Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 120: Layoff Decisions and Overworking Peers

Episode Date: August 20, 2018

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: How do managers make firing decision during company wide cuts? Recently our company went through spending cuts and x percentage of people were laid off as part of this exercise. On one fateful day, our manager informed us that he let go John Doe as he had to fire someone. Overall John Doe was a decent senior developer and was with the company for 10 plus years. My gut feeling is that he was let go because he simply didn’t (or couldn’t) move to management and was too old for a developer position. Does ageism play a role when a firing decision has to be made based on non-performance reasons? I’m in my early 30s, I have a spouse and a small child, and work remotely as a software engineer. One of my peers, let’s call him James, is about 10 years younger than me, works on-site, and is single. He’s a good developer and really friendly. The problem I have with him is that this job is his life. It isn’t uncommon for James to work 14 hour days (including weekends sometimes), submitting code for review at midnight, then back in to work bright and early the next day. This is not at all encouraged at my company. Most everyone comes in at 9 and leaves at 6. I feel a little bad for James because I get the sense that he’s lonely, and doesn’t have much going for him outside of work. However, it’s frustrating working with a peer who puts in way more time at work when my home life literally makes that level of dedication impossible. James receives a lot of praise for the hard problems he works on after-hours. I know my performance is fine and I don’t need the praise per se, but it’s frustrating to feel that I’m going to be compared to him informally by my co-workers in terms of what we get done, and formally, as promotion opportunities come up. I honestly wish someone in management would ask him not to work after-hours, but that’s probably not going to happen. Thoughts on how to handle this?

It takes more than great inversion of control skills to be a great engineer. This is Soft Skills Engineering episode 120. I'm your host, Dave Smith. I'm your host, Jameson Dance. Soft Skills Engineering is a weekly advice show for software engineers about non-technical topics. Inversion of control is like, I mean, you could invert control of your relationships, right? That could be non-technical. And like, well, who would control it? Control them. Just the other person.

so if you're the maniacal controlling one you could just hand that over to the other person i don't know it's been too long i'm out of practice on dumb puns inversion of control freaks yeah that's where you take the closest control freak and you turn them upside down okay yeah um like to punish them or just for the same reason you do inversion of control no one knows why you just okay we have some patrons we want to thank thank you so much to zeitiger and alex freiberg and thomas connell they all uh donated at the ten dollar a month level so they get one-time shout outs you are great also we have our stupendous 20 and above level donations who gets shout outs every single podcast thank you so much to zach grannon david jackson dustin

coats nick cantar dimitro and neonilla sean clayton and ken howard thank you so much you help keep the podcast going we are finishing up some design stuff so we might have stickers soon oh yeah prettier twitter avatar and i don't know we yeah you'll see the fruits absolutely hopefully leftover fruits after i bought very expensive imported fruits with all the money there's some fruit called snake fruit from indonesia oh yeah it's worth every thousand of dollars you've had this uh actually i did but i haven't imported it yet is it literally a thousand dollars a pound no i don't know how much it is okay i'll look it up i'll let you know i'll maybe it'll be a stretch goal donate this much and you get to know jameson is using your donation to eat

snake fruit i've never heard of this um i don't even remember if if it was good or not i just it was just it was just one of those like unique fruits that you don't have here and you're only allowed to eat it on your yacht i yeah yeah it dissolves it's that's why it's so expensive it has yacht tracking built into it it's got drm uh thank you so much patrons you help keep these incredible jokes coming if you want to become a patron you can go to our website and click support the show or you can go to patreon.com soft skills eng and join this illustrious crew that's right dave do you want to read our first question sure this comes from an anonymous listener who writes how do managers make firing

decisions during company-wide cuts recently our company went through spending cuts and x percentage of people were laid off as part of this exercise on one fateful day our manager informed us that he let go John Doe as he had to fire someone. I'm going to assume John Doe is an alias. It would be really unfortunate if your name was actually John Doe. That would be actually a really good reason to fire somebody is because you could claim it was keeping them anonymous. No one will ever believe it was actually John Doe. Okay, so he let go John Doe. Overall, John Doe was a decent senior developer and was with the company for 10 plus years. My gut feeling is that he was let go because he simply didn't or couldn't move to management

and was too old for a developer position. Does ageism play a role when a firing decision has to be made based on non-performance reasons? I'm shocked, shocked to hear reports of possible ageism. Why? That sounds unthinkable. I thought we eradicated ageism

when we eradicated polio. Yeah, that stinks. I'm sorry to hear that. Layoffs are never fun. Even if you get left behind, people you know and liked are gone and i've never been around layoffs where everyone was like you know that was tough but fair like the right people stayed and the right people got let go and the company really is in a stronger financial position just like you said ceo person just like you said

it's always yeah yeah you know this was a tough time but we did come through stronger than ever you're right i do like this bold new direction i can feel the the sleek performance increases um when i slim down i just get hungry and then i feel miserable so i think that's what happens to companies too they just get hungry and sad and not the good startup hungry where you're like hungry to devour the competition or the vc money or whatever i don't know the bad hungry where you're just cranky the headache kind yeah yeah oh so does it play a role hmm i you know i think that it's hard to speak for the whole species of human beings but i'm gonna do it anyway is it then i'll i'll be the judge of how hard it is it seems pretty easy for you it's pretty easy um i i would

find it i mean let's say you had a 75 year old developer who's just working doing great work produces awesome product does a great job um would they get laid off just strictly because they're older than everyone else i don't know i don't i don't know i find that hard to swallow that strictly age um that that there's a room where people sit and like rank people by age and say well these are the oldest people we got to get rid of them you're saying you don't think that happens very often i don't think that happens what i do think happens is that there are other factors that are correlated with age such as probably the number one thing compensation yeah yeah there's a lot of factors like compensation is one if you're trying to cut costs there's also i would say more

experienced people tend to be more sure of themselves and and maybe more willing to rock the boat in some cases so like they could be seen as like not wanting to fall in line because they know they might know more they've seen things done different ways than other places um yeah i think i get what you're saying i wouldn't say that it never happens i'm sure there are places where people are explicitly making decisions based on age which is super illegal by the way and should not happen but does i'm sure i know that like in law firms for example there are certainly partner tracks right and if you have been at the firm for x number of years where x is usually single digits and you're not clearly on the partner track they will fire you and it's like

very clear everyone knows this is how it works right yeah it's up or out um i haven't seen that in the engineering field at least not explicitly stated isn't that in the netflix culture slide deck up around i don't know if they use that exact phrase but it's it's more like people should be progressing and advancing and if they're not then we give them a generous severance package there's like 18 slides in that deck that end with and then we give them a generous severance package yeah there are i'm pretty sure that's one of them though um yeah i don't i don't know um i don't remember that from the netflix culture deck but it it sounds like it would fit right in well i'll tell everyone that it's in there then without checking so like if it's if money was the factor

here you know there can be a pretty big difference between junior developer salaries and senior developer salaries like you know if there's a difference in 20 years of experience you could easily be talking about double or more difference in salary so it could be that laying off john doe actually saved your job because they only had to lay off one john doe instead of john doe and you yeah yeah the the whole decision making behind this gets weird and fuzzy and if you're not a psychopath always feels bad yeah because you start putting numbers to people and like how much do they make okay how much do they contribute like what number do we assign to how much it'll affect this project or i don't know you like you have to if these constraints are imposed on you from

the outside whether like your company it doesn't have enough money or some high muckety muck says cut x percentage of your budget you you have to do this hard thing and it's and it's hard to come to a decision that doesn't hurt people because it's a hurtful thing yeah and you know as you were talking about that i realized i was i was thinking to myself have i ever had to make a layoff decision like this? The answer is no. I don't think you have either, right, Jamison? Nope. Never had to make budgetary layoffs like this. Me neither. And I thought to myself, I wonder how many people actually have to do this. And then I realized there are a lot of companies who effectively do this every year because they do

stack ranking, where they have to actually put everyone and every team in order, and they are forced to pick a certain number of low performers, certain number of high performers, etc. And I'll bet you that makes it a lot easier to do layoffs when layoff time comes because you're in the habit of putting people in this order you know yeah i mean we could pivot this question to be about how stupid stack ranking is well yeah i mean i think that's stupid because it's it's per team and teams are not all equally talented and skilled if you cut like 10 of every team that's not going to cut like the worst performing 10 of the company no you might cut out some of the best performers if you have a high performing team but but you're saying that that could be a way to avoid having

to explicitly say like we don't have enough money we have to do layoffs i was actually thinking it was more like a conspiracy theory like stack ranking is motivated oh it's to desensitize us yeah so that we're always ready to do that layoff if someone comes to you and says 10 staff cuts it's like oh i've already got my list it's in sorted order huh yeah that's just kind of a kind of i've i've heard enough stories and been around layoffs enough to feel like it's not always necessarily just who are the lowest performers i was part of layoffs at a company where it wasn't by performance at all it was basically um reverse order of tenure at the company it was it was kind of like we want to show loyalty to the people who've been here the longest sorry people who

joined us most recently but we're letting all of you go and then there was one exception that was kind of like a an indispensable person and they wanted to get rid of that they didn't like the amount of dependencies that had built up on the team around the indispensable person oh even though this person had a longer tenure yeah yeah um but but even among that that that was what it looked like to me but there were other patterns that you could see in who got laid off that i mean i'm pretty sure the the oldest developer at the company was part of that group they joined more recently um there were some people who were kind of cultural outliers that joined more recently as the company diversified a little bit and they were all laid off and so there there i don't think

there's always one easy explanation and even if there is i don't think they said it explicitly i don't think they explicitly said like we got rid of the newest people because we we want to reward the people that have stuck around the longest yeah i think that's that's the thing i've also seen that's maybe the most common thing i've seen which is like the explanations given are not convincing um and and leave people guessing and if there's a meta point about this that's what i would make that i haven't done it so maybe it's impossible but i feel like you would want to clearly explain even if it's painful here's why this happened here's why we made these decisions that we did so that it seems less arbitrary and weird and it's less clear like well so i don't

know maybe maybe there are talented people that go but but you you say like well this project under these constraints are less important and this is the project they're working on i don't know i don't even know that's possible though yeah i mean you you said you want to make it seem less arbitrary like in order for that to come true you actually have to make it not arbitrary in the first place which i think is probably not the case in most layoffs right yeah i mean there there have to be some reasons but maybe they're not reasons that you can stand up in it to a group of people that's that's exactly what i mean it's like this is the least politically covered team so it's easier to lay people off from this team and that's not a thing you want to say to the

well i have the remaining people on that team i know this manager's on the fast track to vp and i really don't want to make him mad yeah i'm gonna have someone from this other team who had got a bad performance review last year i mean you can't this person shot my idea down once in a meeting and it's time for my revenge i mean it's i've been on the other side of the desk from a couple of firings and even in those cases where the performance was very clear that they needed to be let go it was still almost impossible to tell them and we've had this question before where like yeah you know if you get fired should you ask for feedback and try to get a clear understanding of why or rather if you have to fire someone should you try to give them

all this feedback on their way out the door and and our conclusion was no like that's just not the time to do it and i think i'm pretty sure i waffled because i waffle about everything it sounds unlike me to say no firmly yeah that's true but i think we eventually wandered back towards like no the person won't be in a place to handle it and so like i don't think you'll ever get a layoff or very very rarely will you ever see a layoff where it's like okay here are the reasons it makes sense to everyone and it's all clear and there's no question yeah but this is i mean the fact that the question asker is bringing up ageism people are so quick to jump to to explanations yep and they're often not kind because people aren't feeling kind because it's a bad

crappy situation yeah so i mean wouldn't it be better to give an uncomfortable explanation versus let people think well clearly it's ageism which is real bad to think about your company that's true so you're saying don't leave the door open for more nasty interpretations i think if you can yeah just say out loud this wasn't ageism and everyone will be like oh phew well it really looks like it but you cleared up my concerns man i feel better yeah john doe made x amount of money and you all make x minus a large percentage so see that's the thing it was clear it's so hard it was either him or three of you he made three times as much as us uh the the clear solution is be so successful that you never have to have layoffs oh that's

easy just only hire people that for the rest of their lives perform exceedingly well and only make business decisions that always work out exactly perfect and then you don't have to exercise this skill or worry about it at all we have found the root of this problem and we dug it up or just encourage skydiving in your employees get natural attrition yeah just as they age you just start encouraging more and more risky behaviors just slide over in a performance review slide over a piece of paper that has a list of drugs on it and like you know i've heard these are good no just start giving out gift certificates to really dangerous things like yeah we know you always wanted to try out a wingsuit ride here you go oh i feel bad about this question i feel like we

joked a lot about scary things because it's easier than talking about how painful they are just like actual layoffs yeah it's it's too uncomfortable to give real advice i think i think your answer is right though that in most cases it might be it might be bias influencing their decisions but it i agree that it's unlikely to be directly saying like this person is above 55 and we hate people above 55 it's more like they sure are expensive and we need to cut costs and 22 year olds are less expensive uh not every engineer has developed the ability to market themselves and really make leadership aware of the strengths that they bring to the table and make no mistake experience brings a lot of strengths and value but if you're not it's it's not the kind of stuff that shows up in

the in the jira ticket queue you know necessarily so i guess we've kind of pivoted to how to protect yourself from ageism but i think you need to make sure it's clear in management's mind why you're so valuable even though you're making twice as much as the kids just out of college yeah yeah it's yeah that's a good point the value starts to get diffused a little bit more where instead of in my experience it's it's not as much that you pump out twice as many jira tickets like you said it's that you take on harder things you're better at uncovering unknowns you you you support larger groups and make them all more productive and that's all stuff that's less visible by our crappy systems than just like yeah how many things did you put in the right bin right

so what about this question about um the feeling that he was let go because he didn't want to or couldn't move into management is that a thing you've heard of or encountered yeah that's that's a very interesting question um not every company has a good individual contributor track and there There definitely is a mentality that if you are more experienced, you should be leading engineers, you know, you should be in management. I felt that. Have you felt that, Jameson? Like, have you kind of seen that?

Yeah, I think it's definitely a clear path that you can follow. I've also, I've definitely run into people that love to influence purely technically and they have to forge their own path a little bit more. There's less of a groove, right? it if if you are a talented engineer and you're like reasonably good with people then it's very easy not easy that that it's it's natural yeah there there are clear steps that you follow that kind of lead to management it's definitely not easy and also uh it's probably easier for me than people that look different from me but it's a path lots of people have

trod before right whereas the the high paid individual contributor influencer but not manager is only recently I feel like have companies really started to establish, maybe in the last decade, established tracks like that. I'm fortunate enough to work for one that has very clearly defined roles and responsibilities at different levels of non-management engineers. And there are non-management individual contributor engineers

at every level of our org chart except the tippy top. And so not as many though, by the way, as managers. So it's not like 100% equal. yeah that's a good point i we have similar paths in our org chart but i agree about the numbers that it's they're they're way more like at each level the higher up you go there are way more managers than than these fabled superhero individual contributors but they are around and it can happen but i guess my point is that if that's what you want you probably have to work for it a little bit more deliberately than if you want management where if you work for it people

be like oh yeah yeah i've seen this before like yeah you're yep talented and you're good with people and okay do these things then you can step up to this next responsibility or whatever yep so i think that your intuition is very possibly right on ageism may have played a factor especially if it's a derivative factor of ageism like compensation and the non-management thing well yeah went into calculus you lost me if you integrate over money you get age okay and if you derive by age you get money someday i'll finish the calc 2 is the one remaining thing between me and my degree oh yeah when i finish it i'll go back and listen to this episode and i'll understand it you'll be like oh that's what he meant wait dave's an idiot oh yeah

oh it didn't actually mean anything no the wisdom will unfold into my mind like a flower all right have we answered this question i think so good luck and i'm sorry you had to go through those layoffs yeah all right i will read the next one this is from another this is from another anonymous listener i'm in my early 30s i have a spouse and a small child and i work remotely as a software engineer one of my peers let's call him james is about 10 years younger than me works on site and is single he is a good developer and really friendly the problem i have is that this job is his life it isn't uncommon for james to work 14 hour days including weekends sometimes submitting code for a review at midnight and then back to work bright and early the next day

this is not at all encouraged by my company most everybody comes in at nine and leaves at six i feel a little bit bad for james because i get the sense that he's lonely and doesn't have much time and doesn't have much going for him outside of work it's frustrating working with a peer who puts in way more time at work when my home life literally makes this level of dedication impossible james receives a lot of praise for the hard problems he works on after hours i know my performance is fine and i don't need the praise per se but it's frustrating to feel that i'm going to be preferred that i'm going to be compared to him informally by my co-workers in terms of what we get done and formally as promotion opportunities come up i honestly wish someone in management

would ask him to not work after hours but that's probably not going to happen thoughts on how to handle this it's clear you must sabotage james oh well if you want to get medieval yeah you could do lots of stuff besides that though you could slowly raise the standing desk just a millimeter every day until it ruins his posture and then well if he works 14 hour days his posture is actually probably ruined already he's way ahead of you on that uh what if you sneak into his settings and slow down the keyboard key repeat rate on his keyboard every day by a little i would notice that instantly oh you the second someone touched oh if you did it a little bit every day okay yeah maybe that yeah take down the clock frequency on

his cpu just a little bit every day yeah if you just gradually made his computer crappier and crappier what if you took his escape key and replaced it with a touch bar to sabotage him yeah i don't know what their long-term plan is but they've demonstrated success so far so i'm sure it'll work out well for him i'm sure somehow sabotaging me will be good for them uh yeah you gotta just torpedo his ability to get work done um teach him haskell distract him with functional programming yeah distract him with things that are just deep enticing puzzles that lots of people don't use to get real work done um i make fun of haskell because i like it uh yeah this is interesting this this is a really hard situation and i'll and i'll tell you why management just

can't say no to people like this it's like it's like a habit forming drug when you have someone who works for you they put in ultra hours they don't get burned out they love what they do and they do good work and it's like wait i'm getting 40 more engineer for the price of one like it's really hard to say no yeah what's what's the cost to them it's like maybe in like five years they'll be burnt out but there'll be several jobs away from working for you by then most likely so i I mean, I had a I had a CTO who we had an employee like this and the CTO was just thrilled. You know, he was like, I'm not going to stop him. You know, I mean, now he I'll tell you what he didn't do, though, is he did not shout this guy's praises to all the other engineers.

And he certainly did not make it obvious that he was favoring this guy. And frankly, I don't think he did favor him. But he also didn't discourage him. Not a little, not even a little bit. You know, he was just super thrilled that he would do that kind of work. So you're saying the question asker wanted someone from management to step in and say, don't work after hours. And you're saying that's unlikely to happen, right?

Well, it's, I mean, a wise manager will see the conundrum here. And the conundrum is I'm creating an artificial, accidental, inflated set of expectations for everyone else, right? On the one hand. On the other hand, he's getting a lot of work done, James. And I like that work that he's getting done. And it's helping me to meet my goals faster. so how do I do that how do I balance those two things yeah it's it is a tricky balance like if

you're worried about being compared to this person I mean if you're being measured on your productivity and output then if they get more done like what's unfair about that comparison that's that's what my more cynical side of my brain is saying like that's how it works right like people get compared based on how much they get done if he puts in a lot more time and gets more done not just like puts in more time without much to show for it then maybe maybe james deserves these praises but the other part is um there are so many things that go into how much time you can put in like the question asker mentioned having a family is one thing um some people have responsibilities outside of work besides family some people just i don't think everyone can just sit down and program for

14 hours a day i don't think i've ever been like that even when i was 20 um there are all kinds of reasons some of them come some of them your your background or culture or socioeconomic status goes into some of them as well and and like we want to be fair in comparing people not just say like well this person has these best circumstances and is making the most of them so they get they get even more than they already have i know that's uh it's true but like at the end of the day he is producing more right and and yeah that's that's the tricky part yeah like you don't want to punish someone and you know i think the the answer to this question is as a manager you have to make it clear what your standard of expectation what your standard of productivity is and if someone

is exceeding that standard great if other people are exceeding that standard but not as much also great um and i think what it comes down to is that compensation is an individual affair right and you know you this question makes one big assumption i think which is that all these people are compensated you know in a nice proportional fair way according to their contributions and the fact is that's probably not the case in fact james is so obsessed with work there's a good chance he hasn't worried about his compensation at all and he may be making less than you you know that is a thing i've seen more often than these people being paid extremely well actually yeah exactly like yeah they were motivated by money they wouldn't be focusing so

much on this on like you know cranking out the code at midnight and whatnot you know they'd be coming up with ways to use that time to make more money because every marginal hour you spend beyond your you know minimum expectation is is an hour you're donating and if this guy was really obsessed with money he probably wouldn't be doing it yeah but what about so in an ideal world you would have these objective measures of here's what we expect at each position and and here's where you're up against these expectations but people's brains don't work like that we're just we look at what's around us so i i think the question asker is making the argument that like um if they ask for a raise or there's a promotion that they'll they'll just be measured against this person's

against james's output because people will look around to see what's close by yeah say like well james works twice as much as you do like why do you deserve a raise and and when that happens then I think you can address that concern. But until that happens, I think you might be worrying about something that may never happen. Yeah. It's possible.

Yeah, it's possible. I don't know that I have a good answer for this question. As a manager, I have worked with people who work a lot and I've had conversations with them, basically bringing up my concern at that point is that they're going to burn out, that they're working because they feel pressure or that they're working at an unsustainable pace.

And depending on how that conversation goes, people have slowed down or they've they've just said like this is just what i like to do i just want to do this and i'm not going to say don't do it if you like to do it and if you feel like it's healthy if i detect signs of burnout i would step in more and say hey i know you like to but i'm seeing these things which make me think it's not good for you in the long term but if they seem like their life is going okay living that way and then i don't know i i feel like a person this motivated it would be pretty demotivating to say like you have to not work this much yeah because they might do it because they're really interested in the problem or they really

like the company and and it might dislodge something in them that's what i'd be worried about i guess and then you wouldn't get all this extra free labor is that yeah then i wouldn't get all the extra free labor no it'd be more like they they would it wouldn't be like they would go from working twice as much to a normal amount it's that they would they would like what is the reason for it. I think I'd be worried it would tip them over into burnout, I guess. Where part of what makes that amount of work possible is because it feels meaningful. And if I say it's not meaningful, like it's just a job, man, don't worry about it. Then they'll be like, it is just a job. What am I doing with my life? And then they'll quit and join the circus. Maybe I should

do that because maybe they would be happier. I don't know. What should I do, Dave? I think that you need to as a manager you got to make it clear to everyone on the team that their performance is an individual affair between you and them and that you will make it clear to them if they're underperforming and you will make it also clear to them what they need to do to get to the next level and i'll tell you what like as a manager being in a position where someone comes to you and says here's what i want what do i need to do to get it and you create a plan together that gets them there and then watch them deliver on that plan and then give them what they asked for that's great and yeah never in that conversation does it ever need to come up well james is

working 14 hours a day you know it's like no let's talk about you let's talk about what you're doing and what you can contribute and let's come up with an agreement where you can get to the next level where you want to go yep and i think if you keep that conversation individual then you can forego and bypass a lot of this painful stuff so if if that's the advice you're giving to this person's manager what about to the actual question asker you're saying you should probably go to your manager and say this to them the the inverse of that say like hey i i want these things what can i do to get them and make that conversation about you instead of about instead of just waiting for something to come up and then let people compare you to james is that what you're saying exactly

get yeah i think so try to get ahead of the comparison to where you say all right you know i want to make sure that i am performing well and uh that you know in your eyes everything is good and if it's not i want to have an honest and frank discussion with you and yeah and get it all squared away and i might not even mention james um other than to express concern for james because i have concern for james he may be yeah i do too i mean if james is causing everyone else on the team to feel inadequate or vulnerable then this could actually be a problem it could be impacting the team you know and you should probably i mean i don't know if it's your place to assess that but it's definitely your manager i think it's definitely your manager's place to

set clear expectations for performance and if those expectations are being set implicitly by the person who works the longest hours then that is a problem and i think you can say hey i'm worried i'm being measured unfairly against this person like what what is good performance to you is it ours is it how much i get done is it how well we communicate what what lets you know that people are performing well so it's not just like down to this workaholic person yeah definitely i think that's really smart yeah i like that good stuff dave you said good things after i admitted to everybody i am i'm bad at things not true um have we answered the question question answered all right good luck let us know what happens tell james we're worried about him

yeah tell james to give us a call yeah yeah all right what can people do if they want to give us a call go hit soft skills.audio and click on ask a question you can fill out all the information you like or leave everything blank and we'll just try to interpret what you meant yes and if you want to support the show keep listening tell people about it or if you want to support us financially you can go to our website and click support the show or to patreon.com soft skills ZNG. Thank you so much for listening. We will catch you next week.