Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 113: Quitting Your First Job and Too Many Responsibilities

Episode Date: June 25, 2018

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: How do I quit my first job if I’m working with a manager I love? I started my first full-time job about two years ago and I’m starting to think about looking for a new job, both because I am ready for new challenges and I’m ready to move to a new city. I have a great working relationship with my boss, so a part of me wants to tell her about my interest in finding a new job, both so that I could use her for a reference and also so that I can be honest with her about my intentions. She’s been a great boss and mentor to me, so there’s a part of me that doesn’t want to jeopardize our working relationship. But another part of me feels like I might be jeopardizing my presence in my current office if I make it clear that I am looking to move on, especially if my job hunt doesn’t go as smoothly as I hope. How do you deal effectively with rapidly increasing work responsibilities? My technical lead was recently promoted to management. Being both ambitious and the only Sr. Engineer without retirement plans in the next 4 months, I immediately stepped into the power vacuum and inverted a binary tree faster than all my coworkers to establish my position as new tech lead. After a few months the other senior engineer on my team retired, and I’ve ended up holding the bag for my new job responsibilities, my old responsibilities as a Sr. Engineer, AND the departed Sr. Engineer’s responsibilities. I told my manager how much was on my plate and that I was afraid my work output would suffer, and her response was to throw money hand over fist at me and promise to backfill both Senior positions within the next 12 months. How do I get through the next 18 months without losing all my hair? Are there any strategies to make sure the team doesn’t go up in flames when I forget about a key deadline? Or at least position myself so that nobody can tell it is my fault until I can make a subtle getaway in the brand new Ferrari I’m going to buy?

It takes more than predicting that 2018 will be the year of the Linux desktop to be a great software engineer. This is episode 113 of the Soft Skills Engineering podcast. I'm your host, Jameson Dance. I'm your host, Dave Smith. Soft Skills Engineering is a weekly advice show where we answer all of your non-technical questions about technical fields like software development and also, I don't know, hypothesize about when we'll finally be the year of the Linux desktop. I think 2018 is going to be the year of the Linux server, along with the last 10 years. yeah i guess technically yes do people even care about that anymore that was a big deal people always used to care about like will this be the year linux desktop happens i think uh

i think the only reason you would ask that question now is so that you can signal about how much of a gray beard you are and that you know you've been around for a long time i mission accomplished then i guess but no i i haven't heard anyone talk about the linux desktop in years maybe because it's happened it's so ubiquitous no one even needs to talk about it uh do you want to talk about our patrons oh you know i do we'd like to thank people who are supporting us at the contribution level where we call out their name every single week thank you to nick cantar dimitro and neonilla david jackson chris fitkin sean clayton and dustin coats if you would like to join them go to patreon.com

slash soft skills eng the funds that you contribute each month help us to pay for editing and design services to keep this podcast afloat so thank you yeah thank you so much for contributing um let's get into our first question do you want to read it dave sure this comes from a listener named grace who says i started my first full-time job about two years ago and i'm starting to think about looking for a new job both because i'm ready for new challenges and i'm ready to move to a new city i have a great working relationship with my boss so a part of me wants to tell her about my interest in finding a new job both so that i could use her for a reference and also so that i can be honest with her about my intentions she's been a great boss and mentor to me so

there's a part of me that doesn't want to jeopardize our working relationship but another part of me feels like i might be jeopardizing my presence in my current office if i make it clear that i'm looking to move on especially if my job hunt doesn't go as smoothly as i hope hmm the traditional jameson hmm has been uttered yeah that's the preamble it's like a header on like an ip datagram or something that's like an html header there's h1 h2 and hmm i'm just imagining this situation where grace goes into her boss tells her hey i'm looking for a new job and grace's boss is is like horrified and betrayed

and just like dumbfounded and how could you do this to me i i don't know i feel like that there's some concern here that i don't know would necessarily manifest um grace talks about jeopardizing their working relationship if if someone told me they wanted to quit i would be like well what happened what did i do wrong how can if can i help you stay but i wouldn't be like you stabbed me in the back and i'll never speak to you again you know like um i have i have lots of friends who have quit jobs that we've worked with together and i still talk to them so i don't i don't know that it's necessarily i don't know that it would necessarily jeopardize your relationship well jameson if everyone had a boss like you then we wouldn't have to do this show

then you would just quit all the time yeah yeah i mean if they're gonna be vindictive about you finding a better job then you probably don't want them as a boss anyway good point it says here grace is worried about jeopardizing the working relationship uh sounds like you know if you quit your job you're basically ending the working relationship so it's fine i i know what you mean though you mean to say that you don't want to have bad feelings between you and your boss soon to be former boss for the long run right yeah I think that's what grace means I have friends who are currently looking for jobs right now and I've told their boss and it's just fine I don't think I've ever done that I've never said

like hey I'll stick around and do my work but by the way I'm trying to work somewhere else that's because when you want to look for a new job you usually surprise yourself and quit your current job like yeah that's true immediately yeah we've talked we've joked about this a little bit but you've done that a couple of times right i have and i can't say it won't happen again ever maybe it will i don't that's the thing it's a surprise i didn't know it was going to happen before i don't know if it's going to happen again that is just a token of how hot the software development industry is right now you can you mean your job how talented i am oh come on right right uh only the best of the best engineers can quit their job without any prospects and be fine

it's a mark of my skills that i have poor planning uh anyways back to grace yeah so i have friends that do this to no harm i maybe i just don't hear about the ones where it goes horribly wrong where they tell their boss and then their boss chews them out and fires them on the spot i mean i could see it being like you get the crappy work because you're leaving anyways or i don't know you're like hey i want to i want to quit my job and i'm wondering if i can use you as a reference not only do you not get a reference from me you're fired immediately i don't think that would happen that seems that seems a little far-fetched especially grace talks about this great relationship they have and if if you really

have a great relationship then quitting your job is not going to torpedo that i also think it's not dishonest to not tell your boss about looking for a new job if you feel trepidation about it like you're not you're not lying to them or betraying them in some way you don't have to tell them that you're looking for a new job if you want to use them as a reference then that's different but you don't necessarily owe it to them yeah i as a manager would hope that i have a relationship with the people i work with where they would feel comfortable saying like hey i'm unhappy here but i don't think they have to tell me that if they up and quit i think that means i probably did something wrong to make it so they didn't trust me enough to say that but

it's not like i wouldn't be like how do i explain it are you saying you would feel like yourself not the yeah i feel like i would feel like i had failed in some way not that they had broken the code of ethics where you have to tell your manager i i think it's very unusual to tell your manager that you're looking for a new job um and all the jobs i've quit i've never told my manager that i was on the job hunt until after i got my new job yeah i guess the the tricky part is the references thing right if you've worked a couple jobs you have people who you're not currently quitting you can use as references that's why you need to just get through this phase as quick as possible so you're bootstrapped for your next job yeah so quit politely stay at your next job for two weeks

and then use your previous manager is that what you're suggesting yes every even numbered job is just a springboard for the next one see if you can get a reference without having your manager know it's for a new job say you're presenting at like a science fair or something or like a scholarship program or something yeah you're trying to join an exclusive new social network that requires a letter of recommendation this other company it's called google yeah whatever it is that is a funny idea or you could pull the old uh if you're just looking for a signature on a letter of recommendation that you write you could just craft craft you sign these 400 forms you slip it in at number 277 oh man oh you could you could say that it's a letter of reference for a new

apartment or something you know like oh man yeah i like how we went from like you don't need to tell your boss to you should probably lie to your boss don't lie i think okay here's what i would do i would try and get a reference from a trusted co-worker if i needed one ahead of time and i didn't want to jeopardize my current relationship especially if if you're not sure that the whole get a new job thing is going to work out i could see that being a little tricky where like you say i'm quitting or i'm looking for a new job i need a referral and then they give it to you because they're they're nice and then you just stay there and then there's this always this feeling of like well are you going to quit now what about now what about now um so

so i think i would just try and get it from a co-worker that might carry less weight than from your boss yeah but i think most companies don't expect you to get a letter of reference from your current boss when they're interviewing you so they know the best they're going to get is either a former manager or current co-worker you could also approach it as uh i'm ready to move to a new city yes okay that's that's a that's a pretty good reason to quit that doesn't involve like you are a bad boss i am unhappy here and and i think that's a pretty strong i don't know that's a pretty easy conversation to have right like i really want to move to i don't know silicon valley or wherever you want to go um maybe you're already there and you want to move somewhere where

you can afford to live um but i don't know i wouldn't be offended if if if a report said like i want to move and i can't move with this job so i would like to get a different job i feel like i would want to help them and help them be happy and and also it'd be nice to have a little more notice too of like hey they're they're getting ready to leave so we can wrap their projects up we can start hiring a new person and it's it's not like there's this problem i need to solve with the team or they're gonna quit you know oh yeah absolutely and it sounds like that's not the case here anyway which is great it's so much easier if you have some kind of external factor that's driving you to a new location like i'm getting married and moving to where my spouse

will live or i'm you know uh looking i've i need to move back to be closer to my family or friends or whatever like this is great and this is something that you i've just always wondered what alaska is like in those four months of no sun and i've got to find out yeah and i mean these are this is like something that you and your boss can partner on as opposed to being an adversarial situation so i would definitely go for that angle if you've got it and even if you don't have it you could back to the lying you could just make it up like i'm ready to move to a new desk location in a company down the street yeah yeah grace specifically says looking to move to a new city though so yeah yeah so that works

maybe maybe i don't know maybe it's like a minneapolis st paul situation where the next city is actually like 20 minutes away they're twin cities i've spent so much time in minneapolis i just really want to see the world it's st paul st paul is fantastic i just feel minneapolis is fantastic just feel like i've only seen one third of the tri-city area yeah so i the other thing i would say is that after two years if you're a software engineer this is a great time to quit your first job oh yeah yeah first job tenure two years is is pretty normal it's normal and it's important i think for you to get a little bit broader exposure to other companies and other dynamics, other technologies.

This will help jumpstart your career, definitely, both financially and from the perspective of gaining more breadth of experience. It's a bummer that that's true, but it just kind of is. It's just a lot harder to stay at one company. Unless you pick just the right first company, it's hard to grow your career by staying at one company, by staying at your first company for a long time. True, but you know, you say it's a bummer,

but I actually kind of like that our industry is like this because it means that you get to get exposed to completely new ways of thinking and doing. You know, if you stay at the same company for your whole career, there are certain areas of things, of ways of doing things that you will never be exposed to. That's what I tell my daughter.

That's why we're going to trade her in for a different child. I've only been a parent to you and I need like new experiences. Well, you see, I quit jobs often so that i don't have to do that with my children uh cool have we answered the question yeah i think so sounds like you're in a great situation yeah good luck grace i hope it works out i i should read the next one because you read the last one i agree i'll do it this is from an anonymous

listener how do you deal effectively with rapidly increasing work responsibilities my technical lead was recently promoted to management being both ambitious and the only senior engineer without retirement plans in the next four months i immediately stepped into the power vacuum and inverted a binary tree faster than all my co-workers to establish my position as the new tech after a few months the other senior engineer on my team retired and i've ended up holding the bag for my new job responsibilities my old responsibilities as a senior engineer and the departed senior engineer's responsibilities that's a lot of responsibilities yeah i i can't handle any responsibility let alone like that let me count them that's three responsibilities

i told my manager how much was on my plate and that i was afraid my work output would suffer and her response was to throw money hand over fist at me and promise to backfill both senior positions within the next 12 months how do i get through the next 18 months without losing all my hair are there any strategies to make sure the team doesn't go up in flames when i forget about a key deadline or at least position myself so that nobody can tell it's my fault until i can make a subtle getaway in the brand new ferrari i'm going to buy why would you be subtle man pedal to the metal tires squealing smoke flying it probably has stealth technology it's like slate black camo i don't know noise dampening the tires squeal but at the same time

you can't hear them because it plays like it's like noise canceling headphones for your tires squeal canceling tires oh i heard i don't know if this is true i'm not really a car guy i heard that some cars play engine noises on speakers oh my gosh like some luxury cars play loud impressive engine noises to make your luxury car sound even more luxurious oh man because it's an electric car it would be cool if you could customize that oh it'd be so cool imagine if you could play like circus music on your car speakers when you read the engine or something that's what i want to hear when you're like revving next to me at the stoplight a bunch of clowns pile out of the trunk yeah the it is a small trunk so it only holds 14 clowns

these ferraris they don't have the trunk space no no it's not like they're teslas oh boy so how do you deal with the situation where you stepped into a power vacuum and then realized that life was actually a little more comfortable in 1g or not 1g one atmospheric pressure instead of zero have you tried just doing all of it really well at the same time have you tried multitasking you just here's what i mean computers switch rapidly back and forth between different tasks and and then it looks like they're doing them all at the same time have you tried doing that type a character on an email write a single point on a whiteboard switch over to your editor hold down shift because you need to type a

parenthesis oh switch back to your email restore your keyboard state yeah and then run to a meeting uh but you only go to the first five seconds of the meeting pop out type another character in your editor pop back in that's tongue-in-cheek because i feel like that is what a lot of people do when they have too many things to do is they just do them all poorly by switching back and forth between them. That's definitely what I do when I'm not being mindful. I'm in a little bit of a different state, but I don't know. I think this situation is familiar to a lot of people where

you just have a lot of responsibilities, a lot of different hats. There's a lot of different things you need to get done all at once. And my dumb brain is like, well, the best way to do them is to do them all at once. And then it sucks. My brain says, do whatever thing shows up in your inbox at the top right now yeah exactly someone tapped you on the shoulder that's the most important thing you can possibly be doing right now oh i feel the same way there's a slack message drop everything quick it took me like three months to finally turn off the little number over outlook telling me how many emails i have and it takes me longer to get to email but boy do i get so much more done oh man

i should do that i've done that on my phone and it's been marvelous i need to do that yeah i there are no numbers allowed on my phone i have banished all those i mean i guess we're we're getting into it but multitasking is bad and anything you can do to have periods of focus on important things would probably help you one one trap that i have fallen into in this situation is like i know how to program and some of the stuff that needs to get done is programming and it's comfortable so i'll hide away from my other responsibilities and write some code because i feel really productive and then like everything else the fire grows a little higher on all the other stuff so what dave joked about earlier like there are important things and there are urgent things and they're

also kind of comfortable things and you want to make sure you're working on the important things not the comfortable or urgent things yes i think one thing to acknowledge when you're in a situation like this is that your time is an unscalable resource it has no horizontal scaling ability whatsoever and on top of that the more interruptions that cut into your time that make you context switch the less efficient your time will be used because of the context switching so when you get presented with a task you know i would probably set aside a few weeks to dedicate to this mindset but anytime you get presented with a task instead of jumping into the task first step back and ask yourself this question can i train someone else to do this and if the

answer is yes then dedicate time to do that now this will make you super inefficient for the first little while but as with all scaling techniques it will yield massive efficiency gains and allow you to effectively scale to handle much much more than you can handle today yeah i'm thinking about the the tech lead comments part of the role of tech lead for me is thinking about larger architectural longer term things and these things all require a little bit more deep thought and kind of pondering and i personally cannot do any of that when i'm pulled in too many different directions i i just can't focus on like what should we move our architecture to long term if I have like a hundred different messages popping up

and pinging me all at the same time. So I think it's even, you will get more done for sure if you focus on scaling yourself out. But you also, there's like a discontinuity where there are things you just won't be able to do unless you figure out how to focus a little bit more. You just like won't do that kind of work because you won't be able to focus

for long periods of time on it. that's right you will only do the things that you can get done in a short amount of time which means you will only do things that ultimately give you low satisfaction levels and have low impact and then yeah that's what burnout is made of in my opinion oh man that's so wise dave i wish i actually did that though here's what you do you start a podcast you get people to ask you questions about this you think and you give what you hope is sage advice and then you realize like oh i should do that thing i told someone else to do you have had money thrown at you have you tried just throwing money at other people

transitive property have money yeah maybe you have a customer who's really upset that you're not focusing on their bug and you can just say like here's a dollar treat yourself to something nice here's a restaurant gift card take yourself out to lunch today here's yeah how do you feel about itunes oh you got five dollars whatever you want on there might i recommend four songs because taxes mean you can't buy five oh my gosh that's such a good idea it's like someone sends you an email and it means you're gonna have to do something you just send them back five bucks i will pay you two dollars to not send me this email i'll pay you two bucks if you wait a week and send it to me next week instead

i think we have the beginnings of a productivity cult on our hands it's time to throw away getting things done it's now all about paying off people that ask you to do oh but see you know as a capitalist you could make a lot of money with this scheme too because you could just start loading people up with action items and then they would just pay you to go away yeah that's true it would encourage i mean if it spread i think it would destroy the earth it's like this but at least you'll get rich you'll die with lots of money yeah uh oh man part of me wants to say like oh i'm always too busy at every job but when i look back there are definitely times when i am more always too busy than other times

and i don't i don't know that i feel like i solved it at any of those times i mean i i would try and focus try and do important things and then every time i try and focus something else important comes up and interrupts me especially in in like a manager position or a team lead position part of your job is to be a little bit interruptible so your team can focus i don't know have you tried just not doing all of it at the same time oh gosh no i i don't know there's something about me that just one, I'm such a people pleaser. I know you and I have this in common, but when someone sends me an email or a Slack message or whatever, I just feel so compelled to respond as quickly as possible. I can't think about anything else until I get the answer, even just to tell them I got

your message and I'm going to get back to you later. And frankly, even though this destroys my productivity, it does give me one advantage, which is that people trust me and they know that I will communicate quickly and efficiently with them. And so, uh, but you just won't get the thing done that you said you'd get done no like i mean i communicate a lot but that doesn't necessarily mean that i commit a lot so i i am not totally dumb about over so they have not picked up on it they're like that dave he's a go-getter every time i talk to him wait a minute don't tell And I think what it ends up being is I only do the things that are expedient for others and instead of sitting down and really having deep work that will ultimately make a long-term benefit.

And so, you know, people like working with me for that reason. You know, I'm responsive and fast. But I just don't like myself very much because I tend not to focus on the things that I want to do. I focus on the things that others want me to do. And I don't know. This is just hard. It is hard. if you can develop um some kind of like anxiety that's what i do to that's that's the main check

on people pleasing is like when i say yes to too many things this black specter over my shoulder arises and holds a big sword over my head and it's like if you say yes to one more thing i'm gonna drop this sword on your head and then i then i get too freaked out and i start saying no again but then the no also has a specter that says you've said no to a lot of people and i'm holding yeah but then the anxiety specter is like i will destroy you you stupid no specter i'll destroy everything i'm like okay i'll say no uh i think saying no is a thing here that you need to figure out even if you are working extra hours that time doesn't scale your output won't necessarily scale linearly with the

extra amount of time you're putting in so you do need to figure out some amount of focus of like maybe maybe you divide it up by days and today's my senior engineer day today's my other person senior engineer day and today's my tech lead day maybe you just say um all these things that i would have done as a senior engineer i have to drop these just because i i just can't do all these and all these other important things and all these tech lead things but i i think focus is a key here the good news is that uh your boss has committed to resolving this solution or this sorry resolving this problem within the next 12 months so you know you could say to yourself i'm just gonna double down and work a lot of extra time i'm gonna earn this extra money i've been

thrown and uh i'm gonna be a little burned out but it's temporary you know and and of course these kinds of situations tend to to drag on especially if you're doing that's why i like why the question asker put their the boss will fill the positions in 12 months the question asker put how do i get through the next 18 months like you already knew i think they know this is never gonna happen that's true that's really hilarious it's almost like yeah it's almost like they knew dave we get asked for estimates and then the people that ask us are always like ah we'll just double it because those programmers they're doing the opposite with the manager estimates right like six months you'll have a new teammate and and the people that depend on

the manager estimates are like oh those managers their estimates are always off there's a there's a corollary here i've unlocked another new management philosophy i'll be right back i have to write two books actually in the spirit of this question i have to pay someone else to ghost write two books for me so true i was gonna say a smart thing before i got distracted by my dumb ideas what were you talking about the backfilling thing uh yeah i was saying that next 12 months are gonna so just double down and and uh work hard earn your money yeah the the danger here is that burnout will actually strike and sometimes burnout takes a while to recover and if it makes you quit and not have a job for a year then it probably actually

didn't make you any money to work extra hard that's true for this year so i don't know i don't know what you need the money for what you're going to do with it what your situation is but if if you're working as an engineer you probably make pretty decent money and trading away i i don't know that it's a great long-term trade to just say i'll just crunch really hard for this period of time and then it'll relax later yeah you're probably right plus crunching really hard but i don't have a ferrari so like i don't know that could change everything maybe this is just bias of me trying to justify my lack of ferrari i wouldn't even want one it wouldn't be fun but if you had one you might change your mind about that

one of the specific questions that they ask here is uh are there any strategies to make sure the team doesn't go up in flames when i forget about a key deadline and i do think that's a big risk especially if you take my stupid advice and just double down and really lean into these responsibilities now the chances of having some issues slip through the cracks that causes a major problem goes up in my opinion you know you're doing you're doing more things and when you do more things if you have like a 10 error rate then the chances that one of those things you know or sorry the total number of errors is going to go up so if one of those errors happens to be a key deadline or or something that has a high impact then this is going to happen so i think

what you're going to have to get good at is categorizing the things you work on as high impact critical versus low impact and really making sure that you set aside the right amount of time for the high impact stuff such as schedules dependencies managing deadlines i mean that stuff is super important and if you make a big mistake here and if sorry if there's a situation where a mistake would lead to like a compounding effect that would cause the team to go up in flames, then you need to make darn sure those things have all the brain power and mechanisms in place to prevent you from, you know, to prevent a manual error from causing them to occur. So in other words, I think you need backup people here to check your work

on things like this. I think you need like a recurring automated meeting or schedule of some kind to make sure that the most critical elements of your team are being reviewed regularly by not just you and i think if you put in place these kinds of mechanisms you can probably mitigate a lot of the highest risk stuff yeah i really like that it's it's about being deliberate about the places where you're going to focus because you're you recognize you've spread yourself a little too thin it it kind of reminds me what you were saying earlier too about training up the team that you can you can just explain the situation to the team too right like hey i'm doing three jobs right now i'm gonna mess up i need to lean on you you might do things you're not very

comfortable with you might see me do dumb things like please call that out your team can help you with this and it's it's it could be a chance for them to step up and take on a little bit more responsibility as well i love that i think that's great well have we answered the question more or less all right i mean i checked a few emails and responded to some slack messages during this one so you know just trying to stay on top i wasn't listening but i think you answered it or something like that uh send me a picture of your ferrari i'll appreciate it all right thank you for uh sending those questions and dave what should people do if they want to send their own questions in go to softskills.audio and click ask a question

fill out the form thank you so much to everyone who has asked questions we've had so many coming in we can't get to them all but we have committed to going back to some of the older ones and trying to make sure that everybody gets a chance to hear these ridiculous things we say. What can people do to support the show, Jameson? They can, while they're at softskills.audio, asking a question, they can click the... Support us on Patreon.

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