Leadership Focus: Senior Software Engineer and Tech Lead Roles

Transcript is auto-generated and may contain errors.

hey folks I'm heading to work we're going to go to YouTube for a comment SL question and it's what are some things I can do to take initiative and be productive to eventually grow into a leader I really want to grow into a tech lead or senior my question is how do you stand out amongst a team and eventually become a senior or leader when you're just at the regular Dev level um so I think this is a good one um I'll give you my perspective on this of course all these videos are literally just my perspective and uh we'll try to touch on a couple different angles here and I guess just a friendly reminder if you want questions answered leave them in the comments below like this person did uh or you can look for Dev leader on social media which is my

main YouTube channel um or you can look for Nick centino one LinkedIn send me a message if you send me a message it'll be kept totally Anonymous so you can write whatever you want and that way you can offer in more you know if you have a scenario that you want to walk through or that kind of thing then you can put in as much detail as you'd like um okay so when I read this question there's a couple of things going on here and it means that there's a couple of directions that I could try to go to answer this um generally when I hear people that are individual contributors talk about leadership um generally I hear them asking like okay well if I want to get into like people management right like the association of management with leadership kind of comes into play

however with this person they're saying grow into a leader but they want to grow into a tech lead or senior right so I think the important thing I wanted to call out is that the concept of leadership is not tied specifically to like a management role in fact uh a few weeks back now on code commute I did have a video about uh leadership even you know as early as being a junior like how do you demonstrate some of these these no don't drive-thru man this person started pulling right up to the intersection super fast oh boy um you know even as early as a junior like being able to demonstrate leadership traits right because leadership is a set of traits and actions and sort of a uh sort of a paradigm or the things that you're doing um it's not that like like leader

is not a title or I mean I guess some places it could be it's not like you are the someone says you are leader and then therefore all of a sudden you have good leadership right um it's kind of like when I talk about company culture you don't just say what the culture is and then it happens culture is sort of the um the side effect it's the observed um nature of an organization right you you can try to influence the culture but you don't just say our culture is X and therefore it happens doesn't work that way so I think leadership is a similar thing where you can't just say like I am a leader therefore I am a I have good leadership traits uh and the opposite could hold true is that you could have amazing leadership traits and um not have a

specific title that is leader right or manager so they are they are different things and I just wanted to call it out uh because as I walk through this I want you to keep that in mind uh and see you know you can kind of tailor this to be applicable to your situation I also want to just mention to people I have to stop for gas so uh this is going to be one of those videos I edit and if you see me kind of trying to rush to get a thought out it's because I'll be pulling into a gas station soon don't want to lose my my trade of thought um okay so this person is explicitly saying uh standing out with leadership trads to get them towards senior or to get them towards Tech lead um so maybe it's worth kind of defining

like some ideas around what does leadership mean and I wish I had my insta 360 going because um it's raining and I have learned that it's completely useless I'm on the stretch of road that I drive every day that's had construction for like over a month now and the road's torn up and there's a frontend loader tractor in front of us driving down the street I'm going uh I'm going 3 m mil an hour right now and there's no way that we can pass this thing they don't even have the people with signs at this part of the of the road it's unreal um I'm so angry come on um okay so what do we mean we're talking about leadership right um when I think about leadership some things that I that come to mind for me are characteristics around uh being proactive right so

not just being passive and uh sort of observing what happens and then purely like uh like only reacting when things reach a certain like Tipping Point right like uh how do we get ahead of some of these things how do we be proactive and go okay um if these are things are happening in in our environment how do we take steps to make sure that we're uh not always behind the curve and we're trying to get ahead of the curve there's always going to be things that we have to react to of course but trying to be thinking and anticipating and being proactive Building Systems uh or even changing how our development processes work so that we can catch things early right being the being part of like how do we get ahead I think is to me part of leading um when we're thinking

about leaders I think that these are also individuals that bring other people along right so mentorship comes to mind um you're the kind of person that is not just in a silo doing only what matters to you but rather thinking about the the greater team right how do you bring others along uh make sure that they're uh sort of Amplified by by interactions with you and sorry I might need a second to see cuz there is a sign Bearer now but he's on the other side of this tractor and I just want to make sure okay they have a stop sign for me but not the tractor excellent um okay what it's going to take me so long to get to work today just because of this stupid stretch of road um so mentorship bringing other people along right we think about uh the phrase

like multiplier right if you're a multiplier on a team you are helping others Get Better by by sort of uh multiplying their abilities right their whether it's output or whatever however you would like to to actually measure that but you're helping others around you be better uh so that's a characteristic of leader um what I would say is like and maybe gets confused with like leadership is like just telling people what to do I don't think is like that might get associated with like people in leadership positions but I don't think that that's a good characteristic of of a leader right and if you think about this you've probably depending on your work experience and stuff you've probably been around people that are very good at just telling you what to do um and maybe you've had experiences where people are able to do this

and you're like hell yeah like that makes sense I can rally behind that like and other situations where someone's telling you what to do and you're like I would rather do literally anything else then do what you're telling me to do um and obviously I'm like having two huge sweeping generalizations when I say those statements but I would say when you have people that are are good leaders that you feel like are leading you if they're giving you instruction around what to do you actually believe in them you actually are okay with like doing you know the thing that's being laid out in front of you and that's because you have a lot of generally I would say you have a lot of trust and respect for the people that are doing that so if you imagine someone that you really look up to right

you have a lot of trust and respect for them if they're saying hey this is the priority this is the thing you should be doing and you should go forward and do it you are probably like yeah that makes sense like and thank you right thank you for the clarity thank you for aligning me on that and let's go ahead and get that done but if you now imagine someone that you don't have a lot of trust and respect for it's also kind of giving you the same type of instruction this is where you might be like no right like maybe you'll do it but reluctantly and I would say generally it's because you don't you trust them and I don't mean like in a malicious way like someone's out to get you or like they're a spy or something like that but but more

like you know you don't really believe in them right someone's telling you to do something and you're like oh sure because you're going to Pivot to something else tomorrow or you don't actually I don't think you understand what you're even asking me to do like you don't have trust and generally respect for them and that person might be in what we're calling like a leadership position or a management position so I just wanted to kind of get this stuff out of the way so we can maybe get on the same page for things that I'm considering are are good leadership traits right you want to be able to inspire others to come along um one more point on this is that I think that in order to get to that point you sort of need to be uh demonstrating consistency right so if you are

building up a track record with the people that you're working with that like that you are accountable right you say this is going to get done and you get it done like people start to trust you right uh they're going to say this is the person that says when X is going to happen they make X happen and not the person that's like hey X is going to happen and it's either never getting done or it's like wildly overdue or no one really knows the status of it there's just like clear transparency there's execution and it's consistent right they become a reliable person um so I think those are all important things that you can be doing to to demonstrate these types of qualities but gas station's coming up what I want to do next is kind of I guess I'm at a red light

before I can even pull in so a little premature on my part but the next part of this conversation that I want to get into is like okay if we have a clear clearer uh understanding or alignment on what some of these traits are like in practice how can you be doing this and then I was thinking about it might be worth touching on different working environments right so um maybe how your team is set up or uh what your you know your relationship with your manager is like how much autonomy you have these kinds of things um I think can play a factor so I'd like to kind of explore some of that uh after I get away from the pump so just pulling up here and I will do the magical editing thing and it's like you never had to sit here and

pump gas with me that was unfortunately a little bit more hectic than I wanted it to be because it like wasn't taking oh no what's this truck doing it didn't take my credit card so it said and then it wouldn't take my credit card after I pumped for gas but then I went inside and the guy said you already paid and I said well tell that to the pump um like I don't want to drive away and then get I don't know like police officer at my door or something um so anyway we got gas um where we left off which uh you already know and I don't because I'm just back in the car now I'm flustered is uh we're talking about now that we have some established idea of leadership traits how do we start putting them into practice right um so I

think where the direction I'd like to go is that I realize that this stuff can get kind of weird depending on how much atomy you have what your team structure and all that's like um you know and I think like I was kind of saying a little bit earlier the one thing that really starts to stand out is being proactive about things okay so if you already find that you're in an environment where you cannot be proactive like it's really difficult to speak up it's really difficult to feel like you can be part of influencing like let's do the right thing from your perspective if that feels like it's not in your environment then I feel like trying to demonstrate more leadership characteristics will feel like there's a lot of friction okay and it's not to say that you can't rise above that I just

mean that it's probably going to feel even more uncomfortable because you have these other barriers now so for example you're like okay Nick is saying that I need to be proactive I need to start like you know helping others I need to be start being like how do we get ahead of these things and like if you're in an environment where someone's like literally just do X and you better deliver on X and you don't have the ability to speak up or do the like kind of put some attention on these other things you're going to feel like you're going against the grain um so please like kind of consider your situation and I would say that um you you have to it's going it's a tricky thing to navigate right I don't want to tell you to go do this and then someone's like

what the heck are you doing like I told you to spend 100% of your effort on this and you're you're focus and you're not um so I just you know like if you're going to go mentoring people and then you're doing a check-in with your manager and they're like hey like you spent too much time doing that I don't want you to fall into these types of like traps right so uh just kind of adding this as a disclaimer that you you have to think about your current situation um now that is something that you could bring up with your manager and saying hey look like I am I want to start kind of proving that I can be doing a little bit more I want to try and demonstrate some more leadership type traits and uh and just trying to clear that with them

if you feel that that's a point of contention right I hope for most people that this would be a welcomed kind of thing that you don't need like permission from your manager but I realize the more videos I'm making and the more conversations and comments and stuff the the more people are like my manager is not like that man like that's going to that would screw me over so trying to give some other perspectives uh when trying to navigate this advice so with that aside some things that we could be looking at doing right are uh I think you as an individual contributor on the team uh if you're if you have some awareness of what's going on you can start to recognize pain points okay this is one approach we could take so if you have people on the team that are saying hey

like the build system's too slow or hey our tests are flaky hey we don't have tests hey we don't have coding conventions hey we don't have um good on call guidance like if you're listening and kind of uh paying attention to some of the the themes that are coming up on the team I would say one way to try and demonstrate some leadership traits are to start kind of I don't know like observing that feedback and seeing if there's something you can start actioning that's a little bit maybe outside of just your you know exact task that you're doing right everyone on the team's been saying the on call guidance is uh is bad and it's hard for more Junior people to get involved with it and be effective okay like how do we start making that better it doesn't mean that it's now solely

your responsibility and like you better you better go figure that out or else you're not a leader but how can we start making that better are there steps that you can start taking and saying to the team like hey look by the way like I heard um you know I heard people were talking about on call guidance St being great I decided I was going to be proactive and maybe start collecting some information on this Wiki page or uh I decided uh I would I don't know depending on what systems and stuff you're using like basically I started to be proactive about this right then you can start to lead by example right if the on call guidance is bad or not it doesn't exist it might just be because no one's taken the initiative to do it and that's probably because there's been other

priorities and that's been neglected I'm not saying that's right or wrong I'm just saying that's probably how it got to that state and if the this is now an observed issue like going a little bit above and beyond what you're normally doing and trying to get ahead of some of this stuff could be very helpful again something to think about is that if you're now spending like half your time going and documenting on call guidance and not doing your other work you might be having a conversation with your manager where they're like what are you doing right uh and then you're going to go well I'm trying to be a leader and they're going to say yes but you're not doing your work so you have to think about the balance here but the idea is trying to take some initiative on some of these

things and that way what you can start to do is show other people hey look if we want to make things better right and we all do we want to be moving forward in in a positive direction we all want to see things improve if this is what we want we have to start taking steps to do it right we can't just keep talking about it don't get me wrong it's good to surface these things and to talk about it but it can't just stop there there has to be action at some point and even if that action is just a little bit right say for on Call guidance to keep going with this example if that action is a little bit and you can demonstrate hey look I'm doing a little bit I'm doing a little bit and then all of a sudden that

starts to have a positive impact then we can build some momentum and then someone else could also do a little bit and then someone else can also do a little bit now it starts to become part of what's going on in the team culture and I'm kind of extrapolating right if this goes on for a long time now all of a sudden if you reflect on this it's like hey look like this person actually was demonstrating leadership by doing this right they were taking initiative they were being proactive they were addressing challenges they were making things better right you're kind of expressing I observe this thing I want to make it better I'm going to be part of making it better that becomes a commitment you take some small step STS and then end up demonstrating um by taking action that other people can do

this sort of thing too this is one class of example that we can look at um another thing that I would say that's a really good opportunity is uh is just around mentorship to be honest um if you're in a position where there's other people on the team that you can be helping I think that there is such um such an opportunity here uh for anyone to be able to take and the I've given this kind of guidance in other videos and stuff so if you guys are watching this and you watched a lot of the other videos this might not be news um I realize I think I'm over 170 videos or something on this channel now so there's going to be some stuff that repeats right um but the idea is that when it comes to helping others giving answers is not necessarily

help in some contexts yes right in some context yes but uh when you just tell people so someone is asking how to solve a problem and you just give them the answer Unfortunately they did not um or they may not have learned how to approach solving the problem their problem is just solved that does not um sort of create growth it ends up just kind of like perpetuating that people come to you for answers now that might have the side effect that feels good right where you're like hey people come to me because they they know that I have answers to stuff that can look good up to a certain point but I would say like that has a um that has a limit and that limit is you so again if you extrapolate this pattern so you have more Junior people are learning yes

like go to go to Nick he will give you the answer right and some was going awesome like now I know if I'm ever stuck I know there's an expert they're they're going to help me so you become known as this expert right you have some of this uh perception around like you know this is someone we trust and respect right these are good leadership traits but what I'm saying is that you become the limiting factor because if you have a whole team of people that are coming up to you constantly and all that you do is tell them the answer you are now the single point of failure for that kind of stuff so I highly recommend and it's a very common thing that happens this happened to me extremely early in my career and it took me a long time to realize exactly

what was going on it's not just about giving people answers to things you have to teach other people how you solve problems right teach them the method teach them how to find the information teach them how to be curious it takes more effort but it's absolutely a long-term strategy that's going to be way better than just you being the expert on something and being the single point of failure this is where you get that multiplier effect right this is where you're teaching other people how they can emulate your behaviors right I'm just making this up as an example Nick is the best person to go debug these types of issues right he's had so much experience doing it you should absolutely just go to him and he'll he'll get it figured out like he's our he's our expert on it but now you have one

person that's an expert and that again could work well to a certain point but at that point you're the limiting factor so how you know if I'm the person in this example how would I go about helping others well instead of me being the single point of failure and saying when they come to me and I go do the debug for them and give them the answer I would say here's I would tell them here's where I start right and like so I would get these tools set up or I would you know bookmark these dashboards and then um here's a couple of like uh Wiki pages I wrote up or some other materials like here's a reference email thread and I would say here's where I would start to look and then kind of point someone in the direction and say you know I

recommend you you try this out and then give them some of the tools and perspective to go try on their own again if this is Mission critical in some scenario where everything's on fire yeah you might want to be the person as the expert to go put out the immediate fire but if that's not the case taking this opportunity to help someone learn means the next time they might still come to you and they need some help but over time that person will rely on you less and less and now they are one more person that knows that thing and you've now had a multiplier effect by helping more people on the team so in terms of standing out right so I'm giving you a couple of I guess like practical ways that this could look but in terms of standing out um this type

of stuff generally feels like it's beyond just the scope of like you know the the work items that you have to deliver on in your Sprint right if you're approaching work where it's like you have a Sprint board what's the ticket on the Sprint board or the tickets on the Sprint board you have to go do and your entire goal is like I'm going to put my head down and just do those you might be good at getting stuff done that's specific to you but I don't think that that ends up demonstrating leadership that demonstrates that you might be very consistent you might be hardworking these are not bad traits right I'm not saying this is a bad thing to do I'm just saying if you want to start to demonst leadership you kind of have to Branch outside of just your own little bubble

because how do you like if you think about it how do you lead people because it's all like leading is about people right it's this is the focus so how do you lead people or demonstrate that you're having leadership for people if you're not spending more time with people right it's I'm I'm saying that maybe hope hopefully in like an obvious way that sounds kind of silly but the the point is like if you're reflecting on the work you're doing and you're like there's never other people involved it's going to be very difficult to demonstrate leadership trads it doesn't mean you can't demonstrate technical Excellence which is also important you know if you had your head down and you were focused on you know delivering awesome Technical Solutions yeah like you know someone might observe that and say hey look like awesome work but in

terms of like people leadership that might not get captured um one other thing that I like cuz I'm coming up to the exit on the highway and then it's not too long before I get to the office I did kind of mention I wanted to talk about more like the work environment uh how things are set up and how that might enable or inhibit talked a little bit earlier about sort of the relationship uh that you have either with your manager or how much autonomy you have um but I wondered too like if there's a little bit more to to generalize here so um I'm trying to do some reflection to like this is these are going to be maybe extremes right so when I was starting out my career and I was working in a startup um I feel like kind of depends how

you want to operate right like for me there was a lot of room for autonomy and there was a lot of room if I wanted to be proactive and do stuff that I was given space to do so so the side effect of that is that if I have if I take the initiative I can make things happen right so it's very in my opinion very conducive to demonstrating leadership if you are putting in the time and energy to do so you may have other environments where you might have so much energy to want to put into that but there's so much friction to being able to do stuff right so if I did not have autonomy so let's use the same startup example for me if I was at a startup and um and I didn't have autonomy even though I had a lot

of energy and I wanted to try and like make things better it might feel like there's so much friction to drive any change that like it's extremely demotivating and I've had this happen in my career when I'm like okay like literally as a manager uh there's an expectation that I am leading people in my opinion it's a people position and if I'm not a good leader then I'm not going to be a good manager otherwise I'm just telling people what to do and like you don't you don't really need me part of my job is trying to to lead people to make sure that they're engaged they're inspired to do good work and that they're growing in their career so I've been in positions where I'm like I'm not being given the space to have that kind of impact where it's now becoming very difficult

for me to even lead people and all that I'm left doing is kind of being you know uh by proxy someone's telling me what to do and I just have to tell other people what to do that's not a spot I ever want to be in right where my autonomy is completely removed I don't have any ability to kind of uh navigate things in a way that's my leadership style and that lets me focus on things that aren't just like here's the set of work for the week go get it done right um the same thing can happen with career conversations right if I'm in a position where you know here's how here's the next step for growing in your career and then uh I'm constantly I go to put people up for promotion and I'm constantly met with like no like it feels like

the goal post is moving then I'm like okay like I can't do my job effectively right that ends up being a decision that I can't be part of making uh just as an example so some autonomy is taken away now I can take the feedback and I can make changes and I have autonomy there but you know when it feels like you don't have uh some type of control or autonomy at least over certain things that you should be responsible for then um you're going to be met with a lot of friction so what I'm trying to say is uh I have found at least you know for my my own career Journey the startup that I started at was very conducive to uh to people that wanted to demonstrate leadership because there was so much room for autonomy if you're on a team that

doesn't have that um again I would I would just kind of uh consider how you want to go about navigating that do you want to and I'm not saying this is bad by the way this is just something to think about do you want to rock the boat a little bit and and kind of take that step and say hey look like I know that we're on tight deadlines for these things but the entire team the entire team is complaining about on call stuff and we can't do our on call effectively and it's really hurting us so I put in a little bit of extra time or I used the same amount of time and I got smart about how to get my other deliverables done and I started doing this and I started doing this cuz I realized it's important uh and I tried

to make sure I'm not sacrificing all my other things that I'm accountable for and here's me taking initiative one step forward that might rock the boat a little bit depending on your environment but maybe that's really worth it right maybe that's sort of the wakeup call that's needed it's hard for me to say cuz I don't know your environment um in some cases you might say like I would love to do that but it's it feels like it's too much risk and again I don't know your environment I don't know your appetite for risk I don't know your environment I don't know your manager um so it's it's not fair for me to say just go do it and then you do it and you're like hey my manager yelled at me like yeah like I don't know maybe it's a manager I don't know

these things so I just want you to have some awareness that when you're trying to take initiative trying to be proactive um just kind of consider your environment but overall um I think what I started with was leadership traits right so we talked about uh being someone that people trust and respect demonstrating that you're reliable and accountable uh and then being proactive and taking initiative I think that these are all very important traits for leaders um I think that you need to layer in the people part to that because some of those traits like they're good but uh when it comes to like this person was asking about like you know being a senior engineer or being a tech lead right if you want to be in a position where you're demonstrating leadership to people so that's how leadership works I think you need to

make sure that you're factoring in your sort of your influence uh of others now sometimes I feel like there are some things we could be doing um and that they're probably almost natural and you're probably demonstrating some types of leadership traits which is awesome um but there's this other reality which is kind of funny and I think that that's it's also apparently uh pretty obvious sorry pretty not common I don't know what the word is there I've seen a bunch of situations where people are doing things that are quite the opposite of um of leader uh leadership traits sorry there's a bus that was trying to merge in in a big truck beside me and my words were also escaping me at the same same time um so there are things that people do that kind of like absolutely work against them in terms of

being good leaders okay so one of them is emotional responses to things this is tricky because I think that it's really good if you're like it can be very motivating when people see that you're passionate about something right because it's showing that you have a lot of Pride on it uh you're probably going to be very proactive to make things better you know when things aren't good you're like okay I'm on it um and you know like you want the thing that you're proud about and passionate about to be the best that it can be that is cool that is something that people can say wow like that is a like it's really great to see someone that cares so much about something so a positive thing it can backfire though because if you get emotional about that thing right so someone pushes up code

and it ends up having an effect on the thing that you're so passionate about and it's a negative effect if you take that out on them emotionally that's going to absolutely backfire so negative emotional responses to things or to people can be very negative for having a positive leadership uh impact and it again I'm saying this and you might be like yeah no Nick like that's pretty obvious but I don't think it is obvious to some people especially in the moment right if they're having an emotional reaction to something it's probably because they're not thinking logically about the thing that's happening it's emotional like by definition right so I'm trying to say this because if you're like if you can think about something that you're very passionate about at work a system you've built or a process that you own or something right you've worked

on the team for 10 years and you're like I really care about this thing because I spent so much time on it when you have a new person on the team that accidentally breaks the build or they push a bug and it's in production do you have an emotional response to them and make them feel like if you do probably not a good set of leadership traits it doesn't mean that you're not allowed to feel a certain way it means how you react to that right so um I think there are plenty of examples like this I don't want to honk at you come on it's a green light I think there are plenty of examples like this that um you know if people just removed them from the things that they do overall they probably would have great uh leadership traits right so if

you're I just give you another example say you're the kind of person that is actively helping lots of other people and having sort of this multiplier effect again great great thing to be doing as a leader but if you also then have emotional responses to people and make them feel like absolute idiots when something doesn't go as planned not a good set of leadership traits right like so part of being a good leader is fostering that environment where uh it's like a we call it psychological safety right you want to a safe place to fail that means that people can make mistakes and they're not going to feel like they can't show their face at work ever again this guy's got to back up I'm going to block the intersection there's construction literally everywhere today so but yeah especially like so I know for this

person they saying how can they stand out to become senior or to become a tech lead I would say like something to keep in mind that can again that can backfire is like if you are sort of on your way there but you're not creating that safe place for people to to be able to make mistakes and learn from them that's not going to work well if you're already in this position you are a tech lead you are a manager right if you're already sort of in the position where you're expected to be a good leader if you're not creating a safe place for people to fail if you're not creating psychological safety these are not good leadership traits it will absolutely backfire it makes it so that people don't want to do things and why don't they want to do it well they could

either you know get yelled at for making a mistake right like that they're not going to be excited about trying to make change and go forward they're going to be nervous about it they're going to be hesitant they're not going to they're going to stop speaking up about things and if you don't believe me I'm not going to say try it um please do not please do not try it but if you don't believe me that it's that important if you're in an environment where you feel like that's the case try steering the environment the other way and come back and report to me and see how things change we see this happen sometimes where um there's a sort of a a Persona the intelligent right you have someone that is very smart but they make it really difficult for anyone else to get things

done because their opinion is the only one that matters and they're generally steamrolling conversations this uh has a really negative impact on psychological safety for people generally when you remove people like this from an environment you will see everyone else Skyrocket in terms of uh their abilities try it um hope that helps I'm at work so I got to work I'll see you next time