Tracking Promotion Progress as a Software Engineer [360 Video]

Transcript is auto-generated and may contain errors.

all right folks I am headed to work here um it is a snowy day in Seattle which is kind of funny because no one knows how to drive in the snow we'll see how this goes uh I do have my insta 360 hooked up for the first voyage I am super nervous about losing it I guess um yeah I I don't know I was like hauling on it and it's not seeming to budge but I'm just like super nervous about having this thing on the top of my car um so we'll see how it goes I have a topic for today it's going to be about tracking um progress SEC and uh the topic comes from Reddit but this is something that I've seen come up like uh many many times um and I think it's a good one I try to have conversations with

my Engineers about this kind of stuff um the the main thing here that I want to kind of clarify and I got to talk about different ways to approach this kind of stuff but um when we're talking about performance reviews and things like that being able to talk about making progress having meaningful impact like the the takeaway from this video hopefully is that um you don't want to just like forget about this kind of stuff it's uh I think it's too easy to go a long period of time whatever that looks like when I say long period of time that could be you know if you're doing performance reviews once a year like you know do you wait the full year to try and recap on all the things you've done or whatever that interval is right I think there's strategies that we can use

to do to do better than that so that's what I want to talk about today if you have questions that you want to answer leave them in the comments below and um if you have something that you want to be kept Anonymous uh or you want to write more detail just look for Dev leader on social media and uh send me a message or Nick centino on uh LinkedIn and uh happy to try and answer your questions about software engineering and uh sort of career development in software engineering so um the first thing that I want to say is that uh as we go into this there's going to be different tools techniques and stuff so we'll go through a handful of different things but I don't want you to take what I'm saying as a prescription like you must do it this way this

is the only way for it to work because different people will absolutely have um different experiences here so some things may work really well for some people and others might say like absolutely not um so the most basic thing that I'll talk about is like and I know this works better for me is like uh and this is more from like a a to-do list perspective but I just want to touch on this it's like I actually need to write things down which sounds kind of funny um but I need to be able to write things down or else like I don't stay on top of them so I find that written stuff is really help f for me it becomes more meaningful I don't understand why I wish that I could just pull up any digital app for tracking stuff and uh and feel

feel like it's effective for me but it's just not so I like to write things down but one of the differences I would say is that or like one of the drawbacks from writing stuff down for me still is that when it comes time to recall things over a long period of time that's not super effective for me uh so I find that writing stuff down is effective because I do it um it's effective because if I need to follow up on stuff it I don't know something about it allows me to be able to take action and feel uh like I'm making progress but for long-term things um sorry I have to stop here for this construction but for long-term things if I need to recall them what I don't want to do is go through pages and pages and pages of of notes

especially because there's going to be so much stuff in there that's just like um it'll feel like noise in terms of tracking um impact because it's going to be like everything that uh my brain is not able to keep up with and I need to have it written down so um point of point of this is saying that like I need written things for tracking but um you may want to use something different for your sort of like to-do list versus tracking accomplishments so just a heads up there uh you know just different tools and kind of use what you have to explore and find what's going to work for you okay in terms of the implementation of it so with that out of the way um I think one of the most basic things that I've recommended to people like most low Tech kind

of thing you can do is in my opinion just like have a draft email to yourself it's nice because you can have it uh sort of wherever your email client is right so you don't have to I don't know like if you if you use Gmail and you want to have it stored there like that's fine um I would depending on uh you know if that's not what you're using for work maybe not because you probably want to if you have like you know work specific things like proprietary information you want to write down probably don't want to have that in your personal email per se but um where the reason I brought I send Gmail is just because of having different clients and stuff so like we use out look at Microsoft obviously um and exchange for email so you know I would be

using that where I used to work I I can't remember anymore like yeah we must have had out like it's funny because the email culture was so different but we had it must have been an exchange server and had Outlook um but some people will have like you know Google workplace stuff like depends wherever you're working but having the ability to access that on your phone wherever it's just really convenient to be able to to be able to jot stuff down but the the whole idea with the draft email is that like it's just like a a notepad right so uh and having it kind of synchronized or on a system that is specific for work is kind of nice um but you can literally just leverage a an email to yourself to take notes what I would personally recommend is I would be more

verbose than not so you know find your own style obviously but if you're like when I don't know I don't want to say when inspiration strikes but when you like remember like hey like maybe I should talk about this accomplishment or I've hit a milestone in this project or it's been a period of time we'll kind of talk about this a little bit more but um when you feel like you have something or you recall or whatever like this this moment strikes where you're like hey I should document this I would air on the side of including more uh details in your notes um the reason I say that is because in the moment it might be very obvious to you which is great um but the reality is that um at the time you need to go recall it it might not be so

obvious so when you add more detail when you have to go recall this stuff it might be that there's too much information but personally I would much rather sift through too much information and try to extract the um the more important parts so that's what I would recommend on that um one sec just getting on the highway here we're uh we're going to see if I still have a camera by the time I get to work it would be uh pretty crappy if it's off my car because that's like half $1,000 in equipment just gone um but we'll see like I said I I was hauling on it didn't seem like it was going anywhere but I don't know I'm just like I don't know if you can probably tell if you watch my other videos I feel very nervous right now that's all I

have to say about it is like just just nervous um I think once I get more use to it I'd really like to find a way to like I don't know I like don't trust the suction cups but this is a highly it's wet here highly reviewed highly rated suction cup setup to mount so I'm just like nervous about it but uh we'll see um also it should mention because I said there's a lot of snow and stuff like there isn't on the highway but it's like there it's very wet and kind of seems like a little bit slushy but uh we'll see so I have to be careful when I'm in the left lane the the highways and stuff here I don't know why we get so much rain but these highways aren't designed to like handle like pooling of water very well so

uh going into the fast lane in some spots like where I just drove past can be a little bit a like honestly like a death trap cuz I anytime it rains really heavy back there I'm I always see cars that have like hit the wall um pretty incredible that like it just isn't addressed but anyway so yeah ver being verbose can be very helpful in your note taking because when you need to go recall it um again like what would you rather have being like I can't remember exactly what I meant here I can't remember remember exactly what I was doing on this project or why it was important because my notes are so rough or would you rather be like okay I wrote you know I wrote a paragraph here and I really only need this one sentence let me just take that one

sentence like I know what I would rather opt for personally so um that's my recommendation when it comes to how you actually take your notes uh just be more of ver Bose remember that you want to talk about um it's a good way to put this it's not like did 10 PLL requests or like you know updated five unit tests like that's not that's not really the the impactful part see this is a good example of the insta 360 this person is going less than the speed limit in the fast lane so maybe depending on how exciting this drive is we'll send this one to the editor and he can show the traffic um I don't know I'm kind of hoping there's something not not like too exciting where it's dangerous but like I don't know something fun to incorporate especially given the stress I

have with this thing strapped in my car right now so um you want to think about the the impact or um how your work is relating to the things that are important that you've discussed with your manager okay so when you're talking about promotion and like what's important to focus on your manager is hopefully aligning with you on the things that you should focus on and I think that is going to be a really good uh set of guidelines for what types of details to incorporate in your notes so for example if they've been saying hey like we need to see that you're collaborating more with other people on different teams because of your seniority that's more of an expectation now great okay when you're working on projects or you have you know you're doing interactions with other teams take a note of it right

collect that data build up the evidence regarding that point specifically right you need to lead more uh design reviews awesome okay so next time you're doing a design review you know take a note of it if you're participating on them so say it's someone else's design review but you're doing a lot of um providing a lot of feedback being actively involved like that's that's related right it's uh it's adjacent to it so so mark that down like try to think about the topics that you have talked to your manager about and record details that support those things because the way that I look at this when I'm working with my employees is that ideally through 101s I'm staying in tune with them on on these accomplishments and these Milestones throughout the year right like I don't want to get what what would be a I

don't know I would feel like I failed my team if someone showed up to me with uh you know their draft email their notes kind of thing and they're like I want to talk about promotion and or whatever else uh or how I'm progressing and then they start going through this list of things and I'm like I had no idea you were doing any of this like to me that would be like I have failed my employee cuz I want to make sure I'm not going to know everything it's impossible for me to know every detail right every side conversation every time someone thanks them for something like I won't know but I should have a good idea of how things are progressing so um if someone showed up to me and I was completely shocked and I was like I just didn't know any

of this I would feel not good so with that said um when I work with my employees on this stuff my my point to them is like hey look like I don't want you to have to do this where you're like trying to like you feel like you're battling me to like I'm gatekeeping the promotion and like you know trying to do anything I can to not promote you and you have to do everything you can to like to overcome the the barrier I'm putting up like I don't that's not the goal the goal for me is to say like look like I want everyone to get promoted that's my goal but I need to have evidence that you're ready for doing it because I'm not going to go in front of my management my you know the leadership team uh my peers and say

yep my whole team is ready to get promoted and then talk through individuals about Regarding why and then feel like I have no actual evidence to support that so what I try to remind my folks is that like I If the more evidence and stuff you can collect about the things we talk about like for me that's helpful I will help sorry I will use that information to sort of um assist my perspective as well that way when I go to talk about your accomplishments and stuff I have more data points it's supplementary to what I'm observing and that way I can leverage that in conversations so um like I said it's not about you know trying to battle me for promotion I never wanted to feel that way but it's really about like help help give me evidence to support this right and uh

I try to make sure that I'm keeping things clear for them so that they understand and that can be really challenging like to be totally transparent as a manager it can be very challenging to make sure that people understand clearly um because sometimes like one of the the most like common cases I found is that people are doing a really good job and they're on the right trajectory and I'm sure like for many people listening to what I'm saying right now this will be familiar where it's like hey like you're doing a good job keep going and like you know just keep doing what you're doing right and that's like obviously that's not feedback I just want to give someone and stop there but sometimes that's the sentiment right is is like I think you're doing a good job but I need to see more

consistency and more time doing this and that's sort of just the reality of it so I try to make sure that when I feel like that's the feedback I want to give that I can be a little bit more specific right like here here are the projects that I think are really demonstrating this stuff here are these opportunities that I think will keep helping demonstrate that and um if we want to go beyond that CU I think that's an important part to talk about too if we want to go beyond that like what could you be looking for as the next step right you're already like on the right trajectory if you want to keep looking and getting challenged like here's something beyond that um so that can be that can be a difficult conversation not because it's like uh like going to upset someone

not difficult that regard but difficult to like to try and be transparent that like we need to see more time because then people are like well then give me a date and it's like it doesn't really quite work that way because if you're not consistent or things come up and we can't really see that this uh the consistency you're offering then it's like I can't give you a date so it's it's really difficult to try and convey that in a clear way that feels fair so my strategy around that just trying to make sure more frequent conversations which kind of brings me to this next point about tracking accomplishments right is like not only should you consider a a frequency that works for you for documenting this stuff right so instead of just leaving it to chance that you're going to take notes like try

to think about something that you know you feel like you can stick to whether that's like every two weeks maybe every Friday you try to take some notes maybe it's once a month whatever works for you find something uh and try to stick to it at a minimum Cadence right obviously if something comes up and you're like oh yeah that's a good point I should write it down like go do it um but you know try to set some minimum Cadence now in addition to that because this is what I wanted to talk about that's not just the note taking is that I think that there's a way to amplify this that's not just hey hey manager I took notes for the last 6 months or last 12 months here's everything I have to talk about and here's why I think I'm either ready for

promotion or um here's all the evidence I have and want to talk about what the next step looks like um so there's a a nice blue BMW behind me maybe we'll get we'll get that one on the insta 360 if it's still on my car we'll see um the uh the idea is that instead of waiting for you know a long period of time try to have regular conversations with your manager about this stuff um the difference like I know when so people might hear this and say okay but I was told in 101's they they shouldn't just be a a status update like I shouldn't just tell my manager here's my poll requests here's the bugs I fixed like and just like kind of like a standup update um and you're right like I I would ideally not want you to focus on that

like um it's fine to talk about the things that you're working on or if you're stuck like as someone who's a little bit more technical as a manager at least with respect to code um I'm H like if you're stuck on something and you're like hey could we carve out sometime in our 101 or like you know could you look at this stack Trace with me like if it just comes up then whatever let's spend the time on it um but I I would like for people to to make some time for career conversations and progression and I would say that you know I let my employees Drive their one-on ones if they want to talk about status updates I'm not going to stop them um but I do try to make sure that if like my employees are only focused on that that I

try to remind them like hey like here's an opportunity where we can be talking about like about career stuff or about progression or about something else so that it's uh a little bit less just like status updates and sometimes I kind of have to push them on that which is fine um but so in those conversations right like you could be saying instead of hey like here's the pull request I landed like what what's the point of that pull request right like what is it contributing towards it's almost like we have to go one level up from that it's not hey I landed these lines of code or I added these tests or I fixed this bug like what is the impact of that because if you can bring up those Milestones right like hey like yes I got that PLL request in but now

the feature that we've been working on for saving uh you know for optimizing performance we're we've now saved like uh we're up to 10% in in performance savings awesome okay great like that's that's the Milestone right or you know we unblock this critical part of the project by working with this other team now and uh so they're ready to deliver that and that's thanks to these conversations we've been having uh in our our collaborative sync meetings with these other groups right like talk about those types of milestones and the impact they have so again it's it is like a bit of a status update but we're upleveling it to be about the impact and if you go back to what I was saying a little bit earlier hopefully you've been having conversations with your manager about what to be focusing on and try to bring

those into the conversation right manager said hey like we should be trying to get you to do more I don't know uh leading or like ENT in the junior Engineers on the team right you're got a strong technical base which is awesome but we want to see more with respect to mentorship okay cool makes sense now when you're trying to put this into action you could be saying hey like the junior engineer X or whatever um so I got to switch lanes here uh they uh you know they're working on this project and I kind of help them to reach this next Milestone here so like there's an example of me you know taking some initiative working with them mentoring them that kind of thing there's a the BMWs in front of me now and there's a I don't know what kind of color that

is it's like a gray it's like clay almost I don't know any Porsche colors but it's a nice Porsche um so yeah trying to leverage those scenarios that you can kind of use again as evidence to help kind of build that case so I would just try to make sure that you're bringing these things up regularly and not waiting until okay it's promotion cycle and like because the other reality is if you're not really in tune with when that is like I know at Microsoft for example um the major promotion cycle when people actually see their promotions that's in like September takes place in September okay and the decision that go into that are like may like end of May beginning of June kind of time frame so then you have all of June all of July all of August it's like three months almost

um so basically if someone's trying to say like oh like promotions are in September like I'll wait until you know last minute in August to talk about it like look man you've You' already missed the window by months um so it's you know and that's the major one there's other off cycle ones but my point is like it's easy to make mistakes about like trying to time it right and even if you had the timing right and tried to approach it in May um it would in my opinion it would be much more effective to be doing it regularly um and again that's a good opportunity for corrective feedback along the way so okay like say you wait the 12 months before you kind of go back to your manager and and kind of showcase all these things that your manager happened to not see

the entire time they might have been saying hey go Mentor more Junior Engineers like keep doing this keep doing this and you're like okay I have been doing it but for some reason they don't have insight into it and then you tell them they might have been like man like I wish you would have done that less like I didn't realize you were doing it so much and there were these other opportunities we could have moved to so I just think it's a good practice to try doing things more frequently um obviously I know that sounds a little exaggerated but I think you get the idea um okay so if it's not draft emails because I want to go back to like implementation of this that was one example you could take notes like I said I use notes for some things like to-do list

but for um for Milestones not really uh for me on on Milestones it's a little bit different because I'll be working with my my product owners more regularly now we're probably doing more like newsletter updates it's kind of a new thing for me in my organization but like that might be a tool that I can use to say hey look like uh if I go reflect on the newsletter updates that I put out but what my team has accomplished like those are much they're like even more leveled up um like uh deliverables and Milestones right so like that would probably be beneficial for me to go look through and get a history of that right now it's not consistent enough so that might be a good opportunity going forward but right now not a perfect solution and get one more Lane over here okay um

and then another thing that this is a pretty common one and I was kind of waiting to the towards the end of this video to talk about it cuz it's got a bit of a weird name and I'm not a fan of the name but this is how it's known it's called a brag document um the reason I don't like brag documents and like the naming at least is that I think that has uh like it for me it's hard to look past the name of it and you know I was raised like bragging is a an absolute no no like don't do that like people don't like being around other people that brag like so I don't want to be in a position where telling people hey use a brag document because the connotation of that to me is already offputting seems like a

small Nuance detail I get it but like um it kind of is offputting for me because I don't want people to think that they're bragging um I think you can absolutely talk about your accomplishments without bragging like bragging to me has again might just be me I don't know has a negative connotation to it and being proud about something or speaking um like totally I don't know accurately about your accomplishments without having to like exaggerate them and boast about them I think is uh is fair so the road just got pretty crappy here in terms of visibility it's funny I'm saying pretty crappy here as in like I didn't live my whole life in Canada um this is actually nothing but in terms of how people are driving and stuff like can already kind of sense that like people have slowed down to like 40

on the highway in the fast lane it it's people aren't equipped to drive here with any snow I'm driving a rear wheeel drive rocket ship but we're we're doing it um this is went uh the Audi would not be good in this either actually I was going to say this is where the Audi would be good with the quadro but uh the back wheels are like 13 the yeah they're like 13 and 1 12 inches wide so like they're they're like a big snowshoes that would be just floating on top of everything so not really good for for driving in the winter but um so brag documents are this idea they're a little bit more structured I would say but kind of the same idea where you you're talking about your accomplishments and um you can find like the reason I'm bringing it up is

because you can look for templates and stuff online if you're like I don't know what that is or it sounds interesting but how do I use it search for brag document um I have a on my my digital products page I have a free one so if you want to see one you can go to Dev leader.com from Canada right um and then at the top there's a products menu it'll take you to a site called Gum Road which is where it's a popular digital products platform um but it's free so you can go check out uh I call it highlight tracker I think it says brag document highlight tracker uh I like calling it a highlight tracker instead because that's what I want you to be thinking about tracking your highlights your Milestones not necessarily bragging but uh there's a template there it's broken

into different sections uh you can talk about you know your mentorship milest Stones your different deliverables and stuff like that uh and I kind of broke it out into different categories that um there things that I would be talking to my Engineers about like hey like it would be good to grow in this area or to put focus in this area so um they're aligned to uh right now I would it's not like it's aligned to Microsoft necessarily but definitely inspiration from the stuff I talk about with my engineers at Microsoft um so if you want you can check that out as a template it's uh you know it's just a starting point I don't like I don't think there's a perfect uh way to do it uh that's going to work for everyone so check it out if you want like I said it's

absolutely free at Dev leader.com or highlight tracker uh there's plenty of different examples online that's why like I'm not selling mine uh because like why it's just like it's a tool it's lit once you see it you'll be like oh that's not that's not that crazy like yep it's not it's not meant to be that's why it's free just a a PDF or a Word document version that you can get um and you might look at it and say oh now I have some ideas for how I would like to do this for myself and that's great like please feel free to go make your own um I say that a about a lot of resources I try to offer like here's a starting point make it your own because you'll probably find it better to use if you Custom Tailor it for yourself but

um yeah you can use something like a highlight tracker the same way just for a little bit more structure in your your Milestone tracking you can go have you know bring that into your conversations with your manager um something that just on the I was thinking about this actually on the conversations with your manager to talk about this stuff something that I I like personally is um I like I'm the kind of person that likes having time to process things so for example if on the spot in a meeting like in a 101 I have an employee that says to me like hey like could you give me feedback whoa we're sliding wo come on winter tires let's go it's just slow Lush here crazy um yeah like I like time to process stuff so if someone says can you give me feedback it's like

if I if we weren't already talking about feedback and I'm put on the spot to give some now I'm like H like how do I give meaningful feedback without having time to think about it and I would say the same type of thing like if you have notes it's super slick here this is nuts and there are winter tires on this car okay we're going to pull into this parking lot we're going slow enough but like if I slam the brakes on I bet you will just slide let's see we're not going to try that yeah it's so the the snow is so wet but we're underground we made it um let's see if the camera made it but uh yeah I think if you can I would try to like give your manager some warning like hey I've been taking some notes like can

we talk about these next time send them over ahead of time like maybe you have a summary or something that you can share uh I think like for me I would love that I would love that so I have some time to kind of prepare mentally about what we're going to talk about um but that's me so um sorry that that was maybe a little scatterbrained I'm super nervous to go check and see if I still have a camera on top of my car I'm like I'm very anxious to go walk outside and be like there's you know thousand or half a thousand dollars gone but we'll see um hopefully that helps if you have questions about like more specifically about how to track what to track how to have those conversations leave comments below um the more specific you are about like hey like

how what what about this scenario the I feel like the better advice I can give um otherwise you kind of get a video like this it's a little bit generic but I hope there's still at least some tidbits in there about how I like to approach this stuff and how I work with my Engineers so thanks for watching and I'll see you next time take care