I must not have made it clear enough, but Papa Jeff Wagner brought me back into Netflix after I left. I am still at Netflix, just in case there's any questions. But I certainly did quit, but it's good to be here.
@@akbarnurullaev7918 I am at Netflix. I said there, which I probably should have emphasized a lot more, that. Jeff Wagner, a previous boss and the man who hired me originally, made me an offer to stay.
It's surprising to hear even a big company like Netflix are letting staff become so overburdened. Even my small company realises that you can't put too much on 1 person or team. Hire more people, cut features or lengthen deadlines.
This did take place quite a few years ago. But there's always time and places when things become difficult. This just became difficult and then stayed difficult
I work at a fortune 100 company and its exactly like this, w/the turnover that goes with it. The 'big company' is just an aggregate up of small departments/divisions that have their own budgets that usually doesn't go far enough. AND you have to comply w/the non-coding architects' mandates.
If you’ve ever worked in a big corporation, you’d know they’re really inefficient. They have the budget to throw money at it. They hire people to create the idea, standards and training of a new project and none of those new hires have any clue about ABC and why XYZ won’t work but they have degrees that say they do.
@Veronika Zaglotova Yes, it depends on multiple project factors. How long to go? How many seniors are on board? How at capacity are they? Are you training people who are experienced? If you had one senior and they were overloaded along with the rest of the team, something has to give. The short term managerial solution is to push the senior and reward them with oodles more compensation... but for the wellbeing of all, extra time needs to be allocated, either/both for training new staff or just giving more time to existing staff to fulfill requirements.
@@ThePrimeagen From how it sounds, you became the Go To Guy for Groovy, which makes a bottleneck. Knowledge sharing is a big deal where I work, so the whole project doesn't stall if someone becomes sick/on holiday/leaves.
I've realized over the years that being open and honest in situations like that can really turn things around. Though painful, they are certainly growth opportunities both professionally and individually. Great story!
I was in a situation like this and yes being honest and professional is important. As a junior engineer I was still emotionally immature from a pretty traumatic upbringing and my communication skills were severely lacking. I was working at Facebook as an E4 in 2017. This really cool idea that I and other people on my team (Web Speed) had been thinking about came up. It was basically OpenTelemetry's "Zones.js" concept but with reference counting added on top to be able to automatically track how long an interaction takes. I don't really know how the implementation of the project started, all I know is one of my senior coworkers dropped out of the project so I was asked to take it.... Boy oh boy there was a a reason that other engineer dropped out. I should have asked. Basically, the other junior engineer on the project was writing extremely complicated code which he covered in dozens of tests which made it very hard to say to him "Hey are you sure this needs to be this complex". Anyways, a week into the project I'm trying to use his prototype and it's not working.... he tells me I must be using it wrong... I spend a whole week digging into the convoluted logic and after a week I tell him "Hey I thinks there's something missing here", to which he replies "Oh yeah, I accidentally deleted a line before committing".... Facepalm. Needless to say the relationship was extremely passive aggressive from then on. A year later he gives up on the project, I take over his side and in two weeks I figure out he made a fundamentally bad assumption in the very first PR of this whole project, which my teammate approved right before leaving the project. Anyways a week or two after that I made a bug while changing some part of the system it was a minor bug but significantly impacted performance metrics for a particular team. After that all goodwill with customers was lost because the project had been out for over a year and still wasn't stable. The hard part is that most of the blame was put on me because it was clear I was being passive aggressive toward him. I never told anyone about the 1 week thing because I thought it would be "snitching" and wouldn't really get me anywhere. As a result it looked like I was "the problem" with why the project wasn't succeeding. Sure I was part of the problem, but I wasn't the whole problem. Who thought putting two junior engineers fresh out of college on a complex project would be a good idea? The more annoying part for me though is that the project finally did work at the end but never got to see the light of day.... and I ended up rejoining Facebook a few years later and there's a team literally with their own project similar to what I was working on.
Something definitely changed for me when I went through a little burnout in a previous team and it's maybe because i saw it happening in parallel with someone else. I realised that the people I work with are humans and for the most part care about me a lot more than the company I work for to whom i'm mostly just a number or statistic. That's perhaps a bit pessimistic but I always need to remind people to look after themselves because the company isn't gonna do it for you.
A couple of years ago, I was in a situation where I got the chance to affect change, and took it, and it wasn't even for my team. We have this C++ project (that I'm not part of) that was stuck at using C++98, because the project lead refused to upgrade for "compatability reasons". Everyone who knows C++ knows that this is a dog water tier argument, because unrelenting backwards compat is the bane of C++ nowadays. Now, they ran into so many problems that would have been so incredibly easy to solve with modern C++. One example, where I also helped someone on the project out, was that they needed to be able to remove arguments from an array, and it needed to be done as efficiently as possible, because it was a super tight bottle neck, so him and me implemented the erase-remove idiom by hand, since we didn't have modern STL to help us. Now, my coworkers aren't 'computer scientists' or otherwise 'profesionally learned programmers / software enginneers'. They're scientists, and they just want to get the work done. When I learned of the situation of that team, for weeks I spoke up for and to them, encouraged them to push their project lead to at least upgrade to C++14, told them why that would be a good decision... and they did it. It was still quite the battle, apparently, and I don't know if they even used any of my arguments, but they did it.
That was some real good piece of advice that I had thought similarly of multiple times the last year but did not had the perfect wording/condition to try to put out there. Thanks for putting it out there 👍
Really appreciate the honest reflection of professional failures and struggles for everyone to see and learn from. You're a damn good egg, sir. Also, "I took down production a few times and it was fun" I can only assume will be a forthcoming "Storytime with Prime" video.
I truly sympathies. I too went through something very similar, but my boss didn't want to know. He was such a crap, back stabbing, scheming idiot that I left. I was so motived that I started my own business in an unrelated field. I can now work on what I want, when i want. I now code, not for a job or a boss, but for pure pleasure - it is the ultimate gift for which I'm eternally thankful.
At a similar crossroads right now. All these tech courses, videos, articles, docs etc... None of them teach or cover the people side about being in the industry. So am grateful for some perspective here, and have really taken something away from this. Thanks
this SERIOUSLY is a great video mr. primeagen. i feel like i got so many parallels to your earlier career, e.g. doing open source, invest tons of personal time to try to make cool stuff happen, but also have a non coding manager and really hate it sometimes...really good tips and it takes serious work to learn and internalize those emotional lessons
It does take quite some time. The hard part is recognizing where you fail. I definitely felt. At first I was 100% in the right and everything else was wrong, but looking back there are always things that could have done better
@@ThePrimeagen Except you did not fail. I _always_ choose B. I also never ask for raise. Here's my point: my manager makes 2x the money of an engineer, there's no problem with that, until he or she works for it, so he or she should have been recognize the situation. How? Talking with people. They don't tell him/her things? Why your co-worker told to *you* what is his problem, and not to your manager? He was afraid to tell it to his manager? Hm. Also, you're right, if you're a senior developer (as me, 32yoe, omg) you just can't close your eyes and turn your head to the opposite direction. But this is only true for technical questions (I have a method for handling these situations: 1xA, 1xAlert). For "human-related" situations, my manager have to detect and manage(!) shit. If he/she feels that the situation is not shit but deep shit, which he/she can't handle, he/she might ask help from... wait for it... it will be funny... wait for it.... from HR! Let me (senior, 32yoe, fck) deal with fucking product and technical issues, I have fucking enough of them, let me teach and mentor juniors, and don't bother me with things which have a complete department for. HR workers don't write unit tests for me, lemme' not dealing with their stuff, I don't want (and I am not able, being slightly autistic, who can't recognize other's feelings too well, okay, it's my problem). Everyone should do his or her job. You haven't failed, it wasn't your job. Probably, you'd escalate it to your manager or HR.
This is gold, Thank you so much Michael por having the strengh of telling us how you feel, and how we could improve as well in our own jobs. God Bless you my friend!
I just recently quit for another company after years of bringing up the same issues with no resolution. I should have quit a long time ago. It's important to recognize your own shortcomings, but it's also important to recognize when you need some kind of change for yourself.
I don’t remember who originally said it but “You have two choices. Change your job, or change your job.” Meaning, you can try to work with your company to make your job better, or you can go somewhere for a better job. It’s often suggested to try to do the first as it’s typically lower risk. But after that fails the second is always a backup plan. One last reminder. Every job has sucky parts.
Been going through some of this at my job and spending time with the people on my team having the hard, sometimes uncomfortable conversations is the thing that turns it around for everyone. As tech focused individuals most take solace in the tech side but the people side can be really rewarding too :)
Just came across your channel today bro 👍🏻 I myself had a decade of experience under my belt and still felt like I struggled. Here 2 years later I’m still struggling BUT I’m able to build huge projects like a social media. I love your take on programming and I now have to consume all your content. Your awesome dude 👍🏻
I was a hands on manager of a cloud infra devops team at philip morris until all the burocracy, architects "Security" people (no actual security skills), pointless IT controls burnt me out. I barely was sleeping, I was sleep talking and fighting with them in my dreams, it was quite bad. I decided to step down to a full time devops engineer, which is what I enjoy, and I was lucky a friend of mine step up to the manager position shielding the rest of us from all that crap. I didnt quit per-se, but I kinda did, however now I do full time what I like with almost none of the torture of having to deal with those other areas.
I had one of the most skilled members of my team confide in me that they were in a situation where they were serious unhappy in their role and actively in talks with another company. I pretty much pivoted my plans for the next couple weeks to meet with them regularly to see if there was something we could do to change the dynamic in our department or create a new role that would excite him. I was not his boss and couldn't make any executive calls, but out of our discussions came some ideas that he did eventually take to his manager, who was very eager to make it work. I believe that if we didn't have all of those discussions he wouldn't have brought anything up with his boss besides giving notice.
This time, for the first time I took a middle ground instead of immediately leaving the company. I just left the team and move to another one within the company, stuff improve immediately.
I walked away from being a high school teacher because I did not know how to ask for help from my supervisors. I let those toxic feelings swell until I snapped. If I could do it over, I would have spoken to the principal and told him where, how I was struggling. It was a great lesson to lean into the support systems intrinsic to healthy hierarchical relationships.
Poppa Jeff saved me a couple times at Netflix too. And I remember that time at Netflix when you were working/arguing about Falcor. We had adjoining cube walls! Great story Prime, thanks for sharing it.
I had a similar experience at my second job. I had an extremely senior teammate who was an excellent teacher and valuable resource, but the client we were working for was toxic. I could not see how good of a situation it was and ended up running away from it. I regret that.
It's so hard these things. Especially when you're young. I'm happy I went through this experience because it has changed me. But it took a couple years to really settle in.
"i greatly dislike non-coding architects" - man, you are talking about my work life... 😅 I have met some many of those. Fortunately, i lately work with some that do code.
Great story, although somewhat of a counter-point, I tried choice A and it just caused me greater and greater grief. I'm proud that I didn't take the easy way out, but my moment of clarity that the situation would not be resolved until it was somebody else's problem to endure and clean up after could have come sooner. Ultimately the refusal to deal with the issue contributed significantly to the ultimate downfall of the entire company in question, since by the time I was gone, the rot was entrenched, and most others who were exposed to it after I was gone packed up and left quickly. I did do everything I could though, so I have less regrets having stayed than I would had I left immediately. We can't fix everything, but we can choose to walk away knowing we at least tried.
That's pretty awesome. Ultimately the same thing happened to the individual team. It was broken up and the products were no longer offered. Sometimes there's nothing you can do
I'm in a very similar situation right now. Leaning towards option B, jumping ship. I relate to the feeling you describe of "probably could have done more, earlier" before reaching this point. I have tried to address the issues, but my manager and I are not at all communicating on the same wavelength. Talking past each other, pretty much. So here I stand with an attractive offer in hand, but at the same time questioning whether it was equivocation my part that led me here. Oh well, we will never know...
Great, relatable story that has earned you a sub :). Out of prolonged frustration and anger, we all too often tend to pick option B without considering option A for a second. Easier said than done, and this video definitely comes as a great reminder to all of us :)
being a software architect without writing code urself was a huge part of my degree. It was only in the end when we got more and more into actually programming the stuff that we were designing that I realized, that they were teaching us, that being a software architect that doesn't write code, just simply does not work. It only works on a very abstract level. Once someone defines classes, interfaces, properties, types and so on, that's where it just stops working, because there will be at least 1 logical inconsistency that breaks the entire house of cards
Just had that moment where I was fired and no one stood up for me. This was coming after putting in so much work on the team I was with I was cut out like an outcast Yea I've been there
Great advice and a really touching, humble self reflection. The while industry, to say nothing of all of business,, could do well to heed this advice. I’d like to point out another, though even more difficult path: organizing. If the culture in management specifically sucks-and frankly MBA-style management almost uniformly does-a union can get the goods.
I greatly appreciate this story. Been having similar feelings at my job. It's my first job as a software engineer I'm about 2 years in. Still soul searching to see what i want to do
Very interesting perspective! As someone who just started their career, I don't feel like I completely understand but when you mentioned the two options that made a lot of sense. That advice to see if you can fix the situation before leaving is great for other things in life too (sport teams, relationships, etc).
Sounds like the reason I quit my first long-term tech job. Over five years I gradually became the senior-most engineer there (YOE at the company, not in the industry), and wound up spending two years without a single day off (including weekends and holidays). Couldn't deal with it anymore, didn't learn to say "no," and eventually I just noped out. It didn't help that I was the guy who had to pull creds through a few rounds of layoffs (which is super emotional!), or that the C-suite kept changing every few months, or that we were dealing with a lot of legacy code from the early startup days. In retrospect I wish I could've had more time to prepare my team, but I did at least spend about a month just documenting the architecture (since I was the one who designed a lot of it).
Thanks for an inspiring story. This pretty much sums up the importance of emotional intelligence in the workplace (which is not easy to acquire) and also the value of (honest) self-reflection. Often our work is not just coding or working with peers, but also just simply 'being there' and having supportive conversations during tough times in a project. The best managers are attentive to these issues, and manage it well (= good outcomes).
I came to my big company job with a lot of ego having pretty much controlled and designed everything in my previous job for a decade. It's crushing to find yourself in a dysfunctional team with out of touch leaders and know that you're working your ass off to make something worse. But these companies are big and one team is not like another, and as software people we have the luxury often to request a transfer. So if it's been a few months and that's how you're feeling, you gotta ask to move and don't let a middle management person convince you to stay "because things are just about to get better" as that's how you get angry and mad and feel trapped. There aren't many other jobs that have to make efforts to please their employees when they are thinking of leaving, we have precious mobility and bargaining power. But we're also an industry filled with meek individuals that dislike conflict, suck at demanding compensation for OT, and often do a bad job of looking out for each other. Remember senior engineers, any bs you're willing to put up with for your paycheck is bs * 2 your juniors have to put up with for less, because if you can't say something they have no ground to stand on. We're in this because we love programming and the world needs programmers. Honestly we work best when we have some autonomy to execute the businesses needs, we deserve a little ego for being able to do it, and we need to stay a mile away from consultant types that don't write code or don't get business goals accomplished. You can't design if you don't use the code you're designing. whew what a rant, hits a nerve lol
Having only seen you on FM and twitter, I was very pleasantly surprised by the seriousness, honesty and transparency in this video. Thank you for sharing. GREAT advice for us who aren't working in big tech but dealing with the same issues.
Thanks for sharing. Recently found your channel and loving it. Thanks for mentioning the time about a former coworker. I had a coworker commit suicide while at work. I had no idea he was struggling. It’s important to prioritize people and relationships over projects and deadlines. I would like to find or start a company that lives these values.
I have had a similar phase of feeling so bad from a project. I tried to reach out, but everyone just agrees and says "daamn that sucks" (they do care about me, but can't do anything but listen which is kinda nice). And the boss is just there to give the sweetest talk that works like a painkiller for every line of code that hurt you, so she is not a solution obviously. I said this is enough time to leave. But guess what I couldn't because i was just ~1 year of experience. So I had to learn in the hard way that nothing is forever, especially problems. Everyone went smooth overtime and just silencing my feelings for a better time. I am glad that I didn't get out at that time, since I have learnt a lot from bad times. Ultimately, I have left that shitshow after ~10 months the moment it became actually toxic, to a job with the experience I need and the culture I wanted to experience. I discovered your channel a weak ago, and sir you are great! Your stories and your takes are actually inspiring and I have learnt from them.
Big, small, medium size really doesn't matter here when it comes to team environment. You feel what you feel while being in a job because of the people you interact with daily, your direct reporting manager or your colleagues not the entire company. And it's very good advice to spread to communicate more and talk about your issues. If things aren't working still, you atleast don't have the regret that you didn't try to make it better.
Had a similar situation at my last company and also ended up quitting -- communication is important, lesson learned lol. We were a small team at a mid-sized startup (startup/company? not sure it was exactly a startup) working on some issues that didn't have much influence for the project, and it definitely made me and the team feel almost useless -- I ended up getting a better offer at a different company, another person took a year hiatus and the team was eventually reworked. If i had spoken up and voiced concerns I probably could've helped the changes get in faster and ultimately the team could've worked on something more influential for everyone
I got baited by the title but this was a really good video. I speak up more nowadays too when something bothers me and I try to be more proactive. People can’t know something bothers you unless you talk to them.
Such a fact, Eddy. What I end up finding is that if I don't speak up, I end up blowing up. I communicate in a rough tone to someone who doesn't deserve it.
Groovy! "Actual dog water" hahaha! Oh man I feel you, I started at a place that used Groovy on the backend and went through the trauma of using it for over a year before I convinced my managers to let me do a rewrite. Good times!
I'm in this kind of situation, already tried to help the team and say that things are bad but no changes happened at all, so I started to apply everywhere.
In my opinion, don't just be open about how things are bad technically, if toxicity and saying shit behind everyone's back is something that is happening. Try to improve the team mood somehow and say out loud that this toxicity is affecting not just you, but everyone even if they don't notice it. If still, things don't improve, do leave for your own sake. Boa sorte, mano!
Great consideration, but for anyone out there DO NOT linger on plan A. You should try and help defuse any toxicity, basically because it will get to you eventually. And if you can't see it improving, and no support from bosses or worst yet, co-workers, LEAVE your team or even the company or YOU WILL BURN OUT. Do not think you alone have the power to fix every problem that leads to the toxicity of your team. Sometimes is a colleague or a boss who you cannot do anything about them and the solution would be having them out of the team, which is often out of your grasp. Crappy code, dumb decisions, bad management... These are usually tolerable, but toxicity creeps up without you noticing it and fucks up your life, not just your job. Don't waste so much time trying to fix it.
Hey man. I also quit the Netflix Product Team as a designer a couple years ago. Had to quit when I felt I crossed the line between getting paid for my work versus selling my soul for a paycheck. The pivots on the product teams were absolutely non-sensical and felt absolutely political- as well I did not feel heard by manager at all. I'm really happy to hear someone with your talents landed in EduTech. Congrats :)
I think your hitting the key points that us devs don't have enough which is communication from both side of the fence, listen to others opening up and articulating subjective questions that engage our bosses to critically think is this environment good for my fellow teammates and act on it.
In my experience, whenever you are in a crappy situation as you describe, bosses rarely will do anything, and worse, they may maneuver to put the blame in you when sh!t hits the fan. Almost all the time, you are better off just leaving.
Option A can also be dangerous, you can get too deep into trying to make things better in a context/environment where you never really stood a chance and it gets hard to understand when it's time to give up. Definitely not a fresh scar, a friend told me this :D :D
Thank you for your story. I think that gives the idea to talk to my boss in our next 1-on-1 about how I have been feeling, and what we can do to make me feel more excited.
This is so interesting. I am at that point now. I have actually already tried reaching out to my managers with some varying success. I don't want to quit because most of the work my team does is so gratifying. Its just this one thing that REALLY grinds my gears.
I feel really connected to what you've said and I'm dealing with a similar situation at my current position. My bosses don't pay attention to the way things are made, they push features like they're free doughnuts and don't listen to feedback from the team. Any advice?
@@ThePrimeagen if it's a contract thing and moving teams ain't really a possibility for now, should I try and improve things or just invest the time on good learning for myself? I want to contribute but it feels like they're just coming to clock in the hours
@@d_6963 exactly. by leaving it'll hopefully send them a message in the future. bad workplaces in effect work kind of like the free market (when you're at op's salary). If the company mistreats or overburdens workers and they leave, they'll either change their working environment or they'll forever have to settle with less talented/inefficient employees as that's the only people they'll retain.
Only advice (apart from leaving, which you should strongly consider) is when you're asked to do XYZ by next week go "no problem boss" then give them a few sheets of paper of your responsibilities/tasks you're currently working on and say "which 20 of these things would you like me to put on hold while I make this new feature of yours?". If they refuse to play ball and tell you to just add it on top then you hand in your notice the next day.
Awesome content as usual! You're one of the few talking about this subject in a self-reflective way and focusing mostly on how you could have done things better given those circumstances. This is the kind of advice people need to hear. Subscribed!
Thanks for sharing your experience. I hear people focus on B far more than on A, and A is the critical first step. I've definitely left teams instead of having conversations, and I regret those times. I've found that far more people are open and wanting conversations and feedback than I thought when I was younger.
I hear you man ! I had a similar experience where a great architect designed a really great system in theory however, in practice it did not scale and was nightmare to code and manage.
I really felt this video. Back in 2014 one of the best places I ever worked had a bad situation with a team I was part of. During my time at the place a few situations came up that I really wasn't mature enough to handle the way they should have been handled. It got to be too stressful and so I left. Likewise, they made a real effort to get me back and set me up better. I regret not taking them up on the 2nd offer from time to time, but that's a different story.
I appreciate you sharing this as it has inspired me to continue down the path I'm on currently. I recently got laid off from a company that espoused all of the good ways of working that Netflix pioneered. The layoff happened because of tough economic pressures, but for me it was an eye-opening year and a half of seeing what truly world-class software development can look like at a company that actually cares about it's people. On the other side of that, I've landed on a team wants to live up to the same ideals but is so junior and isolated from the rest of the development world that they have no idea how to go about it. I feel like the closest thing they have to a SR dev, even though I was only barely growing past a mid-level developer at my last place. I have been doing my best to teach good software development practices and agile dynamics, but was getting discouraged at the odd mix of excitement and friction that was coming from management. I almost let the friction get the better of me, and decided to start looking for another job, but after listening to your story, I think I am correct in my initial course of action to try and be the lynchpin for this team's growth. It may not work out, the friction may well turn out to be more than I can handle, but if I just moved on without trying to affect change here, I would probably regret it for the rest of my career.
as a customer, i ve quit netflix because the original catalogue melted awat... you have no garantee that you ll be able to watch the xx movie tomorrow that you can watch today. and the home creations are for braindead.
Strangely, as I get older, I feel like these situations are like relationships. You kinda have a lot of abundance and opportunities in the wild (a lot of girls and job posts in the tech world) so you get a "fuck it, gonna find something better elsewhere" but later you realize that great things are actually built, not found (altough you may get very luck, who knows? but remember, everything is amazing in the beginning...)
In any situation, you can, in order, 1. Deal/live with it, 2. Fix it, & 3. Leave it. If you can't live with it & the next step is to walk away anyways, might as well try anything you can (within reason) to fix it. If fixing it isn't sufficient or doesn’t work, then you did what you could, & your choice to walk away is clear. And you can do that with a clean conscience.
I used to work at Crowdstrike. I was on a team trying to help migrate the CI/CD pipelines from Bamboo to Jenkins. One of the senior devs called groovy a "anti-pattern" as it was used in Jenkins. Three years later I now fully agree with him, but at the time the statement took me by surprise and I didn't believe it. Listen to your coworkers folks!
Thanks for sharing. Good luck going forward! Let's make everyone uber Rust programmers now (i understand the borrow checker to an extent now), ready for your stream. edit: lol, busted. good one
I got my first tech job at the help desk. First two months was a steady growth, but i don't tend to be a good speaker so after that realisation things started spiraling down fast af. It really hurts but i have a good connection to them, we looked into me doing other work for them as a side hustle but my heart tells me that maybe it's time for me to start a business instead. I can still technically work for them but i get a piece of mind pursuing my own thing which is one of the most important things you could ever have.
I'm right in the middle of this situation and about to change my mind to choose option A where I wanted to choose option B at first. The algorithms brought me here at the right time.
I recently left a Help Desk position after trying many times to have conversations around work load and understanding "why we do what we do" but it always felt like it fell on deaf ears/the managers had no motivation to understand the technicians side. Since I left they decided to hire more people and yeah...I never thought more people was the problem, it was the lack of trying to remove work and think a little deeper about the jb and how it could improve. Instead we were simply work horses doing the "dumb work" I wanted to automate away. Young professional but I resonate with your regrets and opinions on this. I could have done a better job as well in presenting possible solutions but I guess at a young age assumed management would fill the gap and understand where I was coming from. No such luck
@@ThePrimeagen I think I am noticing this as well with the help of mentors in my life (including you). The world and people are complex and you only have your point of view, but I can at least get better at illustrating that point of view so it applies to the goals of others (understanding managers goals, dev team goals, etc...)
Learning to communicate with your supervisor the good and bad of the job is one of the toughest skills to overcome if you don't like the feeling of conflict. Through growing frustrations of a job, I decided to abandon the team for a new job instead of work with my supervisor to inform them of the situation. One thing leads/supervisors are supposed to do are solve challenging roadblocks, enabling the team to advance forward. Whether that is technical in nature or personnel, it's their job to ensure success by providing tools, people, processes, and technical guidance and remove external influences hindering the team. So, provide that feedback with possible corrective actions for your supervisor to take. Help them make the decision by laying out the problem, the needs, and even the wants, with finish with a few options you've thought about.
Yeah, anywhere that's asking me to work more than 35-40 hours a week is a no-no. You Americans need to stop accepting this as the status quo. Also, not saying you do Prime, but those people who glorify working stupid hours and wearing it as a badge of honour, please just stop.
Been there. But it feels easier to leave instead trying to change the world, you know. Especially in a big corporate environments where most of people (including devs) are just parts of the machine. But it's definitely a good idea to try to speak up and raise awareness about any toxic situation. In practice though, I don't think it's worth. There are plenty of jobs and amazing team out there, no point to hold on for some situations for too long.
I'm like 7 months late here, but would really like to either hear some more thoughts from you on "non-coding architects". My current job is this extremely weird mashup of highly technical proprietary platform development and customer scoping/interaction. The biggest frustration I see in the industry is total lack of effective communication, especially around logistics like time zones.
When the system fails us, it also teaches us that we failed it. In a world where obedience, rather than emotional intelligence is taught in schools, where bosses shame you for not sacrificing your well being to ship their product, where reasonable personal boundaries are considered grounds for firing, you did not fail. You did the best with what you had in a system that burned you out. And you made a survival decision. Now that you have survived, you were able to look back, with fresh eyes, on ways you can improve in the future, and you are sharing that with the world. You succeeded!
"Non coding software architect" is an oxymoron. I had my deal with "architects" like that and it's a one ridiculous experience after other. If there are any managers reading this: Please don't hire any software architects. Either let the devs to make their own decisions or promote one of the devs but make sure they stay a hands on part of the team. Trust me I became one of these architects for a bit and within 2 months I got disconnected with reality and started having some super opinionated genius ideas just to make my staff miserable. Hands on or shut up!
I'm in a similar situation.. but it's the monetary issues that are leading to me moving on rather than continuing to attempt to make an impacting change.
Man, this reminds me of the time when I was just starting to work as a freelancer but couldn’t support myself full time yet so I was working as a cook part time. My boss asked me how I felt about the new chef, and I was only there a few days a week so I just said he was ok, and then launched a big ass can of tomato sauce at the dude later that night. That’s the story of how I became a full time developer 😊
Had quite a few jobs where I was trying to put in a lot of work to improve the situation, which ultimatelly lead my ass to total burnout. But, very sound advice. Just need to know when to do what and when to stop 👍
Your timing on relevant videos to my career is scary. (While likely just a perceived issue), I can feel myself unravelling in my discipline, likely burnout, and I haven't adopted great coping methods. I feel it in my work and interactions. I have a great video and super understanding team, but I feel like I'm letting them and myself down. (I'm typing this between coding sessions).
I had similar situation, looking back at my experience I think that there was no way I could have do it differently, I just think we do not have the tools to understand while it is unfolding. The only way to really go through is after it happened and you had the time to reflect on it. At least, this is my experience ...
I must not have made it clear enough, but Papa Jeff Wagner brought me back into Netflix after I left. I am still at Netflix, just in case there's any questions. But I certainly did quit, but it's good to be here.
Yes, I just liked my own comment
Sooo, at the moment you aren’t in Netflix?
@@ThePrimeagen narcissism at it's finest 😂
I just saw it as clickbait. It's cool, everyone does it, gotta beat the algo
@@akbarnurullaev7918 I am at Netflix. I said there, which I probably should have emphasized a lot more, that. Jeff Wagner, a previous boss and the man who hired me originally, made me an offer to stay.
"I took down the production a few times" actual true definition of fun job for dev
I have enjoyed taking down production.
@@ThePrimeagen 😁 you were having fun with production code right?
Testing is a waste of time, when you can more efficiently get immediate, detailed, angry feedback from your users.
Let's face it, if you haven't brought PROD down then you're not a real dev.
Scary at first? No doubt, but then it becomes an achievement.
It's surprising to hear even a big company like Netflix are letting staff become so overburdened. Even my small company realises that you can't put too much on 1 person or team. Hire more people, cut features or lengthen deadlines.
This did take place quite a few years ago. But there's always time and places when things become difficult. This just became difficult and then stayed difficult
I work at a fortune 100 company and its exactly like this, w/the turnover that goes with it. The 'big company' is just an aggregate up of small departments/divisions that have their own budgets that usually doesn't go far enough. AND you have to comply w/the non-coding architects' mandates.
If you’ve ever worked in a big corporation, you’d know they’re really inefficient. They have the budget to throw money at it. They hire people to create the idea, standards and training of a new project and none of those new hires have any clue about ABC and why XYZ won’t work but they have degrees that say they do.
@Veronika Zaglotova Yes, it depends on multiple project factors. How long to go? How many seniors are on board? How at capacity are they? Are you training people who are experienced? If you had one senior and they were overloaded along with the rest of the team, something has to give.
The short term managerial solution is to push the senior and reward them with oodles more compensation... but for the wellbeing of all, extra time needs to be allocated, either/both for training new staff or just giving more time to existing staff to fulfill requirements.
@@ThePrimeagen From how it sounds, you became the Go To Guy for Groovy, which makes a bottleneck. Knowledge sharing is a big deal where I work, so the whole project doesn't stall if someone becomes sick/on holiday/leaves.
I really appreciate this.
I'm on the verge of putting in my two weeks at my current position and this brought some great insight.
I'm happy this could happen.
@@ThePrimeagen I'm happy you happened
Same here. After three years at any job I get bored and know it's time for a move. I've never regretted the decision in the end.
Not just clickbait anymore
I've realized over the years that being open and honest in situations like that can really turn things around. Though painful, they are certainly growth opportunities both professionally and individually. Great story!
Thank you. I totally agree
I was in a situation like this and yes being honest and professional is important. As a junior engineer I was still emotionally immature from a pretty traumatic upbringing and my communication skills were severely lacking.
I was working at Facebook as an E4 in 2017. This really cool idea that I and other people on my team (Web Speed) had been thinking about came up. It was basically OpenTelemetry's "Zones.js" concept but with reference counting added on top to be able to automatically track how long an interaction takes. I don't really know how the implementation of the project started, all I know is one of my senior coworkers dropped out of the project so I was asked to take it.... Boy oh boy there was a a reason that other engineer dropped out. I should have asked. Basically, the other junior engineer on the project was writing extremely complicated code which he covered in dozens of tests which made it very hard to say to him "Hey are you sure this needs to be this complex". Anyways, a week into the project I'm trying to use his prototype and it's not working.... he tells me I must be using it wrong... I spend a whole week digging into the convoluted logic and after a week I tell him "Hey I thinks there's something missing here", to which he replies "Oh yeah, I accidentally deleted a line before committing".... Facepalm. Needless to say the relationship was extremely passive aggressive from then on. A year later he gives up on the project, I take over his side and in two weeks I figure out he made a fundamentally bad assumption in the very first PR of this whole project, which my teammate approved right before leaving the project. Anyways a week or two after that I made a bug while changing some part of the system it was a minor bug but significantly impacted performance metrics for a particular team. After that all goodwill with customers was lost because the project had been out for over a year and still wasn't stable. The hard part is that most of the blame was put on me because it was clear I was being passive aggressive toward him. I never told anyone about the 1 week thing because I thought it would be "snitching" and wouldn't really get me anywhere. As a result it looked like I was "the problem" with why the project wasn't succeeding. Sure I was part of the problem, but I wasn't the whole problem. Who thought putting two junior engineers fresh out of college on a complex project would be a good idea? The more annoying part for me though is that the project finally did work at the end but never got to see the light of day.... and I ended up rejoining Facebook a few years later and there's a team literally with their own project similar to what I was working on.
Something definitely changed for me when I went through a little burnout in a previous team and it's maybe because i saw it happening in parallel with someone else. I realised that the people I work with are humans and for the most part care about me a lot more than the company I work for to whom i'm mostly just a number or statistic. That's perhaps a bit pessimistic but I always need to remind people to look after themselves because the company isn't gonna do it for you.
A couple of years ago, I was in a situation where I got the chance to affect change, and took it, and it wasn't even for my team. We have this C++ project (that I'm not part of) that was stuck at using C++98, because the project lead refused to upgrade for "compatability reasons". Everyone who knows C++ knows that this is a dog water tier argument, because unrelenting backwards compat is the bane of C++ nowadays.
Now, they ran into so many problems that would have been so incredibly easy to solve with modern C++. One example, where I also helped someone on the project out, was that they needed to be able to remove arguments from an array, and it needed to be done as efficiently as possible, because it was a super tight bottle neck, so him and me implemented the erase-remove idiom by hand, since we didn't have modern STL to help us.
Now, my coworkers aren't 'computer scientists' or otherwise 'profesionally learned programmers / software enginneers'. They're scientists, and they just want to get the work done. When I learned of the situation of that team, for weeks I spoke up for and to them, encouraged them to push their project lead to at least upgrade to C++14, told them why that would be a good decision... and they did it. It was still quite the battle, apparently, and I don't know if they even used any of my arguments, but they did it.
Hey, that's pretty cool. Thanks for sharing
Cool story, Tommy. How much did performance improve after implementation?
He is too busy upgrading to C++ 20...
That was some real good piece of advice that I had thought similarly of multiple times the last year but did not had the perfect wording/condition to try to put out there. Thanks for putting it out there 👍
Hey thank you.
I think this kind of advice is priceless for all the junior engineers out there. Thank you Prime for sharing your experience!
Yaya!
Really appreciate the honest reflection of professional failures and struggles for everyone to see and learn from. You're a damn good egg, sir. Also, "I took down production a few times and it was fun" I can only assume will be a forthcoming "Storytime with Prime" video.
There may or may not be. I'm always a bit hesitant sharing details of how I took down production.
@@ThePrimeagenstill hesitant now, Mister? 😏
I truly sympathies. I too went through something very similar, but my boss didn't want to know. He was such a crap, back stabbing, scheming idiot that I left. I was so motived that I started my own business in an unrelated field. I can now work on what I want, when i want. I now code, not for a job or a boss, but for pure pleasure - it is the ultimate gift for which I'm eternally thankful.
Aww that’s awesome I’m happy for you :)
what business did you do?
@@javier.alvarez764 I started a property business and a quantitative trading business.
At a similar crossroads right now. All these tech courses, videos, articles, docs etc... None of them teach or cover the people side about being in the industry. So am grateful for some perspective here, and have really taken something away from this. Thanks
this SERIOUSLY is a great video mr. primeagen. i feel like i got so many parallels to your earlier career, e.g. doing open source, invest tons of personal time to try to make cool stuff happen, but also have a non coding manager and really hate it sometimes...really good tips and it takes serious work to learn and internalize those emotional lessons
It does take quite some time. The hard part is recognizing where you fail. I definitely felt. At first I was 100% in the right and everything else was wrong, but looking back there are always things that could have done better
@@ThePrimeagen Except you did not fail. I _always_ choose B. I also never ask for raise. Here's my point: my manager makes 2x the money of an engineer, there's no problem with that, until he or she works for it, so he or she should have been recognize the situation. How? Talking with people. They don't tell him/her things? Why your co-worker told to *you* what is his problem, and not to your manager? He was afraid to tell it to his manager? Hm.
Also, you're right, if you're a senior developer (as me, 32yoe, omg) you just can't close your eyes and turn your head to the opposite direction. But this is only true for technical questions (I have a method for handling these situations: 1xA, 1xAlert). For "human-related" situations, my manager have to detect and manage(!) shit. If he/she feels that the situation is not shit but deep shit, which he/she can't handle, he/she might ask help from... wait for it... it will be funny... wait for it.... from HR!
Let me (senior, 32yoe, fck) deal with fucking product and technical issues, I have fucking enough of them, let me teach and mentor juniors, and don't bother me with things which have a complete department for. HR workers don't write unit tests for me, lemme' not dealing with their stuff, I don't want (and I am not able, being slightly autistic, who can't recognize other's feelings too well, okay, it's my problem). Everyone should do his or her job.
You haven't failed, it wasn't your job. Probably, you'd escalate it to your manager or HR.
This is gold, Thank you so much Michael por having the strengh of telling us how you feel, and how we could improve as well in our own jobs. God Bless you my friend!
Thank you. Also the name is prime. Who's this Michael fella?
I just recently quit for another company after years of bringing up the same issues with no resolution. I should have quit a long time ago. It's important to recognize your own shortcomings, but it's also important to recognize when you need some kind of change for yourself.
I don’t remember who originally said it but “You have two choices. Change your job, or change your job.” Meaning, you can try to work with your company to make your job better, or you can go somewhere for a better job. It’s often suggested to try to do the first as it’s typically lower risk. But after that fails the second is always a backup plan. One last reminder. Every job has sucky parts.
Been going through some of this at my job and spending time with the people on my team having the hard, sometimes uncomfortable conversations is the thing that turns it around for everyone. As tech focused individuals most take solace in the tech side but the people side can be really rewarding too :)
Just came across your channel today bro 👍🏻 I myself had a decade of experience under my belt and still felt like I struggled. Here 2 years later I’m still struggling BUT I’m able to build huge projects like a social media. I love your take on programming and I now have to consume all your content. Your awesome dude 👍🏻
I was a hands on manager of a cloud infra devops team at philip morris until all the burocracy, architects "Security" people (no actual security skills), pointless IT controls burnt me out. I barely was sleeping, I was sleep talking and fighting with them in my dreams, it was quite bad.
I decided to step down to a full time devops engineer, which is what I enjoy, and I was lucky a friend of mine step up to the manager position shielding the rest of us from all that crap.
I didnt quit per-se, but I kinda did, however now I do full time what I like with almost none of the torture of having to deal with those other areas.
dude! pretty much same!!!
I had one of the most skilled members of my team confide in me that they were in a situation where they were serious unhappy in their role and actively in talks with another company. I pretty much pivoted my plans for the next couple weeks to meet with them regularly to see if there was something we could do to change the dynamic in our department or create a new role that would excite him. I was not his boss and couldn't make any executive calls, but out of our discussions came some ideas that he did eventually take to his manager, who was very eager to make it work.
I believe that if we didn't have all of those discussions he wouldn't have brought anything up with his boss besides giving notice.
I wish I could have been that coworker
This time, for the first time I took a middle ground instead of immediately leaving the company.
I just left the team and move to another one within the company, stuff improve immediately.
I walked away from being a high school teacher because I did not know how to ask for help from my supervisors. I let those toxic feelings swell until I snapped. If I could do it over, I would have spoken to the principal and told him where, how I was struggling. It was a great lesson to lean into the support systems intrinsic to healthy hierarchical relationships.
Poppa Jeff saved me a couple times at Netflix too. And I remember that time at Netflix when you were working/arguing about Falcor. We had adjoining cube walls!
Great story Prime, thanks for sharing it.
I had a similar experience at my second job. I had an extremely senior teammate who was an excellent teacher and valuable resource, but the client we were working for was toxic. I could not see how good of a situation it was and ended up running away from it. I regret that.
It's so hard these things. Especially when you're young. I'm happy I went through this experience because it has changed me. But it took a couple years to really settle in.
"i greatly dislike non-coding architects" - man, you are talking about my work life... 😅
I have met some many of those. Fortunately, i lately work with some that do code.
Communication is everything, whether you’re an employee or manager, 90% of workplace problems can be avoided by better communication!!
Great to see some honest personal content out there that will likely resonate with most people working in a team.
:) ty
Great story, although somewhat of a counter-point, I tried choice A and it just caused me greater and greater grief. I'm proud that I didn't take the easy way out, but my moment of clarity that the situation would not be resolved until it was somebody else's problem to endure and clean up after could have come sooner.
Ultimately the refusal to deal with the issue contributed significantly to the ultimate downfall of the entire company in question, since by the time I was gone, the rot was entrenched, and most others who were exposed to it after I was gone packed up and left quickly.
I did do everything I could though, so I have less regrets having stayed than I would had I left immediately. We can't fix everything, but we can choose to walk away knowing we at least tried.
That's pretty awesome. Ultimately the same thing happened to the individual team. It was broken up and the products were no longer offered.
Sometimes there's nothing you can do
I'm in a very similar situation right now. Leaning towards option B, jumping ship. I relate to the feeling you describe of "probably could have done more, earlier" before reaching this point. I have tried to address the issues, but my manager and I are not at all communicating on the same wavelength. Talking past each other, pretty much. So here I stand with an attractive offer in hand, but at the same time questioning whether it was equivocation my part that led me here. Oh well, we will never know...
Some questions don't get answered on this side of eternity. But it is good you've tried to reach out. You have proven to be wiser than me
Great, relatable story that has earned you a sub :). Out of prolonged frustration and anger, we all too often tend to pick option B without considering option A for a second. Easier said than done, and this video definitely comes as a great reminder to all of us :)
being a software architect without writing code urself was a huge part of my degree. It was only in the end when we got more and more into actually programming the stuff that we were designing that I realized, that they were teaching us, that being a software architect that doesn't write code, just simply does not work. It only works on a very abstract level. Once someone defines classes, interfaces, properties, types and so on, that's where it just stops working, because there will be at least 1 logical inconsistency that breaks the entire house of cards
Just had that moment where I was fired and no one stood up for me.
This was coming after putting in so much work on the team I was with
I was cut out like an outcast
Yea I've been there
Great advice and a really touching, humble self reflection. The while industry, to say nothing of all of business,, could do well to heed this advice.
I’d like to point out another, though even more difficult path: organizing. If the culture in management specifically sucks-and frankly MBA-style management almost uniformly does-a union can get the goods.
Groovy huh, nothing like refactoring a project from legacy to legacy 😎
Ain't nothing like it.
I greatly appreciate this story. Been having similar feelings at my job. It's my first job as a software engineer I'm about 2 years in. Still soul searching to see what i want to do
Very interesting perspective! As someone who just started their career, I don't feel like I completely understand but when you mentioned the two options that made a lot of sense. That advice to see if you can fix the situation before leaving is great for other things in life too (sport teams, relationships, etc).
Sounds like the reason I quit my first long-term tech job. Over five years I gradually became the senior-most engineer there (YOE at the company, not in the industry), and wound up spending two years without a single day off (including weekends and holidays). Couldn't deal with it anymore, didn't learn to say "no," and eventually I just noped out. It didn't help that I was the guy who had to pull creds through a few rounds of layoffs (which is super emotional!), or that the C-suite kept changing every few months, or that we were dealing with a lot of legacy code from the early startup days. In retrospect I wish I could've had more time to prepare my team, but I did at least spend about a month just documenting the architecture (since I was the one who designed a lot of it).
Thanks for an inspiring story. This pretty much sums up the importance of emotional intelligence in the workplace (which is not easy to acquire) and also the value of (honest) self-reflection. Often our work is not just coding or working with peers, but also just simply 'being there' and having supportive conversations during tough times in a project. The best managers are attentive to these issues, and manage it well (= good outcomes).
I came to my big company job with a lot of ego having pretty much controlled and designed everything in my previous job for a decade. It's crushing to find yourself in a dysfunctional team with out of touch leaders and know that you're working your ass off to make something worse. But these companies are big and one team is not like another, and as software people we have the luxury often to request a transfer. So if it's been a few months and that's how you're feeling, you gotta ask to move and don't let a middle management person convince you to stay "because things are just about to get better" as that's how you get angry and mad and feel trapped.
There aren't many other jobs that have to make efforts to please their employees when they are thinking of leaving, we have precious mobility and bargaining power. But we're also an industry filled with meek individuals that dislike conflict, suck at demanding compensation for OT, and often do a bad job of looking out for each other. Remember senior engineers, any bs you're willing to put up with for your paycheck is bs * 2 your juniors have to put up with for less, because if you can't say something they have no ground to stand on.
We're in this because we love programming and the world needs programmers. Honestly we work best when we have some autonomy to execute the businesses needs, we deserve a little ego for being able to do it, and we need to stay a mile away from consultant types that don't write code or don't get business goals accomplished. You can't design if you don't use the code you're designing.
whew what a rant, hits a nerve lol
I get that. And this is all good stuff here. I am happy that ultimately I transfer teams. And from their life became way better.
Having only seen you on FM and twitter, I was very pleasantly surprised by the seriousness, honesty and transparency in this video. Thank you for sharing.
GREAT advice for us who aren't working in big tech but dealing with the same issues.
Thanks for sharing. Recently found your channel and loving it. Thanks for mentioning the time about a former coworker. I had a coworker commit suicide while at work. I had no idea he was struggling. It’s important to prioritize people and relationships over projects and deadlines. I would like to find or start a company that lives these values.
I have had a similar phase of feeling so bad from a project. I tried to reach out, but everyone just agrees and says "daamn that sucks" (they do care about me, but can't do anything but listen which is kinda nice). And the boss is just there to give the sweetest talk that works like a painkiller for every line of code that hurt you, so she is not a solution obviously.
I said this is enough time to leave. But guess what I couldn't because i was just ~1 year of experience. So I had to learn in the hard way that nothing is forever, especially problems. Everyone went smooth overtime and just silencing my feelings for a better time.
I am glad that I didn't get out at that time, since I have learnt a lot from bad times.
Ultimately, I have left that shitshow after ~10 months the moment it became actually toxic, to a job with the experience I need and the culture I wanted to experience.
I discovered your channel a weak ago, and sir you are great! Your stories and your takes are actually inspiring and I have learnt from them.
Big, small, medium size really doesn't matter here when it comes to team environment. You feel what you feel while being in a job because of the people you interact with daily, your direct reporting manager or your colleagues not the entire company. And it's very good advice to spread to communicate more and talk about your issues. If things aren't working still, you atleast don't have the regret that you didn't try to make it better.
yayayaya!
Feeling better after hearing this. I'm in a very similar situation and really don't know how to deal with it
Minimum be there for your coworkers. Whether you choose to leave or to stay, be an encouragement when you can.
Had a similar situation at my last company and also ended up quitting -- communication is important, lesson learned lol. We were a small team at a mid-sized startup (startup/company? not sure it was exactly a startup) working on some issues that didn't have much influence for the project, and it definitely made me and the team feel almost useless -- I ended up getting a better offer at a different company, another person took a year hiatus and the team was eventually reworked. If i had spoken up and voiced concerns I probably could've helped the changes get in faster and ultimately the team could've worked on something more influential for everyone
yeah, its always hard looking back. it feels like i just know so much better now :)
I got baited by the title but this was a really good video. I speak up more nowadays too when something bothers me and I try to be more proactive. People can’t know something bothers you unless you talk to them.
Such a fact, Eddy. What I end up finding is that if I don't speak up, I end up blowing up. I communicate in a rough tone to someone who doesn't deserve it.
Love these videos. As a junior who does not have a mentor, these videos are really a good source of guidance and experience for me.
Thanks prime
That's good to hear. I did not have this when I was younger, so I'm happy that you do
Part of growing up (or not). Kudos to you.
Groovy! "Actual dog water" hahaha! Oh man I feel you, I started at a place that used Groovy on the backend and went through the trauma of using it for over a year before I convinced my managers to let me do a rewrite. Good times!
I'm in this kind of situation, already tried to help the team and say that things are bad but no changes happened at all, so I started to apply everywhere.
In my opinion, don't just be open about how things are bad technically, if toxicity and saying shit behind everyone's back is something that is happening. Try to improve the team mood somehow and say out loud that this toxicity is affecting not just you, but everyone even if they don't notice it. If still, things don't improve, do leave for your own sake.
Boa sorte, mano!
Great consideration, but for anyone out there DO NOT linger on plan A. You should try and help defuse any toxicity, basically because it will get to you eventually. And if you can't see it improving, and no support from bosses or worst yet, co-workers, LEAVE your team or even the company or YOU WILL BURN OUT. Do not think you alone have the power to fix every problem that leads to the toxicity of your team. Sometimes is a colleague or a boss who you cannot do anything about them and the solution would be having them out of the team, which is often out of your grasp.
Crappy code, dumb decisions, bad management... These are usually tolerable, but toxicity creeps up without you noticing it and fucks up your life, not just your job. Don't waste so much time trying to fix it.
Me: Freddie Mercury had the best mustache...
Primeagen: Hold my coconut oil
I agree with you. I do have a beautiful mustache
I appreciated hearing you reflect on past choices and how you've become wiser. Good video, Prime.
Thank you
Hey man. I also quit the Netflix Product Team as a designer a couple years ago. Had to quit when I felt I crossed the line between getting paid for my work versus selling my soul for a paycheck. The pivots on the product teams were absolutely non-sensical and felt absolutely political- as well I did not feel heard by manager at all. I'm really happy to hear someone with your talents landed in EduTech. Congrats :)
Re: "I'm really happy to hear someone with your talents landed in EduTech." He got the offer with Coursera but went back to Netflix (see video).
I think your hitting the key points that us devs don't have enough which is communication from both side of the fence, listen to others opening up and articulating subjective questions that engage our bosses to critically think is this environment good for my fellow teammates and act on it.
In my experience, whenever you are in a crappy situation as you describe, bosses rarely will do anything, and worse, they may maneuver to put the blame in you when sh!t hits the fan. Almost all the time, you are better off just leaving.
Man I really needed to hear this today, Much appreciated!
Option A can also be dangerous, you can get too deep into trying to make things better in a context/environment where you never really stood a chance and it gets hard to understand when it's time to give up. Definitely not a fresh scar, a friend told me this :D :D
Yeah, even all these years later it's still resonates with me. It's hard to get over these things.
The stories of what did not go right or work out are so valuable. I'll carry this with me as I enter into the field. Thank you.
Thank you for your story. I think that gives the idea to talk to my boss in our next 1-on-1 about how I have been feeling, and what we can do to make me feel more excited.
This is so interesting. I am at that point now. I have actually already tried reaching out to my managers with some varying success.
I don't want to quit because most of the work my team does is so gratifying. Its just this one thing that REALLY grinds my gears.
I feel really connected to what you've said and I'm dealing with a similar situation at my current position. My bosses don't pay attention to the way things are made, they push features like they're free doughnuts and don't listen to feedback from the team. Any advice?
I just had to change teams. I quit Netflix, but then a friend of mine pulled me onto another team.
@@ThePrimeagen if it's a contract thing and moving teams ain't really a possibility for now, should I try and improve things or just invest the time on good learning for myself? I want to contribute but it feels like they're just coming to clock in the hours
@@d_6963 exactly. by leaving it'll hopefully send them a message in the future. bad workplaces in effect work kind of like the free market (when you're at op's salary). If the company mistreats or overburdens workers and they leave, they'll either change their working environment or they'll forever have to settle with less talented/inefficient employees as that's the only people they'll retain.
Only advice (apart from leaving, which you should strongly consider) is when you're asked to do XYZ by next week go "no problem boss" then give them a few sheets of paper of your responsibilities/tasks you're currently working on and say "which 20 of these things would you like me to put on hold while I make this new feature of yours?". If they refuse to play ball and tell you to just add it on top then you hand in your notice the next day.
Awesome reflection for you, and everyone watching. Everyone can learn a thing or two from this 😀
Thank you
Employee experience also varies greatly team to team and manager to manager - huge consideration that's often overlooked
We work with information and is quite strange that we don't usually have the conversations we need with our teammates, including our bosses ...
Awesome content as usual! You're one of the few talking about this subject in a self-reflective way and focusing mostly on how you could have done things better given those circumstances. This is the kind of advice people need to hear. Subscribed!
Lol, complaining is lucrative in the US
@@imagreatguy1250 Yeah that's a fact. Fortunately better content does exist though
Important was the experience with toxic environment for us that most places have and how to deal with that! Thanks Prime to share with us
Thanks for sharing your experience. I hear people focus on B far more than on A, and A is the critical first step.
I've definitely left teams instead of having conversations, and I regret those times. I've found that far more people are open and wanting conversations and feedback than I thought when I was younger.
I hear you man !
I had a similar experience where a great architect designed a really great system in theory however, in practice it did not scale and was nightmare to code and manage.
Some great learnings here, really awesome to hear you talk about the communication & EQ side of engineering
This video is so unbelievably relatable. I feel like this needs to be shown to every single new grad because it is reality.
Could you elaborate why it is so important
Thanks for this share. I was in the same bubble last year, I've never related this much to a video before
I really felt this video. Back in 2014 one of the best places I ever worked had a bad situation with a team I was part of. During my time at the place a few situations came up that I really wasn't mature enough to handle the way they should have been handled. It got to be too stressful and so I left. Likewise, they made a real effort to get me back and set me up better. I regret not taking them up on the 2nd offer from time to time, but that's a different story.
I appreciate you sharing this as it has inspired me to continue down the path I'm on currently.
I recently got laid off from a company that espoused all of the good ways of working that Netflix pioneered. The layoff happened because of tough economic pressures, but for me it was an eye-opening year and a half of seeing what truly world-class software development can look like at a company that actually cares about it's people.
On the other side of that, I've landed on a team wants to live up to the same ideals but is so junior and isolated from the rest of the development world that they have no idea how to go about it. I feel like the closest thing they have to a SR dev, even though I was only barely growing past a mid-level developer at my last place. I have been doing my best to teach good software development practices and agile dynamics, but was getting discouraged at the odd mix of excitement and friction that was coming from management. I almost let the friction get the better of me, and decided to start looking for another job, but after listening to your story, I think I am correct in my initial course of action to try and be the lynchpin for this team's growth.
It may not work out, the friction may well turn out to be more than I can handle, but if I just moved on without trying to affect change here, I would probably regret it for the rest of my career.
Man, that plot twist in the end :D :D
I thought he canceled Netflix subscription
as a customer, i ve quit netflix because the original catalogue melted awat... you have no garantee that you ll be able to watch the xx movie tomorrow that you can watch today. and the home creations are for braindead.
Strangely, as I get older, I feel like these situations are like relationships. You kinda have a lot of abundance and opportunities in the wild (a lot of girls and job posts in the tech world) so you get a "fuck it, gonna find something better elsewhere" but later you realize that great things are actually built, not found (altough you may get very luck, who knows? but remember, everything is amazing in the beginning...)
yyayayayaaya!
In any situation, you can, in order, 1. Deal/live with it, 2. Fix it, & 3. Leave it.
If you can't live with it & the next step is to walk away anyways, might as well try anything you can (within reason) to fix it. If fixing it isn't sufficient or doesn’t work, then you did what you could, & your choice to walk away is clear. And you can do that with a clean conscience.
I used to work at Crowdstrike. I was on a team trying to help migrate the CI/CD pipelines from Bamboo to Jenkins. One of the senior devs called groovy a "anti-pattern" as it was used in Jenkins. Three years later I now fully agree with him, but at the time the statement took me by surprise and I didn't believe it. Listen to your coworkers folks!
Yeah I strongly dislike groovy. It becomes such a mess so fast. But the nice part about it is you can just write Java.
@@ThePrimeagen Prime I can’t tell u how much I would love a video of you discussing Groovy and how to deal with it
Thanks for sharing. Good luck going forward! Let's make everyone uber Rust programmers now (i understand the borrow checker to an extent now), ready for your stream.
edit: lol, busted. good one
I am ready for your presence
@@ThePrimeagen 🦀
Man thank you for this video.
I'm very grateful that my Boss and colleagues are awesome.
but, It is a great tip.
I got my first tech job at the help desk.
First two months was a steady growth, but i don't tend to be a good speaker so after that realisation things started spiraling down fast af.
It really hurts but i have a good connection to them, we looked into me doing other work for them as a side hustle but my heart tells me that maybe it's time for me to start a business instead. I can still technically work for them but i get a piece of mind pursuing my own thing which is one of the most important things you could ever have.
I'm right in the middle of this situation and about to change my mind to choose option A where I wanted to choose option B at first. The algorithms brought me here at the right time.
I recently left a Help Desk position after trying many times to have conversations around work load and understanding "why we do what we do" but it always felt like it fell on deaf ears/the managers had no motivation to understand the technicians side. Since I left they decided to hire more people and yeah...I never thought more people was the problem, it was the lack of trying to remove work and think a little deeper about the jb and how it could improve. Instead we were simply work horses doing the "dumb work" I wanted to automate away. Young professional but I resonate with your regrets and opinions on this. I could have done a better job as well in presenting possible solutions but I guess at a young age assumed management would fill the gap and understand where I was coming from. No such luck
It's funny how that works. When you're young. You feel like answers come so quickly, but as I've aged answers come slower
@@ThePrimeagen I think I am noticing this as well with the help of mentors in my life (including you). The world and people are complex and you only have your point of view, but I can at least get better at illustrating that point of view so it applies to the goals of others (understanding managers goals, dev team goals, etc...)
Learning to communicate with your supervisor the good and bad of the job is one of the toughest skills to overcome if you don't like the feeling of conflict. Through growing frustrations of a job, I decided to abandon the team for a new job instead of work with my supervisor to inform them of the situation. One thing leads/supervisors are supposed to do are solve challenging roadblocks, enabling the team to advance forward. Whether that is technical in nature or personnel, it's their job to ensure success by providing tools, people, processes, and technical guidance and remove external influences hindering the team. So, provide that feedback with possible corrective actions for your supervisor to take. Help them make the decision by laying out the problem, the needs, and even the wants, with finish with a few options you've thought about.
Yeah, anywhere that's asking me to work more than 35-40 hours a week is a no-no. You Americans need to stop accepting this as the status quo.
Also, not saying you do Prime, but those people who glorify working stupid hours and wearing it as a badge of honour, please just stop.
Been there. But it feels easier to leave instead trying to change the world, you know. Especially in a big corporate environments where most of people (including devs) are just parts of the machine. But it's definitely a good idea to try to speak up and raise awareness about any toxic situation. In practice though, I don't think it's worth. There are plenty of jobs and amazing team out there, no point to hold on for some situations for too long.
I'm like 7 months late here, but would really like to either hear some more thoughts from you on "non-coding architects". My current job is this extremely weird mashup of highly technical proprietary platform development and customer scoping/interaction. The biggest frustration I see in the industry is total lack of effective communication, especially around logistics like time zones.
Such a timely video - going through something like this rn. Thanks for sharing!
When the system fails us, it also teaches us that we failed it. In a world where obedience, rather than emotional intelligence is taught in schools, where bosses shame you for not sacrificing your well being to ship their product, where reasonable personal boundaries are considered grounds for firing, you did not fail. You did the best with what you had in a system that burned you out. And you made a survival decision. Now that you have survived, you were able to look back, with fresh eyes, on ways you can improve in the future, and you are sharing that with the world. You succeeded!
Communication is one of the most underated skills, good communication can make the difference between a great or a bad job.
"Non coding software architect" is an oxymoron.
I had my deal with "architects" like that and it's a one ridiculous experience after other.
If there are any managers reading this: Please don't hire any software architects. Either let the devs to make their own decisions or promote one of the devs but make sure they stay a hands on part of the team.
Trust me I became one of these architects for a bit and within 2 months I got disconnected with reality and started having some super opinionated genius ideas just to make my staff miserable.
Hands on or shut up!
What about non-coding software architect that had been a developer for years and is still coding but not in production?
I'm in a similar situation.. but it's the monetary issues that are leading to me moving on rather than continuing to attempt to make an impacting change.
A person who openly talks about their mistakes and let all of us learn from it. Thats what tells you that this is a good part of the internet.
Hio! That's quite the complement
Man, this reminds me of the time when I was just starting to work as a freelancer but couldn’t support myself full time yet so I was working as a cook part time. My boss asked me how I felt about the new chef, and I was only there a few days a week so I just said he was ok, and then launched a big ass can of tomato sauce at the dude later that night. That’s the story of how I became a full time developer 😊
Take it easy buddy! I know how you feel.
Yaya
Had quite a few jobs where I was trying to put in a lot of work to improve the situation, which ultimatelly lead my ass to total burnout. But, very sound advice. Just need to know when to do what and when to stop 👍
yayaya
Your timing on relevant videos to my career is scary. (While likely just a perceived issue), I can feel myself unravelling in my discipline, likely burnout, and I haven't adopted great coping methods.
I feel it in my work and interactions. I have a great video and super understanding team, but I feel like I'm letting them and myself down.
(I'm typing this between coding sessions).
I had similar situation, looking back at my experience I think that there was no way I could have do it differently, I just think we do not have the tools to understand while it is unfolding. The only way to really go through is after it happened and you had the time to reflect on it. At least, this is my experience ...