Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 105: Interviewing for Management and Annoying Noises

Episode Date: April 12, 2018

Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’ve been a software engineer for 13 years and would like to apply for a management role. I’ve never managed before. How do I apply for a job as a manager without managerial experience? How do I deal with annoying noises around my desk? One neighbor listens to loud music. Another one pops the bubbles on his bubblewrap (to calm himself obviously but also infuriate me). Please help =)

It takes more than an exhaustive list of overly prescriptive linting rules to be a software engineer. This is episode 105 of the Soft Skills Engineering Podcast. I'm your host, Jameson Dance. I'm your host and human linter, Dave Smith. I just turned on a linter on one of my projects and it just made me mad. It's so stupid. It's just thousands of useless errors that don't matter. I feel like you are going through the stages of grief the first one is denial then anger then bargaining then what's the next one well is there a stage where you just turn off the thing that's causing you grief because i think that's coming up pretty soon that's bargaining okay yeah you can't tell me what to do i'm a

strong independent programmer i'm gonna use var you can't stop me um what are we doing what is this podcast besides a place to gripe about linters yeah i mean that's the number one thing but the number two thing we do is we provide advice for people who write in with questions and we answer your non-technical questions about technical fields like software that's right and you know i was doing a little math we've answered a lot of questions on this show like is it hundreds 105 times two i think it is was that the math you did it took me a while but yeah i did it you know i had to carry the one at one point we did a rapid fire episode and then we skipped episode 100 so that complicates the math but yeah i need to do it offline so many questions and you know i yeah

We've said this before, but when we started the show, I remember talking to Jameson and thinking, okay, there's probably enough material here for like three or four episodes, and then we're going to run out of stuff. And Jameson was like, Dave, you're completely wrong. Do you remember that conversation? I always remember the times where you are wrong and I am right because there's so few in number. So, yes, I remember that one. It was very wrong. and the questions just keep pouring in and I'm like oh that's a great topic

most of these questions I'm like this is great I wish we could answer all of them we just don't have enough hours in the podcast yeah I've been reading a lot about project management and lean and agile stuff and so now I'm really inspired to make a big old burndown chart of all the questions yeah of our question backlog

and just like a good scope creep that will always it'll go down a little and then move right on back up yep never quite burning down to zero just like a good scrum team well think of it like a campfire you don't want it to go all the way out because how are you gonna roast marshmallows fair point you need to have it burning still i don't know if you ask my 11 year old boy the best way to cook a marshmallow is in a raging fire that's like six feet tall and the marshmallow comes out just blackened to a crisp yeah you need that hint of lighter

fluid on it it's a nice garnish uh we have some patrons to thank do you want to talk about those helpful wonderful people yes thank you to those who are contributing at the level that gets a call out every single episode we have paulino de rocha david jackson chris fitkin ken howard sean clayton and dustin coats thank you for your financial support and if people want to support the show financially jameson how do they do it they can go to www.patreon.com soft skills eng that's our patreon you can also find a link to it on our website at softskills.audio and then you click a button and then do what it tells you when it asks you to sign up and donate that's right if you do that what what what's the outcome like what do you get out of it

you mean besides the sense of satisfaction and good sleep at night well when you say besides it makes it sound like there are other things i may have been a little unaware that's the main benefit no yeah we don't offer a ton of rewards it's it's mostly a thing we we encourage people to do because people have asked for ways to support the show and that's the way you can show support um it helps us pay for expenses related to the show hosting and and time and editing and all that stuff and uh it it encourages us to keep going we feel great to see how much support we've gotten yeah yeah it's great thanks a lot yeah thank you so much should we get to the questions sure should i read the first one please read the first one yeah okay this comes from an

anonymous listener who says i've been a software engineer for about 13 years my director encouraged me to apply for a new management position i've been thinking that management is something i'd enjoy and do well i find myself caring more about improving the way my team functions than about the way our code functions, which seems like it's the right time to consider a management role. My director made it clear that while he thinks I'd be a good fit for the position and would benefit from the experience of applying for it, there's no guarantee that I'll get it. So I want to make my resume look as strong as possible and prepare to interview well, but I'm struggling to point to concrete accomplishments I've achieved through good

leadership. I currently serve in a scrum master role, that's scrum master in air quotes. I put scrum master in quotes because my team doesn't use scrum But we don't have a better term for quote person who advocates for lean and agile practices and runs most team meetings It's probably more scrummy than most people I would guess actually, yeah, yeah, I think so Sounds like you're doing just fine. Yeah I know I can talk about what i've done as a scrum master But i'm not sure what else to include most of my accomplishments up to this point in my career have been technical in nature And I don't know to what extent I should continue to highlight them

i know my technical skills will continue to be relevant but i'm not sure how relevant any suggestions for putting together a resume and preparing to interview that's a great question yes and what a difficult situation like don't i you know a lot of times people have to interview for jobs within their same company and isn't that kind of frustrating like wait i already interviewed for this company yeah i was just thinking this feels like a similar there's this divide from going to a bootcamp or, or starting to learn how to program and getting your first programming job. There's this gap that you cross and it's like, it feels like a miracle every time anyone crosses it and, and everyone wants to know how to do it. And it's hard to come up with like

a concrete list of steps you follow. And it feels almost similar that the gap from individual contributor to manager, like you want a job that you have not officially had before. And everyone says we want someone with x years of experience in this job to do it yeah exactly like how do you how do you do that how do you it's like yeah how do you do it once you when you need experience to do it if only there was a metaphor for this involving poultry um i have i have no idea what you're talking about it's the chicken and egg problem ducking oh the chicken and egg problem okay i don't know i thought you were gonna say like layers of responsibility stuffed inside each other oh my gosh oh boy i wish it was yeah the classic turducken metaphor

maybe we'll make it a thing oh man what a turducken situation you've got here what a just turducken of a problem yeah chicken and egg okay i got you i have heard that one before what you humans call chicken and egg problem i've come to know your culture and appreciate it oh man yep yeah ah in in this case okay i have real stuff to say besides pretend to be an alien that doesn't know how human culture works okay if you don't have experience directly doing the job you can mold your existing experience to be relevant to the job and you can also make it clear that they're hiring on potential so i think you're on the right track when you say i'm struggling to point to

concrete accomplishments i've achieved through good leadership where where you might not have worked as a manager but you for sure have done some kind of individual contributions that involve leadership so if you can take your individual experience and emphasize how it involved working with other people and helping other people accomplish tasks and kind of broad managerial stuff even if your title hasn't been manager that's great okay so but but you need to come up with this number right so you say i've spent about 20 of the last i don't know 13 years in a leadership capacity so therefore i have 2.6 years of management experience and i meet the qualifications for this okay i gotcha yeah okay so it's like a it's like a man month kind of thing

yeah yep which is accurate we know yeah okay yeah i mean honestly i think a lot of this is like dealing with your own imposter syndrome so if you can convince yourself that you're qualified and you deserve to apply i think you're being a little tongue-in-cheek but i think it's probably true right there are people that have no qualms about just like blissfully applying to jobs they're in no way qualified for and sometimes they get it and and if you have some qualms but some non-qualms what's the opposite of a qualm i don't know you're you're like medium qualmy compunctions uh no is that a real word i thought boy we find ourselves in a turducken of a situation again um basically if those people can do it you can do it because you're way more qualified

Every time I look at resumes, I always think, if I could have the boldness of this, like, bottom 1% of the people that applied for this job, what would my life be like? You'd be an astronaut. I would die alone in space. You'd be orbiting the Earth, looking down on Earth, going, I made it. Boy, I wish I had attached that line. yeah anyways i think rambling back i rambled away from my point i'm gonna ramble on back to it if if they're hiring for potential make it clear what that potential is right you you don't have to say like i have done all this stuff before but you can say here are all my ideas for what i would

do in this situation especially especially when you know what team it is and you know the situation they're in in the position i think that's a pretty great opportunity to come in with a strong plan of here are the problems that this team has. Here are how I would address them. Here's how things would be different if you hired me. And that's a pretty unique advantage you have as an internal candidate that someone from the outside might not have. Yeah, I like that. I like that a lot. And I think when you said hire for potential, Jameson, that really struck a chord within me because I moved into management a few years ago and that's exactly the situation I was in. I had no formal management experience. But what I had was plenty of team collaboration, a lot of

experience supporting my team and helping them. And I had definitely earned my team's trust. And so when I sat down with the supervisor, the manager who is going to, you know, make me this opportunity, create this opportunity for me, you know, I told him, I will throw my heart into management in the same way that I have thrown it into the technical aspects of my job. And I think that my technical track record speaks for itself you can see all the great things i've delivered the work i've done and i promise to give that level of enthusiasm and effort and rigor into being a good manager as i have into being a good engineer you're hired you get the job what a pitch boy i'm trying to i'm trying to think of the the pitch for when i became a manager and i think it

was a reverse pitch it was like no one else will do this everyone we've asked before you has said no and we asked everyone we're all 23 no one knows what they're doing well you that was a little bit of the situation i was in as well it was kind of like okay we don't have a manager we really need one we don't really want to go hire one yeah and i was like well i guess i can do it you know it's a little bit of a different situation here yeah yeah that's much different you sound like you know what you're doing yeah yeah so i i like that i like the idea of emphasizing your potential i like what you talked about about pointing to your technical success too the question asker says a little bit that they struggle to to point to like these

leadership accomplishments but for better for worse technical management is often based off of individual contributions and people that are strong individual contributors get promoted to management even though they're wildly different skill sets and people good at one might not necessarily be good at another one just having a track record of individual success is is a pretty strong argument and that's kind of the default way most moves into management happen someone does good work and they seem like they wouldn't be like actively horrible at it and don't actively not want to do it and then they just get an opportunity to move into management so you're saying if you're a good engineer and you're not a monster then we're going to give you a chance as

a manager is that is that what you're saying i mean it might not fall into your lap but if you are a good engineer being a good engineer is the first criteria that most places use for having people having engineers move into management okay so i i yeah i wouldn't i wouldn't under emphasize that i would say that's a that's definitely a thing you can use in your interview say this is all the stuff i've delivered like dave said yeah and one of the things that this writer says is i know my technical skills will continue to be relevant but i'm not sure how relevant and i'll tell you they will be very relevant and in fact i think this is maybe a unique opportunity or a unique attribute that you bring to the table for this opportunity which is that really good managers

not this isn't like a prerequisite to being a manager but some of the best managers i've seen in action are those that still have intact technical skills and the reason is they can empathize with their team really well because they know firsthand what it's like to be in their situation they can nudge their team in the right direction when they see a mistake coming down the pike and they can call out small mistakes before they become these big titanic size disasters so don't undersell that i think that um i think that that's actually a really good thing that you bring to the table and and to answer your question how relevant will those skills be i think very relevant you might not be writing code every day depending on the company but it will certainly

serve you as a leader for this team yeah were you writing code every day when you were a manager at your previous position not every day but i probably spent about um 10 to 15 hours a week on a good week writing code so my team's pretty small it's only five people i probably spend about half my time writing code still oh cool that's great yeah and if i spent less than that i feel like it would be a problem oh really i don't know it spikes up and down a problem for your team or a problem for you personally you know i don't know the answer to that i i like the amount of code writing that i get to do still because i feel like it keeps me in touch with the team in a way that i wouldn't be if i wasn't writing code and also it's i don't know it's nice to get a very concrete thing done

when you're working in the abstract so much oh yeah so true it's nice to sit down and say the problem here is these inputs and these outputs need to get connected and i will connect them with my brain and nothing can stop me except my brain that's that's great so what about skills in what about skills in the actual interview or sorry not skills but like you know what should they do in the interview itself i i think what i said earlier about having a plan is pretty important um i mean they're going to ask you questions so answer those but if you don't know what they are it's hard to know exactly but try answering the questions that's a good idea plead the fifth

flip the interview around interview them so you'll be rating them on their abilities as an interviewer yeah i i think going in with an idea of what would make you successful and what you are going to do and see if you can work those into the answers to the questions they ask be like a presidential candidate in a debate where they ask you a question and you turn it into like here's what i want to say yep i don't care what the question was one of the things you can do to try to convince your the the decision makers that you have the trust of your team and that you'll be a good leader for them is to collect testimonials from them and um you could have them write little snippets just you know one-on-one seek people out that you feel like you did a particularly good

thing for and who you have earned their trust and ask them to say hey could you write a few sentences describing you know how my help on this project impacted you positively and i want to use this for feedback as well as as a you know kind of for my own portfolio for the future um and and see what you can gather there because those little testimonials will speak volumes like you can say out loud my team trusts me and i'll lead them well but it's much more powerful to have your team say i trust this person and they will lead me well yeah i like it any other tips well aside from the typical interview stuff of trying to make yourself bigger and taller taller yes louder you know maybe bring a megaphone more physical and verbal and i don't know emotional space that's

maybe demonstrate how good you are at reprimanding people through elevating your voice okay you you pretend like you were late on a task and i'll show you what i would do and you slam the table and call him a moron perfect you're hired this is the best management i've ever seen we need strong decisive leaders strong loud tall decisive leaders yeah ah shoot i'm disqualified okay i think question answered i think you're set up pretty well for success agreed good luck let us know how it goes yep all right would you like to read the next question oh you read my mind before you read the question i will now read your question yes this is from olga how do i deal with noises around my desk that annoy me the guy sitting

nearby listens to music very loudly another one pops the bubbles on his bubble wrap to calm himself, obviously, but also it infuriates me. Please help. Oh, this is a tough one. Can I tell a little story? Oh, yeah, please do. So there was a time about 10 years ago in my company where we had shared offices with just two people to an office. And at one point, my office mate had left the company leaving me alone for a period of time. And so I took advantage of that by playing some music soft music not too loud maybe a little loud but you know i had my own private office so i thought this is cool i can play music in my office well i did this can you give me an example of the genre of music you would play uh it was probably they might be giants okay so most people

probably find it very particle man particle man probably not just like cranked shaking the walls so i'm just working along you know it had been most of the morning this way and my neighboring office a person from my neighboring office walked down the hall came into my room and said would you please turn that music off this is not a dorm room he was so upset and then he just left and i was like oh crap and guess what i did turn it off okay so yell at them that's what you're saying i feel like i've personally had issues with people listening to music on headphones in at volumes that i i can't comprehend how they have any hearing left at all it's just like so

earth-shakingly loud in their headphones that it's pretty easily audible to me like sitting even not even next to them but pretty far away and i've never said anything well usually i just put on my own headphones and yeah bail out but i wish that i could channel your friend and just come over well maybe he wasn't your friend maybe he was until that moment but maybe i needed to just go yell at them open floor plans are pretty great though right isn't it great that you get to hear the noise of every single person you work with all the time oh yeah every no not just hear the noise you get to see exactly what they're doing so you hear a strange noise you look over you see them just clipping their toenails right up on the desk you can't pretend like it's like

some soothing background noise that they that they've set up for you oh my gosh yes i work from home my workplace habits have deteriorated and we went to a team-wide meetup a couple weeks ago and it was the first time i had worked like around a bunch of other people for long periods of time in several months and it was like tiring to maintain good etiquette i feel like i did a pretty good job but it was exhausting after being used to just like lounging in my sweatpants all day playing my they might be giants of course you were i can only get work done when i listen to a little birdhouse in your soul it's my happy place here's what you do okay the bubble wrap thing you find his bubble wrap you get a very small syringe and you inject a clear yet very

smelly fluid into all the bubbles so he pops them splatters all over him nice and he stops popping those bubbles and now it's not only loud and annoying but it also stinks in your open floor plan i mean it wouldn't it wouldn't be loud because it would just like ooze out but it might smell that's true i guess that's a risk you have to take or you could pop them all right if he stands up to go get a drink just run over to his desk and pop all his bubbles oh yeah that's a great idea then he comes back just the look on his face is gonna be just priceless like oh my bubbles you tell him it was so relaxing to me just sit in your chair like with the most relaxed look you can possibly muster so great so satisfied yeah yeah so a few years ago a friend of mine

worked for a company that had a pretty cramped open floor plan and he posted on facebook look how awesome my employer is they bought noise cancelling headphones for everyone and i just i thought to myself i know why they bought those noise cancelling headphones you know how much cheaper it is to buy noise cancelling headphones than give people offices oh yes a lot cheaper and i was i i had been in his office and it was like the computer the monitors were like touching each other these developers are so close yeah so i was like well enjoy your noise cancelling headphones but you could try them i bought noise cancelling headphones to deal with this problem once and uh have you ever used those before yeah yeah i worked in an

office like that where they bought everyone noise cancelling headphones as like a sorry we can't get you a real office apology perk and did they work for you they were uh well no first of all because it didn't help the visual stuff and then also i mean they're they say noise canceling you can still hear it's just harder to hear yeah so i would still get distracted by other stuff pretty regularly i found them to be pretty effective at canceling noise especially uh white noise but they made me feel like i was on an airplane climbing upward and my ears were popping permanently huh and i kind of get that feel a little bit i found out that there's like a psychological effect that does that where it because there's no noise your ear thinks or your brain makes you think that

there's a low pressure situation or a pressure differential and some people suffer from it so i had to sell them i just couldn't handle it wow they made it worse yeah i can tell a difference but it didn't it wasn't unbearable i have had co-workers who said they just can't use them though no that's me you had to sell them as in the company bought you noise canceling headphones and then you sold them for a profit no i bought my own and then i sold them for a loss okay construct an office out of used bubble wrap that this dude leaves behind okay build yourself oh an acoustic chamber yeah out of bubble wrap yeah what i actually really ended up doing was i would work i feel like most places that have open offices have little private rooms for you

to go take conference calls or whatever and i would just work in those basically all the time yeah and then eventually we grew so much that they weren't ever open and then i was just unhappy that was my solution just be unhappy yep what if you started a noise war arms race where you come up with annoying noises that you make to try to counteract their annoying noises this is my therapy boo-boo zella it just really relaxes me i guess you need to save that towards the end of the race otherwise oh yeah yeah that's your nuclear option yeah there's not much to escalate to beyond that an air horn i don't know yeah a train whistle oh yeah that's what i was just thinking anyway go for it just just go all in

on this thing so you are joking but i think there might be something to to talking about noise policies around the office maybe i've heard of places that do like library zones right where you're just not supposed to talk there's like a quiet room or i don't know maybe you could talk to people and establish some kind of baseline for for what the expectation around noise and conversations is yeah i think so i think any any group of people that are going to work in that close of a space need to have some kind of charter or like what's the word kind of like a a rule of law i don't know to yeah to basically have like an agreed upon set of norms that we're going to follow and i think noise definitely is on the list i don't think i've seen a company do this before

where they actually formally write down the rules for noise i have only seen the quiet spaces set aside and i've seen it happen in an ad hoc way of like the engineering team is just very quiet because they want to be but i feel like especially if you're in interdisciplinary teams or teams where there are lots of loud people otherwise the policy just gets set by the loudest person and that's great for them and horrible for everybody else so yeah maybe maybe there's something to just talking about as a team and saying like hey we we work better when there's quiet we're in this situation that sucks and we can't just move everyone into offices so to make it easier for everyone to be productive here are some expectations

yeah and if you want to blast your music super loud like that's great but um if it's so loud that it bothers other people then you have to turn it down or get headphones that isolate it better yeah maybe they're using those open backed headphones or something that's a thing yeah yeah they're open back headphones that supposedly have some nice acoustic properties i am not an audiophile so to me they after like if i switch between them i can tell a difference and then two minutes later it just is all like my brain is used to it so yeah yeah i don't know all right yeah we probably helped do we have any real advice i feel like I I your story of getting yelled at and then stopping is like inspirational to me but I'm

not I would never be able to just storm over and yell at someone for being too loud well there's a first time for everything Jameson yeah maybe well I guess I do that to my daughter sometimes when she's like screaming and pounding on my stop yelling yeah it helps a lot she's like oh we're in an arms race i get it i know how to do this i've done it yeah i've done this before yeah good luck with that i think good luck it's a it can be a sensitive topic to tread but i think it's probably worth treading if it bothers you and and whatever you do don't be passive-aggressive about it where you know you just kind of drop these subtle hints in awkward situations it's much easier i think to be direct about it and i think you can approach

this subject without being negative or complainy you can just say hey i'm having a hard time working and i think it would be great if we could have you know these let's have these rules you know no bubble wrap popping while i'm trying to write code that just seems i can't understand how that's a thing this person thinks is okay in a shared office space that's so bizarre to me get them a get them like a dog instead the dog they can pet the dog i've never worked somewhere with an office dog and i see all the like i have glowing tweets about it and i just think what if they just pee like yeah what if the office dog pees on you what if you get on an elevator distracting right and there's a dog on there that's huge and has clearly not been bathed in a

while and you start dry heaving a little bit from the smell i mean i'm maybe speaking from experience here what if your office dog is not friendly and makes people uncomfortable that couldn't possibly be the case dogs are no a force of pure good in the universe right if you have a problem you can leave the company because for sure that dog is not going anywhere i think that's probably pretty true actually if a culture of a company culture has office dogs it's like they just self-select for people that don't hate dogs yep so yeah because you can't even interview it's like dogs yeah now office cats i just had an office cat in my office for most of this podcast and it really improved the quality so i think those are that's great inarguably good i guess so

especially when they start stepping on your keyboard yeah no my cat is actually a pretty good office cat she'll just like curl up in my lap and sit there for an hour while i type wow that's i think that's because her name is rear admiral grace hopper so she has a background in computing that's fantastic rear admiral why rear admiral because she was a rear admiral grace hopper was in the navy yeah no i didn't know i didn't know her her uh military title yeah yeah she was a pretty high ranking person in the military also my other cat is named donald newth and he's orange and fat and his name is donald and now everyone thinks that he's named after donald trump oh i saw that coming yeah it's an interesting conversation to have with people

when we're like oh this one's donald and then it's depending on whether they like or don't like donald trump they give me different looks yeah either way you're going to get a reaction i'm like no no it's donald newth haven't you heard of donald newth famous famous computer scientist no i have not heard of donald no they haven't no okay he's named after donald trump what should people do if they want their questions answered dave go hit our website at softskills.audio and click on ask a question or follow us on twitter at soft skills eng our direct messages are open for anyone to send us any message that's true we've gotten a few recently thank you and if you want to contribute to the patreon we really appreciate your support

you're you make us feel great really it does make a pretty big difference in how we feel about doing the podcast to see that this many people care enough to contribute financially so thank you so much for that please keep it up and i think with that we'll just catch you next week all right