Arguing Agile

AA213 - Being a Good Engineer Kinda Sucks (Reaction)

• Brian Orlando • Season 1 • Episode 213

Share episode

Do you want to hear a story about stifling growth and creativity through the lens of one developer's personal story?

You're in luck! 

Join Product Manager Brian Orlando and Enterprise Business Agility Coach Om Patel as they watch and react to Theo's YouTube video: "Being a good engineer kinda sucks," April 28, 2025.

It's a tale about the tension between excelling at your craft versus navigating organizational politics and dysfunction. 

That's right, today, we're talking about themes of career development, team dynamics, and leadership, so feel free to stick around for our thoughts on these and:

  • The sustainability trap of overworking to meet unrealistic expectations
  • How organizational politics can punish innovation and excellence
  • The importance of product sense vs. documentation-driven development
  • Finding and nurturing relationships with like-minded professionals

#Leadership #ProductManagement #CareerDevelopment #TechCareers


LINKS

= = = = = = = = = = = =

YouTube

Apple

Spotify


REFERENCES
= = = = = = = = = = = =
Check Out Theo's Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VuM1GCadt4
...and his YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@t3dotgg
...and his website: https://t3.gg/


MUSIC

= = = = = = = = = = = =

Toronto Is My Beat (Music Sample)

By Whitewolf (Source: https://ccmixter.org/files/whitewolf225/60181)

CC BY 4.0 DEED (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en)

om, I got a surprise for you. I have a video for you to watch. Nice. About a developer. He's having a tough time. You ready to help him through his tough time? Let's do it. Welcome back to Arguing Agile. Ever since , AI has taken over., I can't bring myself to get outta bed in the morning. I'm sleeping I have long spells where I don't wanna do anything, I might be depressed. That's what I'm saying. And the content that people are putting out. I can't take it anymore. So I follow a lot of, developer centric channels. And I steer away from a lot of the large, product podcasters it's just AI hype, all the time. I'm not coming out as anti ai.'cause I, because I've been using like, I'm the AI hipster. I've been using it when it was still called when it was still called machine learning learning. I dunno why that was so funny to me. Since I've been using it forever, it's old hat to me. So I pulled this video that I saw, that I watched that I thought was pretty good. And it's more of a teams conversation. And it is product management and AI buzzwords that you'll see. So thought I'd bring it to your attention. Get your feedback as a team coach this one out real quick. Okay? Yeah. All right, let's get to it. All rights site unseen. Om hasn't seen this one. I've not seen it. So this is Theo, T3 dot GG. Theo who is a, he's a developer. He is a streamer. He's across a bunch of platforms. You know, he's got a whole ton of followers. So we're gonna listen to his video. I'm gonna pause it at different intervals as he shifts between topics. We're gonna talk through it. Sounds good. Here we go. It's weird to talk about these types of things 'cause they're deep in the mechanics of how businesses and teams operate, and it's also a really personal story The things I'm gonna talk about here might not apply to you and your role and your life and the specific position and team you're in. So don't take anything I say here as gospel on the right way to deal with the workplace that you're in. This is meant to be a conversation about the things I succeeded and more importantly, the things I failed in as I got good at coding. A lot of this is going to be about my personal experience and the failures that I had when I started getting better at code and hopefully it's gonna be helpful to you guys as well. So if you're a good engineer or even a great engineer and you're getting frustrated with your workplace or you hope to be in that position someday, hopefully there is something of value for you here. This rant was triggered by a message from the Chatter, Jiro. Hopefully I pronounce his name correctly here. And it was a really good question. Mind if I ask you for advice on managing a thick headed boss. I've been assigned work that feels three to four times bigger than other teams inside the company, and I work alone. I feel like this is the fault of myself trying my best to work well and fast, but I guess I shot myself in the foot and this is not sustainable. I'm gonna stop right there at the question. So there we go. Om, I'm gonna ask you the same question. I'm, I'm gonna just say theoretically myself. Let's just pretend myself, like in the product management world, okay. Om like you, you're like, welcome to my office, lay down on the couch. I was like, this, this is weird. Om where did this couch come from? I've been assigned work that is three to four times bigger than other teams inside the company, assuming it's bigger in scope impact, or importance, right.. I work alone. I feel this is the fault of me trying my best to work well and fast, but I guess I just shot myself in the foot and this is not sustainable. Oh boy. Like, sight unseen because you haven't seen the rest of this video, so I've not seen any of this before. So first of all, he's been assigned work. Somebody's telling him how much work to do, three to four times bigger than other people. So it's like, where do you start with this? this is all hypothetical., there's no real money changing hands here. sometimes I work with developers that will say they can do something, , oh, I'll get that to you by the end of the day. It's a quick five minute fix. And then they get into it and it's not a five minute fix. It's like any of those stories that you initially took on thinking you understood it, and then once you got into the code you completely like, oh, this estimate totally doesn't service what really needs to be done. Yeah. And then rather than having the conversation and going back to the team, you keep grinding it out. you just keep grinding.'cause you're like, well I think I can get it done and I'll just work extra tonight and knock it out in the morning and nobody will ever know. Yeah. that's real. That's normal. Absolutely. and the larger organization you are, the more, pressure the organization puts on you, like the, the more you feel, the more pressure you feel that you need to go the extra mile there are just some cultures like that. Yeah, definitely. Some of that is happening here. I think you're right. his last two words, it's not sustainable. Absolutely. This is an organizational dysfunction, where people don't feel safe to say, , I know I said I could do it in a day, but when I got into it, here's what I found. Ever talk to a mechanic who says, yeah, I will have that to you tomorrow. When you get there they go, here's what we found. So it won't be tomorrow. This is really a, an issue a lot of the large, mainly large companies, 'cause smaller companies have lower number of vectors. Communication, people are okay to say, yeah, this is too big. if you're not in an environment where you can talk about this and say, Hey listen, I'm in over my head here. on the contrary, that environment forces you to say, I'm just gonna work extra hours. I'm gonna grind it out and I'll get that done. not only is it not sustainable, what's the quality of that output gonna look like? it is an output at that stage. You're just trying to get this done, save face for yourself. So you don't look silly in front of your teammates ' or stakeholders I mean, or your bosses because if this person works alone, they probably work for someone and they're the rock star. if you ever read the Phoenix project, they're, that one person that everything's always waiting on Right, right. The hero developer. Yeah, the hero. Some of this is like, yes, you do it to yourself. And I think we have another podcast where we talk something similar to this, but I wanted to stop before you hear the rest of the situation. basically, he'll pull from his own experience where he was in this position. That's where the rest comes from. But I wanted to stop there to say, this is not a single developer problem. A lot of people in their career, they never even realize that this is a systemic problem. Right, exactly. That they're being punished by the system. The longer you stay in that system, the more ingrained you become. you're less likely to say, let's lift our head up and say, wait, does it have to be this way? I'm pretty sure people listening and watching can relate to this 'cause everyone's been in this environment before at some point in their career. get a team coach. When I read this, I was like, this is a problem that can be helped with enterprise coaching. When I saw it, I mean, for sure. Obviously present it as a single developer problem. I have felt this exact way far too many times in my career, I dunno how to explain this other than to get personal with it. First though, I wanna challenge you, the viewer, and also the chatter. Think about where you're at in your career. The most important question before you can do any more deep diving here, is how important are you to the company? This is a hard thing to judge, especially when you're still new or even if you're there for a while. But lower level, you gotta think about the bus factor. If you were to disappear or stop contributing to this code base or working at this company, how much does that hurt them or slow them down there? The, the bus factor. Is that what he said? Yes. The bus factor. Yeah. The lottery factors, how I call that. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely true. If you're just starting out in your career, you kind of feel there's some pressure , to excel and make an impression, right. To perform. and some of this comes back down to the organizational dysfunction You are made to feel that way. Some organizations do half-hearted attempts by saying, well, we'll pair you up with a senior. that you can talk to. But they've gone through who's never available. Who never available. They've gone through it themselves. This goes downhill pretty quickly unless, the developer can say, time out here. Right. But you don't feel like you can say that because, you wanna impress and get promoted and whatnot. Yeah. I was at a networking event recently where I was talking to somebody about, how do you succeed in and stay in tech? If tech is just this horrible grind where all your skills today, six months from now might be gone. Some fad rolls through and, now everyone wants to do waterfall development, and then two years from now, another fad comes, now waterfall development's out and you've made yourself an expert in waterfall with CMMI or whatever. How do you deal with, this, unforgiving punishment of constantly like fads are in, fads are out. Not that they're effective over time. It's just that's the way the career field is suddenly, the skill's really in demand. A great example early in my career. A networking administrator was a prestigious position. Yep. those folks got paid a good deal of money and did very important jobs about maintaining the networks and server racks and all that And then three, four years later, suddenly, somebody sold a bunch of executives on oh no, you're gonna be left behind if you don't go to the cloud. Which sounds a lot like you're left behind. That's a good example. Absolutely. You don't be left behind if you don't get AI in everything. This baby can fit so much AI in it. and then suddenly that whole profession went away. It didn't really go away, but that whole profession went away. And that's not gonna change. I don't think that's gonna change. I think that's just gonna keep going, if you look back 20 years, you can see plenty of examples of how fads have come. Fads have gone, new fads have come, they've gone., If you're in this space starting out specifically, you don't know. You don't have that benefit of, , hindsight, right? Yeah. Knowing that this too shall pass. So what do you do? Stay nimble on your feet. Learn the next thing. And as we always say here, keep that resume updated because you don't know the environment you are getting into. You don't really get that at the interview or interviews. You get a dressed up version of that, right? So once you're steeped into that culture, you realize, oh goodness, i'm seeing a lot of friction here towards my own personal growth. Yeah, that's true. And yeah, I mean, this is why flip side of this is, now we talked about this before other podcasts, but a lot of the young people tend to flip jobs frequently, right?. A year or two and they're moved on. In the past we used to say, well, that's not good. Where's their loyalty? But now we've come around to saying, is it really their fault? what would you do if you were in their shoes? I'd probably do the same thing because you get bored quickly. you get that ceiling and then go someplace else. I think the younger folks are quicker at vetting out that ceiling, that, like that glass ceiling does exist, and then feeling around to find out exactly where it is. Then quickly coming to the realization that oh, there's where the glass ceiling is. Cool. I'm out. I'm out, , other than having this illusion that the company's gonna bend over backwards for you, the reality is I've seen employees that work at one place for a long time. Just get washed out thoughtlessly. sell on a spreadsheet, get washed out, and then the position gets posted for more money. six months later when the company, when somebody at the company's under pressure realize they make a mistake, they've reposted a position for more money with less job responsibilities , they're completely thoughtless as to how they've affected that person who's dedicated so much time. I hear something like this and I'm like, , the organization's putting pressure on me., Some of that is true, but some of that, just treat it like professional wrestling, like it's kayfabe, but pressure. It's like just, , tell'em no, and then what are they gonna say? Right? They're gonna be like, oh, that's too many times you said no to me. You're outta here kid. Pack your bag. Exactly. Do you really wanna work in that place if that's what they're gonna keep doing and not change? That right there is the one that I start arguments with at networking events where I'm like, well, you shouldn't work for those people'cause they're bad people. And then they say, well, Brian, you gotta live in the real world. That is the real world. Walking away from people that are bad for you. that's what you do when you're an adult. Exactly. And I think some of these young people realize that, but very few. A lot of 'em complain though, right? hopefully it's a skill that we can help with. if you have your resume updated at all times, it does help you to be like, I don't have to deal with this. It helps you be nimble. Flip the table far too few devs take the time to think about this because the answer kind of sucks in both ways. Either you're not essential, which means they can let go of you at any time and be fine and that. It's a harsh reality to face, or you are essential. And now you're kind of trapped forever because if you stop everything that you've ever worked on, all the people you hired fail underneath and it sucks. So it's a hard question to ask, and I think that's why most devs don't bother. It's not easy to accept either that you're not essential to the company or that you are essential, and now you're stuck maintaining all of these things, possibly indefinitely. If you are one of these new people and you feel all of this, but you kind of just grin and bear it and you last a while and then you go, okay, I'm here now. I'm no longer new, yeah. Two years under my belt, whatever it is. And then you maintain that environment going forward, you're now complicit in perpetuating that culture., And a lot of people do this. I'm surprised at how many people do that and just don't have the guts to say, , this is wrong. I'm gonna stand up and say something. Listen, I firmly believe that. I thought you were gonna come at this from the angle of the older people that are there , they can't change. They're just like the wallpaper now. Changing them out would be the way they feel is like, they feel that much like the wallpaper changing 'em out requires like, chemicals heat and steam that you don't even know where to get. they think it's difficult to dislodge them, but in actuality, the company will just rip the whole wall down and they don't care. That's a reality of working in tech is because some of the older people though and maybe it's more than, , two years under their belt, but they, they get into this false sense of security that they are there. They've been there a while. And therefore they are quote unquote safe. But you're right. Organizations will change that situation in a heartbeat. the other thing he mentioned, is that really what you want? you want to be like, oh, I'm gonna work at this company. But it's like, you think you have some level of seniority.'cause you have all these systems that are dependent on you But from the product management perspective, I don't want my team members like balling chained to this system that they have to babysit 24 7 or, what I mean? They have to watch this system and these old legacy things in addition to the new work they're doing , when DevOps first became a thing on the scene, it wasn't about just good CICD practices and good development practices. it was Hey, you don't need all these system administrators and people that run your computers, let development just run everything. We'll save you money. that's what it was about. wasn't pitched very well. when DevOps first started gaining a wider market share, the initial pitch wasn't very good because that's how it sounded to everyone else in the business. we will just pile all this stuff on developers. that was under the guise of, , you build it, you ship it, you run it. But I agree with you. Which I do believe in. it, that was not great marketing of like, no, it was, we'll just let development do everything. We don't need all these experts anymore. you don't need DBAs and network administrators and people to understand switching. We'll, just let development do it and give you great tools in the cloud It was never true. It was part of the whole selling thing for the cloud Right. You don't need to hire these expensive DBAs and network admins Just pay a small fee to your cloud solution provider.. And behind the scenes is a bunch of people outta school or out of India or whatever, just figuring things out on the fly. Terrible Amazon walkout technology. All right, let's, let's keep going. Let's assume you've figured this out now and you've realized like, oh, I'm pretty essential here. It would be really hard for them to operate without me. This is the experience I had.. I hopped teams a lot when I was at Twitch my first year, the name of my team and the people I worked with changed three times roughly. There was even a window there where I switched my office twice in two weeks. Yes. Actually I switched. My desk was four times in three weeks, and I switched the actual office. I was in twice in two weeks. It was an insane pile of reorgs and people being hopped around and moved. I got shuffled to working on the video on demand platform, which is how people watch things on Twitch when they're done being streamed. Turns out nobody does that, which is why the week after I joined the team, it got cut in half and I had to go find a role somewhere else. I had friends in the safety org, so I decided to chat with them. It went really well and they pulled me in and I am so thankful they did. I would almost certainly not be here on YouTube today if it wasn't for the incredible, exciting and just supportive experience I had. When I switched to that team, I was on that team for three years because of how much they helped me be better. The first crazy thing that happened when I joined the team was my manager within less than a month, and I think it was our second or third one-on-one just immediately brought up, you're under leveled. You're not being paid the right amount for the work you're doing, and your role does not represent the quality and reliability of the things that you're putting out. I've never done a promotion before, but I'm gonna figure it out because you're getting screwed right now. And that was such a shift for me to have a manager batting for me and fighting for me I started my career and then I started working at Twitch and it was great. But then I moved around and it was kind of chaotic and then everything came into focus and it was world changing when I actually got a good manager like that. I feel the Underhood story here is the stark worldview between the way things are normally done and the way business is normally done. And then, I actually got a manager who actually was like helpful. Scared about me and actually like, took an interest in my professional development in addition to the normal KPIs and metrics, yeah. So it's not hard to be a competent leader when you're in a leadership position. You just have to actually care. basically rolled a triple seven on the 1:00 AM bandit machine. Right. It it's not that common unfortunately.'cause managers manage, they don't necessarily have your best interest at heart. They just don't. Did you just say traditional middle managers are not incentivized to actually put your best interests. That's right. Not to lead or actually have empathy. Exactly. if they can find a robot in your place, they would do that because they don't complain as much. Sally Silicon Valley's not working on empathy robots. That's not what they're working on. They're not upgraded to the empathy chip just yet. Well, why wait for a manager to do that? Because what if that doesn't happen, which is the reality sadly, for a lot of people. It doesn't happen. You just basically put up with the situation you're in. Or you leave. Organizations lose good people that way. I hear what you just said I want to push back against it to say I think you will be way more successful in. Basically what you're saying is I want to advocate for my own sponsorship of like, Hey, I should move to this position, or I should get more money, or, the work that I'm doing is at a level of excellence beyond the job role that I'm working in. I think, I should get a promotion. true you should be advocating for yourself. However, between two people advocating for themselves the person who also has sponsorship in the organization, some kind of leader sponsoring on their behalf and lobbying on their behalf I think that the, the person with support from the management slash leadership will get promoted over the person who's just on their own doing it. I think that, the company. Abdicating the role of having someone to support you is part of why he was like, oh, I was so shocked that I got this manager. in previous roles in his career , he was only advocating for himself. Potentially unsuccessfully. how many tools do you have to do this when you're early in your career? when he had a manager that helped him it was like night and day. he described a lot of people's in tech, a lot of people's experience. Right there. You are absolutely correct. If you, you're in that phase of your career. You young Yeah. Coming into a field. It doesn't have to be tech, it could be any field. The point I'm trying to make here is seek out your personal coach. Seek out your mentor. But you're absolutely correct. It's those people that have sponsorship that succeed. Seek out those opportunities. Go to the socials with your leadership team. go play golf if you can with them. Seek out new life. Recognizing these things and forcing me to reflect and recognize myself. where am I at, what level am I? I owe that manager so much, I'm so lucky. My first few managers when I worked at Twitch were incredible They set me up for so much success. it's heartbreaking to see people who don't have that level of quality in their leadership because you have to DIY, the things that I was just given when I was given that promotion. I was given the opportunity to reflect on how important I was to the workplace and be more realistic. But what I could and couldn't do, it gave, but, you, you hear the, like, the language of like, this, this is why I wanna do the Who Moved My Cheese book.'cause like there there's a language that it's been like, it's been like it's in the culture Like it's interwoven with the business culture so much that people just talk like this of like, oh, I was given this promotion. I think you ticked all the boxes and did all the work and were like heading shoulders over everyone else and you just were lucky enough. you get caught in the, like the cog in the machine turning that day. Because again, the system is a system, right? So like there's plenty of people that, weren't in the right place when the cog was turning to get noticed. They worked for a year or two, got frustrated and then left, , it's not you were given anything. You definitely earned it. It's just the system happened to be firing on all cylinders that day and you got recognized. There's a modicum of luck there too, but yes, I agree. Absolutely.. It shouldn't be that way. the system should be better. You shouldn't have to have luck on your side to do this, but, hey people will yell at me and throw fruit to be like, well that's the real world, Brian. Okay. Cool story bro. Gave me the confidence to suggest big changes to how we were building tools and introduce new libraries and solutions to problems. It gave me the buy-in. I needed to take these steps further challenge people on the way they were doing things request more money when I got a raise and push to get a hire that we might not have gotten otherwise.'cause I thought this person was great. All of this happened because I realized I have some leverage here. I know what I'm doing, and this team is built around the speed and the way. I built. Once I had that realization, things got both a lot easier, but also a lot busier. I didn't have the fear that I was overstepping. I just had more questions and looked for more opportunities. I was hopping into meetings with teams that certainly were not mine, and constantly getting questions from people asking why was I talking to them? And then I would tell 'em, be like, oh, that actually helps us a ton, and my environment and my team was really supportive of this. They were hyped seeing me helping out other teams. We started to strategize around this when other teams would block things that safety thought was important, we would do swaps where they would send me to that team for a little bit. They would send an engineer over to ours. We knew that engineer wasn't gonna get anything done on our team, but I would unblock their roadmap so they could add the safety features that we cared about. The result was awesome. You see this is a team conversation it's from his personal development story, a team coach inspecting from the outside, of course, like, I need more people like that because the glue that binds the teams together, the communication channels the individuals and interactions.. If you can map them out, you need more people crossing teams to be that glue. Maybe the organization's planning is not mature. Maybe product management is not mature. Maybe the development leads who I would normally think would be doing that kind of stuff. Like maybe they're not, advanced or maybe they're overburdened or maybe they Right. They don't have enough engineers who there's a million maybes. Yeah. But like under hood Your brain is probably firing on a thousand questions that you would get into that environment and start asking. Exactly. In situations like this though, I feel like he's. More of an exception. a lot of people are heads down doing what they do They're not thinking about how you can have swaps and things like that. I'm thinking about teams specifically that are doing production support work. You know, that's all they do. if I was a developer, I wouldn't be excited day in, day out, coming to work knowing all I've gotta do is fix bugs under deadline. whereas my colleagues in another team are doing net new development. With new tools and new technologies. swaps and things like that are some of the techniques by which you can do this, rotations are another option, I agree with you. This is definitely a team discussion. All that is true, but also like, I'm looking at it with my product management lens Where are your product managers, why are they letting teams be like, got the ball and chain to one system where they can't move product managers should be like constantly pushing and be like, I want get my team in front of the new tech. You know, I want, I want to sunset these old systems and like replace'em with new systems. And like, that's what tech is all about, six months after we're done. It's all, ancient history. Let's move on to the next thing we're building new pyramids on. Yeah. You're assuming product managers actually care about the builders of the pyramid. I heard a great product management slight the other day. They called doc, meaning document jockey. They're like product managers, doc jockeys. All they do is ride that document to success in their next promotion. they make the most finely tuned, honed and crafted. Product document Perfect. That's all they do. Unless you're at some of these other orgs where all you're doing is backlog management. Are those polar offices? I don't know. they kind of feel on the same side of the spectrum. That's what we need to explore the many sides of product management doc Jockey needs to be on that list. that'd be a fun podcast. All right. Let's go back with him. I never took him off the screen twitch was safer as a result and I was happy getting to have my hand in so many different things. But in terms of my role and level and salary, things had plateaued. A lot of this was because I had a huge stock grant that was worth a lot more 'cause Amazon blew up so I wouldn't get promotions and raises because that would counteract twich. It was a whole mess of how I was being paid. But I also felt like I was running outta things to do on that team, so I swapped teams. That Team Swap showed me so much. I've called it the biggest mistake of my career, but in retrospect, so much of what I am today happened from what I learned when I did that team swap, I left safety to work in the creator org because I loved Twitch creators and I wanted to help them do better content by having better tools. I wanted to get the, when I stopped the video before you went in this direction. Yeah. Where you're like, what happens when you move to another? He's gonna get into it. I was smirking.'cause I knew the next part of the video goes immediately into that. This was me in my career as well, I switched into product management because I saw some things and I was like, we could have better tools for this. rather than join those teams as a developer or QA engineer I switched to be a product manager. Now I was connected to making my case to the business, For budgets people's time and roadmap space which is, I feel the story he's about to tell would've been completely different had he jumped from development to product management. That's where our story diverged, Lemme play the rest of it. Creator tools to a similar quality level that the moderators had with new things like mod view. I failed, but I learned a lot from this failure I saw how important I was to the safety team because when I left, they were heartbroken since I was technically still not a senior role. When I left that team, the seat that was left when I quit and moved was a mid-level engineering seat. You can't just hire another random mid-level engineer and get your team back to where it was. Even if it looks the same on the table, it's not the same in terms of the speed that you're shipping. This showed me a ton of different things. First my. Value is greater than any one or two, or even three normal level engineers. Not because I'm a way better engineer than them, simply'cause I can ship faster and solve problems in a simpler, more reasonable way for a lot of things, so I'm stop here 'cause I think that's a bad takeaway. I think the way he framed that was a bad takeaway. he said, he's emphasizing speed. I'm more valuable than any. So I'm in a standard level individual contributor role. Not senior, not staff engineer or whatever. but I can work with the coordination of the staff engineers or the principals with the creativity and future vision of the principal engineers And I basically, there are no walls, there are no silos containing me. I can look across the other roadmaps and help other teams when I want and stuff like that. And you can't just go hire someone off the street who now has horizontal experience. You're gonna ask them to work in the vertical. right. And, you want that T-shaped experience now. You also want domain expertise that you have, right? With someone fresh in is not gonna have necessarily There'll be a ramp up when it comes to domain, not technical skills necessarily, I feel it's a bad take because he is like, well, these other people can't build as fast as me and they can't solve the problems I can solve with the scope of vision, Yeah. Where he sees , the systemic issues with the problems that he's solving. I think it's a bad take. I'm, struggling to express why it's a bad take. he's emphasizing the speed at which he's solving, but that is not what I heard from his story. What I heard from the story is you went the extra mile to understand the pain points across different teams, across a wider view of the organization than any one team's gonna see. Right? Because you're that kind of person. Now you can solve problems that impact other teams, you're reducing pain from more than just one set of customers. Right, you're no longer the individual contributor who's just shipping anything faster. Right, right. I agree. It's a slightly nuanced take on that perspective. Also, you have more experience than somebody coming in. So in a way you could say, well, you're expected to be more effective. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Not necessarily efficient. As the enterprise coach, finding the magic formula that lets an engineer work, in spite of the system that keeps them, like, oh, just stay at your desk and do what you're told and make sure you have whatever, 85% of utilization or whatever nonsense, you found a way to. Knock that stuff out check all the check boxes that are expected of you and then go to this next level of success. there should be people in your organization looking at the conditions of why you are so successful, then trying to replicate that to the rest of the team members. Take those successes and drag and drop them into other teams. Who in the organization is working to bring the tide up, to lift all the boats at the same time, yeah. and if the answer is like, well, there's no one, we all operate in little fiefdoms with middle managers and they fight amongst each other, that is unfortunately the answer. But also there are other answers like, well we are in matrix environment, right? Yeah. So it's like, well, if I've just moved motions over here, no one's gonna get impacted over there because they work differently. Who's looking after this side of the, story in an organization? It's not your PMO. They're after standardizing processes across the board. they're gonna give anybody coming in a playbook, this is how we do things around here. Go follow this. Right. Unfortunately That's antithetical to what he's trying to do. Or has been trying to do. Alright, let's put him back on screen and hear the rest of this grant when it came to building really complex systems that could be maintained for years. But when it came to making things much simpler and not adding complexity where it didn't belong, I was really good at that part. And when you're rebuilding the entire Twitch website from scratch, what we were doing at the time, I just wanna call out the building really complex systems that were cross teams, me really simplifying existing processes. They're easy to maintain and easy to scale. 0.2 sides of the coin. They're the same. Yeah. I ended up being a pretty useful skill that got me a lot of leverage, but because of that, my team couldn't just replace me and be back at the same speed. I had to face that fact. I had to watch the team struggle and shuffle around trying to figure out what the future of safety looked like at Twitch. After I left, a lot of the other people who had been on that team for a while started to as well. They're in a good state now. There's a lot of people there that I genuinely care so much about and owe a lot of my success to. But I made things a lot harder for them when I left and that sucks to face. But then I was in a new org that had their own opinions. And the difference with this new org is that they weren't excited and supportive of a person who was there that could ship fast and had a bunch of leverage. They felt threatened by it. I was showing up and taking tickets that they'd been delaying for months, saying, oh, this will take way too much work, and I would just grab it and do it in two hours, and they hated me for it. This is exactly where you were leading when you started early. Yeah, exactly. This, I mean, you, you're upsetting their status quo. Hard to hear you come in and change things. Right? Right. I've seen this on the product management side new product person comes in, looks at a backlog that's so deep that items on it go back years. then they start to question, is this stuff important? And everybody goes, yeah, that's why it's on the backlog. let's just keep it there. delete everything that's older than six months. No, you take their binky away. these people are really upset at anybody coming in and changing things radically, a smart person would come in and start chipping away at it. Instead of quickly just chip away at it and say, well, what about this? And then a week later, what about this? Slowly get to it, right? Mm-hmm. And you'll find if you do that, some of the people that are frustrated with what you're removing, the friction that's already there, they've been frustrated for a while, but they haven't had the guts to speak up. Now you start to build alliances with them, Right. So they become your allies. now you get the strength in numbers thing going. But you can't rush it it. doesn't work. Not if you want it to last or, or not. If you don't wanna be undermined six months from now by,, the slow drip that cuts holes in rocks They were doing everything they could to try and poke holes in everything I was doing. I had a meeting with my manager because he was upset that I was meeting with people higher up than him every week. He would constantly check my calendar to see who I was talking to and where I was. Saw the people I was talking to at the company and the meetings I was being involved in. Got mad at me for it. I had never in my life had someone upset with me for the things on my calendar. the insecurity and fear I felt from that moment was horrifying. I immediately privated my calendar and started interviewing at other places 'cause I was so offended by that dude. The level of paranoia and insecurity in that story what it would induce in you, the employee to be like, I can't believe. I found myself working for such petty people. Right? The grass is definitely greener on the other side., You lose good people as a result and this is the kind of thing that precipitates,, gorilla Agile, right? As I call it. put that leadership meeting on your calendar and invite your manager at the last minute, Forward that on to him. they're double, triple booked. Sorry, I invited you. There's so many little, tactics you can play, but the easiest of aay is update your resume if you don't like the pain. Wild. Yeah. Crazy. Why old you go golfing with the CEO, you don't have to deal with these problems. Exactly. Like, hey, my boss is a problem. And then they just wash out your boss. Yeah, it got worse. Like way worse. I ended up rebuilding the mobile app from scratch during a hackathon 'cause I was so tired of mobile team blocking stuff. We won the hackathon, we built the best Twitch app that's ever been made. my reward was two trophies and an HR warning.'cause the mobile team was so mad. the HR warning wasn't because of the mobile team. It was because the mobile team went to my higher ups about how upset they were. the higher ups in my org, who already were insecure just for me being there, threw me under the bus and made HR come to clean up the mess. Absolute disaster. And all of that happened for two reasons. First, because I was building faster and better than the people around me. And in some environments they take the opportunity to do better. But in this particular team, in this particular environment, they took the opportunity to drag me down. And the other thing, and this one is much more on me, I was nowhere near strategic enough. About how I was better than my coworkers and how I shipped more effectively. There was opportunities that I just didn't take 'cause I didn't see them or think about them. It was a waste of my, my energy to spend time figuring out which of these tickets can be placed out and run in a specific way that keep from pissing people off. I ended up having to rely on other engineers that I still call friends to this day, to coach me through that part, and we got to the point where I would make the whole thing in a day, send it to him, and let him slowly roll it out with me so the team could accept the timelines that these things were moving at. At the same time, I was looking for new opportunities. Things are turning bad in the culture right now. That's yeah. For basically what's happening. For sure. He is deploying some of those tactics that I referenced earlier. Ship it to somebody else's. It's introducing a dam, basically, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah. There, there's a ton of those, but you shouldn't have to resort to them. In an ideal world, unfortunately, we don't live in an ideal world. Right? Right. Yeah. some of this could have been resolved by, splitting the team. more cautious. Team members move over here. More ambitious team members move over here. One product manager can manage both. it's the same number of people management. Really shouldn't have any say in what's going on. If you're just, well, I am gonna take the more cautious folks, they're gonna move over here. They move a little slower, they do pretty good work. You know what I mean? Yeah. But causing a little friction. I got these folks that like to work across things. They like to work fast. They're a little chaotic, but they're still within the rules and whatever, and you're just understanding the personalities and basically separating the personalities. The work is still getting done. So I feel some of this is like,, where's your management in this? we're assuming in that discussion that he actually has the authority, to make these changes. If he's an individual contributor, though, he may not let me put him back here. I convinced myself that I could just sit and be patient though, and this is the advice I was trying to give to go back to the message here, the thing I want to say, and the thing that you should do if you're capable is stop doing work that isn't going to benefit your role at the company. And this drove me mad and I outright failed at this. If there was an opportunity to make something better, like this dashboard I'm in right now, the Twitch Creator dashboard, if I had a way to make this better for our creators, but it didn't immediately benefit me career-wise or my positioning on my team, it wasn't worth doing. if I saw a coworker product manager or lead proposing something that I knew would make the dashboard worse, speaking up is hurting my position at the company in order to make the product less bad for creators. And that sucked that I felt like I was between. My own role and what creators actually needed. the fact that my org made those two things antagonistic towards each other, especially in contrast to my experience in safety, where making safety operations more efficient or making moderators happier immediately resulted in me having more leverage and more support helping creators hurt me on this team. The solution here was really simple. I just needed to shut up and I couldn't do it. I, so again this is, this is, I dunno how I'm gonna edit this. Oh my God. Oh my Had to, had to just bite your tongue and be quiet. Just, just go along with it. Oh, just go along with it. Just be quiet , I don't feel That's good advice either, this is the reason I got into product management. I'm like, this petty nonsense. nobody benefits from this. The customer doesn't benefit the bottom line doesn't benefit from this. All the finance folks that drive most of these companies. they don't benefit from this. we're not making money off these things. Product management can fix a lot of this stuff. My pivot was intentional in my career. I can solve these things. he cared enough to do that. he cares enough to say he was frustrated, he should have shut up. But he cares enough to even share that. Right. a lot of people will simply just grin and bear it. It's like it is what it is. This company moves. Right. Well this is what we said earlier in the podcast congratulations. Now you're part of the carpet or the wallpaper.. Why are you staying quiet? Like the company has five people?'cause it's like every little decision you make like this that makes your product suck. It's visible. it's closer to putting you out of business. Exactly. your inaction, Your silence is visible in a small company. in a medium-sized company, no. As long as you're not making waves. There's no ripples. Everyone's okay with that. that's a shame because you are just being jaded year in, year out. You're not really tapping into your potential. You're not challenged at your work. These are the people that either just stay there and retire in the same position.'cause they don't get promoted. Or these are the people that say, , this company's really not long term for me. I'm just gonna Right. And sometimes I've seen people take a lower paid position to jump ship. Yeah. Because they're so frustrated with this. And I mean, the other thing that I've seen people do is quit without a job lined up because they're frustrated about this. I have seen that too. those are bold people right there. Yeah. Alright . We're getting to the best part. Still to this day, remember the meeting where this happened? There was a proposal to change how the dashboard layout works. The proposal was that we would start syncing it on the cloud. So if you had three different computers in an iPad, all with your custom dashboard layout that would now be synced across them. There's a problem though, this setup is all percentage based. So what looks good on this screen will not look good on my vertical monitor. This just went from usable to barely readable, and if I make it even narrower, that is entirely unusable. if you have different aspect ratios for your monitors or devices that you're using, syncing the layout is a regression. It makes the product worse, not better because I customize my layout for my different devices. They're fine. They never need to change. Why make the product worse for no reason? we just got a new product manager on the team and she insisted that this one random ticket on user voice with five up votes was the thing we needed to do, was gonna take five plus engineers, seven plus months My head nearly exploded. I sat down with this pm we had a 30 minute meeting. It went for two and a half hours and it seemed like she understood when I explained how it would hurt the product. She listened, asked good questions and I was hopeful that this mistake wouldn't happen. There was something I didn't account for though it was the end of December. So we had this conversation. We took a break for two to three weeks and then came back for the kickoff meeting for this huge new ship. I figured a lot must have changed because we had this long conversation about how bad this product change would be, where I would have the kickoff meeting for it, and I wasn't even on the original invite. I got added last minute and I'm thankful to whoever thought to add me Someone tried to report me for sexism because of how pissed I was. I went into this meeting with the goal of sitting back and being quiet because I already gave my feedback. We already had this conversation. This is done now. And the proposal had not changed at all. It was the exact same PDF that I had read a month before and shocking. Oh, oh A PDF. Shocking. Om, shocking. Oh yeah. A, a product manager who's riding that document to success. I bet they got wild promotions. Oh, I'm sure they did. Oh my God, crisp, nice document. What a savvy, pm she is. You know, it's a PDF. I can't change it. Anyway, next be two and a half hours. That's right. But that's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right. Yeah. I feel for him, first of all, listen, I also feel for him, but also like if you're in a culture where you have product managers that, write the crisp documents 'cause they watch that one video with Jeffrey Bezos. Like that's great. If you're a product manager and you're not willing to change your mind, you're a terrible product manager, you're not willing to gather evidence or deploy your team to say, oh look, okay, smart guys, you say this is not a great thing to do. Go get me some evidence. Go look through some logs, pull some aggregate statistics and , put your money where your mouth is and the team should have no problem saying, challenge accepted. They should, they should say that because they, because they will bring you. Like good and the bad. Be like, I wanna see some cases that support what I'm saying and cases against what I'm saying I don't bring me one side of the argument. if you're gonna present this back to me, bring me both sides. And if there's, very few things to support it, then that's great. Like compile it all one place. We'll talk about it. And if you're not, if you're not willing to change your mind, then you're not willing to have that conversation with your development team or any team. Bringing your product manager. I would say you're not a very good product manager at that point. You might be a project manager, or a Microsoft executive who found their way into the role of product manager. You might also be an account manager where that account has told you to build this feature. That's right. Yeah. But boy, you can get that promotion. Exactly and my question to the PM was, what happened to the two and a half hour conversation we had less than a month ago? To which she replied? Oh yeah. I'm sorry, I kind of forgot about that. We actually decided that we didn't have enough data to prove your theory, So we're just gonna go through with this seven month proposal instead. And I bet they didn't have enough data to prove that either., This is why, like little pm trick I do. So if I expect the test to come back the way I want it to, then I will write the story as a negative test. Negative hypothesis. Yeah. I always write whatever the test is against, whatever, I expect it to come back. So you don't have bias that way? I try to, because like, I, the, the, the issue is like, I actually talk to customers. run surveys, stuff like that. My product sense is at the point where I can basically spot, I'm like that music producer that hears a song and I'm like, that's gonna be a hit. That's gonna be a hit. Yeah. That's garbage. That's no good. Like I, I may not be able to tell you why I think something is great. But I can sense it's that instinct. Hit Yes. So that we, like, I call that product sense. A lot of people don't have product sense. a lot of product managers I've met do not have product sense. I think that's one of those things that you only get by just doing it over and over. There's no substitute for that. They don't teach you that in school, the person that he's working with as a product manager the conditions of her continued employment as a product manager obviously are not the success of her product bets. Yeah, it's probably something along the lines of how much management likes you and how much the people love the way you talk, that you can stand in front of an audience and be like, let me tell you a story about going on a hike I genuinely thought I could just sit and be quiet in this meeting. that was my goal going in and I outright failed. considering how pissed I was, I actually think I was relatively calm, but holy shit, that was the moment that my career at Twitch ended. Not because, and funny enough, I didn't actually get in trouble for any of those things. My manager, as much as he was not great, he knew me well enough to stand up for me in that, and also was a streamer, so he knew I was entirely right. I had also, at the same time, started and was running a data experiment that tracked the aspect ratios of different displays and of users that use more than one device. 5% had the same aspect ratio on both devices. So I was like literally entirely correct here. Like I, I couldn't be proven more correct than all the numbers I ran and stats I did and interviews with users. I was right. It is what it is. There you go. The dude's data-driven, bringing evidence. But again, this is a sign of a bad culture What he did was seen as a challenge. It was seen as like a sour grapes thing , now you're just throwing out numbers to make me look bad.'cause you didn't agree with my thing. That's the way this product manager's pitching it. And since she talks to management and he doesn't, she's the one who has to be proven incorrect, and he doesn't even have a shot at it. Yeah. they're not even gonna hear him. Right. Even though his manager's on his side, , I've also worked for some managers that are, quote on my side until they step behind closed doors and have to put some of their political capital on the line. Then they back down and be like, management wants this and blah, blah, blah, It's not me. Yeah, I feel for him even more now. The frustration here is that I couldn't just let them do the wrong thing. If I actually cared about my position at Twitch and I really wanted to get the highest salary, the highest role and be in the best place possible, I would've shut up and done the same thing that my coworker did when he built buttons that click themselves. That's a whole separate rant for another day. I will give you a quick TLDR 'cause otherwise I'll trigger myself. See these buttons here? Quick actions. The on click for these buttons doesn't trigger the action for the button. The on click triggers a state change to the active state for the button, and the active state for the button has a use effect in it that runs the action. Yes. Already terrible. Yes, but it gets worse. Ludicrous. The state of these gets perceived in the layout, which means if the buttons an action state and you trigger something like a resize that caused the light to save, and you refresh the page, every time you load the dashboard, you'll trigger that action. This caused ads to run automatically in the middle of the League of Legends World Championship in the middle of the PS five reveal. And the engineer who built that got two promotions during my time on that team because he wrote a really fancy looking PDF, it shipped.'cause I wasn't on the team when it happened. And the best part was I wasn't on call when that bug happened. The ads team reported it to this team. They denied that it had anything to do with them because look, there's an on click event that proves the user. Click the button. And then I, not even on call at the moment, looked at the logs and saw the page load event happened four milliseconds before the on click. There is no user in the world that can click a button within four milliseconds of it appearing on the page. It was triggering itself. I can't even, like the mental gymnastics I have like, I actually know React and if I saw that now, I would have no problem believing it was real because of vibe coding and stuff like that. I think of something like hand coding, I can't even conceptualize. That's crazy. Anyways, the reason I'm bringing all of this up. Is because I went from being a great engineer on a good engineering team to being the best engineer on a team. Being the best engineer on a good team is great because you surrounded people who want to do better, who want to push themselves and want to like excel and improve themselves. And if you don't have people around you that are at least trying to keep up, you're screwed. And you need to get out of that situation. If you ought move forward and no one else wants to move at all, you're never going to be happy. And it sucks that that's reality. Unfortunately he is. Right. And the only remedy seems to be that resume updated. Oh, well, well, we're, we're not ready to end the podcast yet. No, no. But we'll repeat that message at the end. what else are some silver linings here? The first one is what happens when you find those people? You will find some at your current job. There is no company with more than five people that doesn't have at least one that's a bit motivated. I've basically collected these people like Pokemon throughout my career To this day, I have so many random people from when I was in university, , when I was in high school, people I worked with on random teams people I collaborated with for one feature on a product that are still people I talk to, to this day that I consider good friends. Some of them mentored me, some of them I mentored. Some of them are the reason I learned React in the first place. And then the people who taught me React at Twitch showed up at React Cough. I was so hyped to see them. And then Dan Abramoff came in to say, check in on me and see how I was doing. And they were like, wait, what? These moments are not rare. You will find so many of them throughout your career, but only if you do this one important thing. You need to find these people. If you're motivated enough to be however many minutes we're into this video, too many, I, I don't even wanna think about it. If you're sticking around these types of videos for this long, you're watching my stuff, you're progressing as an engineer and you, , the feeling I'm talking about. You have exceeded and excelled past, not just where the people around you are, but where they want to go. If you want it more than they do, or you want it and they don't, you're screwed. But the people who want it make themselves known very quickly when given the opportunity, and I have been one to misjudge this. I've had people that I was sure didn't want to really progress in their careers. They were happy with where they were, but as soon as I gave them a little more buy-in or just said, wow, that was a really good solution to that problem, all of a sudden they cared a lot more. And some of these people are some of my best friends now. Again, this is a teams discussion. this is something I need to discuss with you because what he's describing basically is leadership. Yeah. I agree. And this is what I was saying earlier when I said, , you're gonna have good people there like he said, you're gonna find them and then you build alliances with them. Right. And to this point, Some of these people can be your colleagues, your mentors, mentees for a long, long time for life even. Right. So it's not like every job, you're gonna pick up a few people like that. Right. it's not linear or anything like that, but who these people are That you can turn to. Right. And yeah, I mean, they're like. They Like um, gold dust, you know,, hang on to these people. They will help you. I thought you meant gold dust, a wrestler. Oh no. The slightest nudge and they ran so far with it. And there's a bunch of these people in my chat right now. Here's one from earlier from Void. Crazy. How much I've grown is a dev in just five months. Watched all your YouTube videos and your Twitch Pass podcast stuff. I'm surprised at myself how well I code now and what I find more valuable. Reading others code and understanding it. This message is not about me. I happened to provide an environment where someone like void could grow and do better, but I'm not the one. Who made them better. I am just a tool they used in their process to get there. That is all their hard work. I'm just a person creating these resources. But what's really cool here is now I know VO isn't just an okay dev or a good dev. He's probably already a great dev. And if he's not, he's going to be very soon because he is motivated to improve and change. a lot of people in his position weren't in that position until someone around them pushed them to try a little harder or rewarded them for something they didn't think that much about. Once you get addicted to that feeling, once you feel what it is to progress and have more confidence and ownership over the things you're doing, you either don't care or you get addicted. The people who get addicted are very visibly addicted. That's what I am and if you're that type, I don't know if you can properly assimilate into people who aren't. I, and this is again the thing I said at the beginning, don't take my words as gospel here. I did this wrong. I am very fortunate that I found this YouTube career that now pays way better than my job at Twitch Did. It took a while to get there, but most don't. I very well could have destroyed my career by not just shutting up and letting things go. I would probably be a principal engineer at Amazon or Twitch now making a lot of money if I could just shut up and smile through things that were stupid and just ship the thing I was told to. But I wasn't capable and the people around me also weren't and just cared more are still people I am close with to this day. And I value them all immensely. They're the reason I was able to have the successful career I had because they would defend me. They would understand me, they would coach me when I was being stupid or aggressive, or my autism was causing me to spazz out on things that didn't matter. they supported me , when it hurt, and when it sucked. those allies, those friendships, those people you can trust matter more than any title or role or technology or feature that you ship. Find those people. And if you can't find anywhere you are now. Find somewhere that you can, because if they don't exist where you are, that's the truth. They don't exist where you are and only one of two things can happen. Either they make you no longer one of those people, or you find somewhere better. I don't know which one's right for you, but I hope this video helps you figure it out for yourself. Well, he pretty well at the end there, I thought. You really only have two choices, right? You shut up and just put up with everything or do something, but regardless of which way you go. You still really need to seek out those supporters, right? The people that will help you, people that will, , really have your back, right? It doesn't matter if you wanna just say, look, this is terrible. I'm just gonna go. You could go, you have that choice. Everyone has that choice. But if you go with those relationships, that's a lot better than simply,, oh, this company sucks. Go someplace else, and what are you gonna have? Yeah, probably you're gonna have and repeat experience with that attitude too, right? I feel for him, first of all but a lot of people listening to this and watching this can relate to this.'cause I'm sure each of us have been in this situation. thanks for sticking around and listening to this leadership vacuum love story that we just listened to, because I think that's what it was like. Yes, indeed. Like there's a lot going wrong in here that I want to talk about, but this video has been long enough, so we're gonna cut it off here and we'll see you next time. All right, well, I can subscribe down below here and let's know what your thoughts are on this.