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Ryan Burgess
Welcome to the 17th episode of the front end Happy Hour podcast. In this episode, we are joined by a special guest, Chris Saint-Amant from Netflix. In today's episode, we'll be discussing the career path of growing into an engineering manager, and what it's like to be an engineering manager. Chris, can you give us a brief introduction of who you are, what you do, and what your favorite Happy Hour beverages?

Chris Saint-Amant
Alright, my name is Chris. And I lead one of the UI engineering teams over at Netflix. And recently, I've gotten really into making cocktails. And so I'd say these days, usually most things that are bourbon based, so good all Manhattan would be my go to for happy hour.

Ryan Burgess
And you've made some pretty amazing drinks on this episode, the precursor to the Manhattan the Martinez. Yeah, they were delicious. Let's also go around the table and give brief introductions of today's episodes. Panelists.

Derrick Showers
Derek showers, a senior software engineer at LinkedIn.

Ryan Anklam
I'm Ryan anklam. I'm a senior software engineer at Netflix,

Brian Holt
Brian Holt, and there's two people that can fire me in this room. So I'm a good little boy at Netflix,

Jem Young
Jem Young, Senior Software Engineer at Netflix, I guess this

Ryan Burgess
year in front end engineer at Evernote. And I'm Ryan Burgess. I'm a software engineering manager at Netflix. And each of our episode, we like to choose a keyword that if it's mentioned at all, in the episode, we will all take a drink. What did we decide today's keyword is meeting meetings. So anytime we say the word meetings, we will all take a drink? Well, let's get started. What are some steps that led you to becoming a manager I guess this is more for you. And I Chris, what led you becoming a manager and now a director,

Brian Holt
they love meetings.

Chris Saint-Amant
Cheers, there's actually had two different paths to becoming a manager because the first time I failed, rather spectacularly. So I was in a very small company pretty early on in my career. And we'd gone through many, many rounds of layoffs in the.com bust, and we'd gotten down to a team of about four or five engineers and I seem to be taking lead on a lot of projects. And so they encouraged me to take on a management role on the team. And I did that for about a year and really did not have a great time. It was I realized pretty quickly that it wasn't the right role for me. And it wasn't what I was really looking for ready for in my career. And so I stepped down after about a year, I'd say I probably did an okay job, but I wasn't great at it. And I didn't have a lot of good support and mentorship. So I stepped back down and got back to writing code full time again, and was very happy for quite a few years. The second time I was at Disney and was offered a role to build a new team to focus on platform level work for the UI there. And at that point in time, it was many years later in my career, I had a lot more experience under my belt. And I also had a really strong supporting manager at that time who helped grow me and mentor me and I was in a company that had a lot of great training and growth and development opportunities. So that time was much better. And what's ultimately what led me to where I am today, kind of sounds

Ryan Burgess
similar to some of my experiences. Like when I was in Toronto, I was at a couple agencies, and especially the one eye director there had actually started putting me becoming more of a lead. And that's kind of how it started to I was still on a lot of projects and building things. But I was helping deal with a lot more with the clients and with the like other engineers and help leading those projects. And that's actually what kind of pushed me into doing more management but not at the time. But I actually enjoyed the new challenge of dealing with clients and dealing with some of the, like product managers and other stakeholders that we had to deal with. So that was that was interesting. But then went to Evernote and actually as a lead engineer, which then the director left and then they were like great now you can lead the team and I'm like, okay, at that point I got thrown in. I don't regret being thrown in. I loved it. But I didn't have a lot of support. I think it was really hard to learn it. I didn't know I'm like, Oh great. I have these people I have to hire, I have these people to manage. And it was a little bit difficult at the time. And then going to have at Netflix, I was an actual manager and had really good support from my director. So that was very helpful, which is Christina Mont.

Jem Young
So let me just interrupt our conversation here to say, what would you say are the differences between being an engineering manager and being a manager like any other kind of manager?

Chris Saint-Amant
So I'd say the biggest thing is really just the expertise and the visibility into a range of technologies. So I think In my experience, a successful engineering manager is more than just a specialist in their area, they can reach into other areas and look across a wide range of different teams that their team is collaborating with and influence them to, to work effectively with their teams. And that requires knowing, you know, enough to be dangerous across a bunch of other different engineering skills.

Ryan Burgess
As an engineering manager, do you actually feel you have to be an engineer before being a manager, or needing the technical skills?

Chris Saint-Amant
Absolutely. I've worked in places where it felt like the leadership and especially the the further up, you got up up the chain didn't have a lot of understanding of what it was like to be an engineer and what it was like to tackle certain challenges or that you had to kind of dumb down what you were saying the further up, you got the chain. And the places where I've seen been much happier as an engineer is where I can really get to a certain level of depth with anyone in the engineering leadership. And they understand and they can empathize with what you're going through.

Ryan Burgess
I think it also makes it easier to help manage people to I completely agree with that you should be a technical manager, if you're going to be an engineering manager. But I think when you're dealing with individual contributors, you have to ask them great questions to help help them out. And if you have no idea what you're talking about that can be problematic, I think in the day to day,

Chris Saint-Amant
that being said, I don't think you need to be a wonderful engineer to be a manager. But I'd say certainly, for sucking up here, I'll say that every single engineer on our team is a far better engineer than I ever was. And today, so I think surrounding yourself with engineers that have far smarter than you are is a great way to success as well.

Ryan Burgess
That's why Chris and I are in the meetings, go to

Brian Holt
cheers to no meetings.

Jem Young
Cheers. So have you have you ever seen a successful manager who wasn't an engineer before? Is it possible?

Ryan Burgess
I mean, I think it's depends on what you're managing, I think no, no, the answer's no, I think probably, that's what I'm getting at is like for for managing other engineers, I, I have worked with someone who was new, a little bit or like almost enough to be dangerous, but not really understanding some of the complications that some of the decisions he was making, and how that impacted the team. In some ways that was actually really hard for the rest of the engineers on the team if because of some of the decisions being made that were poorly made. It was there again, it was like he was an engineer at one point, but just not, not really just like a little bit had dabbled in it. So I've seen it where it's been really poor, I do feel like you to be a good manager or an engineering manager you have to be but if it was just a manager, obviously, if something else, that's not engineering related. Yeah, obviously, you don't have to be an engineer at that point or be technical. That's my thought on it.

Jem Young
I just historically, sexually happened one. So I say historically, but I've I've had an IT manager and they were not an engineer. And you said actually, it was dangerous, because they just they read something. And then they're like, We need to implement this or like, actually, I don't think so. Like no, no, no, trust me, I'm a manager. And we did it is, is a terrible experience. But I just want to know if they're, if it's even possible,

Chris Saint-Amant
I think what you said is trust, trust me, right. And I think the trust should go in the other direction. Right? The the the leadership has to trust the engineers, because when it comes down to it, as an engineer, you're making 1000 decisions on a daily basis about how you're working, how you're building something, how you're implementing something, and you have a lot more depth of context on what you're writing day to day and what the challenges are, and that that trust should be really bidirectional?

Derrick Showers
I think yeah, I think sometimes in our industry, there's this misconception that, in order to be a manager, you need to know more than your team. And you know, you need to be like an expert. And I think unfortunately, I think sometimes people get promoted on that and and get into management on that with that, like idea. And don't have that trust the other way around. And I think that's what, maybe there's like a little bit of a balance, not not saying that somebody should come in that's, that's not, you know, doesn't have any experience in in as an IC. But I think that can kind of go both ways. Sometimes.

Chris Saint-Amant
Yeah. And I think that actually, you mentioned Brian about being a team lead or a tech lead. And I think that's kind of an interesting angle. When you look at what makes like a successful tech, lead or architecture team lead. That's not always the same thing that makes a successful manager. You know, people, a lot of people think, oh, you know, I've been leading projects, and I've been kind of the lead architect on these things. And so natural next step is to become a manager. And I don't think that that's always the right thing. I think it is a very different role with a very different set of responsibilities and that people I think, fall into the trap of thinking that's the route that they have to go down in order to continue advancing and the organizations that I've seen work well, they provide a lot of other advancement options. means for engineers to play a leadership role without actually moving into management.

Ryan Burgess
Yeah, more focused on actually leading like architectural decisions or higher level coding anything like leading large complex projects,

Chris Saint-Amant
whatever might be.

Brian Holt
I think that's pretty forward thinking though, I feel like a lot of companies don't go that way. And so that if you want to advance, you go up to senior engineer, and then you're done. Like you either stop there, or you have to be manager.

Ryan Burgess
No, I think that's a problem with a lot of companies is like, if you want to advance, it's like, oh, well, you can go into management, which management is a completely different thing. It's like, yeah, you're so close to the technologies, and you're talking about, like engineering work. But you're also now managing people, you're responsible for their career growth, you're responsible for things that go wrong with their careers or anything like that. And that's like, a completely different ballgame, as you got

Brian Holt
more meetings,

Ryan Burgess
more meetings, cheers.

Jem Young
I just want to say I, everybody is 100%, right? In this this fallacy in the industry, that you have to be a manager, if you want to move up. Netflix is a great example of how to do it, right? There's people been there 10 years, they're engineers, it doesn't make them any less. They're just like, I don't want to do that. And I'm a great engineer. And they're excellent contributors.

Chris Saint-Amant
I think a lot of companies fall into the trap and exhibit this behavior where your influence and your impact is directly related to your title. And that if you have a manager, director level, title, your voice when it comes to technical decisions, it carries a lot more weight. But the better way to do it is to have individual engineers, architects that can have that director or manager level influence on the direction of the technology itself. Now, that may not be the direction of the organization and how its managed and how it works in with other teams and the kind of more typical management oriented things, but you should still we will have just as much if not more influence on the technology direction.

Ryan Burgess
Yeah, I think that's actually a really good point, too, is the fact is, we rely a lot on engineering decisions, because you're close to the code, you're coding in that every day. And so you kind of have to rely on your team to really understand that you ask the right questions and try and parse out those ideas. But it shouldn't be a director or manager or VP, or whoever in the organization, making those decisions and saying top down like, Oh, this is what we're going to do. We're gonna adopt this new technology that you've never heard of. But that's we think it's a great idea. I googled, it sounded good.

Chris Saint-Amant
It doesn't stop us from making estimates for you, though. That'll only take like two weeks, right? Yeah.

Brian Holt
Okay. horror, horror story, very quick. I'm not gonna name names. But at a former company called Reddit, I was making estimates for some product that I was building, and I was, you know, throwing out like, Okay, this is gonna take me three days, and the, like, typing into a Google spreadsheet the same time, and the manager was falling behind me, changing my estimates to be like, two or three days lower than everything that I was saying is like, wow, why are you asking me, you, obviously, are just gonna put this anywhere, right. And so like, that is like, the worst thing that a manager can do is just like, not trust engineers, not give him any sort of Koreans just say like, Okay, let's go through the ritual of asking you questions, and then fuck you go work, you know, 60 hours to get this done?

Ryan Burgess
Yeah, I think the better question is, like, if I didn't trust your estimate, I'd maybe ask about it. His name

Brian Holt
was Ryan Burgess.

Chris Saint-Amant
But yeah, that'll only take two days. Right, right. Because I told somebody that in a meeting the other day, cheers. Yeah.

Ryan Burgess
We've been talking a lot about being a manager and everything. How, as engineers, how do what do you expect from an engineering manager? Like, what are the qualifications and importance that you expect an engineering manager?

Ryan Anklam
Well think for me, since I've moved out here, my expectations have completely changed on a manager. Now I see. You know, my manager is someone who kind of comes in and helps me solve problems together with me, asks me questions and helps lead my thought process will previously it was just a manager with someone who's gonna come in and say, This is what you need to do this, and you have to do it. No, go get it done. So I think since I've been out here, it's completely changed. And it's such a better way to work.

Derrick Showers
For me, I think it's also I mean, it's not just the like, discussions around getting things done in projects, but also just a career development and stuff like that, that sometimes is missing with, you know, managers that are just concentrated on all the technical aspects and the estimations, scoping, and like, you know, and the, the product and the project that you're working on. So, I think it's super important to make sure that you're having those those conversations as a manager with with, you know, your direct reports about like, where you want to go and is, you know, what you're doing right now, the right path. And

Augustus Yuan
yeah, I totally agree. I feel like when I think of an engineering manager, it's like someone who's really paying attention to my growth as an engineer and like really helping me build that path. I also think of someone who like, kind of shields me away from all the meetings all the time. meaning.

Brian Holt
There's

Augustus Yuan
also like just all the bullshit that just comes your way that you really shouldn't really have to be dealing with, I feel like like, I just want to code, I really just want to focus on the technical problems. I don't want to have to necessarily think about all the other problems that might be probably on someone shouldn't be on someone else's plate, like, Oh, does the design for this make sense? Like, maybe that's why we have a designer to think about those problems, right? And

Ryan Burgess
you should almost rely on your manager to kind of help close that gap. And so that you don't have to grow on chasing someone trying to find where the designs at or who's on the project, any of that kind of stuff.

Augustus Yuan
Exactly, exactly. I

Brian Holt
feel like the most important thing, at least for me, I believe it or not, someone used to pay me to manage people, which is weird. Joke's on them, the most important thing for a manager to do is to hire I feel like, like filter people in and out of your team, like let go the people that need to be let go and bring in the people that need to be brought in. That is not an easy task, having been involved with a bunch of hiring, but I also feel like it is my opinion, the most key thing that any manager can do,

Ryan Burgess
I think it's such an important one. Because you're, you're really setting the tone for the culture of your team. And if you bring the wrong person in, if they're bringing down the team, like you have to make those hard decisions and make them quickly because you don't want them to affect the rest of the team. Bringing in the wrong person can be really bad. But bringing in the right person can be so great as well.

Derrick Showers
Yeah, and kind of along the same lines, I think that a lot of managers tend to focus, I think you even have been a manager in the past too. And it's like, you kind of focus on those people that are that are lower performers, just because they're the ones that have the larger voice. And they're the ones that are going to continually come to you with issues. But I think it's like, trying to weed that away, whether you put them on to some sort of plan and eventually, you know, get rid of them. Or you you know, you just don't focus all your time on that you focus your time on on your Higher Performers. I think that's easier said than done as a manager. But I think that's really important.

Chris Saint-Amant
One of the things I always look at is the most important parts of my role is doing whatever I can to help the team be successful, and be productive and effective, what they're doing. So whether that's chasing down an answer to a question and going to talk to some other team or going to get coffee, I remember we had a pretty challenging rolling project about this time last year, and working really long hours. And every day, I go take Phil's order and go run and go grab coffee. right in. Thanks, Chris. Yeah, no problem. Whatever needs to be done to keep the team happy and productive. Nothing should ever be beneath you in helping keep your team happy.

Ryan Burgess
No, I think that's really well put we are in meetings all day long. Cheers. Yes. But at the same time, the most important thing for me is like the team, like whatever the team needs, that's more important than anything on my calendar. If something happens, I need to jump on that with my team. That's important thing for me,

Derrick Showers
I think it's good. And that's easier said than done. I think a lot of those a lot of times, it's just about like, okay, how am I going to get as a manager, right? You're like, how am I going to get through that that's a natural tendency, how am I going to get through the day, like, what else is going to come up today? What else is gonna be thrown at me from left field, but putting yourself kind of second tall that I think is important, but hard?

Augustus Yuan
Something I also like really respective engineering managers is they also kind of have to be the motivators of the team sometimes, like, there's always like every now and then, like that project that everyone's like, Oh, God, we have to work on that project. And you know, they really just have to be the person is like, Guys, this is like, I, well, I can't, I can't, I can't say I've had any strategies and motive people for those projects. But it's like, it's really difficult. But like, I've seen some people able to do it. And really, I really respect the

Chris Saint-Amant
coffee, coffee helps.

Jem Young
I think the shield is probably the most important because what's most costly for an engineer is what costs x. Exactly. Yeah, everybody knows that answer,

Chris Saint-Amant
which is basically the job description of a manager is to be context switching all day, every day. Yeah,

Augustus Yuan
yeah.

Jem Young
But I've seen and this has been a complaint of, I think, numerous companies I worked at where the CEO or the CTO or somebody high up gets an idea. And they're like, Joe got this idea, chop everything, and you have to listen to them because they're the sea level, you know, and a manager's like, He's on a roll. But so many times I've seen that where just the engineer gets derailed and like, all context is lost, everything's lost. So most important for me is that umbrella that keeps everything away, and

Ryan Burgess
she'll shield you from that bullshit that's coming down. That might not be the best idea.

Brian Holt
Absolutely. There's a, like a cartoon out there that like one of those developer cartoon like web cartoons, and I wish I could find it. I couldn't find it. But the basic gist of it is like, the poor manager is like, the slave driver. That's like cracking the whip. It's like, alright, you know, let's work 70 hours this week, and let's get this shit shipped on time and like the best managers and the people actually out in front pulling along with you. Yeah, I've seen that

Ryan Burgess
too. Can you be successful as a manager coding, I would love to hear your thoughts on that. I know Chris and I probably have similar opinions, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on it too, as well, Chris.

Chris Saint-Amant
So I tried that the first team that I managed at Disney, and I was fairly unsuccessful for a couple of reasons. One, I ended up staying too close to the code. And then being far too opinionated with my team about how things should be done. I can be very particular and a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to things. And it kept me too in the weeds. And I was far too controlling at times if wanting things done a certain way, because I stayed too close to it. I think the other reason I was not as successful when trying to do that was that because I was splitting my time between writing code and all the other things, I was less successful at the other things that I need to be doing to help my team. And so when you think about it at any given day, as a manager, I actually got some really great advice on this, when I started at Netflix is that you could look at all the things you could do on some sort of a continuum at one end of the spectrum is things that only you can do. And on the other end of the spectrum are things that only your team can do. And you should be focusing as much of your time and energy on the things that only you can be doing for your team to help them successful and then be successful and then challenging your team to also move further up that spectrum so that they can grow and take on additional responsibilities.

Ryan Burgess
I like that that's actually really good.

Brian Holt
That's awesome advice.

Ryan Burgess
Yeah, that is really good advice. I know when I was at Evernote, especially being thrown into it, it was like I was struggling, that transition time was the hardest thing. I think that was the biggest thing. Yeah. So I'm an individual contributor. And then now, hey, you're managing this team? Well, one, we didn't have enough people at the time to tackle all the projects that were coming in. And so I would have to I mean, it's either until you backfill yourself. Yeah, it's like either I pass it off onto my team and kill them. I was the most familiar with the code. Do I just jump in and do it? Well, I did. And it was really difficult. I found my day was filled with meetings. Cheers. Cheers. And so I was pretty busy all day long. But then still had to ship features. And so what I found what I was doing was literally going home, at night or on the weekends and doing all my coding. And so that was really difficult. Am I a good manager, or I'm a good engineer, I'm not good at any of them. Right now. I'm not focused. And so I think really focusing in I think, similar to what Chris said, is like having that focus on what you're supposed to do as a manager versus what your team's supposed to do is really important. And so I think being just a manager is really important. I think it's important to understand the code base, and understand what your team is working on. I'd also be interested to hear from you guys. What do you think when manager is submitting code?

Brian Holt
Well, so I was a coding manager. And I feel like I was fairly successful. But I also want to throw out the that I was a kind of a specialist case. Was it a small team, large team, small team? Yeah, so I was employee number 29. At Reddit, so I was pretty early on. I feel like I did a really good job hiring that I could I hired mostly people that could manage themselves, I just basically said like, okay, here are things that need to be done, go forth. And that was about the end of my managing. And so I was free to pretty much code about 90% of my time. And so I just want to throw out there that it is possible, particularly if you hire very well, not only hire very well, but you just have a team that is self motivating, and you set the direction, and it just happens. So

Ryan Burgess
I have a really strong team and still feel like it's a hard thing for me to do and juggle at the same time.

Brian Holt
Yeah. So we're an organization of over 2000 hours in an organization of 30. Right, I

Chris Saint-Amant
think it really depends on the size of the company. And I think it

Ryan Burgess
also depends on the size of the team, too. I thought Brian was he is. So you call him not very talented,

Brian Holt
super talented.

Chris Saint-Amant
The other thing that I found falling into the trap of and I think we all do this, as engineers were you're working with somebody else on something and they're struggling with something and you have two choices, right? You can either sit down and spend a bunch of time with them, helping them solve the problem and helping them learn whatever it is they need to learn to be able to solve that problem. Or you can do it yourself. And it's far faster to choose the latter option. And when you're still I found I fell in that trap when I was still coding as a manager of taking that that latter option because my time was so stretched thin was okay, I can go home and knock this out in an hour, you know, or even less or I can sit down and spend a bunch of time with somebody talking through with them. And now that's an investment. It's the right investment to make but it comes with you know, those trade offs.

Derrick Showers
I think I actually can be relayed to any engineer. Yeah, exactly. It's like, it's a lot quicker sometimes to just do the work. But yeah, I think you're gonna get better dividends, if you

Chris Saint-Amant
Yep, taking the long term versus short term view,

Jem Young
devil's advocate here, because we're, like, I hear it from both of you. And like, we're on the same boat. We're speaking from the concept of Netflix, where everybody is a senior engineer. And you can say, here's a hard problem solve it, and I just solved because that's my job,

Brian Holt
don't fire us.

Jem Young
But I think some managers responsibility is some sort of mentorship towards especially you hire a fresh engineer. And we haven't really talked about that as much what's what's your staff thoughts on metadata?

Ryan Burgess
Like, if you had a junior engineer, you're saying, Yeah, that's

Jem Young
someone, you absolutely do need to sit down and say, here's how we solve problems. And here's, here's what I would do. And like, let them run, I think it

Ryan Burgess
goes back to the point that even like, kind of what Chris was getting out there is that sometimes, yes, I could probably write it a lot quicker, and get it done faster. But isn't it better to try and help that person and maybe it is taking some time to actually grow that engineer, I'd rather spend the time in investment to do that, rather than taking it all myself, because it helps them take that ownership, and also helps push them to grow to me, like, I know, even when I was in that transition period, one thing that I started to do was I took all the shitty things that needed to be done, whether it be like really small content updates, or like all the little fly in things that needed to be done. I took those three hours. Yeah, like I literally took those ones on, because I'd rather have someone who needed to get ramped up on the codebase focus on building great features. And so that's how my approach,

Derrick Showers
I don't know that it's always the managers, or really, often the managers responsibility to be the mentor. Like, I think that, you know, mentors are better when they're not your manager. You know, I think actually, there's a there's, there needs to be career conversations that happen. And that's but I think that's a little bit different than mentorship. And I think mentorship is better when maybe it's even not even somebody that you work with on your on the same team. You know, it's just somebody that you just getting an outside perspective. So yeah, when you have a mentor, as a manager, you kind of have like two things going like you're trying to, obviously there's a level of like trying to knowing that your performance review is coming up. So you're going to do things, maybe have different conversations with manager, but I feel like a mentor somebody can be truly honest with and open with and be like, Look, I have no idea what's going on here. Like I need your help on this. Whereas you might not admit that to your manager.

Jem Young
That is a awesome segue into my next question. This one's hard. How do you manage the balance between personal relationships and business relationships? Like, should you be friends with the people you manage? Or should they just be? You know, you have that aloof relationship? But you're not? You're like, oh, yeah, we're not gonna hang out. But you know, I understand you, I understand what's going on your life.

Brian Holt
So Jen's asking, should you get drunk on a podcast with your people that you manage?

Chris Saint-Amant
Sounds like a horrible idea. Yeah. I'm gonna totally deflect that question. Because Trump's totally I want to chime in on the on the mentorship question real quick. And then I'll come back to that. The the mentorship thing I think actually goes to when you when should you transition into becoming a manager. So I mentioned that I had this rather unsuccessful run and being a manager early on in my career. And I think a lot of that was because I didn't have the maturity and the experience to be able to successfully mentor or coach is a different way of looking at it, the people on my team. And so I feel like you need enough of a body of experience and kind of been there done that seen a bunch of different types of teams, different types of organizations, different technologies, different challenges, worked with a range of people, to be able to have that breadth of expertise to be able to successfully kind of coach and mentor people on your team. And you need a certain amount of time and maturity, to be able to do that successfully. In terms of being chummy, or friendly with the people on your team. I don't think that's a bad thing at all. I think that's totally fine. I think the only thing is you have to figure out how to sometimes compartmentalize stuff, right? Because we all have tough conversations from time to time about somebody's growth or what they need to do and what you're expecting out of them. And you want to make sure that you those things don't become kind of conflict of interest.

Derrick Showers
I actually think that it's getting off topic a little bit, but I actually think that that's unique to our industry. I think that like I've worked in other industries as a manager and it's like very frowned upon to go out for drinks with but it's it's, I don't know, I don't know, this is hip, this is just,

Chris Saint-Amant
I think comes down to caring for your people, right is you should actually care about them, and empathize with whatever they're going through. And how do you do that if you don't actually really know them as people?

Ryan Burgess
Yeah, I agree. I want to say it is trust, you build that like on a personal relationship with them. And I think totally playing off what Chris said to have the fact that yeah, sometimes There has to be those harder conversations. But I think on building that friendship or relationship with them, you learn a lot about the person and understand them. So I don't think it's a bad thing. I think it's something you have to balance like, because yeah, you are sometimes having to make those tough calls. But to me there is that trust build by being close with them, instead of being, hey, I'm not gonna hang out with you, because we can't that's like, you know, unspoken rule, we can't do that. What advice would you give to engineers interested in moving into management quit? Like, I know, Brian, you love meeting. Cheers.

Chris Saint-Amant
Cheers. So I think recognizing that it is a very different role. It's a very different set of skills. And it comes with lots of leading different setups. And so I think there's this word promotion, right, you get promoted in this role, which implies that, you know, every other part of your career, typically, when you get promoted, it's because you've shown that you've demonstrated a new skill set, or you're, you've improved in a certain area, and you've gotten better at what you're already doing. But when you get promoted from an individual contributor into a manager, and I think this is true for any discipline, really, you're moving into an area where you don't necessarily have those skills, because you haven't done it. So you have to learn on the job, and be okay with making mistakes and looking like an idiot and asking dumb questions. So I'd say a couple things I'd suggest one is have a good peer group of other managers you can lean on, whether that's in the same company or outside of that company, and be vulnerable to them. Don't don't feel like you've got to always act like you know your shit. And you know, everything. say like, Hey, I'm struggling with this, this is hard. How did you handle this? And ask them for advice and ask your boss for advice? And like, this is this is hard. What am I doing here? How do I you know, what do I do? And being okay with fucking up along the way and making mistakes?

Ryan Burgess
Yeah, I think that's actually very good advice. I similar advice is learn from others, and ask the right questions and be comfortable do that. But not only other managers, also your team, put trust in your team and say, What can I do better as a manager, you know, these are some things I'm struggling with, like, put it out there. Say that, you know, share your vulnerabilities with your team, build that trust, you're in this together, you're a team and even know that you're a manager, I think you're in it with your team. And whatever you can do, to learn from your team and learn from others is really important.

Chris Saint-Amant
I think the hardest thing is actually somewhat touched on this is getting candid feedback from the people that report to you, right, you're, you're likely going to be getting feedback and input from your boss from the other teams you partner with. But it's rare to be able to get good feedback from the people that report to you because in most companies, in most cultures, that's not really encouraged. And in many cases, it's frowned upon. So we all come from, you know, many years of work cultures where criticizing your boss is not really cool. And so I struggled with that. I don't know how you guys think about that.

Brian Holt
Life advice, have a drunken Podcast with your managers. And Get real, get real advice.

Chris Saint-Amant
Can I share a wonderful story from Jem? Oh, he's since he asked them some tough, tough questions earlier. Jem gave me some fantastic feedback in his first two months at Netflix. He knows where I'm going with this. It was impressive. Yeah. So it's 360 feedback. And so you get to write whatever feedback you want for anybody in the company. So two months in, he wrote feedback for his boss's boss, saying something to the effect of when I first met you, you came across as Curt and uncaring. I think I'm mostly paraphrasing there, but I think that was pretty accurate. And now that I've gotten to know you, I realized that's not the case. But you came across this way initially. And I was shocked initially, because I was like, Wow, that's awesome. Nobody's ever told me that before. And I'm really glad that I got that feedback. And, wow, this guy's got some courage. And that's awesome. I wanted to do more of that. So I actually shared it with as many people as I could to say, This is good.

Ryan Burgess
This guy.

Chris Saint-Amant
Like, this guy is awesome. You should all be he's only been here two months. What about the rest of y'all? What are you been doing? LinkedIn

Derrick Showers
is hiring.

Jem Young
You mean Microsoft?

Chris Saint-Amant
What gave you the courage to do that?

Jem Young
I didn't know. And I was just like, I'm gonna go in guns blazing. Because that's what people told me. I should do.

Ryan Burgess
Yeah, it was impressive. Because I remember reading it to as your manager and going, Oh, you're speaking to my boss saying this. And I was like, This is great. Like, I wasn't worried. I knew Chris wouldn't be upset about that. And I think being direct with your boss is important. I think there again, it builds that trust and it's really important. I wish more companies did that.

Jem Young
So here's the thing like What gave me and this is a few beers in so I can, you know, go for it all. I'll say this, I respect the hell out of both of you just because it's very egoless. You're not afraid to say, I don't understand what a ServiceWorker is, and we're trying to get our TTI. And you're like, what is that? And like, most people wouldn't do that. They'd be like, huh, sure, but no, I saw both of you were very egoless. So I felt comfortable and giving you honest feedback, saying the stock of their of their feelings, they want to be better. And I want to be

Chris Saint-Amant
because they have no feelings than the feelings

Brian Holt
that I'm feeling

Jem Young
prior to their $100 bills every day. No, but the genuinely why I felt okay. Work for Netflix. That's why I felt okay, given that feedback was that I saw, I could give you candid feedback, and you're not gonna get your feelings hurt, not like, this guy doesn't like me, what can I do to get them? Like, it's just no you want, we all want to be better at what we do.

Brian Holt
Hey, it's like, they started out being receptive to feedback before you gave them candid feedback.

Jem Young
Absolutely. I think

Ryan Burgess
that's important as a manager to is try and build that rapport so that you can build that trust, because no one's going to give you feedback, if they don't trust that. And the minute that you are given hard feedback, as a manager, if you react poorly on it, you're never going to get that feedback again,

Derrick Showers
on the topic of like advice that you would give to people interested in moving into management. I'm curious what you guys would give advice to as far as people that are asked to move into management, because kind of like going back to what we talked about earlier, is you know, there's there's a lot of like, maybe pushing that, you know, the next career move is to move into management and like, it's hard as a it's hard as anyone as a human being to, to turn down an opportunity for you to potentially move your career into, you know, a new direction. And but I think there are some times where you maybe just aren't ready yet. So I'm just curious, like, what are some things that you might evaluate, when you're given that potential opportunity? I

Chris Saint-Amant
think it comes down to really thinking about what you want to do what you want, and what is important to you, and what skills you want to develop. If you feel like you have a whole bunch of other exploring to do, and new technologies want to learn, and those are the problems that you're interested in solving, then keep going down that path, I think, especially, you're likely to be asked to move into that role when you're more senior in your career. And so at that point, you should really be owning your career direction. I think this goes back to episode where you had on a couple of folks from our recruiting team. And you were talking about really owning and charting your own course, especially as you become more experienced. And so I think we're all fortunate enough that we work in an industry that it has a lot of demand for our skills. And you shouldn't feel like you have to move into management in order to be successful, but you can still be successful for a very long time, as an individual contributor, as an engineer, and those are the types of problems that you're still interested in solving, then then do that. If you're feel like you're not motivated or not passionate about those types of problems anymore, then consider something else. But really do it based on what your curiosity what your passion is. And don't go into it. If you feel like it's not something you're ready for, actually an amend that. I don't think should ever go into something, or avoid going into something because you don't feel like you're ready for it. I think that every step that I've made my career, I've kind of gotten gone into it going Holy crap, I have no idea what I'm doing. I'm like basically diving into the deep end headfirst, and It's sink or swim. I feel like those are the the areas where you really level up and you really challenge yourself to grow. But the transition into a management role is very different. And I think asking questions about what the expectations are for that role, what level of support you're going to get, what the conversation is going to be like, if you don't like that, that direction, and being able to think critically with the person you're being who's asking you that, before you make that.

Derrick Showers
Maybe it's it's like you just can't be concerned about failing, right? Because it's like, is maybe you do just need to experience it. But But then again, there's people that get into that, that just aren't good at it. And you know, like, it's not necessarily a sign of you're just not good. You're just you're just not good enough because you know, maybe you're just better at being an architect or like, you know, moving more into the technical side of

Augustus Yuan
it. Well to build on that. And I'm also totally in the I don't believe that every engineer like should like the natural thing to do is to become a manager to go to move up or something like some people just don't want to manage they don't want to go to meetings.

Ryan Burgess
Cheers.

Augustus Yuan
True. For those that don't just want to dive in like are there any like, is there any advice you can give to managers to like, get their toes dipped in like what can they do to expose themselves to like, manage what it's like to be a manager like should they be trying to do like tech up Tech Lead opportunity, should they? What should they be doing? This

Ryan Burgess
is a really good question. Because I think there are opportunities to try out some of that kind of stuff. Some of it's really hard to learn, to me that lead is a very important thing is like leading a project. And maybe even, it's just managing a project where you're actually not coding, I think, to me, that's really important too, is you're leading the project, but not necessarily doing the work. And so you're delegating and learning that as you go, the one thing that's really, really hard to get is actually the people management side of that, that's a really hard one to do is like, hey, now you have these direct reports, you're responsible for them. That's one thing that's really hard to learn as if you're wanting to test the water of it for per se, but I think if you're interested in it, ask your manager or whoever you report to is, hey, I'd like to do this and like lead a project and see how that goes.

Chris Saint-Amant
It depends on which aspect of management you're interested in learning. So there's the recruiting and team development aspect, there's leading complex projects, there's kind of staying out ahead of your team. So looking at the next 612 18 months of what your team needs to be successful in. And so there's some of those you're unlikely to get, be able to get that experience until you're in that role. But you can participate in the hiring. So you can help find people for your team. You can help interview people for your team and ask your boss candid questions about why they chose to hire or not hire somebody that you interviewed and understand their thought process and how they think about evaluating that. You can take the lead on complex projects, you can do your own thought exercise of, hey, as a team, what are we doing right now? Or do we think we need to be doing that's going to set us up for success in the next year, the next two years and suggest those ideas and bounce those off people on your team and make them happen?

Brian Holt
Some advice maybe that I would throw out for people thinking about moving into management is that we as engineers are used to like very hard logic that we write a line of instructions, and it works the way exactly that we told the computer to work. And when you move into management, you start dealing with humans and humans are squishy, you give an instruction to a human, and then they're called back to you to put in JavaScript. It's not necessarily going to give you the answer that you anticipate, right? It could be better, it could be worse, but it's a very squishy answer. And so if you are okay and willing to deal with that margin of error, then management can be okay. And it can be great. And if you are particularly good at inspiring those to give you better callbacks, then then go for it.

Jem Young
I think you made promises. Well,

Brian Holt
I observe the people.

Ryan Burgess
That pretty much wraps up everything for today's episode. But before we end the episode, let's go through today's episodes picks. Derek, what do you have?

Derrick Showers
So the first one I have is a Reddit article or Well, whatever we call Reddit. Yeah, it's only a week old. But it's It's called being a manager is hard. And so I think it goes really well with with his talk, and especially the hypothetical on like, what you deal with on like, a one day as a manager. But it's, it's interesting reads like a quick 510 minute read. And then the other thing that I found this week is, it's called the state of JavaScript. It's not to be confused with the original article that we started on. It's, but it's a really cool project that a bunch of people kind of got together to get some data together as far as like, one of the most popular frameworks, but it also goes down like CSS tools, and CI tools and stuff like that. So it's some interesting data of his and they go through like all different kinds of stuff, testing frameworks, all that kind of stuff. And, and then, like, do some analysis on the data that they found. So highly recommend checking it out,

Chris Saint-Amant
make JavaScript great again.

Ryan Burgess
Ryan, what do you have for us?

Ryan Anklam
So my first pick is the Samsung SmartThings. Hub.

Derrick Showers
I think we're gonna say the Samsung phone that explodes.

Ryan Anklam
No, so I just bought a house and a home automation has been something I've been really interested in lately. So this, the SmartThings Hub is pretty nice. It works with a lot of different protocols that are out there. And it lets me get a notification of my dryers done when my washing is done.

Ryan Burgess
So it's pretty neat. That's badass. That is pretty cool.

Ryan Anklam
And my second one is the album skin by Flume, to some some pretty good coding music to put on in the background and kind of zone out too and write some code.

Ryan Burgess
Great, Brian, what do you have?

Brian Holt
My first pick is bottle logic brewery. We're currently drinking recursion IPA. And we're about to open logarithms lager. It's pretty pretty badass. Thanks, Anaheim. My second pick is meetings. I love meetings.

Jem Young
I've got a few picks because I don't know on a roll today, first big infinite jukebox, this one is so cool. I call it a thank you Augustus. I call it kind of like a DJ in software because it it automatically finds the same rhythm and pattern in music and it'll automatically loop it for you at certain at random intervals. So it's just the best example is in the Get down that show that I feel strongly about on

Ryan Burgess
Netflix. feel strongly negative, negative.

Jem Young
I didn't want to say negatively but yeah, but the part was learning how to DJ and it's like hours like this montage me sweating. This software will do that for him in like a minute say doesn't

Ryan Burgess
have to sweat over it doesn't sweat over it, you know, but but that was also years and years ago, they didn't have the technology.

Jem Young
He should have learned the dropdowns and vinyl. Yeah, use crowns and vital. Second pick and this one, I'm a little embarrassed but riding clubs here with me. So it's okay. The expo Expo soundtrack. It is pretty good. The movie is. Well, I have a lot of thoughts on the movie. But that's not for this podcast. But the movies not great. But it's the soundtracks pretty good.

Ryan Anklam
It's not terrible, either. It's

Jem Young
not terrible, but it's

Ryan Burgess
not good either. So So yeah, it's like a it's an okay movie. It's not amazing. It's not horrible.

Jem Young
Yeah, third fic TC 39, I had the opportunity to sit in for an hour because he thought I was meaning at jobs or at Netflix. And I sat in for an hour on a TC 39 meeting. Wow, I learned so much about JavaScript. And just that hour, just the thought that goes into designing JavaScript. And the dex features is mind boggling. It's not just oh, you know, I think this sort of work. It's just it's a lot of arguments, a lot of heated, heated words. But in the end, I see why JavaScript is where it is today. And it's just fantastic. And my last and final pick is Ryan Burgess speaking at full stack Fest in Toronto in a week. I have heard a talk and it is really good. It's all about migrating a large code base to react and a lot of people are going through this so I highly recommend if you haven't done your six yet, do it. We'll be there. And Ryan Burgess has told me he will buy a bottle of Dom Perignon for every person eventually this episode.

Brian Holt
Very true. He signed a contract. He

Derrick Showers
did. Damn. And I'm done. Sure, yeah. Yeah, I

Augustus Yuan
do want to say the infinite jukebox is awesome. And shout out to the hackathon. I think it was MIT hex, that it's awesome. Yeah, my pics. It's also one of them is a Reddit post. Yeah, this is a Reddit post on subreddit programming. It's just a bunch of free O'Reilly books. And he just went out of his way to list all the links. And then this guy, put w gets for all of them. So you can just grab them all and just put it in your terminal. And it just downloads them all. So and there's some really good managing books in there too. Like how to architect and a large code base and stuff. And then the other pic I have is notified by Google. It's a font that they created that is actually works for all languages, supposedly or crap. 10 languages. Really cool. Cool, Chris,

Ryan Burgess
what do you have for us?

Chris Saint-Amant
My first pick is an article called Radical candor, the surprising secret of being a good boss. It's from this woman, Kim Scott, who worked at Google and at Apple and has really great advice for how to give direct candid feedback will still caring about people and being empathetic to how they might receive that feedback. So that's my first pick a really great read for anyone, whether you're a manager or not. My second pick is a band called soons su u and s that one of my favorite new discoveries this year, I was fortunate to see them play live back in June, that are Montreal based band and they are fantastic, so highly recommend checking them out.

Ryan Burgess
My first pick is a documentary called all sleep when I'm dead. It's a documentary about the life of DJ in LA named Steve Aoki. It's all about his drive, and how he pushes himself to be better and better. I thought it was even interesting. At one point, he did 300 shows in one year, which is just crazy. I recommend checking it out.

Brian Holt
Hashtag only on Netflix, I

Derrick Showers
was gonna say is no.

Ryan Burgess
And my second pick is a book called The advantage. The book is about improving organizational health. I think it's really well aligned with today's episode, speaking of from a manager perspective, does give you a lot of insights into how to help lead your team and help build a better organization. So definitely doesn't have to be for a manager reading it, but I highly recommend anyone to check it out. Chris, thank you for joining us on the episode. Where can people get in touch with you?

Chris Saint-Amant
We can always hit me up on Twitter at C St. amant. We'll post that in the notes and I look forward to hearing from you all.

Ryan Burgess
Thank you all for listening today's episode. You can find us on Twitter at @frontendhh. Make sure to rate us on iTunes and Google Play. Let us know what you think of the pod asked Does anyone have anything else to add

Brian Holt
hashtag meetings cheers