These Junior Developers Are CONSUMING All Of My Time! HELP!

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Hey folks, I'm headed to CrossFit. I'm gonna respond to a comment on one of the videos. Um, recently that's about helping juniors out, how to navigate that, that kind of thing. Um, so this might be a little bit of repeat, but maybe we'll find some different ways to talk through things. Just a friendly reminder, if you want questions answered, leave them below in comments. So you can go to codeameete.com submit stuff anonymously or just send a message to me Nick Causantino on LinkedIn or dev leader on any social media platform and I'll do my best. So this person had commented and said um the challenge that they face is that they have a project that has you know particular timelines that's very important that they have to work on like that's their focus and um because they're helping out two more junior team members that's really taking away all their time and they don't have they don't have the time necessary to like deliver on their critical project.

And so this I feel like this type of thing is like pretty common, right? It's um it's not like an unusual scenario. It's not like, oh, let's talk about this cuz this is crazy. It's like, let's talk about this because this is probably something that a lot of people have experienced. And I don't mean to talk through this and make it sound like, oh, the solution's just easy. Um, I think there's a path forward. Uh, and I think that there's ways to improve this. Um, I think, you know, spoiler alert, I think that if I told you, oh, like the, you know, just follow these two simple steps and everything will be solved. I think that's kind of like a a misleading way to to talk about it. But, uh, I I do think we have to kind of take a step back and and think about what we're trying to accomplish, right?

So, on the surface, it's like you have two goals. at least, right? In this case, what was kind of written down in the comment was there's there's two goals. One is that you're working on the project, whatever that happens to be. Uh for you, uh you know, other person watching this video, that's not the person that submitted the comment. Replace whatever project they're talking about with whatever like deliverable that you're responsible for. Okay. um or deliverables. So you have some set of deliverables and then the other goal is that there are people on the team that need help. They need to be ramped up. They need uh mentorship and coaching kind of thing. Um what we don't know specifically I guess is actually around that last point the mentorship and coaching part. Is it mentorship coaching? Is it you know junior person is blocked? you need to help get them unstuck.

Uh, is it a hybrid of those two things? And I think that this is where, you know, even as I'm kind of saying these words out loud, this is like the reminder, the number one thing that we talk about on this channel, everyone together. Now, if you've watched more than one of my videos, uh, level set expectations with your manager, right? So, this is a sort of a a pain in the ass scenario for you because you have two goals in front of you where you're like, how I can't take between them and I need to do both and I don't have sufficient time for both. Well, like what is the expectation? Um, so like is it truly a priority to have both of these things done? Because if it's truly a priority to have both of these things done and there's only so much time, either the timeline of these things or one of these things or some of these things has to be moved out or you need assistance or both.

Like if we, you know, if we make generalizations about the whatever the things are and you're talking about sort of uh capabilities and resources, you know, the more things that you add in that need to get done, you either have capabilities that let you go faster through them or you need more resources to do that or you change the timeline. It's kind of like there's limits to physics, right? So, the reason this gets really frustrating, challenging, confusing is like there isn't clarity around what is expected. Now, on the surface, it might be like, well, sure there is. And I, you know, as I make this, as I make this, uh, this video and others and talk through things like I don't know what conversation you've had versus the next person watching this video. So, uh, yes, I am making generalized, you know, sweeping statements and I am sorry for that.

But, um, you may have had a conversation with your manager and they said, "Yes, you have to work on this project. Here's the due date for it." And also like Timmy and Sally on the team need help with things and you're going to help them. So you're coming to me saying, "Well, Nick, yes, I I did get that clarified." Um, I do have to do both those things. And so far so good, right? That's that's absolutely better than not having any conversation about it and totally making assumptions. But kind of like when you are um say more junior or new to a team, if you've ever been in a situation where you're doing like a your standup meetings or your sync meetings for the week or whatever, reporting on status and you're like, I'm behind on this compared to what I said. Like you might have an instinct where you want to hide, but really what we need to do is the exact opposite.

We need to be kind of like waving our hand being like, hey, like this is off track right now. Um, here's the status of it. Here's what's going on. Uh, like I need some kind of help. And maybe that's just like I had the breakthrough yesterday and like now I can catch up. But like you need to raise awareness. You might need some kind of help. In this case, it's the same thing. It's oh crap. Me trying to help these two people in whatever capacity I'm trying to do that and deliver on this project. This is overwhelming. So instead of hiding from it, and I don't mean to suggest that in a like lazy, condescending kind of way. I I mean I mean that honestly because you might not realize that that's kind of what's happening.

Because if I say to you, well, what's the conversation with your manager look like when you've told them, hey, look, like I'm I'm having a really hard time keeping up with this project and helping these other people out. If if your response is, well, I haven't told my manager that or like I don't need to because they already clarified with me, then I'm like, okay, well, you're avoiding a conversation is my opinion on that. And I like, you know, I'm not te telling you that because like it's wrong to feel that way or something like that. Like I get it. That's a that's a hard conversation to go. I think that you set some expectations for me and I think that I am not meeting them. But the reality is if that's truly what's going on if you're honest with yourself, then that's the best time to have a conversation about it.

What's going to be worse in, you know, weeks or months from now when, you know, you're completely burnt out and like you've missed deadlines on your project and someone's like, "Dude, what the hell's going on?" And you're like, "Oh, yeah. For the past few months, like, I haven't been able to get anything done cuz I've been overwhelmed." Like, that's that's too late. Bring it up right away. I I also say this as someone who has no idea what your working relationship is like with your manager. So, if your immediate visceral reaction is, "Oh god, I can't talk to my manager about that." Um, either work on that relationship or maybe time for a new team. If you've been putting in effort into that and your manager sucks because that's what needs to happen. The conversation needs to happen because the clarity needs to happen on the priorities.

So, we need to have this conversation with our manager to be able to say, "Hey, look, I think these are the expectations and I am uh having some challenges with feeling like I am meeting those expectations. Here's what's going on." Now, there's some variations to I mean, there's infinite possibilities here, but uh some some ways that I see this kind of panning out depending on on this person's scenario or your scenario, I think a lot of the time I think a lot of the time for for many of us, we need more we need more support and coaching on how to help others. This is generally what I find in my experience. And if you're kind of like, well, who the hell are you? Uh, that's totally a fair question. Um, I am just a guy. I have been an engineering manager for 13 years. So, you know, I am only one person and I make these videos just cuz I'm trying to share my perspective and experience.

I'm not here to tell you it's the only way. I'm just here to share what I've seen and that way you are a very smart person. You can make informed decisions and I am giving you one extra data point that you can listen to or totally ignored. But I have often found that when it comes to the technical side of things, if uh in these situations usually like making progress on the project or on the technical side of things, uh I I find that people can navigate that much easier. Now, you might be in a situation where there's like technical hurdles, you have other team dependencies that are falling apart, and on top of that, you're trying to like help out some people.

Like, you can stack up all sorts of But um more often than not, I would say where people are struggling in these scenarios is they're like, I think that I'm helping these people or I think that I'm trying to do what's expected of me, but there's either inefficiencies with that or um they're they're just having like they're struggling trying to do that effectively. And so a lot of the conversations that I end up having in these situations are coaching people on my teams for how to help others, right? So just to give you an example, um this person who wrote the comment said they have two juniors that they're helping and that's kind of taking all their time. Well, like what what does it look like when they're helping these individuals? So, you might have someone say something like, "I'm spending time with Billy, but like Billy just doesn't get it.

Billy keeps making these mistakes. Billy's doing this. Like, uh, you know, I really have to, you know, air quotes here like hold Billy's hand through everything." And like, uh, it's just, you know, takes too much of my time. And it's like, well, maybe the way that you're trying to help Billy is actually not effective. And don't get me wrong, like I understand what it's like to try and coach and mentor different people um or just help people out. And you have to be very patient. But like I understand that feeling where you're like, "Okay, I got a lot of things to do. I'm under a lot of pressure and like I only got so much patience." But the unfortunate side effect is that a lot of the time we start pointing at the other person going, "Well, Bill, it's like Billy is like, it's just Billy.

Billy doesn't get it. Billy slow. Billy keeps making these mistakes. Billy, Billy, Billy." And it's like maybe, just maybe, yes, Billy has a role to play here, but maybe how you're trying to help is just not effective for Billy. and you are spending an extreme amount of time because you are unfortunately picking ways that are not effective for helping Billy. So like being able to like give guidance and help people and stuff like that, that's a whole skill set on its own. And the more people that you try to help navigate different situations on different levels, you'll realize like every single person is completely different. So, I don't mean to say all this to say like, "Oh, it's it's trivial. Just suck it up." But it's like, if you don't have the conversation about this with someone else, like your manager, then you might not realize that you have some blind spots of this kind of thing.

So, a lot of the time when I'm coaching people on this, it's like you may be like picking ineffective ways to help with people. A lot of the time what I've noticed is like there's communication gaps and sort of as a third party looking in, especially if I manage both people. Um, sometimes I will get the feedback from the more junior person that they're like, "Oh, I think I'm bothering so and so or um, you know, this is this working relationship's like not feeling so great." Um, whatever it happens to be, we get that and then simultaneously from the person with more experience, I'm hearing like it's really hard to help this person. But that's like interesting benefit of being the third parties. I get to see both perspectives often in a way that's like pretty candid as long as I've built good relationships with those people.

Um, and then I can try to offer advice because I see or I've had both sides presented quite clearly to me. And like a lot of the time people in those situations have not had a clear conversation with each other. Okay. So pivoting from like how do we coach people through this or maybe it's just like you have inefficiencies in how you're you're trying to help which I think is the most common one I run into. The other thing that we need to talk about is like is the priority of things right you might have a manager that's like well I said those things so like everything is you know a P 0 like those have to get done you don't have a choice. Um, but like I said a little bit earlier, there's physics. So, um, if things are taking time to do and you only have so much time, I think the more that you can be transparent about this kind of thing, the better.

And there are ways to do this that aren't just like I'm not doing that and like um purely getting defensive, right? It's not um it's not probably not your goal because your goal probably is like and if not you should ask questions but like I see value in in both of these things. I want to try getting these things done but I'm having challenges with the amount of time spent on both. So yes, if you think that both of these things are important, right, and equally important, then like I need support or I need to push a date out like the I need something has to change because I don't have capacity to do both. Maybe I need uh I need help getting unblocked more effectively on on the technical project, right? I need uh is there another engineer that can help with this thing? Is there something we can change in our process so I get reviews done faster?

Like what what needs to change to speed up the one thing if the other thing is consuming more of your time? But I would say a lot of the time if you have conversations like this and you break things down, you will find that not everything is the same priority. So to give you an example, if you have this conversation where you're trying to raise awareness like you're you're kind of struggling to do to to do both of these things and that's the expectation you feel has been set. You might find that when you talk with your manager, they're like look like you know that project that you're working on is that is important. We have that deadline. We have to meet that and like I do need someone to help Billy and Sally. like that needs to happen too.

But the reality is like if Billy and Sally are getting attention and it's a little bit slower and maybe that means they have to spend a little bit more time like trying to problem solve on their own, but you're still going to help them or try. Maybe that is the right balance, right? I think a lot more of the time when you break these things down, you'll find that there's a difference in priority or at least how you're trying to spend your time and energy on them. Um, I have conversations like this all of the time with people in one-on ones. Uh, a lot less like on on a regular basis I have these conversations, but a lot less around like people and more like, hey, look, like these are the priorities that I have.

Um, and I just want to make sure that, and it's really cool to hear from people, but it's like I just want to make sure that I'm spending, you know, from your perspective, am I spending the right amount of time on these things? And this is sort of the side effect of of systems that move a little bit slower, just for what it's worth. as an example um like when we have to make changes that go out to the entire planet uh can the technology deploy the changes fast the answer is yes but also we don't do that because if you've seen I mean this is not just because of this but uh if you've seen in uh recent incidents and stuff with like you know huge outages for big uh big tech companies You know, this includes Microsoft, um, Cloudflare, right? AWS, a lot of these things happen because changes propagated extremely fast.

You can have catastrophic braking changes and if they only if they only go out to a small percentage of a fleet at a time, it's like, oh, it's catastrophic for one machine out of, you know, 1 million machines. Okay? Right? And if it's going slow and you can see the signal, then you can you can do something for it. But so you might have developers who've got their changes rolling out and they're not just going to sit there and c like you know start just waiting like they will generally be working on other things and then looking at signals and stuff on the side as changes are rolling out. So we do have some uh some higher whip and that means that people have questions about priorities very frequently which is totally normal. Um, but yeah, people will come to one-on ones and ask questions and, you know, ask to get things clarified.

And a lot of the time, you know, it's not like both of these things or all three of these things are um are exactly the same priority. It's like, look, if you if you need to split your time, let's let's talk about what's got to happen first. We'll order them and go go about it that way. Same thing happens when people come to me and they're like, I'm spending time helping people. We talk about a priority order, right? We just try to make sure that people have support and then I will dive into those things individually. But I'm at CrossFit. I hope that helps. Um, as always, interested to hear people's perspectives in the comments. But there we go. Reminder, questions in the comments codec.com for anonymous questions. And then you can message me on any platform. Thank you so much for being here. I will see you in the next video.