely the right thing. just not realizing that the environment you're in is not conducive um for the way that uh that you need to operate or that other people need to operate quite frankly.

So yes, as managers, we need to be kind of looking at the health of our team overall and there's going to be situations where we're trying to let people go because if we've tried to coach them for long enough and there's not change, um, what's happening is two things. One, you are basically creating problems for the rest of the team, right? So, let's imagine for a moment we have this person that wrote this on Reddit. We have their team lead and um and then I don't know a few other people on the team. Odds are, we don't know this, but odds are that if the team lead is really challenging to work with for this one person, they're potentially really challenging to work with for other people on the team. And the other bit of information that helps us think that maybe this is a true statement is that the manager is saying that they're already aware of this being a challenge.

So odds are it's not just this one person finding the team lead hard to work with. Okay? So you now have one person on the team that's impacting the ability for others on the team to work effectively. Now, obviously, like I keep saying, we don't know the specifics of the situation. Is it that this team leads actually awesome and the other people are just so difficult to work with? Like, we don't know that. I want to kind of have some faith in the manager that they're kind of seeing the the personal interactions and understanding that like it's they're making the right decision with the team lead. We don't know. But if we assume that then you have one person that's impacting everyone else. Not a good thing if it's not positive impact. The other thing that's really unfair about this situation is that odds are that if the team lead is acting like this that it's not going to be an environment that the team lead is going to be very successful in.

It's literally unfair to keep that person on the team to hold everyone else back and to potentially hold back the person themselves. Now, I realize how that sounds, but like it's the truth. So, when you get rid of people, odds are that you can be making it something that's favorable for them. And in the moment, it doesn't seem like that. That's why I said, I get how that sounds. Oh, you're telling me that you're going to let someone go and that's better for them. And um yeah, probably it's better for the team and it's probably better for that person in the moment. Absolutely not. I don't I don't know if I can think of anyone in the moment that would be like, "Thank you for letting me go and I understand that this is going to be, you know, a very positive thing for me." Probably not, right?

It's a It's a shitty position to be in for both sides. It's not like I don't know. I have never met a manager. This includes me. I've never met a manager that was like, "Oh, I can't wait to like go let people go." No one like I don't know anyone that likes doing that. It's a really crappy thing to have to do. But what's worse is having a team that hates coming to work and cannot be productive. So I, you know, when this person's describing this situation in my head, I'm like, I can understand as a manager like what the manager is trying to do. Makes sense. But um let's talk about this like political Game of Thrones because this person heard or interpreted like, "Hey, you're we're basically training you to be the replacement of this person." And uh the author is going like I don't want that man.

Like I don't want to be I don't want to cause any drama. It's not in in general for team building. Like think about it this way. Imagine that this person the team lead was awesome to work with. Okay? Imagine they're awesome to work with and imagine that they don't want to let the team lead go. There's absolutely situations where I am looking to train people up on the team to effectively replace other people. I I literally have that on my current team where I was brought in and my manager was already telling me hey look we have a tech lead from this uh you know this feature crew which is like a sub team for us and uh you know he's we're kind of have him working in other areas as well and we're trying to get one of the other engineers ramped up to effectively become the subject matter expert in this area.

We're we're basically training him to replace the other person. And that's not looked at like a in this case, it's not looked at like a oh, it's because we don't want or need the other person. It's just because his time will be more effective spent in other things. It's not like all of a sudden he just erases the history of working in this space. like no, he's still got it all up in his head, but we need other people to kind of step in and fill the role that he has had there. And it's actually a very positive thing because he's able to go work on new other challenges. So, I'm describing the same type of thing where we're training someone to replace another and the entire thing is a very positive thing like everyone wins, right? The only thing that sucks for this person is that they think they're like correlating that I'm going to replace this person with them getting fired.

That you have nothing to do with them getting fired or laid off or however it's going to come across. You have nothing to do with that if it's not like it's that was already in the plan. Like the manager is already going like I know that this isn't going to work. So you have nothing to do with that. There's no politicking there. And the reason I'm trying to give you this other example that's effectively the same in terms of your getting trained up to replace someone is like that's all that you need to look at. You don't control the other people in the team. It's not your responsibility to coach them and make them better. Like that's the manager's responsibility to start with that. and put their best effort into making sure that's possible before trying to take some other action like like firing them. Now, we we have to make an assumption that that's what's happened.

But so, you know, I I think that this person, you know, personally, I think they're overreacting a little bit because I I do understand where it comes from, but it's not like all of a sudden things are going to be cutthroat and this person's going to like, you know, be stalking them because you're going to replace me kind of thing. Like I like at any point in time I want every single person on my team this is going to come across the wrong way already but let me let me say it this cuz this includes me. Okay, but let me add that so that it sounds better. Everyone on my team including me I want to be replaceable. Now that's why I said I know how that one's going to sound too. Um, not because I want to just let people go at any point because think about if like someone's sick, someone is on vacation.

I need anyone else to be able to step in that function. We run a live service. I I need people to be able to step in and perform the function of other people at any given point. To to what degree of expertise? That's going to vary dramatically of course cuz not everyone is the same as every other person. But I need enough knowledge sharing. I need enough like expertise built up across multiple people that I have some some like fault tolerance in my team, right? I that's how I need to think about it. And it's not because oh I want to fire people or whatever. Everyone on the team is great. So that's not the point. The point is like it's we run a live service. Our live service has fault tolerance. I need fault tolerance in humans as well because they are the ones who are going to be helping out with the service itself that is running live.

So that includes me. If I need to step away, if I want to go on vacation, I can't be like, I guess I can never take a vacation because if I step away then my team's going to fall apart. Nope. I need to make sure that I can step away, right? That means I need to have people that uh are empowered on the team. They can't go, "Oh, Nick's not here. We We're not allowed to make a decision." They should be able to go, "Nick's not here. Like, we've been aligned on these things and I need to make a decision. Like, I know that Nick has trust in me to be able to do this, and we can sync when he's back." Hell yeah. You don't need me to make every decision for you. If you do, then I've been doing my job wrong. So, I need to have redundancy and fault tolerance built into the team.

And no, that's not because of firing people. So, it's a normal thing to do within a team. It's normal to skill up other people and have overlap and skill sets and experience and domain knowledge. So, that's not there's no politics to that. Right? These are these are mutually exclusive things that can happen. It just so happens in your situation perhaps the manager said too much and this person saying maybe I said too much in my oneonone. No, perhaps your manager did. Right? If if you're now feeling like you have this weird like political pressure because of what they said, like maybe they said too much and that's not something that you were and I'm not I'm trying to make fun of this person, but not something that you were able to kind of I don't know deal with, which is totally fine cuz now that's apparently that's causing this person enough, you know, discomfort that they have to go write about it on Reddit cuz they're concerned.

turn, but I would per like I'm appro approaching CrossFit right now. So I I would look at this situation as like, you know, your manager said maybe a little bit too much information. So you have some insight as to what they are like how they're planning to kind of uh alter the team. And that has nothing to do with you. If it wasn't you, it would be someone else. It could be that maybe they're They're trying to do this with multiple people as well because maybe they have a team lead that's that's solid and if they're going to be getting rid of this person, they want to make sure that there's a few people who can kind of step up at least technically or the domain knowledge. So has nothing to do with you and this person going part one and part two.

It's a very normal thing to train people up to like make other people air quotes like replaceable when we you like if you frame things like that it sounds terrible because then it's like oh well people are just disposable but that's why I'm like as I'm driving I'm trying to think of a better word but you know I I was trying to say like fault tolerance in the team and like take the take the negative things and put positive things in place instead of oh firing someone goes on vacation I need false tolerance in the team. Someone wins the lottery and they want to leave the team. Great. Do I want to be like, "Oh, I guess my team's entirely screwed cuz one person left." No. I want to make sure there's multiple people on the team that have some level of expertise in the area.

This person doesn't have that. And that could be domain knowledge like I've been talking about. in this person's case, like their team, it sounds like they need a little bit more leadership in the team. So, he's trying to build in some redundancy for that. Yeah, I don't think this person said too much in their one-on-one. I think maybe the manager did, and that's probably my takeaway from this, but wish this person success. There's no parking spots at the gym. Oh my goodness. What am I going to do? I got to do a lap now. Go park somewhere else. That's dumb. Might as well drive home. I don't even know where I am now. I even know if there's parking spots over here. Okay, there's one. We're safe. Okay, folks. Thank you for watching. If you thought this was helpful, please feel free to share it. Otherwise, I'll see you in the next one.

Baker.