12:00

to work on and helping managers

12:02

manage their people by providing feedback on their people.

12:05

I guess I didn't really read that as a

12:07

major problem that they see. To me

12:10

it sounds like they're saying, I'm doing too much

12:12

of this stuff. Oh. Like it's too much like,

12:15

I feel like I'm the manager of this team. Yeah. Well,

12:17

to that I would say, the things that were listed

12:19

here, so I am responsible

12:21

for their output somewhat. If

12:24

they underperform, I work with their managers and

12:26

I do upfront work to incentivize their investment in what

12:29

we're doing. These are very much

12:31

important bullet points on the job description of a

12:33

principal engineer. So if you don't wanna do that

12:35

job, then maybe you don't wanna be a principal

12:37

engineer. Yeah. It still might be taking

12:40

up more of your time than you would

12:43

like. And I think you

12:45

can shift the proportion of time that goes

12:47

towards that. I think I

12:49

agree with you that increasing the output of other

12:51

engineers is a big part of the job, but

12:54

maybe you can time box it somehow. You

12:57

can delegate some of that. You

12:59

have your army of staff

13:01

engineer peons, the lowly

13:03

staff engineers that all look up to you. Hopefully

13:06

it's not only your responsibility to

13:09

support underperforming engineers. So

13:12

if you wanna do less of it, there

13:15

are ways to do that. Yeah,

13:17

like just stopping it. Like,

13:19

yeah. Or just saying, I don't know.

13:22

Do you just schedule it?

13:24

Say, great, I have time two

13:26

weeks from now, I don't know. Time

13:29

box, how many hours you spend on it, and then

13:31

you queue stuff up, and then they go somewhere else.

13:34

Or I do kinda like the idea of delegating some

13:36

of this. If it's a, I

13:38

don't know, maybe it's a very senior engineer, then you're the

13:40

best person to help them. But

13:43

you shouldn't be just in the

13:45

weeds meddling with every performance issue with

13:48

every individual contributor. So

13:51

maybe you can help coach or train or

13:53

ask other engineers that are also seniors to

13:55

help with this. Yeah, so I

13:57

mean, when the question...