Be a Lead Engineer people admire, with Shelly Benhoff - HS#21

If we had to describe the latest episode of HockeyStick Show with one word, it would be "inspiring." And if you're looking for ways to become a better lead engineer or if it sounds like your dream role, then you'll be pleased to hear everything our guest Shelley Benhoff has to say.

Shelley is the author of the Lead Developer Career Guide, a book aimed at helping others navigate the complexities of the role. Obviously, that's something we can expect from a great lead engineer like her.

We discuss the pros and cons, who’s a great fit for the title, the responsibilities that come with it, and its challenges. It will be a talk you won't want to miss, and you'll walk away with some good advice.

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Summary

In episode 21 of HockeyStick Show , Miko Pawlikowski ??? interviews Shelley Benhoff , focusing on her experiences and insights as a lead engineer. The conversation covers the challenges and rewards of being a lead engineer, emphasizing the importance of approaching the role for the right reasons. Shelley discusses the responsibilities of a lead engineer and also addresses common challenges like imposter syndrome and the importance of mentoring in leadership roles. The episode provides valuable insights for those considering or currently in lead engineering roles, with Shelley offering advice from her book, Lead Developer Career Guide.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Why do you think people go in the direction of lead engineer? Sometimes it's ego. And one of the first things I write in my book is... Mentors, you are more of a career therapist, right? If companies don't hire junior devs, how will junior devs ever be senior devs or leads. 'No' is a full sentence. You don't have to say anything else.

That is a terrible approach to being a lead.

Miko Pawlikowski: for everybody just hearing this on Spotify, rather than watching on YouTube hit hint, Shelley has a really cool backdrop What is this thing above the bookshelf there?

Shelley Benhoff: that is a prop from, Horizon, Zero Dawn,it's a game about a redheaded heroine. And so I was like, I have red hair. She has red hair. I feel [00:01:00] a kinship with her. And, I actually won it off of a contest on YouTube. So yeah, it's a prized possession.

Shelley Benhoff: I love it.

Miko Pawlikowski: prominent way of being displayed there. You talk a lot about lead developer and your, developer experience manager yourself. and in your book, you mention your own mistakes and your own journey a little bit.

Miko Pawlikowski: So maybe the best place to start talking about lead developer is to ask about the pros and cons. What's the best and the worst thing in your opinion about being a lead developer?

Shelley Benhoff: the best thing is when you have a project that's got really clean code, the architecture is just, awesome. And, it takes a whole team. And the pride.is really a great feeling. On the other hand, it is a lot of [00:02:00] responsibility. you are responsible for making sure everything's up and running all of the time, handling, deployments can be daunting. but if you learn how to delegate responsibilities, which is something that I talk about in the book, because I had problems with that. I'm a control freak. So sometimes it was hard to pass off tasks to someone else, but yeah, it's a lot of responsibility and it's also rewarding as well.?

Miko Pawlikowski: So what's the difference between lead engineer, staff engineer and team leader??

Shelley Benhoff: the lead engineer handles, estimates and talking to clients and stakeholders, project managers, making sure that everything is planned out.and you [00:03:00] have to manage the dreaded technical debt as well, or try to avoid it altogether. That's another thing I talk about in the book. And then a staff engineer, is basically handed tasks,like search And is responsible for ensuring that their code matches the requirements and testing. whereas a lead also mentors. A staff engineer, especially a junior is not expected to mentor at all. Now, a senior engineer,should have started mentoring, to prepare for the lead role if it's applicable to, the person's, Personality, skills, all that kind of stuff. The [00:04:00] engineering manager is generally, the person who hires people and fires people. Unfortunately, they are the person that, has enough technical skills to lead a technical team, but might not, code Or have previously had, coding experience, but haven't coded in a while.?

Miko Pawlikowski: Sure. So as you describing that, I think it gets a little murky in my head. I definitely have seen people who might've been doing both lead engineer, the way you describe it and also staff engineer, in many ways, and I think. It probably depends on the size of the company and the culture?

Miko Pawlikowski: and all of that. But I think the distinction you're making about focusing on people versus focusing on basically managing the, requirements from people is an interesting one. So let's focus on the lead engineer because, Hey, you happen to have written a book about that. [00:05:00] Can you describe just to follow that train of thought, what a regular day for a lead engineer would be like, what it's actually day to day, other than the high level, description that you just gave.

Shelley Benhoff: in my experience, my day was half meetings, half planning slash coding. I've always had jobs where I was expected to be the lead and also staff engineer, and I would have to argue, don't have time to be a lead if I'm trying to write, actual code,

Miko Pawlikowski: as a lead, it is very important to be comfortable with people. a lot of technical people, aren't so comfortable initially. I would spend time speaking to project managers mainly and, having a relationship, [00:06:00] and making sure that people are comfortable coming to me and asking questions, It's really a lot of answering questions, actually, now that I

Shelley Benhoff: think about it.?

Miko Pawlikowski: So you've been doing this for a while. And, you obviously have a wealth of experience with that, but if you were to pick one thing that you're particularly proud of as a lead engineer, maybe a story, that you feel was a great success, would you be happy to share that with us?

Shelley Benhoff: absolutely. in 2020, I was the lead, Dev On the Johns Hopkins, site, which is a hospital that is very large. It's global. and so when COVID hit, we started to get a lot of traffic. We started to get a million hits per day and we were built for [00:07:00] five million a month. So we were in no position to handle that much traffic. it was a lot of work, a lot of late nights. And I will say their team was fabulous. They worked so hard to put out articles explaining, symptoms and treatments. And yeah, it went to a place where we were wondering if the servers were smoking, we had to scale up really quickly. And, the problem with that was that they were. On prem, meaning that they actually had a physical server, and

Shelley Benhoff: I worked with their team to add, more, and then the whole pipeline, needed to be, included, and it was a lot. the first deployment that we [00:08:00] did to the servers was manual. It wasn't done in like the Azure tools?

Shelley Benhoff: We literally just copied all the files and configs manually to the server. And I always think about if we had Docker. at the time and just had containers, we literally would have just added two containers to the deployment. And that would have been that no 14 hour setting up a server and all of the stress of making sure the site stays up while all that is happening. But again, I had a great team and we got to know each other really well. It's like when, soldiers, just meet and have that kinship. I still talk to almost [00:09:00] everyone on that team. and we actually earned a prestigious award as well. So it was a very rewarding, occurrence, but then it was also just really hard at the time.

Shelley Benhoff: But again, like if I had delegated more responsibilities to other people, maybe I wouldn't have been so stressed out. But at the same time, it was COVID. It was an untenable situation.?

Shelley Benhoff: yeah, it was hard, but good.?

Miko Pawlikowski: So where are you responsible for figuring out how to do it? Basically scale up from, what is it? Five hits a month to 30 million a month.

Shelley Benhoff: Yeah. I had to plan everything. I was a combination of a lead engineer, lead architect, and staff engineer at the time. It was a [00:10:00] very small, Agency. And yeah, that was my role. if I had been able to split out that role into the architect and stuff. So yeah, I literally helped, stand up the servers and connect everything together.

Shelley Benhoff: and make sure that the code on every server was the same as well. And then I had to learn, Azure DevOps at the time. Cause I wasn't really, up on that skill, it was a lot, but handled well, I think.?

Miko Pawlikowski: Yeah. Plus the other benefit of feeling good, helping people get informed?

Miko Pawlikowski: in scary and uncertain times

Shelley Benhoff: Exactly. Exactly. It was so important to all of us to provide accurate information because there was so much misinformation everywhere. And I was proud to [00:11:00] have a team of experts who, wrote all that content.?

Miko Pawlikowski: Shelley, why do you think people do that job? you mentioned a few things. talking to people, a lot of meetings, a lot of?

Miko Pawlikowski: people who go into tech, they really like tech and then They kind of branch out, right? Some of them branch more into the staff engineer thing to not talk to people as much?

Miko Pawlikowski: Some of them will branch into the lead engineer.

Miko Pawlikowski: Some of them will branch into maybe a manager and I guess trade a little bit of their technical cutting edge for more people skills, and all of?

Miko Pawlikowski: that, but specifically for the lead engineer, why do you think people go in the direction of lead engineer?

Shelley Benhoff: sometimes it's ego. And one of the first things I write in my book is if you are interested in this position to impress people, your parents, right? that is not a good place [00:12:00] to start. because you wouldn't understand what's really, your job. Most people who take on the lead job are incredibly technical first, obviously you have to have that technical expertise. to start, but then learning the people skills that's down to personality traits. if a person likes to support people, likes to mentor, then this position of lead is a perfect, fit.but people who love to put on headphones, listen to music and just churn out code. That type of person really wouldn't be, happy.because they would not be as responsible for coding anymore. Even me, who I was expected to [00:13:00] be. to wear a whole lot of hats. so I still had time to code as well. but yeah, I think that people look at the lead position as a, career promotion. And, It is. but if you look at it as I am the leader, what I say goes no,not for you.?

Miko Pawlikowski: I'm glad you mentioned the headphones because, It's out of my mentoring. I used to call this the headphone test. If you are more comfortable putting them on and really trying to solve a problem and really make a dent in what you're working on. If you go the people route, you're going to have to be taking them off very often.

Miko Pawlikowski: And

Shelley Benhoff: Yes,?

Miko Pawlikowski: likes that, but to address like the elephant in the room, isn't that the case that a lot of the cultures that people land in, they do [00:14:00] see this as, some kind of upwards mobility slash carrier trajectory slash, promotion really. So it's not?

Miko Pawlikowski: just vanity, it's also seen as progression in a lot of places, which kind of makes the choice for people to a certain extent.

Miko Pawlikowski: Do you agree with that sentiment??

Shelley Benhoff: people, a lot of the times need a goal,If you are a person who is, very ambitious, then you have to have that career trajectory. but if you are a person who's comfortable where you are, I say that is completely fine. Absolutely. Not everyonemoves up, right? And I've known plenty of people who were just comfortable coding and that's that.

Shelley Benhoff: And that is perfectly fine. In the past, I [00:15:00] thought that was the worst thing that someone could do and all of that. But then I realized not everyone's like me. So that's, important to know as well.?

Miko Pawlikowski: Yeah, I think that's a big problem with the staff engineer roles that we need those people. Every company wants to have those people, but then at the same time, there is either a pretty well known secret and that if you want to earn more money, you have to go and manage some people, right teams or do things like?

Miko Pawlikowski: that.

Miko Pawlikowski: Or,

Miko Pawlikowski: a few places I know actually make an effort to say that, no, listen, this doesn't really matter whichever way you go your career can be equally amazing, but it's definitely not the standard. So I think there's a long way to go for the staff engineer role to be more cemented and more appreciated because, A lot of places run on these people and, they don't?

Miko Pawlikowski: appreciate them as much as they [00:16:00] should.

Shelley Benhoff: Exactly, yeah. And I also say, hire junior devs. If companies don't hire junior devs, how will junior devs ever be senior devs or leads or anything like that, there's this whole culture of companies saying that junior devs are too hard to work with or too hard to train. That sounds like a 'you problem'. That's not the junior dev that's on you to lead and understand that they are still learning and it is your job to teach them. and mistakes are made and you learn so much more from Mistakes than success, actually. So it's all a part of leading a team of people at all levels and ensuring everyone is up to speed on everything.

Miko Pawlikowski: [00:17:00] oh man, that's another crazy can of worms you just opened there about, recruitment in tech, which can be very broken sometimes. That reminds me of that meme, I'm forgetting which JavaScript framework it was, but a guy didn't get an interview because they required five years experience with a JavaScript framework. And he just happens to actually have written it, and it was only three years ago, so he wasn't eligible. I'm not sure,

Shelley Benhoff: all the time.

Miko Pawlikowski: I'm not sure if that one necessarily is 100 percent true, but I think it really captures the sentiment. and some of that is just crazy when you're describing multiple jobs as one and it can be physically impossible, but maybe let's not go down that route back to your lead engineer. you describe the motivations, why you think people should be doing that and who should be going there.

Miko Pawlikowski: How do you think, people sabotage their career, as a lead engineer, what's the worst thing that they can [00:18:00] do, for their lead engineer career?

Miko Pawlikowski: I think, one of the worst things that a lead can do is not really lead, that

Shelley Benhoff: yeah, if you are, not speaking to people, or if people are afraid to speak to you, this is another thing that happens all the time. I see it all the time. Why would any project manager accept a lead who they were afraid to talk to? I've actually seen this happen in practice, and I come in and I'm just like, oh no. You need to be, more easy to talk to, not seem angry that someone's coming to ask you a question or making people feel stupid. Because in tech, everyone is in tech. if you're at a tech [00:19:00] company or an agency, right? Like you're in tech, no matter, If you code or not, right? leads have to understand how to speak to non coders and not assume that they know absolutely nothing, because they do have jobs where they have to. know specific terms or, processes. And if they have a question, then you speak to them in a professional manner and not 'you don't know what this is? what's wrong with you?'.

Shelley Benhoff: That is a terrible, Approach to being a lead. And, the other thing I wanted to touch on because I am currently, struggling myself is imposter syndrome.

Miko Pawlikowski: Oh, yeah,?

Shelley Benhoff: Everybod y has imposter syndrome. It's probably the number one [00:20:00] thing that I, talk to mentees on and it is something that can hold you back and I'm saying these things and I literally had a conversation with my manager at Docker, Monday about this, because I am having such imposter syndrome working there because everybody's so smart and just with it.

Shelley Benhoff: And I've unfortunately never had this experience before where I feel stupid, like all the time. And they remind me that number one, you shouldn't compare yourself to other people. That's just not the way to go. And you should remember your successes. because if you Always have your failures in your head, then your inner critic will take you down and cause you to [00:21:00] make poor decisions or, try to act like you understand something when you don't. So it is very important to understand that imposter syndrome is something that impacts everyone, right? So you are not alone, and you're probably not an imposter because you have a job that you had to apply for and interview for. So it's not, It's a hard thing to overcome, but it's important to not allow it to, hold you back.

Miko Pawlikowski: hundred percent. I agree. if somebody says that they've never experienced that, I get very suspicious because either?

Miko Pawlikowski: they're lying to me. Or, they're just not smart enough to realize that they don't know enough about things because you're always finding yourself in situations.

Miko Pawlikowski: You know, for example, for me, I've had a massive [00:22:00] problem with impostor syndrome when I started, speaking at conferences. I was thinking, wow, oh, all these people and potentially every one of them knows things I don't and why should they listen to me? And, what am I doing here? And who even let me in?

Miko Pawlikowski: But then, you go and you do it and it's like It's one of those things that are very simple, but also very hard, right? Because if you go on LinkedIn, I don't know if your LinkedIn looks like mine, but as I scroll through the, feed, it's basically 50/50 motivational, quotes and great life advice and career advice.

Miko Pawlikowski: And then there is the other half that basically says, Oh, look, I raised this much for my company, or I just achieved this. And I got promoted. And, it gives you this idea that everybody's doing so well, when in reality, you're just looking at their best snapshot of their achievements and stuff.

Miko Pawlikowski: So it's [00:23:00] this kind of weird schizophrenic state where on one hand, you've got all this advice to help you. And the advice is usually very simple. It just need to remember about it. And on the other hand, you get all this stimuli about how everybody's doing the best and, you might not be. And that fuels that an imposter syndrome for sure. So I can definitely relate to that.?

Shelley Benhoff: Yeah, and you have to remember that people only post the good stuff on social media. People don't post I'm having anxiety today, or I have a presentation and I'm freaking out about it, so I try to post as much of that as possible because I don't want people to think I'm perfect.

Shelley Benhoff: I'm a Pluralsight author. I'm on LinkedIn learning too. And I've written a book, but then I also have anxiety and I, [00:24:00] struggle a lot. it's important to take social media with a grain of salt.?

Miko Pawlikowski: for anybody who actually clicked to listen to our conversation, my assumption is going to be that they are at least vaguely interested in becoming the lead developer kind of person, be that for the good reasons or the bad reasons. And you happen to have written a book about that. Can you talk as a little bit more about learning the lead developer skills, in your book, you're talking about your leadership styles and presentation skills and, stuff like that, obviously you still need the technical skills and all of this.

Miko Pawlikowski: Can you give us a short, intro to how you should be learning the skills that you?

Miko Pawlikowski: need for the lead dev role??

Shelley Benhoff: So I would say,if you can start to learn these skills prior to getting thrown [00:25:00] into the lead role, it helps. Things like speaking to clients, making sure that you aren't speaking,too technical, and making sure that you are comfortable speaking to clients and having a relationship, you have got to forge relationships because that'll make your job so much easier.

Shelley Benhoff: If an entire team of people helps you, and if you ask questions and ensure that the technical, requirements match the, business goals as well. That is a skill that, can be hard to master. And then, also a lot of clients who are technical, they'll try to tell you exactly what to do. And you have to be diplomatic [00:26:00] in telling them, that's an approach for sure, but this other approach might help you, et cetera. yeah, that's probably one of the hardest, skills to,actually tell clients that their ideas,Have a good intention, but maybe the actual technical implementation just isn't right.

Shelley Benhoff: but yeah, a lot of leading is just people. You have to know how to talk to, client's project managers and staff as well. So making sure that you listen, that you actively participate in conversations and make sure that your team has the skills and the tools needed to be productive [00:27:00] as well.

Shelley Benhoff: managing technical debt is probably one of the hardest things about being a lead is just looking at that list of technical debt grow and then telling the team, you have to stop and you have to fix something before continuing, because if you don't, it'll create more and more technical debt. so yeah, it's, a lot of planning, a lot of people, mentoring. yeah.

Miko Pawlikowski: interesting. I always found that addressing technical debt for a deeply technical team comes almost as a pleasure. a lot of the times they were so keen because they were so tired of the technical debt that was accumulated. And the real challenge wasn't really to tell them, Oh yeah, we need to do that before we move forward.

Miko Pawlikowski: It was getting [00:28:00] The buying from whatever, whoever is paying the salaries to spend the time to go back. because, obviously you have to strike balance, between new features and delivering on things, and at the same time realize that, okay, it's like tires on your car, right? If we let them go too worn out, it can be a crush and it's dangerous.

Miko Pawlikowski: So it's better to go and spend some extra money to replace them.?

Miko Pawlikowski: the human aspect that you just described it also expand to I think in the book you call it presentation skills, but I think I would maybe expand that more generically to Basically sales, whether you're selling the content of your presentation or whether you're selling an idea to somebody, this is something that I've seen a lot of people struggle, especially very technical people because they know,reason a, b, and c, why this idea is superior to that idea.

Miko Pawlikowski: But they often have really terrible time [00:29:00] actually selling that. Have you seen that? Is?

Miko Pawlikowski: that a problem that you face also?

Shelley Benhoff: Absolutely. when I started out, I, often felt like I couldn't tell people 'no'. no is a full sentence. You don't have to say anything else. but it's important for leads to understand that their technical expertise is valid. They wouldn't be a lead if they didn't know, technical architecture and, all of the principles and yeah, it is, incredibly hard to learn to make sure that you are presenting your case. and It takes that kind of confidence, too. And, again, you can't feel [00:30:00] imposter syndrome, you have to be just confident and not say, I have this approach, it might be good, let's talk about it. I'm just like no, have an approach. Let's talk about it. Stop the passive, language. And that to me, it was also very hard to just remain confident and explain the approach in a technical enough way but not too much in the weeds, right??

Miko Pawlikowski: For sure. Anything else that is required for the lead engineer job that you would like to, bring to our audience's mind??

Shelley Benhoff: Yeah, actually, I haven't touched too much on mentoring, but that is very important. I've mentored hundreds of people, honestly. [00:31:00] I couldn't tell you all their names, right? But,I generally answer The same types of questions over and over, questions about career trajectory or, important skills to learn. but you have to be comfortable providing advice, but then also telling the person this is my experience, right? Yours might be completely different. All I can tell you is how I've handled stuff. And, mentoring isn't as much about teaching skills or training, right? A lot of people, confuse that. And it is important to provide mentees with, the resources for training, like my book.

Miko Pawlikowski: Yeah, as I was reading your book, I found it quite [00:32:00] interesting that you made the distinction between a mentor and a trainer. I think for a lot of people, this are effectively interchangeable, terms, but you did make that distinction in your book.

Miko Pawlikowski: Can you tell us why??

Shelley Benhoff: Yeah. So I think that, mentors, you are more of a career therapist, right?

Shelley Benhoff: You are answering questions about maybe an incident at work or, helping people understand, their role and path As well, a trainer takes a lot more time to provide lessons and, provide sample code and, stuff like that as a mentor, you can answer questions, but You aren't really expected to provide, concrete training. And I think the reason is because that's two [00:33:00] skill sets, actually. Sometimes the lead wouldn't have, Maybe current skills or hadn't had time to learn yet. so that is a important thing. Obviously as a lead, your skills have to stay current, but sometimes you just don't have the time to study or, implement skills, on the job,Mentors, I think, are more expected to provide training resources like, online courses or books, podcasts, stuff like that.?

Miko Pawlikowski: And I think that's not to say that the same person can't jump into mentor's shoes and on occasion

Miko Pawlikowski: trainer's shoes as well, depending on what's needed. It's not necessarily, a distinction and that has to be, like, always like that, right?

Shelley Benhoff: Not always, yeah. [00:34:00] I think, For me personally, because I do have training experience, I actually have the skills to train, but I think that the issue that prevents me from, training mentees is just time because I don't. always have time to customize, training for each person or it takes time to outline as well. but I have definitely taught training, a lot in my career.

Miko Pawlikowski: For sure.?

Miko Pawlikowski: Why did you write the book??

Shelley Benhoff: it needed to be written. There is no resource available like this. And I struggled so much and I could have used some help, right? most resources for tech careers talk [00:35:00] about management, right? But a lead dev isn't management. It is a very specific skill set that, you have to have in order to be successful.

Shelley Benhoff: I, I wrote topics on everything I struggled with and I had, reviewers, editors, who agreed that, why doesn't this exist? It's a important topic, especially for people who are interested in leadership, on a technical level, because you are expected to be, extremely technical and then also have those people skills as well.

Shelley Benhoff: Andthe first time I led, oh, I failed so much, but like I said, you learn so much from failure, but I noticed [00:36:00] that everything I was experiencing. Others also struggle as well. And as a trainer, as a mentor, speaker, my ultimate goal is to help people not struggle, as I have, so it's why I teach, and I just love to help people, honestly, and it was just a important topic to me.

Miko Pawlikowski: definitely was. it still is. Who should not be picking up your book??

Shelley Benhoff: People who are interested in, leading because of ego as we, talked about earlier. and I actually state in the first chapter, I'm pretty sure that if you are interested in leading because of, prestige or, [00:37:00] Ego, then that just isn't a good approach.

Shelley Benhoff: Now, if people, who are looking at it, as a promotion,if they are in a place to grow personally, then that is perfect then, I commend those people. And then also, who it's actually for is anyone, from junior to senior. if you're a lead already and struggling, or just want to know how to improve, then this is for you.?

Miko Pawlikowski: So the book is available already, right? Or is it still in the early access?

Shelley Benhoff: Yes, it is still in early access. You can, pre order it on Amazon, but I believe it, should be [00:38:00] printed and out in stores or whatever, in October.?

Miko Pawlikowski: you can go to manning.com and search for Lead Developer. And their early access, it's called MEAP: Manning Early Access Program, I think.

Shelley Benhoff: Yes.

Shelley Benhoff: Yeah.?

Miko Pawlikowski: And you can actually, see some of the book, before you buy it. And then you can read it immediately online. You don't have to wait for Amazon to deliver a physical copy. Plug finished.

Miko Pawlikowski: There's one more thing that I wanted to ask you, to finish the episode and that's HoffsTech. I think I find it very unique, that husband and wife working together and this way you spend even more time together.tell us about this project.

Miko Pawlikowski: How did it come to be? How did you find it? would you recommend it to other people?

Shelley Benhoff: Yeah,I started HoffsTech to handle, my, plural site, contracts. I have produced more than 20 [00:39:00] courses and my husband edited them all. So not only do we spend a lot of time together, but then he sees my face and hears my voice quite a bit. So kudos to him for wanting to do this in the first place, but it, helped us grow, pretty quickly.?

Shelley Benhoff: Shelley, thank you very much. This has been really interesting. I'm very glad that someone went ahead and wrote a book about that because before that, like you said, it was all tribal knowledge. And a lot of people, I assume, went into that just because they figured, Oh, I have to do that.

Miko Pawlikowski: Thank you so much for coming on the show and I'll see you next time.

Shelley Benhoff: Awesome. Thank you so much.