If you're struggling to grow (or just survive) in your tech career - I've been there. I started out in QA and was promoted to a software architect way too early at just 23 years old. That's when the political games hit! It was a fight of every developer for himself from there on out...
About 20 years later I suffered from chronic burnout. I lost my job, my savings - and almost my marriage. But it taught me what matters - and who I really am. The IT industry has many problems, and sometimes they can't be fixed. But we can fix ourselves!
Today I offer tech professionals all over the world integrated career and life coaching, and courses to help them succeed without burning out. I can help you improve your mindset and mental health, lean into your strengths, and if it's time - start working for yourself.
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10 years in, I quit. Scrum is a scam, project managers are dead weight, all the free riding is toxic and leads to BS hierarchies and deceitful gaming behavior.
The 2015 book "Thinking, fast and slow" by Daniel Kahneman explains a lot about why people make decisions, come to conclusions, hold certain opinions, etc. and how severely all of this is influenced by loads of biases. It can probably explain all of the things you mentioned and more. The book is based on decades of psychological studies, many of which by Daniel Kahneman himself, who was a Nobel price laureate. Strongly recommended reading :)
To me, it seems like most people think programmers, developers, engineers, techies, etc., can do EVERYTHING in tech. I give them the analogy, "Would you go to your eye doctor for brain surgery?" There are generalists and there are specialists. I don't go to one mechanic for every single problem with my car. I go to the person or place who can fix that specific problem.
What they most want is obedience. Whether what they ask for is likely to lead to maintenance headaches, security breaches, or is plain illegal. It's just typing, you peons. tl;dr Suck up to the PHBs.
Avoid Scrum altogether. Scrum has little to do with agile development and was not created to help programmers, but to help management. Sure, it takes some ideas from agile development, but it bastards them to make agile development more compatible with classic corporate hierarchies and management and it does so by violating plenty of requirements made by the agile manifesto. The idea of Scrum is "How can we give developers a tiny bit of agile development without giving up total management control over every aspect of the software development process". And that's the key reason why Scrum is not really agile: The key idea of agile is that management gives up that control and hands it over to the developers! The key idea is that people who have no idea what it really takes to write good software, and who have never written more than 10 lines of code in their lives, tell expert developers who have been doing this job for 25 years how to do their daily work, because they simply know nothing about it and only make everything worse for the developers, the product, and the customers. If I'm the manager of a restaurant, I have to make sure that we have good food in stock, and I have to make sure that we're operating profitably, and I have to make sure that customers like our menu and our decor, and that our hours of operation meet customer demand, and that we have enough staff. But the one thing I'm certainly not going to do is go into the kitchen and tell the chef, "No, you can't prepare this dish this way, you have to do it this way," when I have zero knowledge of cooking and everything I cook tastes like crap. Yet that's exactly what managers of software companies do on a regular basis. They go to developers and try to tell them how to write code, or how to design components, or what tools to use, or what the development cycle should be, not realizing that they are just talking BS, and half of what they are saying makes no sense, and the other half is bad advice. That's where the agile manifesto comes in. It's just a set of requirements about how things have to change if you want better quality software, if you want it to be delivered on time, if you want it to meet customer needs, and if you want developers to be happy and not work themselves to death just to ship crap. And you cannot compromise on these requirements. If you compromise, you don't achieve the goal of the manifesto. The idea is to let the developers do their own thing and just manage the environment. Trust me, there are still plenty of things to manage, like human resources, hardware resources, customer acquisition, project prioritization, feature prioritization, release management, budget allocation, time management, and so on. All things developers don't care about and don't want to be bothered with. But once the external parameters are set, management should hand over control to the development team, which should now be free to act and organize as it wishes to deliver the best software it can, given the external constraints. And that's exactly what management doesn't want to do. And that's how Scrum came to be, as a way to keep control over the development team and every single developer through close monitoring, daily reports, planning meetings, and so on. Scrum is a very rigid framework that basically controls the entire daily workflow of developers, despite the first requirement of the agile manifesto being: *Individuals and interactions over processes and tools* Scrum is all about processes. Scrum is a collection of processes and it controls the entire workflow! Robert C. Martin, one of the original authors and signers of the agile manifesto, says that Scrum is not agile development. Scrum does not have the goal of making software better, finishing it faster or allowing developers to develop more freely, Scrum has the goal of making it easier for management to conceal management errors or to be able to iron them out more easily and to be able to blame developers for management mistakes. It is designed for the needs of management, not for the needs of software developers. It may be better than a rigid functional requirements specification or a waterfall development process, but it's nowhere near what a modern development process should look like to ensure high-quality products, continuous delivery, agile development, and happy developers.
I’m not a software engineer but a mechanical engineer and I have taken a “yes…and” approach to bringing problems up to management. I don’t tell them “we have this problem” I say, “we have this problem and here’s what I (or someone else on my team) am doing about it.” That proactive way of thinking is a game changer in communication.
You're spot on with so much of this. When my teammate succeeds I give them credit by name. When they've made a mistake I always say 'we' even if I had nothing to do with it. Accountability falls on the team, individuals are rewarded for success.
After being the guy with an ego that moved from small to larger companies......i figured out quick that hours spent working alone means hours spent not learning from the real experts of an industry. If you know everything in your bubble, you arent growing. I also spent too much time in a "jack of all trades" role that allowed me to control everything and feel important, but i lacked mastery of the high-demand specialized skills and it hurt my compensation.
Another video with some bad advice for unsuspecting up and coming developers designed to sell worthless subscriptions to more bad advice. Please stop !! He provides the illusion of some generalized mindsets that developers find themselves in. This is all a bunch of nonsense, and there is no mentoring or training that exists that can help you navigate your situation except your own good judgement, talent and experience. Do not be fooled into giving this guy your money. He isn't going tell you anything useful about when it is ok to think or not think in binary terms. And he is clearly going to tell you to be confident to the point that the plane crashes with the passengers after you've received that promotion or pay raise, sending you straight to jail. He's hawking an MBA in programming for dummies - don't fall for it. He is not going to be able to give you any advice on avoiding anecdotal overconfidence or recency bias, because such advice does not exist. You're the judge of what happens in your workplace, and there is nothing this guy can tell you that will make you a good judge of what happens there. He can however make you a really really bad judge of what happens there, while taking your cash, and making decent guesses on what he thinks you want to hear from him. As for vanity metrics... here's some free advice... no charge whatsoever. They exist to serve agendas - sometimes for companies looking to market their product or service, and sometimes by middle managers trying to justify their positions or seeking promotions or pay hikes, and sometimes by bad developers trying to become managers themselves. Now.... what exactly is this dude going to tell you to help you that might actually make your life better in such organizations ? There is absolutely nothing. It is on you to find the people, usually good devs, who are against such corporate corruption, and fight against it, if it is making your life miserable. He hawked his resume to me when I called him out on the bs he gave on managers not trusting developers, and I'm sure he will use that for that slick marketing for pointless mentorship. Beware of the MBA software engineers - the accreditation is fake, just like their personalities.
Learned this the hard way and it is super crucial, buffer the heck out of you estimates even if you have to fight for those estimated time because the manager will try to bring down that time(everything is an emergency for them). At the end of the day its your reputation(and often your job) on the line.
At the same time, performance reviews are all about what YOU contribute. Being a team player and helping others accomplish their goals? Careful, they may get better reviews and you lag behind just because you did not spend 100% time on your own tasks!
The job of a manager is to manage, hence the name. And manage can have many meanings, but the meaning here is "to achieve". A good manager is the link between a development department and the executive board. His task is to bring the wishes of the executive board to the development team and the needs of the development team to the executive board. He has to explain to the developers what is expected of them, i.e. what software they are to develop, what the fixed requirements are, what the desired scope of features is and what the time and financial framework for the project is. At the same time, however, he has to explain to the executive board what the development team needs for this, e.g. in terms of personnel, hardware or software licenses, and also put the brakes on the wishful thinking that you can freely choose the scope of features and time, because you never can. You can wish for a feature scope, but then it is open how long the project will take or you can specify a fixed completion date, but then it is open which feature scope will be finished by then. During development, he must above all keep the development team's back free, because they do everything right on their own if you just let them do their job properly. He has to see what progress is being made and if it is not good, find out where the problems lie. Is there a lack of resources, for example? Or is a feature much more complex than expected? What would help the developers to overcome these problems? At the same time, he has to constantly consult with the executive board and fight his way from meeting to meeting so that the developers don't have to do this, because a developer in a meeting only wastes his time, which he should use more sensibly for development. It is enough if the manager presents the progress, discusses any changes and then just gives the team the final summary of the results. More than anything else, the manager is therefore a mediator between the developers, who simply want to write good software, and the executive board, which would prefer to have everything ready yesterday and is only interested in marketing the end product. Two worlds collide here and the manager has to ensure that, despite all the differences, the end result is a product that both sides can be satisfied with, even if no one will be able to push through their maximum demands. It won't have all the features that executives wanted and probably won't be ready as quickly as they had hoped, but developers won't be able to use all their desired technologies, languages or frameworks either and will also have to accept compromises in code quality or testability, both of which will hopefully still be very good, but not as good as they would have liked because it would simply have been too expensive or time-consuming otherwise. In the end, both should be equally satisfied with the manager's work, then he has done a good job. But the problem in practice is this: In the end, usually only the executive board is satisfied and the development team is not satisfied at all. The reason for this is that it is exclusively the executive board that decides who becomes manager and always selects people who primarily act in their interests and therefore against the interests of the developers, which is why managers are so hated by developers. Unfortunately, very few bosses out there understand that this means they only get dissatisfied developers who do a much poorer job, which leads to a poorer end product and this in turn is then noticeable in the sales of the product.
I hate Agile because a) Agile = Scrum (per leadership and team "group-think") and b) Scrum is being used for inherently water-fall type projects (H/W and/or low risk tolerant "gate driven" enterprise infrastructure projects). It becomes a 100 epic backlog, all priority 1 w/ no date dependencies nor clear defined "user" benefit...it is just a "to do" list of shifting priorities.
This video jumped-start me into starting my project...I so needed to hear this! I have been spending far too much time mastering several APIs...had I just jumped in and started using them, struggling with them, learning how to call them, what parameter values I should use, and how to use the response, I would've learn this tech 10 times faster! I'm not exaggerating here...
I'm really big on making sure I recognize my coworkers contributions. I know how helpful it is for me and I want to spread that around. Nothing feels better than getting kudos for your work, it does so much to combat imposter syndrome.
How come you claim to be a Christian, but you have this salt lamp placebo at your desk? Do you do yoga? If so, yoga is hinduism and their gods are demons, and if not, why did you pay for it?
I would say one thing is theyve already considered different implementations, can list off 3 of the immediate knee jerks, if the pattern differs and why they chose an implementation So many ppl just do first ide, or debug idea, which is "this got it to work", another thing i find difficult is people miss what is truely important about the code, seperation, what it exposes, what it hides. If ppl start talking to me of unwrapping a function which already does 4 behaviors into a superfunction which does 64... im going to let them know why, and if i am equal position, i will fefend my point and tell them why its bad and theyre misinformed. Ppl arguing about things which dont matter... create sctipts, test scripts or integration tests as a matter or design, i dont really care how we get our data in, im not exactly super concerned of the inregration design as well.... im concerned with the functionality, but the core logic core, that is repeatably executed. I care we can extend and more importantly modify our system without pure additive development I see a lot of targeting to inconsequential choices, which arent apart of the main core and i think there should be different levels of sophistication for each piece, loads are going to change if we change upstream database provider or the way we store our json or db or yaml, we dont need a robust framework, same with integration and ml performance tests... like maybe that one is more important but whole thing might have to be ported anyways lol Idk seperation and encapsulation i find the most important needs for my time atm
I'm always curious what programming biases we're personally willing to admit vs. simply saying we see that bias in someone else. I can readily admit I'm not language agnostic. I've made a good living on the Java technology stack, Spring Boot and NoSQL. It works for me, but I recognize a good portion of programmers want to evaluate each use case.
Genuinely nobody articulates how I feel, but cant out into words, like you do. My lack of binary thinking and belief that theres merit to multiple approaches has held me back career wise. I believe that not holding strong binary opinions can make you look unconfident.
This advice is slightly misguided. What he's really saying is learn how to manage up with an inept manager. It's the most common manager, so it's good advice, but it's not actually the best way to operate if you have a competent manager with good leadership qualities.
@@HealthyDev Understood. You're right that it's the norm and therefore highly applicable advice. I just think it's worth pointing out that if you are working with a manager, PM, or executive with good leadership and management qualities, they are handling these social and organizational gymnastics and running interference so that ICs can focus on the work in front of them. It's still important to understand this phenomena will happen somewhere in the organization; ideally it's primarily happening within leadership roles rather than ICs, but it's a great skill to have even for ICs.
“This is where I’ll probably get ripped in the comments” *proceeds to call procedural programming “method based” programming*. LOL. Seriously, though, great points! I don’t have a dog in the race, because I just love all the doggos! I see the attention to verifiable computing in the FP world, and I say, “That’s the part I’m in love with!” I don’t work in an FP shop, but I still bring those principles; I use short, focused chunks of logic that receive input and return some result, returning control to the caller - so what if they’re often namespaced to something that has some configuration constants and protected internal state? I don’t have the luxury of writing combinator chains in team code if that means I will be the only one on the team that understands what’s going on. I certainly don’t care what anyone calls it, so I simply write provable code.
@@HealthyDev, the youtuber @acollierastro does a blooper reel during her Patreon scrawl. It's really humanizing. You totally should do it! Meanwhile, yeah, too bad AI Profiteers are all focusing on generative models instead of stuff folk could actually use, like proofing software.
I was at a company where "fake agile" was the norm. I said as much, when I asked me to explain what I meant, I just told them "you use the name of agile as an excuse not to plan and not to think". They wanted you to "act agile" without the benefits of being agile...
When it comes to placing blame, it's fine to do it if your company is a contractor. Your project manager wants to know who to nag and will contact the people responsible to move the project along. The information is also important for when the customer comes around, and management needs to present themselves well or never get another contract again.
