Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 117: Defense Industry Stigma and Responding to Negative Feedback

Starting point is 00:00:00 sorry yeah you have built up my anticipation so much i'm worried it won't live up to it okay it won't it takes more than great silverlight skills to be a great engineer this is soft skills this is soft skills engineering episode 117 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jameson dance in case it gets edited out dave spent about a minute trying not to crack up to prepare himself to drop that like earth shattering joke silver light uh i didn't think it was that funny but now i think it's hilarious you couldn't read that without laughing i told you it wouldn't be funny but now that makes it funny because it's not what is what is this show soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show

Starting point is 00:00:51 for software developers about non-technical topics yeah we have some patrons to thank thank you so much to the folks who are supporting the show nick canter dimitro and nianilla david jackson ken howard sean clayton and dustin coats you all are supporting at the level where we thank you every single week and you too can pledge your support to the show it helps pay for design and for editing and um ice cream like maybe once or twice a month with all the leftovers you can go to softskills.audio and then click the support us on patreon button or you can go to patreon.com slash soft skills ing and join this this elite group yes thank you very much all right would you like to read our first question jameson i would yeah this is from an anonymous listener

Starting point is 00:01:33 will working as a defense contractor hurt my future employability in private industry i work as a full stack engineer at a small defense contractor with a security clearance my company is awesome all my co-workers are super talented and motivated on top of that we get to work with modern tech stacks like react elm go rust kafka you name it we can use it i've heard rumors that is hard to move back to private industry after working in this world due to working with old legacy tech and the view that defense contractors generally have less than stellar engineers. Is this true? I feel I'm in a bit of a unique situation due to how good I have it at my company and feel I could demonstrate that my technical chops are up to par with industry

Starting point is 00:02:09 standards. All right, listen, defense contractor with security clearance, I have a question for you are aliens real is there a security clearance level at which you can answer that question definitively i don't know you don't have it if there is yeah clearly if there is i don't know about it yeah so what do you think jameson is there a stigma against defense industry software engineers i'm gonna say yes as someone who has never worked in the defense industry i feel like i have in this this this image in my head of of someone who's very conservative technically and very interested in like stability and you hear about all these like bloated government projects and and huge cost overruns and failed programs and stuff so i think all that together in my

Starting point is 00:02:56 head contributes to kind of like a clock punching do the bare minimum possible to to go home and not worry about technical excellence thing this is like the harshest version of the view in my head i'm not a huge jerk i swear but but i do have a vague negative stereotype of defense contractor developers and i recognize that that can't be true like i don't know they have i'm sure there are great people that work there there are like dozens of engineers listening to this podcast right now just enraged with you i'm sure there are yeah that's the thing i'm sure there are lots of people that work in these industries and i just don't know them at all but i don't yeah i i think it is from just hearing about like crappy government programs that fail i mean no no one

Starting point is 00:03:40 ever has crappy startups that fail or like crappy big business projects that fail everyone knows those always succeed so their sterling reputation is deserved when startups fail you get amazing think pieces out of it though yeah that's true so you know when a government program fails you just get nothing because because they can't write about it because they have security clearance i'm now imagining this like our incredible journey style medium blog post by somebody who worked on like some robot arm on a spaceship or something and just like i don't know we learned so much and we grew and the market just wasn't ready for our four trillion dollar titanium coated i don't know well maybe now would be the time for me to reveal that i worked in this very industry for

Starting point is 00:04:33 eight years i knew you sucked all along dave um how was it uh great do you do you feel like there was a skill difference between private versus public industry um you know no uh so i'll just tell a little bit about my story so first of all i'm actually very surprised to hear from this listener that they were able to work with such new technology stacks you know react elm go rust i mean that's very impressive um when i started out in the defense industry we were working with uh stuff that was reasonably new at the time but it was never bleeding edge cutting edge stuff um and what ended up happening over the course of those eight years is that new technologies emerged outside of uh our like visibility and we just

Starting point is 00:05:23 didn't really adopt them and it wasn't so much programming languages frameworks things like that it was whole new ways of building things like this whole new like sass model where the engineers develop it the whole devops concept kind of sprung up came out while we i was working as a defense contractor and the kinds of systems we were building what you call turnkey systems where you build them and then hand them over to someone else to operate. And so, you know, whereas typical SAS development now is more like you build it, you operate it, and it's just a completely different model. And so I found that I was unable to get experience doing that, you know, things like AWS and whatnot, completely out of reach for where we were working. Some of that's changed, by the way.

Starting point is 00:06:04 But anyway, long story short, I transitioned just fine. It was no problem at all. There were certainly a lot of things in my mind that needed to change the way that i approached problems and thought about especially things like processes and um like deployment strategy and like release strategy you know that all had to change really significantly but as far as technology goes you know there's no problem what about like so so technically skilled wise that's not a word or phrase but in terms of the level of technical skill you're saying it's it was pretty much the same we um so we hired um we grew our office from about 25 engineers to about 100 over the course of eight years and we had we were just surrounded by amazing people it was fantastic i hired i'm

Starting point is 00:06:52 sorry i didn't personally hire them but i interviewed a lot of people um and was part of the hiring decisions for a lot of those people and uh no i didn't see any skill gap between the engineers i worked with in the defense industry and engineers i worked with later on in like an internet startup um in fact many of my co-workers from my defense industry time eventually came and joined me uh at the startup i went to later so that was probably like six or seven people um so yeah they all had no problem transitioning to private industry either i honestly i think the boundary is more imaginary than real between these two sectors um having said that though i will say that not all defense companies are the same and i certainly encountered

Starting point is 00:07:34 a lot of companies that uh hired engineers who um wouldn't really succeed as well in what i would call private industry you know sure uh there's there's a lot of reasons for that like um some of them are the pace is just totally different you know like if you're working on an internet startup you know it's all about you have to be willing to not only release software very quickly but be able to completely change directions throw things away start anew um i think that would would have probably blown the minds of some of the people that i worked with at other companies in the defense industry um because they're just used to these long-term projects it's like okay we signed a two-year contract you know we're going to work on delivering on this contract for two

Starting point is 00:08:11 years you know and the startup it was like two months is your runway you know and you might pivot three times in that two months yeah two years is like how long the ceo has been here the founder has been here no one else has been here more than six months yeah exactly so it sounds like some of it is uh not necessarily technical skill but just more conservative in terms of planning and organization and budget and hours and i'm sure there's got to be an enormous pile of regulations that affects all this stuff too that you don't have to deal with as much in most private industry oh yeah in fact um i didn't have to deal too much with like uh regulations like that but oh my goodness one of the things that i was so happy to leave behind was time

Starting point is 00:08:55 tracking you know almost all these contractors have to track their time down to like six minute intervals recording what you worked on what contract which customer um and uh oh man i was so happy to let that go but you know that's that's not really part of it but i mean you mentioned punching the clock when you were saying stereotypes and and frankly that is kind of baked into the industry because so much of it is organized around time spent working on a project and there are cases where you have dollars that are going to disappear unless they get spent and so it's like you know i've seen cases where the company would have to throw people on a project just to burn those dollars or else they disappear and boy oh man that's just demoralizing but you know some

Starting point is 00:09:35 people don't it doesn't bother them that much sure and if you are working in like a high pressure high stress situation with crazy hours punching the clock sounds pretty good probably sometimes yeah oh yeah it certainly was as long as the clock is like eight hours instead of 18 hours um but all that i think all of that is overshadowed by the fact that you get to put cool fancy things on your resume like if there is a negative bias against defense contractors or the defense industry it's it is completely swept away as soon as you put the word rust or elm or go let alone all three of them the trifecta yeah yeah like i don't know i don't think i think that's enough to dispel any any negative image people have of defense contractors that said i

Starting point is 00:10:20 think there might be some places uh politically that might not love the idea of hiring someone who worked in the defense industry but i don't know it's not really anything you can do anything about you just won't work those places that's fine yeah um that stigma might exist but i haven't really seen too much of that yeah uh so i i would say in your specific case not to worry about it at all that's you you've got really fun experience to put on your resume and for good or for ill people wait that very heavily yep they absolutely do so in fact that'll unless you come right out and say that this company i worked for was a defense contractor that might never even come up you know yeah yeah that's true that is very true i mean for me and you actually i did fine right i

Starting point is 00:11:02 transitioned to private industry it was no problem at all this was about uh six almost seven years ago that i transitioned into private industry and it was totally fine and i didn't even have these hot technologies on my resume and the technologies that i was interviewing to go work on didn't appear on my resume at all either so it's kind of like um what i i think that what made me successful in that situation is that i found companies that were willing to assess me for aptitude and not just checking a box to make sure i had the right laundry list of technologies on my resume and yeah you're in a better position because you can probably walk in and check the aptitude box and the hot technologies on your resume it's fantastic all right i think we

Starting point is 00:11:43 answered it do you want to read our next question dave yeah sure this comes from an anonymous listener it says thank you for the podcast it's very funny and useful that's great thanks you got those in the correct order uh okay we just did a 360 performance evaluation where we provided quote strong points and quote improvement suggestions for two colleagues assigned by management. The completed reviews were sent to management, and management forwarded it to the people under review. One of the reviews I received was very positive, but the other one from a senior teammate that I work closely with had a very harsh and exaggerated improvement suggestion section, and very short and unconvincing strongpoint section. I'm not sure if he really considers

Starting point is 00:12:21 me incompetent, or he just wrote the suggestions which do have some truth in them, without bothering to put things in perspective, and without considering the impact it can have on my career and motivation. I feel a bit resentful towards the reviewer, and am worried about the potential negative consequences of this review i am relatively new to the company i only joined seven months ago for now i'm trying to act as if nothing happened i am hesitant whether i should talk to this person on one hand he can write whatever he wants and say what he wants on the other hand i feel the review is unfair and too negative i would appreciate your input on this ouch painful situation hmm yeah yeah it'd be it'd be hard to get kind of formal negative written

Starting point is 00:12:56 feedback from a colleague that you worked with closely especially if it was a surprise too if it yeah that'd be the hardest part if if you worked a lot with this person and you thought like things are going great we seem to get a lot done and then you get this review it'd be kind of feel like you're you're blindsided almost oh yeah especially because it came through your manager right yeah yeah so you know your manager saw it maybe this is the nice version that your manager filtered out is that what you're saying i wasn't saying that but that is a possibility i haven't been through 360 degree performance evaluations in this format where you you kind of like privately evaluate someone and then they all is this how they're supposed to work i thought your manager was

Starting point is 00:13:33 supposed to like anonymize yeah that do this that is how my company does it we uh select in fact there's a couple differences here we select the people we want to hear from and then those people fill out the review stuff it's you know short few sentences positive and uh so they do that basically the same format after that but then yeah they're anonymized your manager is allowed to see them and see who wrote them but the employee doesn't so i'm kind of surprised by this But I wonder if the person who wrote the review knew that it would be not anonymous. It'd be very easy to accidentally anonymize yourself if you just talk about the project you worked on. And there's two people that work on that project.

Starting point is 00:14:13 It's pretty clear. I don't know. Yeah, so having never been through this process, that did feel weird that either what's the point of going through the manager if it's still just like your colleague handing you this piece of paper, but also your manager sees it. that seems weird yeah so maybe the process broke down or maybe it was not clear maybe that's how they do it maybe they want people to give direct feedback to each other well that's how i've done that in the past at a so at a previous company i uh set up the feedback system and i i told people straight up this will not be anonymous and i my reasoning was i want people to be willing to stand behind their feedback and i felt that it would encourage people to offer constructive feedback

Starting point is 00:14:53 And what I mean by constructive is not just say positive things, but rather give people coaching and encouragement on ways that they can do better. So it's kind of like rather than saying, you know, you're a terrible engineer, you can say things like, I think that to take it to the next level, you need to improve your documentation skills and your, I don't know, refactoring skills, whatever. Just pick something as an example. Don't just pick something randomly during the actual feedback. but by not being anonymous it's like you can go to someone and look them in the eye and say i intend i'm offering this advice to you because i believe in you and i want you to improve not just to walk up to someone and say you're terrible so it sounds to me like maybe this person missed that opportunity to really offer good good actionable advice yeah i think there's a

Starting point is 00:15:38 difference between harsh feedback and being insulting or mean or rude and i i know if i got negative feedback it would hurt my feelings because i'm just a delicate sensitive soul but i feel like i would take some time to think is this person being rude are they are they calling out my personality or or saying insulting things or are they saying jameson failed at this thing or he is not good at this thing or when he did this thing it hurt the team in ways that don't make me feel good but that that might be true or might reflect their perspective and trying to separate like they're trying to hurt me versus they're they're describing what they see as reality helps me a little bit in those situations it's also in some ways getting direct feedback is is a rare gift

Starting point is 00:16:23 most people don't give any feedback because they don't want to offend you so they err way on the other side of they might drop some delicate hints that you'll never pick up on or understand about things that they they see you can improve on or they might just like talk about it behind your back with everybody else. But they will very rarely come up and say, hey, this thing you did was wrong and bad, or you should have done it this way instead. So even though it hurts, it is kind of a gift to say like, well, at least I know. It's not passive aggressive. It might just be aggressive aggressive. Active aggressive. One skill to develop as a more senior person on a team is how do you give direct feedback without offending people and i think most people err far too much on the

Starting point is 00:17:08 being too indirect to try and preserve feelings side um so at least you get exposure to the other side of it yeah like maybe they're not worried about your feelings but they're being very direct as a result of that i i would suggest maybe examining how they work with other folks are they are they kind of like a curmudgeon and grumpy in general do they like love to talk about how much code sucks and i don't know there's is this kind of how they deal with the world so that might make you feel a little bit better if that's true they're not singling you out as singularly incompetent but if that's not true then it's even worse yeah maybe don't open that door but but i would say try and separate the tone from the content they they might not have developed

Starting point is 00:17:53 the skill of delivering clear direct feedback in in a kind way so you might have to apply that skill for them and say like they said things in an insulting way but what was the content of it and and then you can evaluate whether you think that's true or not maybe there is some truth to it maybe there isn't um but but they've they've left some work for you in in figuring out like this makes me feel a certain way what are they saying behind what it makes me feel yeah it makes sense. Yeah. And I want to call out one thing that the question asker wrote, which is that it says there is some truth to these comments, which that takes a lot of maturity to say, I just got some harsh feedback and I can see that there's grains of truth in here that are going to, that are

Starting point is 00:18:34 something I can improve. Especially if it wasn't delivered delicately. It's really easy to just get defensive and clamp down and say like, you joke or you don't know anything because you, you hurt me. Exactly. And so the fact that you're able to see some truth in here speaks very highly of you and what it tells me is that you're probably in a place where you could sit down with your manager if you have a manager that you trust and say here's the feedback i got then describe what you understood it to be see if the manager agrees and then ask the manager for coaching and say what do you think i can do to improve in these areas and how should i prioritize this this effort of self-improvement sure that will be a useful for you as an individual to

Starting point is 00:19:13 receive coaching from a hopefully disinterested third party whose job is to coach you but b i forgot b oh yes b uh you are signaling to your manager that you are a proactive self-improving team member um which is a great message for your manager to hear because it tells them that you are willing to go the extra mile and do the work it takes to be a productive positive member of this team and meanwhile this other person who maybe was a little bit flippant in their feedback and maybe didn't put that much effort into it has sent a separate signal which is that i'm willing to hurl negative feedback at people without considering their feelings and without giving them positive constructive ways to work on it and that's a very different signal

Starting point is 00:19:54 from what you'll send by sitting down and getting coaching from your manager yeah yeah it's it's it's great to hear someone say i want to improve how can i do it especially if you have concrete feedback of like here's the feedback i got what do you think about this that's um i think that reflects fairly very highly on you so so what about the potential damage it does to the working relationship between these two people they've worked together closely on a project and then the question asker gets this negative feedback and it's possible that they haven't it sounds like it was a surprise so they probably haven't really talked about it in person like how do they go back to working together now do you bring it up and say like hey those are my feelings or that's

Starting point is 00:20:32 tough i mean it's awkward hate them forever in secret or i don't think it would be productive to tell this person that it hurt your feelings i don't see any good coming out of that unless it was like really over the top bad behavior and they need to be corrected for that um and in that case it's probably above your pay grade and needs to be handled by a manager anyway what would you do what would i do i think i would talk to my manager about it i don't know i'd probably do nothing honestly it'd probably just feel bad it feels it feels like the right thing to do would be to talk about it with this person that feels like the harder thing to do but potentially the right thing and and if just like you're trying to communicate to your manager hey i'd like to

Starting point is 00:21:09 improve i'd like to get better you can communicate that to the to your co-worker and that might affect how they view you you want to be careful to not like make them your boss by saying like oh you gave me this feedback and so i'll just do whatever you say as long as you are mean to me oh gosh yeah yeah that's a risk i think you really need to size up the character of this person before you go into this relationship because you're making yourself pretty vulnerable yeah yeah that's true if they're a sociopath and you're in trouble well if they're a sociopath they might just like murder you at any point too so that's true so you probably don't want to be alone in a room with them anyway yeah i hope you have an open floor plan

Starting point is 00:21:45 oh finally yeah one of the benefits a high percentage of ceos are sociopaths the open floor plan is really to protect employees from the herd together like zebras oh my goodness you've done it you found the reason yeah i i think your suggestion of talking to your manager about it is that's hard i mean your manager already knows the feedback so it's not like you're going to reveal any additional information besides i am interested in feedback and want to get better so i've talked to two different managers over my career about negative feedback oh actually three i'll just share uh one thing that i found common among these stories was i got a bunch of feedback um mostly positive because usually especially these non-anonymous

Starting point is 00:22:29 things they're overwhelmingly positive plus i'm just a really likable guy so you know also i'm very intimidating in private so people have a hard time giving me negative feedback you can't tell over the podcast but dave is eight feet tall anyway so um amidst the positive feedback that i received in a couple of these sessions there was a few little uh negative feedback items that stood out and i really latched onto those because you know like you read all these nice things dave's a great engineer yada yada oh that's nice and then someone's like dave made me feel bad in this situation and i'm like whoa whoa what did i do you know and in one case actually in both cases my manager said you know what dave i have some

Starting point is 00:23:10 extra context on this situation and i wouldn't focus too much on this feedback item uh i think it's an outlier and i think it's not your normal behavior and i do think there was some unusual circumstances that led to this feedback and i don't think you need to change anything in particular for it and i really appreciated that from my manager to bring a little bit of extra context to shine light on it in such a way that i could say okay i can let this go i don't have to latch on to it i don't have to make an action plan and lay out goals to improve you know i can just say look my normal mo is actually uh good for this situation but in this one circumstance things went a little bad i really like that that's great you don't necessarily have to pivot your life

Starting point is 00:23:49 because someone gave you negative feedback especially if if you're performing well at work like that's theoretically that's the ultimate feedback right um so so i agree talk with your manager about it they might give some more context i think i also agree with myself try to separate the tone from the content but but also realize that you and i have something in common we both a podcast no we both usually agree with you good then i'll keep working with you in a podcast if you have two hosts and they both say the same things and one of them's not necessary it's just redundancy in case one of us let the one go who doesn't have

Starting point is 00:24:33 the beautiful smooth melodious voice uh Uh, okay. Pre-pubescent Jameson voice cracking. All right. Did we answer this question? I think we did. Good luck. It's a tricky situation, but I feel like learning how to deal with feedback well is a good skill.

Starting point is 00:24:54 And especially even learning how to deal with feedback that isn't so great, either not so positive or not so high quality is also a good skill. So yes, very, very important. Awesome. Well, where can people go if they want to get their own questions answered? They can go to softskills.audio, which is our website. They can click the Ask a Question button and put in some details into a form. We really appreciate you sending in questions.

Starting point is 00:25:14 We need more. Give us more questions. Start some trouble at work and then ask us how to deal with the trouble you started. Do something. Please keep them coming in. We really appreciate all the time and effort, and we're working through them. We'll get to yours. We will.

Starting point is 00:25:28 The universe might die from heat death before we get to them, but we will eventually... Wait. No, that means we won't get to them all. uh we we will keep the universe going okay don't worry about it all right also if you're interested please support us on patreon you can go to patreon.com soft skills eng or to our website and click support us on patreon we really appreciate it thank you so much to all those who do thanks very much all right catch you next week

Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 117: Defense Industry Stigma and Responding to Negative Feedback

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.