What I learned from 44 random 1:1 meetings

The post

Last month I posted the following post in an Israeli developer group - English translation follows

Translation:

I want to give some of my time to the community I love 🧡

I opened some slots on my calendar for anyone to grab and talk to me.

What will we talk about?

1. Salary - Want to ask for a raise? Not sure you are compensated fairly? Options? Anything more you want to discuss I’m happy to share from my experience.

2. Performance reviews - It is the season, Anyone who wants to talk about filling, getting or discussing performance with their manager. [I did plenty as a manager and a developer]

3. Career management - Anything from thoughts about being a manager, changing a job to existential dilemmas

4. Manager’s dilemmas - To the managers among you who want to talk about issues with managers or reports.

5. Interviews - Preparing for interviews, job searching, etc.

6. Anything else hat you want to talk about

7. I like chess - if you want to play a match on lichess.com with a mediocre player, bring it on ♟️

<Technical stuff about setting the time>

Thanks to Tamar for giving me this charming idea and let me duplicate her text and try it myself

Why I did this?

Tamar, who I mentioned above, told me about an experiment she did before we started working together. She was amazed by the different stories and situations people shared with her.

This inspired me and piqued my interest, 1:1s were always my favorite part of being a manager, and doing so with people I don’t know was even more intriguing.

I didn’t know what to expect, but that was also the exciting part.

So I borrowed most of Tamar’s text and posted it in a Facebook group I love and follow for years - מפתחים חסרי תרבות is a community founded by a great Hebrew podcast with the same name - which translates roughly to culture-less [uncivilised] developers. I once participated in the podcast co-hosted by my previous manager Iftach.

The meetings

I ended up having 44 thirty minute meetings with people I don’t know [except 1].

The subjects we chatted about were diverse as were the people I met. Here are some charts to show the data.

What I’ve learned?

Some of the things I’ve learned

1. Being a developer in tech can be quite a lonely occupation. Some people have some questions and discussions they don’t feel comfortable sharing with their co-workers and managers. I must admit I felt this way myself for most of my career.

2. There are so many different things going around I had no clue about, our industry truly is huge. I spoke to people from 44 different companies, most of them I didn’t know.

3. Top performing senior developers are even more lonely and sometimes can be clueless about how to grow in their profession.
   In most companies - big and small - being a staff / senior+ developer means you are not likely to have a role model [in or out of the company] to learn from. As a result, personal growth becomes harder to imagine and achieve.
   Many time there is a notion that growth can only be achieved by becoming a manager.

4. Managers were less likely to talk to me.

5. An intriguing category of “Joined the wrong company” was surprisingly common. In most cases this puts the new hire in a very peculiar position - they just started and already feel this isn’t right.
   It can be about the project they were assigned to or about a bad culture that was invisible from the outside.
   It puts them in an extremely lonely position, I felt it helped to tell them that it happens and it isn’t necessarily their fault.
   I think this is quite common, I saw this in my previous companies and in some CVs. However, I never saw this in any posts.

6. Half of the people that spoke to me were looking for their new position - I tried to help them figure out the right criteria for picking the next place and connected some of them to few of my friends.

Tips I found myself giving over and over

• Before asking for a raise - be curious about the system

  • Every company has its own compensation system, typically tied to employee performance. Your manager or HR person can tell you about how it works.

  • Understanding the system will make the discussion easier and less stressful.

• When looking for your next job - define what are you optimizing for.

  • “Growing my skills as a developer” - “Finding my next step as a technical person”

    • Make sure you get the right support [manager / peers].

    • Make sure you are excited about the domain / technology.

  • “Learning some new skill” [ML/AI/Full-stack]

    • Make sure the commitment is real, it is often easier for the new company to just use your current skillset than teach you something new.

    • Be ready to compromise on compensation to gain the experience you want.

  • “Improve my compensation”

    • What are you willing to give up for that?

    • How much are you willing to prepare for the interviews?

• Before signing on an offer - Set expectations.
  Make a list of the things that are important for you and make sure to cover all of the list with your future manager before signing.

• “Find a role model” - I believe this helps figuring out where our growth should be. I found My role model by joining a manager’s community and it gave me a lot of clarity.

• System design interviews are all about the trade-offs. You can start every sentence with “It’s a trade-off” and it is likely what the interviewer is looking for 😉

• Don’t join the first place that reach out to you - if you are looking for a job, make sure to proactively search for your next place.
  It is a repeating theme in the people that joined the wrong place - they didn’t proactively search for a place, they joined a place after a recruiter reached out to them.

What am I going to do with it?

A few things I will definitely do:

1. Continue holding those meetings while there is still demand. 22 hours a month is a lot, I’ll reduce it to be less. Grab your slot here: https://calendly.com/od3d/ - message me if you can’t find a good slot and I’ll add one for you.

2. Top performing senior+ developers - there is a real opportunity to build a community of some sort - I will follow up on that. Talk to me if you want to be part of it.

3. Helping people who are looking for their next challenge is rewarding and hopefully was valuable for them.

Many thanks to the people who reached out to me and spoke openly. I know that reaching out to a stranger and asking help is not easy and requires courage. I hope I was able help even if just a small bit.