Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 129: Office romance and What to say during one-on-ones

Episode Date: October 22, 2018

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I recently started working at a small dev shop. Somewhere along the way I may or may not have started seeing a coworker outside of work. It’s really been great but there are no clear examples of how the organization would react to something like this. We have fairly lateral positions and there are no written policies or anything in the handbook. Even so, we’ve been doing our best to act “business casual” when we run into each other during the day. We don’t work directly but it’s a smaller company so the chance is pretty good that we eventually will. It’s been fun to navigate so far but wondering what your take is on this/the pros and cons of telling trusted coworkers or management. Thanks!! I’ve been working as a software engineer for several years now. In my current job I have fortnightly one-to-one catchups with my manager. My problem is that I very rarely have anything to say. My work is going fine, I’m happy enough with my job, and I don’t feel like I really need help with anything. I feel as though not having much to say reflects poorly on me, giving the impression that I’m uninterested or that I don’t value my managers input. What is it we should be talking about?

It takes more than knowledge of the Curry-Howard isomorphism to be a great engineer. This is episode 129 of the Soft Skills Engineering Podcast. I'm your host, Jameson Dance. I'm your host, Dave Smith. I looked it up on Wikipedia. How did you even know to look for that? Just osmosis of functional programming stuff. Some people really get into it.

It's this idea that programs and proofs are related together very closely if you use the right programming language oh in other words your your language your program itself is the proof yeah basically is haskell yeah yeah you've read between the lines correctly okay it's often used as a sales pitch for haskell and if the language is c then your program is an anti-proof it's just like just prolonged screams now what was the name of the isomorphism again curry howard isomorphism is this named after haskell curry yeah haskell curry i don't know who the howard person is um old studebaker howard famed for his love of hot dogs i don't know uh william alvin howard all right enough reading wikipedia what is this show

uh soft skills engineering is a podcast where we answer all of your non-technical questions about the technical field of software development and we also have a bunch of wonderful supporters we'd like to thank all right i'll thank them if you don't mind i'm just gonna slide right in there and thank them please all right this week we'd like to give shout outs to those who are donating at the every week shout out level their names are matthew woodwicks the agile ventures charity zach grannon michael green david jackson nick kantar and sean clayton thank you for your support on patreon the support this money that you contribute goes to helping us keep the show running nice and friction-free by paying for editors and graphical content and even a little

advertising here and there, marketing. So thank you very much. And if you'd like to contribute, go to softskills.audio and click on support us on Patreon. Yeah, thank you so much. I'm not even going to ask. Oh, well, okay, I am. What were you going to say? I was going to say even a buck a month is helpful. It really is. Thank you so much. Okay, I'm not going to ask. I'm just going to read our question okay this is from a listener named ball pitterson i think that's fake or they were astutely named i recently started working at a small dev shop somewhere along the way i may or may not have started seeing a co-worker outside of work it's been really great but i there are no clear examples of how the organization would react to something like this

we have fairly lateral positions and there are no written policies or anything in the handbook even so we've been doing our best to act business casual when we run into each other during the day we don't work directly together but it's a smaller company so the chance is pretty good that we eventually will it's been fun to navigate so far but i'm wondering what your take is on the pros and cons of telling trusted workers or management thanks i'm just running through this scenario in my mind where you bump into your romantic interest and you're like be cool try to act business casual yeah the line about business casuals is great you change into a polo or a smart a smart skirts like all right time to see a significant other be cool be cool uh how's your

weekly report going i think you should call each other citizen citizen make it very clear that it's completely business no feelings at all between the two of you you you have to start calling everyone else citizen though oh yeah at the same time otherwise it sticks out yeah um there's some I think it was the David Eddings books. There's some fantasy book where there's a character who calls everyone Dearheart. And then like five books later, it's revealed that that was her secret tactic to disguise the fact she was in love with this one dude for the whole time. And you could pull that off. Just call everyone Citizen or Sweetie Pie.

Yeah, I like Sweetie Pie. Yeah. Everyone is Sweetie Pie. But when you say it to your romantic interest, there's a little glimmer in your eye and they know. They know. the sweet is just a little sweeter that could get really creepy don't do that for real citizen though go the other direction and just treat everyone with absolute disdain and then you're making up for it um so let me give you my credentials for my qualifications to talk

about business romantic relationships oh i'm looking forward to this these are going to be extensive when i was 17 i kissed a girl and then later i got married to that girl and she's the only person i've ever dated or kissed i know nothing about dating wait like like later that week no no i mean i was pretty sure that was what was going to happen later that week after we kissed for the first time it got put off by several years okay all right but basically uh that's what i got i can tell you a lot about um the curry howard isomorphism though yeah like there's a reason this isn't like the love question show yeah so that's why my advice is for you to start rumors about other people if you're testing the waters to try and see how the workplace will react to

romantic relationships just muddy those waters real deep yep and track the mud and see where i heard steve and the water cooler have a thing going on boy doesn't that make you just respect them even more and if they smile and nod then you're like you're safe and if not then yep double down on the citizen thing it's a very simple very simple algorithm yeah oh man so i have a i have a friend who a former co-worker at two companies one of my favorite co-workers of all time and he just loved finding gaps in hr policies so that he could become a new hr policy and and basically you know he's like haven't you ever wanted to be the reason a new

hr policy was created well oh geez now's your chance yeah i feel like some people just get fired though like if the wrong person did that then it would it would yeah it would turn out poorly you're right and and if an hr policy gets created and you're not at the company to see it then what fun is that yes that's true no fireworks in the ping pong room ever again once is too many times yeah oh man i you know i jameson and i have similar credentials i have never engaged in a work romance i have no idea here's okay here's my work romance credentials While I was 17, my girlfriend came into the dry cleaner that I worked and we would go in the back and snuggle.

And like that was workplace romance. Oh, so it all worked out, I guess. Man, we're really getting a lot of interesting glimpses into your life. Last week, we got to learn about how you carried the the wand around campus at night to catch. Oh, yeah. To stop people from snuggling. Yeah, it was really poetic justice, I guess. Yeah, yeah.

You were like, look, I know how this works, guys. I can do this job. I just feel like we're really getting to know you. This is great. That's the whole point. Everyone else can come along if they want to. Okay, so you were about to say you don't know anything about this, but, and then really good stuff is going to come later. Oh, no, no.

I never said but, and there's no good stuff. Okay. Sorry. I just don't know what to do. I think I think my knowledge from this really just comes from romantic comedies, you know, and I think that I think usually those end up with some kind of airport chase scene and then everyone's happy and the movie ends. OK, that's all I got. OK, how do you get to the airport, though, from work? I don't know. I was kind of hoping it was more of a metaphor.

So I think if you really just want to make a big bang, I think you should take some time from your next all-hands meeting agenda and do a big relationship reveal party where you pass out little cards, maybe have little party hats, some noisemakers, and just make sure everyone knows. I feel like it's got to be one of those ones you'd see on Facebook where there are two balloons or it pops and it's full of pink or blue smoke or whatever for gender reveal. Yes, there's you have like an epic PowerPoint slide transition. And then the two of you in some cute like photo booth picture appears on the on the screen. If this really was a romantic comedy, though, and you started rumors about someone having an office relationship, you would find out that there are like 14 others. Yeah. And you just would out a bunch of people. And I feel like that's the traditional route. The traditional route is to out 14 other couples.

I mean, no, that's just what happens in romantic comedy things. oh okay okay like someone's having an office relationship and then you find out a bunch of people know about other people that are having office relationships and then and then it proceeds then hijinks ensue the um the the question at the end is is kind of like what happens if i tell people basically and i think if you tell a trusted co-worker that is the same thing as telling everyone but just with a timeout so they'll know for a little bit and then more people will know and yeah i mean that's what will happen you've heard of eventual consistency right yeah that's what this is yeah it's just propagation delay yeah i think being a little more serious you

just want to preserve the appearance of uh fairness so making sure you're not working together or favoring each other is probably pretty important and then um being prepared to be mature about it if things don't work out those feel like the two like big dangers about workplace romance that i hear about that someone in someone's dating a superior and then it gets weird or the relationship ends and then it gets weird for everyone because you still have to see that person every day yeah i think that's exactly where i was going to go with this too because i feel like you owe it to the rest of your team to make sure that there's no bias in the way that you're treating your co-workers especially if you're in a leadership or influence role where you could

actually be it says lateral but maybe that could change i don't know well maybe they're both managers i don't know yeah i mean yeah and you always have to partner with people at companies of any size so it's like you know maybe you're favoring someone else's ideas so you be careful like there is a reason we have conflict of interest investigations and it's because the people who have the conflict of interest are literally blinded by that conflict of interest right so just i would take an honest assessment and you probably do need to consult with someone who actually knows what they're talking about. Sorry.

Not that we don't, but we don't. But yeah, anyway, I mean, I would probably consult with someone on this just to make sure that you're not, don't have any blind spots about what you could be doing that could be harming your team or company. Sure. Do you think they have an obligation?

If there's no policy, nothing written down, do you think they have an obligation to tell someone or can they just keep it cool and handle it themselves? I mean, most companies I've worked at, i feel like did have some written policy about this which means to me that even if your company doesn't it's not like there's some loophole where suddenly you're exempt from basic behavior or basic rules of um what's the word like etiquette in this i don't know i just i just can't imagine a scenario where you disclosing this to hr goes well for either of you you know yeah well i'm

assuming they don't have hr because it's a small dev shop so i guess you would tell your boss i don't know i don't know we really just wanted to make jokes about this i don't know that we have any good advice what uh jameson you're gonna reveal the whole show's like secret yeah i think i think you have to decide if you feel like you can be objective um and just handle it you're on your own and just make sure you answer that question objectively yeah yeah it's it's subjectivity all the way down right because if you tell your boss even if you're handling it very professionally it's gonna color how they observe your interactions probably i don't know i feel like would i want to know i think if things were going fine i wouldn't care

but if there were issues being created from it i would definitely want to know if i was this person oh yeah but how would you know i don't know i just i would just assume that everyone is in a relationship all together all at once and the relationship is we're all one team working the work relationship yeah okay i don't know okay well i ran out of things to say well good luck i mean it says here you said it's been fun to navigate so far like i i would love to know what that means like what kind of situations have you had to navigate i yeah i imagine there's some like there's there's some like sneaking into i don't know like your accident you're wearing coordinated socks but you can't let anybody know or like little little tricks you

play on people that would be fun to navigate that would be that sounds fun to navigate good luck i hope the i hope everything goes well all right can i read our next question please read our next question okay this comes from an anonymous listener who says i've been working as a software engineer for several years now in my current job i have fortnightly one-on-one catch-ups with my manager my problem is that i very rarely have anything to say my work is going fine i'm happy enough with my job and i don't feel like i really need help with anything i feel as though not having much to say reflects poorly on me giving the impression that i'm uninterested or that i don't value my manager's input what is it that we should be talking about you could talk about anything

you have their time hostage it is a good time to talk to them about your war games miniatures hobby or force them to listen to music that you like anything anything talk to them about the different gauges of of thread in your crafting hobby you can do whatever you want i love that let me tell you what's new in the expanded star wars universe since we last talked which was three days ago you would not believe how fast things change you know i i'm only laughing because as a manager when i was in management i did have conversations like that and you know what i was only too happy to listen and just have just be able to show that i am interested in you as an individual and i enjoyed some of those

conversations in fact i think some of my more memorable and enjoyable conversations were one-on-ones that were just completely not work related yeah there's and that's one of the purposes of one-on-ones is to develop a relationship because you you work better together if you understand each other better so i don't think it's that's kind of tongue-in-cheek but it's not a total waste of time to just chat if uh maybe you're not the small talk type though and you don't like to just kind of sit around and chat and then i could see it being hard if like i don't know i don't have any problems so can i go and let me just tell actually that that also is kind of great as a manager having someone who has no problems and no needs from you uh it's kind of a relief

honestly i mean the fact of the matter is most people have some kind of problem that they need their manager's help with and so don't feel bad that you don't because someday you will yeah i um what do i talk about with my manager i have lots of problems maybe i'm not like like the question asker life is more dramatic for me i think um but i never feel like i have nothing to talk about because i always feel like there's either something that i can learn or do better or there's something that i am complaining about which was different um it's it's it's a good time to pitch ideas basically like i i don't know there are different kinds of people i guess that do different that work differently but there's there's got to be something that bothers you at

work or something that you feel like i think the team would be better off if we tried this or i want to try this new technical solution or like some pitch that you have of or some pitch or pain point that feels like a great time to bring that stuff up yeah where you just have one-on-one time to explore it more in depth without doesn't have to be fully formed yet you're not like presenting it you're just like i feel like i don't know the way we do css is a pain and what if we tried something different or i don't know there's it's a time to address um pain points or things that could be more efficient yeah i love that i think that's great i mean you'd be surprised how infrequently people bring that kind of stuff to their manager during one-on-ones yeah it's i mean

maybe we should talk about what the purpose of one-on-ones actually is because maybe that helps identify what you talk about and what do you think the purpose of them are i think it's time to have undivided your your manager's undivided attention on you and uh it actually i think depends a lot on the individual what they want to use that time for and i think there's actually quite a broad range of things everything from your own career development to personal challenges to ideas to mentoring others like it's kind of unbounded i don't even know if i could say like here's like the one thing a one-on-one is for other than it's your time to have your manager's attention only on you have you worked with people that don't like doing one-on-ones

that feel like they're kind of a waste of time well i know i didn't do one-on-ones for like the first i don't know seven or eight years of my career yeah um as an individual contributor i just never met with my manager except like annual review time yeah um i actually kind of feel like one-on-ones are a more recent um phenomenon that has become more widely accepted outside of like the big bigger companies uh yeah i feel like one-on-ones are actually a super important necessary part of big company life because there's just so much vying for your time all the time from so many different audiences that if you don't carve out explicitly designated time for one-on-ones then they just you'll lose track of your people and your manager and so but but what i've noticed

is over the last few years they've become more ubiquitous in pretty much all tech companies yeah i had the same trajectory where i never had them and then a couple jobs ago i didn't have them regularly but it was every few months and then this job i have them every week with my manager and then i do them every week with my team too so there's definitely been an increasing frequency i hear things about are you not supposed to discuss status during one-on-ones there are other mediums for that kind of discussion of like how this project is going i feel like maybe i'm just bad at my job but sometimes it is a good time to talk about status yeah i do that's what i was thinking i use status or sorry i use one-on-ones for status a lot yeah because because it's

dedicated time where you don't have to worry about anything else and and that's sometimes important information maybe maybe the feeling is like that's important and you should have a different channel for it so that you can set aside one-on-ones for non-status things but i don't know that's okay uh so if if you're truly just content with life everything's going well it sounds like you should be telling your manager how other people can be like you like maybe you have insight into other people on your team about what uh what problems or challenges they're facing or things they could be doing better um there's got to be information to share and if not maybe you just end early and say, see you later. Yeah. The flip side of the coin that you just shared

is something I like to do, which is asking my manager who needs my help. Because a lot of times your manager has more visibility into the challenges of your teammates than you do. And if you could say to them like, hey, I'm willing to help, willing to be a mentor, willing to serve in some capacity that you see that I don't, let me know. Yeah. So I like to ask who needs my help on the team? Yeah, I do. I need your help, Dave. I think it's fine if they're awkward sometimes. If they don't just flow naturally, I don't know that that's necessarily a sign that you have to cancel them or get rid of them. It just might mean you're still developing that relationship where you can communicate openly with your manager. But I think that gets

better over time too, as you figure out what you're comfortable sharing and see how your manager responds to it. I would say pick a new thing to try and share with them and see how it works out. Either a concern you have or a question or you could give them feedback. I am always eager to hear how people actually think things are going on the team or how I'm doing. And no matter how many times you say that publicly, it's still a lot easier to do privately one-on-one than just call out your boss in front of other people for certain personality types. So yeah, you could give them some feedback. Yeah, you could come prepared to ask for feedback. And by the way, I think one-on-one is a great time to do that. And I think just saying I would like feedback is usually not a

great way to get feedback. But if you've done something specifically in the last few weeks, you could say, ask a specific question about how you performed that duty. So you could say something like, I sent an email with some interesting reports up to our senior leadership this week. Did you feel like that email was effective? As opposed to, do you have any feedback on my email, you know, asks pointed questions that they can give a concrete answer to. That's great advice. I think it's a lot easier to answer those as a manager than answer the general. Do you have any feedback for me? Yeah. Do you have any feedback? No, no, it's good. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's usually how that conversation goes. It's like you've been in

those before. I also like to ask managers what challenges they have. You know, what do you see? What are the challenges that you're facing right now? Those give you opportunities to see if you can contribute in ways beyond just your assigned duties each day and give you insight into what's going on in the broader team i have nothing else it sounds like our one-on-one is over it's just got awkward and that's okay yeah we'll just sit oh silence take just take it meta and just say in your one-on-one say what are good things to talk about in a one-on-one let's talk about that that's not a horrible idea just say you could even say that like what should we be talking about i feel like i don't things are fine so i don't know what to do here maybe your manager

has something specific they want to get out of these that they haven't communicated to you and it would come out there yeah or maybe they will free up some time on your calendar going forward or maybe they'll be like you think things are going great huh i got some news for you the last thing i want to say on this is one-on-ones are a time to get a little bit more meta than you normally do and i know we said it's okay to talk about status even though some people say you shouldn't. I think one-on-ones are a great time to talk about those big picture things like your career goals or development goals or, you know, maybe there's something you're working toward like a pay raise or a title upgrade or some kind of new technology skill that you want to develop.

This is a good time to make a plan with your manager for how you can develop those skills and to follow up to see how you're doing and have some kind of progress report. I'll give an example. I had an engineer several years ago who had come to me and said, I am currently making X and I want to make X plus some amount. What do I need to do to earn that? And I was super glad to hear them come to me and ask that question because I was able to lay out a nice concrete list of things that they needed to do over the next year to show me that they were worth the company paying them more money than they were making now. And you know what? Over the course of the next year, we met several times, we checked in on those goals. And at the end of the year, they got the

raise. And it was awesome because it was like, they took it into their own hands. They were super proactive about it. They laid out a plan with the person who could make the decision and then deliver it on the plan and boom, pay raise. It was awesome. And that's a good thing for a one-on-one, I think. Yeah. Yeah. That sounds great. All right. Any other insights to give? Have we answered the question? I feel like it's answered. I don't know what else I could say. I ran out of things to say long ago. Thanks for sharing your wisdom, Dave. What can people do if they want more of Dave's wisdom

and more of Jameson listening to Dave's wisdom? We all know I'm just a laugh track. Come on. All right. They can go to softskills.audio, click on ask a question, and you can fill out our little form there. Thank you to everyone who has done that. We have been overwhelmed with questions this week.

It was all we could do to even read them all. So thank you so much for submitting those. It really is the lifeblood of our show. and boy we had some great questions we have several more i mean pretty much all the questions we got this week we were like oh man we want to do all of these but alas our time is limited and this one-on-one must come to an end so that's how you can do it softskills.audio is the website all right we'll catch you next week