Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 121: Working Remotely Without Hating It and Managing Rotating Engineers

Episode Date: August 27, 2018

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I used to work totally remote, but found myself absolutely hating it. The lack of office culture and human interaction. The problem is that in my area there are few local development jobs that match my skill set. I work in a large but heathcare heavy town, and their tech does not blend with my skill set. All to say. When it comes time to find my next job I’ll probably be looking for remote again. How can I come to love remote jobs, or at least survive? Maybe my previous companies remote culture was terrible. Is there any advice you can give when evaluating a remote culture at a company? Love the show! I had a question on how to effectively manage of team of engineers who have only partial allocation to my project. I am a project & technical lead for a team of ““8 FTE””, which is composed of a rotating cast of engineers who are allocated to my project in small percentages (most commonly between 30-80% of their time). This has a lot of challenges which you can imagine, but the one I am most interested in your thoughts on is the struggle with other projects about ““whose deliverable for a given engineer has priority””. As an example an engineer with 50% time on my project and 50% on another project will give me feedback that his immediate tasking between projects is unclear, he knows he has to do both workloads but feels they are uneven, or he is under more pressure from one project than the other. My company stack ranks during performance reviews and competition between leaders of matrix organizations (such as myself) in particular is fierce, so discussions between projects on how to effectively tackle this problem does not yield constructive agreements (in my experience). I’m at times guilty of trying to ““squeeze”” more than my designated allocation out of engineers to deliver on agreements for timing, scope, etc. Any thoughts are appreciated!

It takes more than changing your job title on LinkedIn to does computer stuff real good to be a great software engineer. This is episode 121 of the Soft Skills Engineering Podcast and I'm your host, Jamison Dance. I'm your host, Dave Smith. It actually takes a lot more because changing your job title to that

means that you get less recruiter span. I'm surprised because don't they want people that can do computer stuff real good? Yeah, they do. Seems like a failure on their part. that's because you didn't you left off and does soft skill stuff real good oh that's true that would be the complete developer and then i would start a school the recruiter children they want to do

computer stuff real good and other stuff good too yeah that recruiter took one look at your linkedin profile and went this is only half an engineer it is effective if you're one of those first world problems people they get spammed too much by recruiters yeah just put something goofy soft skills engineering is a podcast where we talk about all of the non-technical things that go into being a great software developer that is like linkedin titles i guess dave we have some patrons do you want to thank them or i guess maybe maybe you want to curse them out i don't know what your plan is this week i was

going to thank okay i mean that's the highest okay okay our like unobtainium platinum level of donation is we'll curse you out on the podcast okay this week we'd like to thank zach grannon david jackson dustin coats nick cantar dimitro and neonilla sean clayton and ken howard for donating and continuing to support the show as a 20 a month level thank you we love you and we couldn't do this without you yeah and we have stickers coming yes partially because of you so yes yeah we've got oh yeah we have a new design i don't know we can talk about it but i guess you can't see it when we describe it so it has colors shapes it does have a strange oily texture which was surprising to me when you touch it yeah if you're listening now just pick up your

phone and kind of brush it against your cheek and you'll notice soft yet firm perfect all right Oh, yeah. Should we read our first question? Sure. I think I should do it. Okay. Okay. All right. This comes from an anonymous listener who writes, Hey there. I used to work totally remote, but found myself absolutely hating it, the lack of office culture and human interaction. The problem is that in my area, there are few local development jobs that match my skill set. I work in a large,

but healthcare-heavy town, and their tech does not blend with my skill set. All to say, when it comes time to find my next job, I'll probably be looking for remote, again how can i come to love remote jobs or at least survive maybe my previous company's remote culture was terrible is there any advice you can give when evaluating a remote culture at a company a large but health care heavy town i just imagine a town full of extremely healthy people everyone's just in fantastic shape no health care heavy means everyone gets a lot of health care which means so extremely unhealthy is that what you're saying i'm gonna guess this is this has got to be somewhere in connecticut really there's like a ton of health insurance

companies there oh i have no idea yes there are some everywhere so i work fully remote i have for a while now dave do you have any background in this i have worked remotely now for three weeks so i've pretty much the world's authority on remote work no you you have in your head the contrast very strongly i think you are the world's authority you you still remember what it was like before you could wear pajamas all day in the bad old days do i though maybe maybe i wore pajamas to the office yeah in the time of trials before before you could wear your bathrobe before you could literally open the kimono it used to be a metaphor now it's

um yeah i i guess i'm kind of a canary in that sense because i'm new to it and and i work in a situation i think you know james and i were talking earlier and we feel like there's basically two kinds of remote work arrangements there's one where everyone is remote this is like a remote company yep or at least a remote team where all the people you interact with they all work remotely but then there's also the situation which i'm in which is where your team is not remote and you are the lonely only who's remote on your team yeah and those are two very different scenarios right very different yeah

i've been the only remote person and i've also been the on-site person working with the only remote person and i've also been the fully remote on the fully remote team person and i prefer so much to be part of a remote team it's there's so much that comes automatically if you're a remote employee of an in-person team there's a lot of burden on you to go out and gather information and make sure you don't miss out on stuff because if you don't do that you'll just miss out on stuff people won't people won't make the effort to include you or they will but not all the time or i don't know it's not like they're malicious it'll just happen yeah have you found that happening since you since you moved dave a little bit um but i i knew that going into it so i've

been very proactive and one of the one of the techniques that i did was i set up every single day, I have at least one 30 minute block of time scheduled with people who are not remote on the team to make sure that I have that time. And we don't always use it every every day. And it's not the same person every day. But you know, some people I meet with twice a week, some are three times a week. And I made sure to do that. And it's been it's been great, because we get this time just just me and this other person, we chat about what's going on on the team, we chat about our projects, it's just kind of unstructured, freeform time. And it's been very effective. I would say that it's just i don't know if it's as effective as like the impromptu bumped into in the hallway

conversations but it's pretty darn close and it might even be better in some ways because it's regular you know those those impromptu hallway discussions they kind of happen by chance you know yeah it sounds like the argument we're making though is well not the argument the question asker said maybe my previous company's remote culture was terrible and we're saying maybe you were just the only remote person right it usually is kind of there's not cultural affordances for the remote person yeah even even i feel kind of terrible exactly even in a supportive team they'll just forget they'll just forget you because you're not in their face front and center so that happened all the time on on a previous job there was one person out of a team of five or six that was

remote and we forgot him all the time and we felt really bad we really liked him and he did good work and and we would just like get into it and i'll write stuff on the whiteboard and then at the end be like oh we should probably tell person x what we decided yeah and sometimes if we were good we would say that and sometimes they would find out when i don't know it broke their stuff or right it changed the project they were working on i don't know or when they violated the new process you imposed yeah exactly i've had that i haven't had that happen yet because it's only been a few weeks but um you know i've had like the little nuisances where it's like oh team had a meeting uh and i'm like trying to chat them like hey please turn on the camera or you know please

turn on the please dial into the video conference oh yeah you know yeah that and it's like no response you know anyway it happens yeah but but my team's been very good about it i mean they've they've been proactive about dialing in and the cool thing about my team is we were already a remote office from the main office okay so they were already kind of used to dialing into meetings and participating over video conference so it's not like i had to blaze all this new ground you know sure of course we can't forget the classic remote versus on-site team thing of you show up for the team meeting from your video camera video chat you have your fedora on because you were a fedora team everyone else on the team cowboy hats it just happened and you weren't there

now you look like a fool just a textbook remote just classic yeah classic tragedy if i had a nickel for every time i showed up with the wrong headwear oh a tribly really dave it's all about the beanies so i guess we're we're hypothesizing here one hypothesis one hypothesis could be question asker was in this situation where the company culture wasn't very well aligned around remote and that was why you hated it and you could solve that by changing your behavior and being more deliberate or joining a remote company or a company more friendly to remote work the other hypothesis could be they just really don't like it there are definitely people that i know who do

not like remote work because they don't like being alone in their office all day they value that inner personal interaction they value like having this routine of leaving your house and you you are at work and then you go home and you're at home the lines get kind of blurred and remote there are also people i think that um they just need that to kind of stay happy and stable and healthy there are definitely days where i don't see people that i'm not related to in person and I think that could get rough sometimes, especially if, if, uh, I was feeling extra down or I don't know. So, so there might be some essential attributes of your character or personality that make it hard. And then I don't know what you do join the healthcare industry, I guess.

Join the heavy healthcare. It's a healthcare heavy town. Yeah. Have you seen people? I don't know. Have you seen people like that, that you feel like just weren't cut out for it? Weren't happy doing it? It feels like it's rare enough that it's still a perk that people want where it's it's not like how do i describe it i hear a lot more from people saying i would love to work remote yeah exactly i was going to say more more than than what you were describing i hear people in our industry saying i would like to do it but i wonder if that's just a function of how common it is right there just aren't that many people working remote maybe i don't know any numbers on this but my impression is most people still work in office

so it's it's like there's not enough people doing it for people to have to do it if they don't like it exactly i could just seek it out it could just be a grass is greener syndrome it's like i'm tired of all these meetings interrupting my day or you know the water cooler banter is annoying me because it happens so often yeah if only i could get rid of all of it you know and then you get into it you're like wait this isn't that great yeah but if that's the case and you still despite not liking it still want to do it i think you could do some things to kind of fortify yourself against that people work from coffee shops or co-working spaces then you get that interpersonal interaction you're still around other people there's some kind of bustle and noise

it's not just you in your basement or your attic or your crawl space or your bomb shelter bomb shelter or your cruise boat and then i think you would also need to work harder to establish a healthy routine you don't have this routine of okay i get up i have my time at home getting ready doing whatever and then i go to the office and then i come home and do other stuff you can drift into just work is broadly smeared into your whole day yeah and having delineated start times and breaks and taking advantage of some of the flexibility where maybe you hang out with your family for lunch you don't have to sit at your desk and work during lunch or i i guess what i'm saying is you could you could plan to address some of the weaknesses or things that are hard

about remote work for you by proactively putting in some effort around scheduling and routine and and where you do it yeah and and i like the i like the co-share what is it called co-working spaces co-working spaces i'm in a co-working space now working with a team working sorry sitting proximal proxy in proximity of a team that works for my company but i don't work with this team oh really yeah and uh it's been great because they you know i've been able to have a few conversations with them both personal and work related and you know we can go out to lunch occasionally so it's kind of like hey is everyone going to lunch today you want to go to go somewhere together and i think you could probably get a lot of those perks in a co-working arrangement even if

none of the people work for your same company you know and get kind of a group together and i think that could really help alleviate some of the concerns here yeah i can get sucked into my own bubble a little bit so i really appreciate having friends that either work remotely or even just local friends that i can hang out with and go to lunch with and i feel like it's more important for me to do that deliberately when i work remotely than if i'm in an office you could also try uh starting up a weekly podcast with someone that you like to talk to yeah that's true don't make it about soft skills though we will find you crush you and acquire you and then discontinue you

yeah that's i mean you're laughing but that's the thing i look forward to every day me too not every day i do look forward to it every day but it happens every week we actually record six days a week i'm very disappointed we actually record seven shows a week and we throw away six of them that's what it takes to get this level of quality oh i know can you imagine so the other thing i would recommend as a remote person that i've really enjoyed is take advantage of the fact that you're remote by doing things that you couldn't do if you were in an office where there's an expectation that you'll be butt in seat during certain hours so you could do things like go outside, take a walk, ride a bike, paddle a canoe around something, swim some laps in a pool. And

you can do these things in the middle of the day. And I think it'll remind you about how cool it is to have this flexibility. And I think that might help with the mindset a little bit, you know? Sure. I mean, travel is another huge one, right? If you're not tied to a physical location for work, then you have a lot of freedom, especially, I don't know what your family situation is like, but especially if you're, if you're single, just like, I don't know, put all your stuff in your car and drive around oh yeah it sounds cool go see the world yeah i um i have some friends that are living the van life right they just have a van that they sleep in and drive it around and they work remotely and that's an awesome opportunity that they have because of it

i am not too adventuresome so i don't do that but we have visited family and been able to extend trips that we would have had to make over the weekend i can just hang out and work while yeah my family does fun stuff oh that's a good idea rolls down my eye i see them out the window playing and that cat steven song plays in the back of my head the cat's in the cradle and the silver spoon um that's so yeah good thank you we need more of that it plays a lot so i know it pretty well yeah that's an awesome opportunity you can just you can work and travel and experience new things in a way that you can't as easily if you're if you have to be back in the office by 9 a.m the next morning and if you can manage to fit like retrofit a standing desk in a minivan i mean

that would be oh yeah that would be ideal all right well have we answered this question i think so good luck yeah good luck this is this is i think a great opportunity to learn something about yourself sure and uh we would love to know like is it really the kind of thing that can be learned or is this the kind of thing that it's just so built into you that you just either can work remote and love it or not, you know? Oh, one more good idea. I was going to say dumb things and I had a good idea. Contracting or consulting is a really great way to dip your toes into this

where if you just go get a full-time job as a remote worker and you find out, actually, I do hate this, then in 30 days you're going to have an awkward conversation. But if you just take on some contract work, I don't know, you can find most contract work is remote, I feel like. So our most consulting type of freelancing work is remote. so find some of that try it out and then that gives you a nice easy transition path if you like it or if you don't like it okay now has the question been answered yes it was before but

it's more answered now i'm gonna read our next question this one's kind of long i feel like the detail is important though oh yeah i'll try not to laugh love the show i have a question on how to effectively manage a team of engineers who only have partial allocation to my project i am a project and technical lead for a team of air quotes, eight full-time equivalents, which is composed of a rotating cast of engineers who are allocated to my project in small percentages, most commonly between 30 and 80% of their time. This has a lot of challenges, but the one I am most interested in is the struggle with other projects about whose delivery is given greater engineer priority. As an example, an engineer with 50% of time on my project and 50% of time on

another project will give me feedback that his immediate tasking between projects is unclear he knows he has to do both of the workloads but feels they aren't even or he is under more pressure from one project than the other my company stack ranks during performance reviews and competition between leaders of matrix organizations such as myself is particularly fierce so discussions between projects on how to effectively tackle this problem does not yield constructive agreements in my experience what a diplomatic way to say that i know this wow i my hat is off yeah this is a masterpiece i'm at times guilty of trying to squeeze more than my designated allocation out of engineers to deliver on agreements for timing scope etc any thoughts are appreciated oh i wrote

a bunch of comments that were all just noises like like that this is so crazy it's so bad it sounds so bad oh so okay it took me a while to parse it i'm gonna try and interpret it all right give us the abstract syntax tree of this question okay circle arrow other arrow other circle this manager has eight person units of team and these person units are composed of any number of individual actual people and they're spread across any number of projects and there's no team it's like you get five seconds of dave's time right now and then in two weeks and one thousand of those people together will be your project team and so there's this competition for this

the question asker to get all their stuff done while the other people who all these engineers are allocated to also want to get all their stuff done and whoever is the nicest loses right because they don't yell and say hey i don't care whose other work you have to do do my work and the project doesn't get done and then they get stack ranked and fired and then only jerks are left yes that's my interpretation of what's going on here yeah and just to drive that point home i'm going to do a little algebra okay we're going to like mathematically analyze this let's just say let's figure out the number of full-time equivalents that have been promised or dedicated to each manager and let's call that number x okay sure and let's let's then count

how many actual engineers are working at this company in this system and let's call that number y what do you think the chances are that x is actually less than or equal to y great the chances are great that it's less than or equal to y algebra i got this they're bad the chances are bad yeah you're saying that there are fewer actual humans than ftes than allocated ftes then then arbitrary person units yeah because yeah i mean why else would you do this crazy scheme so so you know especially if you include the context switching like for sure it's that way even if x equals y with context switching your your full-time equivalent allocation is going to me yeah this is assuming okay you're divided between three different projects 33 of the time

on each one and and there's no overhead to being on three different projects which is wrong that's not true at all i mean listen to the kind of questions that the that the individual engineers are asking like i don't know what the priorities are between these projects the workload feels uneven i'm under more pressure it's unclear what project i work on next that's the overhead that's it that's the overhead of them being on multiple projects that's that's one manifestation of the overhead well yeah that's true it's probably not the only one we're not lecturing the question asker you did not create this situation and you're certainly not arguing like i have this great idea for how work should happen what do you think of it but the fact the fact that you are able to

articulate this beautifully written description of this problem yeah when working in this kind of situation says that you are a very emotionally mature individual yeah i mean i if i started to sit down and write this question i probably would have just devolved into pounding on the keyboard and be like help why why you would have just written out the noises that we made at the beginning just like i mean oh man how okay so well one question i have is how does it how does it get like this who who believes was this designed or did it evolve with someone like this is a clearly this is a good way to organize our efforts since when does like staff allocation ever get like a master design it always evolves from some starting point and that you know

conditions change staff grows or shrinks you know money comes and goes there's i guarantee you this is evolutionary and and here's i just have an idea of how this may have happened you started out you had one team working on one product with one manager and then someone comes up with the idea of inventing a new product great idea but we can't afford to invest fully in this product and we also can't stop supporting our existing product right we have to keep the lights on yep so we're just gonna take 20 of four engineers time and we're gonna work on this new project because we don't actually even know if it's gonna be good right yeah now you have two existing products that need to have the lights kept on maybe you can hire a couple more engineers but

you've got like five ftes worth of work and repeat and just do this over and over and over and then pretty soon you've got this little army of managers competing for engineering time yeah that's my theory sounds great i'll try it so what i don't know what do you do because it does seem like the natural consequence is dysfunction and and the question asker is experiencing the dysfunction when i try and talk about it with other managers they're never going to say oh i insist you take more of this person's time so your stuff gets done yeah because you're right your stuff is more important than my stuff i think this would need to be successful this would need a very strong leader at the top basically breaking ties and determining the priorities and then it would

also need very very uh rigorous execution to make sure that the allocations are actually executed on the way they were specified you know and everyone is clear i think stack ranking exacerbates this too because there's always going to be some competition and some ownership and some i don't protecting your turf if you want a project done but especially if it's tied to like you're you're competing directly with this person for a ranking or rating yeah then if you help them you have hurt yourself yes someone loses right it's a zero-sum game so if the stack ranking is measured on engineering output and that's like the main uh input to the stack ranking then yeah you're screwed but if the stack ranking is actually measured on how cooperative you are how big

picture you're able to think you know and and how much ownership and i don't just mean like immediate ownership but i mean like broad ownership you demonstrate then we we could have a more healthy situation i think you know all the signs point to it being that healthy i think you're right dave no i'm i'm assuming it's like how many things did you get done and and all the other nuances washed away like this doesn't seem like the type of organization that would say you know we have created this hard situation so there is value even though you gave up and you missed your deadlines you helped this other more important project succeed by doing so so we will rate you above

this other person all your projects failed but you were so nice about it yeah the organization succeeded thank you for making the decision of who to rate the lowest easy oh so what do what do they do about it well i mean i one of the things that came through in this question is just how articulate and in just three paragraphs this person was able to clearly describe the situation in such a way that it was totally obvious um how like how dysfunctional this is right so i would say you probably have a good skill for this you can probably raise this issue up to your management and say look this is a self-destructive path that we're on we need to figure out a way to do this better and um if you call it out the way you've called it out to us i

think your management will probably agree of course they're not getting stack ranked against do so maybe maybe not i even if this is a broad corporate policy i feel like there's got to be a chance for someone to carve out a more sane chunk inside that maybe maybe the whole company splits individuals across this many different projects across different engineers but it still feels like this feels like a case of valuing um usage over over and like efficiently using everyone's time over maybe clarity and and direction and priorities where sure maybe if maybe if there's one person on this project they'll use like 80 of their time and if you split them across multiple projects you could use 100 of their time but that sounds like a better problem to have than all these

very granular splits between different projects and teams and people so i feel like i don't know i don't know how big this company is that this person works at i imagine it's big i don't feel like this happens at small companies no 10 person startup is like you know we need stack ranking and matrixes that's true but maybe there's a possibility that together with your manager you can carve out a little island of of sensibility where you know we just you have one main responsibility and that's what you do the other or like all the projects are under the same manager that you're split across that would also solve this problem right right if that's oh yeah this is a two-headed management situation then that's kind of the situation i'm in right now where there are definitely multiple

projects that each person is working on but they're all projects that i own so i'm not fighting against other people necessarily it's more like what do i think is more important that's a very different situation yeah very different and you should try it making that happen that's easier to say than do but just hire jameson he'll clean all this up for you no that's it was already like this when i came in i'll come in and appreciate it though once it's cleaned up i think this might be a symptom of under investing where you're trying to extract a certain amount of value by putting in too little money to this to the problem if you know what i mean yeah and that's going to be a hard conversation but like maybe the answer to this question is we need 30 more

engineers than we have um we're just barely skirting by the skin of our teeth right now and if we invested 30 more dollars into our engineering payroll we could completely solve this problem and people could be permanently dedicated to their to solving one or to working on one project at a time and simultaneously you can solve the stack ranking competitive problem yeah but there's also money doesn't grow on trees so it's not like that might not be the easiest sell yeah i think if you can show how it's affecting performance and and make a case either either more money or fewer projects that's one opportunity another opportunity is to find people i guess the question asker says i've tried to talk about this with other managers and it doesn't work

there's got to be someone who you could have an alliance with though um maybe broadly not everyone will agree with you and work productively together but if you could find at least a partner that you share some resources with and and try and organize between yourselves without getting the knives out that might make it a little bit easier as well where you both understand like hey we have this conflict and we're going to try and resolve it together instead of just well i want my thing done well i want my thing done it it's nice to have a peer a co-worker that you can collaborate with instead of compete against yes so you find an ally but you're you're kind of fighting a headwind here because this is an environment that breeds mistrust right because yeah yeah it'll be

very hard but you know if you can ultimately influence everyone to start trusting each other working more collaboratively you know you might be able to solve this problem but the headwind might just be too much you know what we haven't said in a while dave what quit your job quit your job quit your job quit your job yeah this used to be the quit your job show why haven't we reached for that on i think it felt like a cop-out it's not the answer to every problem just most of them as long as you can get a giant raise by quitting a job and getting a new one it doesn't answer the money problem pretty well what if i paid you 10 more not to work in this company how does that sound

oh yeah this is hard to solve and i feel like it's gonna be a project to solve if you want to maybe your manager doesn't think it's a problem and they're like yeah the strongest will survive and we want to kill and eat the weak well that's i mean that's your that will help you make the quit your job decision i think you go down and sit down with your manager and if they go yeah everything you've described are features not bugs then why don't you simply devour the other manager who disagrees with you it's the kill or be killed yeah i that feels like the right thing to do is is try and get some organizational support for solving this more broadly i think you're right dave that you can try and change it but it's going to be fighting against the entrenched culture and

you need you need to change it you need and you need your boss's help certainly to change this i guess you can also just like get an alliance with all the managers i feel like if you're aware of it more people are probably aware of it yeah and and you might have some kind of regular meeting with the other managers maybe it's a thing to bring up there not not in the context of hey this individual person on my project is confused about what to work on and is saying you're pushing them to work on more stuff but just broadly this problem of like hey this is this is feels kind of dysfunctional the way we're allocating resources across projects yeah and then when that fails you can quit your job i was gonna say you use it to create this open atmosphere of collaboration

and teamwork and nurturing right and then you're like thanks suckers and you take all the engineers and get them to get all your stuff done you just ride that stack to the top oh man make your throne of skulls that is the one upside of stack ranking someone's got to be on the top and it may as well be you yeah why am i always so pessimistic about it that is a good point yeah there is i do deserve to step on top of people as i climb to the top i feel like this i mean no i have no more words just more noises oh tough situation but you know the way you described this problem made it so clear to me i'm sure that if you use these words with others it'll be clear to them and i would love to work

with you so you know if you yeah that's true if you take our advice quit your job seriously and you're this good of a communicator i'd love to have you on my team hit us up we can implement this on situation ourselves yes well we will rule it did we answer it sure i'm gonna say sure okay thank you for sending in your questions we really appreciate it we got we got a bunch which is great we have a wide variety of questions to choose from and we will get to yours if you would like to send in a question you can go to softskills.audio and click the ask a question button if you also want to support us on patreon you can go to that same website softskills.audio and click support the show and uh donate any amount that you're comfortable donating

maybe we will i think we will make a curse you out on the podcast oh man but it'll be exclusive oh yeah you have to pay in some hard to acquire currency yeah actually it won't be curse you out we don't say curse words it'll be like hurt me emotionally hurt my feelings hurt my feelings that can be yours okay you might not sound very committed all right we'll discuss it maybe we'll discuss maybe we'll iterate on that idea thank you so much for listening if you like this show please share it with other people that uh i don't know what that does besides get more people to listen to it clearly that's good though right yes all right well we'll catch you next week yep