Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 132: Should I tell my boss I'm planning to quit and keeping tech talks going

Episode Date: November 12, 2018

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Recently I was approached by a manager and informed that I needed to decide if I wanted to stay at the company or not. I initially said I would like to stay, and was told there was some negative feedback from coworkers I’d need to work on to do so. I agree that these were issues I need to work on to become a better engineer, so I’ve engaged in something like a performance plan with her over the last few weeks. But I’ve decided that I don’t want to stay after all, and I’ve started sending out applications. I don’t want to burn bridges when I do end up putting in notice, but I also would like to continue working with her on these issues, and I’m worried if I declare I am leaving that will end. So my question is: should I tell my manager I’ve changed my mind, or stay quiet? We used to have regular “tech talks” in the office - opportunities for people to share something they find interesting that doesn’t have to be work related but usually is tech/development focused. The talks were 30-45 minutes in length, and there used to be free food (at a place that doesn’t normally do that kind of thing) I wasn’t here at the time when it last fizzled out, but used to give similar talks at my last company and I’m interested in starting them up again here. People say they’re interested now but the novelty of free food eventually wears off - do you have any suggestions as to how to sustain people’s interest in attending giving talks? I might be able to convince a few people I work more closely with but there’s 60+ or so technical people in this office I’m still getting to know.

It takes more than switching your font to Operator Mono to be a great software engineer. This is episode 132 of the Soft Skills Engineering Podcast. I am your host, Jameson Dance. I am your host, Dave Smith. Fonts besides Operator Mono make your code run slower. That's what I learned from front-end developer Twitter. That sounds like some kind of disease. What is that? Operator Mono.

It's a font that somebody made. Somebody just made a font and it's $200 and a lot of people bought it. I'm pretty sure they donated a big portion of the proceeds. so the person who made the font is like a plus solid individual and i still sometimes just change my font to courier to fight back against this highfalutin fancy paid font mumbo jumbo you should take courier repackage it and put a hipster name on it and then sell it it sounds illegal it's courier is probably in the public domain come on this sounds sketchy sounds lucrative yeah i'll take it under advisement capitalism yeah it's great

we have some wonderful patrons that we would like to thank who are supporting the show thank you so much to matthew wodewicks agile ventures charity zach grannon michael green david jackson nick kantor sean clayton yeah thank you so much to those people you are great you help keep the show going you help us pay for hosting and design and bandwidth and um font development capital font yeah and the fancy fonts that we use thank you if you would like to donate if you would like to support the show you can go to our website softskills.audio and click the support us on patreon button thank you so much to all those who do that again yes thanks very much well i guess we got nothing else to talk about should i read the first question i we do dave we have a great

thing to talk oh i'm looking at a trello card that is called stinky feet comment which feels like it's important oh yes thank you for reminding me let me read this shall i please little background though episode 131 which is the episode just before this one was about uh how to deal with the co-worker with stinky feet well thank you soft skills engineering community you have come to the rescue with yet another great idea i'll read this one from luis luis says great podcast i'm listening from episode one just a comment about episode 131 about the co-worker with stinky feet i had the same problem with someone smelling around me fortunately we all noticed and it started to be a quote subject so we just did a good old crowdfunding and we bought an automatic air

freshener spray triggered by movement guess what pointing to the individual eventually he noticed that and asked to change to another office area there you go passive aggressive automation you could probably put anything in that dispenser what if you filled it with like whipped cream or something or cheese whiz or i guess it doesn't have to necessarily only be food it's the only thing you have anybody thinking about yeah yeah it's lunchtime so yeah okay that's it sounds like like a hazing ritual but if it solved your problem yeah more power to you all right should i read the first question yeah go for it this is from an anonymous listener recently i was approached by a manager and informed that I needed to decide if I wanted to stay at the company or

not. I initially said I would like to stay and was told there was some negative feedback. I was told there was some negative feedback from coworkers I'd need to work on to do so. I agree that these were issues I need to work on to become better as an engineer, so I've engaged in something like a performance plan with my manager over the last few weeks. But I've decided I don't want to stay after all, and I'm sending out applications. I don't want to burn bridges when I do end up putting in notice but i would also like to continue working with my manager on these issues and i'm worried that if i declare i am leaving that will end so my question is should i tell my manager i've changed my mind or stay quiet hmm so you you're on a performance improvement plan that's

what i'm getting here right yeah and it's it's working possibly in two ways at once your performance is improving and you might not work there anymore so both outcomes I mean every pip ends in one of two ways right yeah those are the two ways yeah I think it's good that your manager sat you down and gave you clear feedback about things to improve that sounds like a helpful thing yeah and even better that you acknowledge that there are areas you can improve it that's great yeah I wonder they mentioned I've decided to leave is it just like I wonder what the catalyst for that was if they're willing to improve on it and maybe the fact that they got approached and told hey you have to decide if you want to work here or not

kind of hurt this sense of safety or i have to assume there's some other factor that came into play here because it could just be like ah i want to move on yeah i mean it's all rolled up into one big you know complex ball of wax but he's saying we can't summarize the motivations in like 30 seconds from 100 words all right all right i'll give up so i feel like if i was a manager and someone came to me and said hey i'm leaving i want to keep working on these issues it depends on how much of my time it took to work on those issues because if it was part of our normal cadence of one-on-ones and and just the way we normally worked together already then that's not an added burden it's just like okay we just keep going you've given me more notice so it's easier

to start looking ahead for a replacement that feels like a good thing but if there's a lot of extra overhead of like maybe i have to review your code more closely or there are extra meetings or there's just takes up a lot of space in my brain i could see me being tempted to be like you know you're good don't worry about it but i don't see it being uh i don't see myself being mad like you told me a month early how dare you so i don't know that it would burn any bridges for me it would just be a decision and i i think i would i assume i would make that together with the employee of like okay do we keep doing this process or if you're already going to leave do we just kind of let let inertia carry it forward yeah and i want to know what what were the possible

choices when the manager said, do you want to stay here or not? Like, if you had said no, what would the manager have done? It would have been like, well, there's the door. Yeah. You know, or, you know, what are the options there? Because basically, you're changing your mind on that decision. And if the option at that time was, there's the door, see you later, then maybe you don't want to disclose that you've had a change of heart right now until you've had a chance to get your new job. so there's the door see you later that usually comes with some kind of severance or something

if you just get fired right or laid out typically so it's all it depends on the size of the company too but i know for a fact that um large companies they will generally have like if if they put you on a formal pip at the start of the pip there's often this decision point that sounds like what you made of like do we want to go through this pip or do you want to just take this severance offer and we'll we'll kind of save ourselves the trouble yeah so i don't know how you ask that without showing that you're considering leaving just out of curiosity strictly hypothetically yeah what would have happened if i said yes would you have given me money to not work but maybe there's some way you can discover what the hr policy is for your company right oh yeah

what the hr policies are for your company because there there could be potential virtuous outcomes for everybody where if you're really interested in leaving and they feel like your performance isn't up to snuff then you could you could go get another job but have some some cushion built in there without having to kind of like trudge along knowing that you're leaving and that they might yeah and and i've heard of weird stipulations on those severance packages for example there was a game studio here locally that shut down a couple of years ago maybe three years ago and we interviewed uh maybe half a dozen of the engineers from that game studio at my last company and they had some kind of weird stipulation where it was like we cannot have a job offer within a

certain number of days of getting laid off or else we don't get the severance so like none of them would interview for something like 60 days or something like that you know so what yes it was like a weird thing that's basically the severance was designed to bridge them to their next job and if they got a job right away then the company was like we're not giving you severance oh it's like you already have this job yeah what's the point right and okay so so is someone's good intention of like we'll give you help until you get a new job and then it the incentives were immediately like don't get a new job until the severance runs out exactly so oh man so there may be something like that, and it would probably pay to do a little investigation to figure out

if you're leaving money on the table before you head out the door. But having said all that, what I would probably do in this situation is I would hold on to that information until you've got a written offer and a start date from your new job, and then just resign like you normally would resign. I don't see, unless you're going to go after that severance angle, I don't see any advantage to disclosing that you've changed your mind. Just go along with it until you get the new gig and then just say hey you know i've had a change of heart i've decided to leave frankly i think your manager will be like i've been wondering when you were going to come say that to me why would you tell them not to disclose it because i don't see what good would come from

you saying i'm gonna go job hunting like under any other condition if you weren't already on a performance plan what why would you do that yeah like also you're not 100 sure you're gonna to even have a job to go to right you're going to go start putting out applications but you know there's no guarantee you're going to get a job at least one that you're happy with right yeah i guess i i guess what i'm saying is i just don't see this as a situation that's all that different from normal work if if this performance improvement situation weren't in the picture why would you treat it any differently i don't think i have logic i think i just have feelings of like it just feels good like like full disclosure feels good you mean yeah but i don't think companies

care very much about your feelings most of the time so well and so the question here is about burning bridges like if you do that if you don't disclose that you're actually searching for a new job then when you finally do say i'm quitting will you have burned a bridge and i would say no no no if you i mean if you give the normal two weeks notice like yeah that's no people quit it wouldn't burn a bridge i agree and so if you flip the tables over while while it happens then or if you literally catch something on fire like maybe a bridge yeah and if if someone quits with like zero prior warning at all that something is a miss that would be i'd feel like i i i'd feel surprised for sure i'd also feel like i kind of screwed up because i didn't know but in this case

like there's indication that something might be going on so i don't think it'd be this it wouldn't be like oh but you were on this critical project that we're doomed on now like your manager probably knows this is a possibility and that's that's why they brought it up to you the possibility that you wouldn't work here anymore so all right i'm convinced dave yes i flip-flopped you win okay cool so stay quiet things will be fine yep anything else we should say i don't know like i feel like that sums it up pretty good all right let's move on then okay down to business next question we're gonna saving you time today we're not gonna we're not gonna beat around the bush well just skip through the first stuff that i said because that's the opposite of what i felt

at the end but eventually you save time all right do you want to read our next question sure all right this comes from a listener named lewis who says we used to have regular tech talks in the office these are opportunities for people to share something they find interesting that doesn't have to be work related but usually is tech or development focused the talks are 30 to 45 minutes in length and there used to be free food at a place that doesn't normally do that kind of thing i wasn't there at the time it last fizzled out but it used to give i used to give similar talks at my last company and i'm interested in starting them up again here people say they're interested now, but the novelty of free food eventually wears off. Do you have any suggestions

as to how to sustain people's interest in attending and giving talks? I might be able to convince a few people I work with more closely, but there's 60 plus or so technical people in this office that I'm still getting to know. Political attack ads. Midterm elections just ended. That's all we know. I feel like political, yeah, political attack ads seem like the way you approach problems. Plus, all of the people who make those ads are desperate for money right now. You can get them for cheap. Yeah, what do they do for the next two years? Well, I think they're starting the next round of political attack ads about now. I must not follow the right people on Facebook. Well, if my newsfeed is any indication,

they are well employed and ready to go for the next election cycle already. okay so they're they're just prepped they've got they've got years in the chamber probably maybe they're like mad libs and they just fill in like a name and an issue and then it's pretty cheap for you to put in like big management doesn't want you to learn stuff at your company but lewis decorated incredible senior software engineer fights for the people he'll teach you react yeah come to lewis's meeting get free pizza learn react stick it to big man so you you have some experience with this right yeah i've i've done it so i've run meetups for a while i don't anymore i kind of just stopped doing it without telling anyone and someone else started

so it wasn't a very clear transition the same thing that's happening here in this question yeah yeah experience is perfectly aligned with this yeah and then i have done i don't know if i've run this well i guess i just started one up at my my current team and then i've participated in starting them and keeping them going at past companies and teams in my experience just the broad desire to do it was enough plus having someone say like we should do this thing especially at work i feel like a feeling that's common at work is is you can't i had a co-worker say there's seeking versus wandering and seeking is you're looking to solve you're finding you're looking for a specific thing so you're trying to like build a specific feature how do i get past this

one bug that i'm stuck on right now and that's a lot of what work is like but wandering is kind of more open exploration of like what's uh what are the dependent types all about and you just ask these broad questions and kind of poke around and a lot of technical work is more seeking than wandering and these brown bag things uh i guess tech talks is what they call them here tech talks are a way to get more wandering into your work day which i think most people are pretty into yeah oh that's a cool i guess it's a credit to gabe he's the one who told me about it i i haven't found it very hard to get people to want to attend the hard part is finding people to do it to give a talk yeah and then balancing like how much time do you spend on it and how high quality is it versus

how worth people's time is it because you probably don't want to make it like okay sprint planning two-week sprint your job is prep for this tech talk that you're giving to the other 10 engineers yeah like there's some constraints around how much time you can reasonably spend on it but also if it's just like let's read this read me together i have given tech talks like that before and they do not feel good on either end the giver or the receiver so yeah you need to figure out how do you how do you set a standard for like how much time do you put into it and how good of a job and how high quality is the information that people communicate you think you need a standard for that like well not like a written standard but but like start with someone that you think will

do a good job and put in a reasonable amount of effort to show like this will be worth your time and if you do one of these it's it's like appreciated and maybe kind of prestigious and people will listen to you and also if you attend it'll be helpful and valuable and you'll learn neat stuff so i think you need that first one to be pretty good but not too good so it doesn't set an unachievable bar for everyone else yeah save your best speaker for like the fourth or fifth one yeah i think it's pretty normal to have lulls too like if if stuff gets crazy at work if there's some crunch time or something you might drop it but if you if you can make it part of a shared value that you have like hey we want to invest in learning and sharing knowledge with

each other's in this defined way is one way we do that i think people can get behind that i think every time i've seen one of these happen they almost always fizzle out after a certain amount of time like either someone leaves or they lose interest because it is a lot of work to constantly be reminding people and you know I did this at my last company for I think a couple of years and I had like a calendar a recurring calendar invite to remind me to go remind the speaker to make sure they were ready and to pick a topic and I would like crowdsource topics and all that you know and it took it took time and effort and then eventually it fizzled out and I handed it off to someone else and that's when I realized I think it would actually be good to make it a formal rotation

where you say you know we're going to take turns being the facilitator of these tech talks and you only have to do it for six months once once a month and then someone else will take it and i think that would help with the fizzle out problem yeah that makes sense i think it probably depends on how often you do it too the more often you do it the more of a burden it is so i think we do it every two weeks and that feels like a pretty good cadence it's enough that it's not taking up too much of the team's time to to prepare but it's and it doesn't get old it's not like we run out of stuff to talk about yeah two weeks it's pretty good yeah i mean how to sustain people's interest i think the key thing about sustaining people's interest is making them valuable so i think that's

the core of it if it's worth people's time they'll want to attend and they'll want to speak and if it's not then they won't and it'll fizzle out organically and organic fizzle usually usually we talk about organic growth but it happens the other way too yeah that means the service or product you are providing is not meeting enough of a need. People are choosing to do other things with their time. So one way I've found to make sure that the topics are interesting and engaging is to have a like a website, maybe a Google Doc or a wiki page or something where people can go and vote on topics that interest them and contribute topics that they want to hear about or and also volunteer to present. And that way, like when you pick a topic, you at least have

some information to know that, yeah, there's at least three people who thought this was interesting as compared to the others that all just had one person, you know, I've done that before. And that actually worked pretty well, I think. And it also was cool to distribute out the idea generation to the whole company so that it's not just you with your limited scope of knowledge trying to come up with interesting topics. Yeah.

So you create a pool of topics and then someone can pick from that and say like, that looks cool. I'll go learn about that thing. No, well, not exactly. So like the way I did it is I would seed the topic list with a few of my own topics. And then I would encourage others to contribute topics. And then at any time, anyone can throw a topic on the list. And at any time, anyone can vote on any topic on the list. Then when I'm picking the schedule, I am looking at the most popular voted items. And then I'm trying to find someone who can give a talk on that topic. Is it like a conference talk submission where you say like, I want to speak on this thing.

so then when people vote on it you have a person ready to speak or is it just like be cool if we knew more about monitoring yeah and then if there's interest in monitoring you anoint someone to be the monitoring talk giver right like you go out looking for someone to give that talk i can't remember how we did it i think maybe we had like a slot on the form where you could say i'm interested in giving this talk or i'm just want to hear this talk you know i think in other words i think you could do both of those things in one in the same like mechanism yeah well Like, what else besides free food can you do, though? Free food is kind of the go-to.

Pay people. Free money. First five people in the audience get 10 bucks. Yeah, I think if you make it super entertaining, so maybe you get, like, an opening act to loosen up the crowd a little bit. Like a local band or something? Yeah, local band, comedian. Magician.

Circus performers. I'm trying to think what kind of different... So, like, there's the standard conference talk format, and that's kind of constraining and you just kind of talk through slides in front of a group of people but especially if it's a small group of people that you know well and work with you could do a lot of different stuff you could do like interactive practice sessions of some kind i recently learned from from a friend about something called tabletop exercises where you this is focused around kind of operations specifically but you you go through like an

imagined outage scenario and say like you detect this on your dashboards what do you do and then kind of keep throwing new data points at people and and you're you're working through it together and and doing stuff instead of just sitting there and listening that's cool you could do like mob programming or or give people like a little mock assignment or something yeah there's there's a bunch of stuff you could do that might be a meta point about how to make it interesting yes make it clear it's not just like sit and watch someone's slide deck about closure or whatever and my last company we did something like that where we paired off there was probably 20 people in the room we paired off into groups of two and we had to implement the game of life in some i

think it was in python or something and uh we but it was time limited so you had like eight minutes or something with each pair and then we would rotate so it's kind of like speed dating and then you would either start over or pick up the program where you left off with someone new and so the idea was to get everyone exposed to different styles of approaching the problem and it was it was pretty cool like um you know i had some ideas and different partners i was paired with had different ideas and i was like oh i wouldn't have thought of approaching it that way and it was just it was kind of cool like on the subject of wandering like you were describing before that sounds like the global day of code retreat have you heard about that no what's that

it's a day-long practice session where you pair with a bunch of different people on specific problems hey there's one in seven days maybe like five or six days by the time this comes out yeah okay yeah okay i like that we so we just started up this tech talk thing on my team and and it's gone three or four times or something like that but i feel like i want to try some of these things that aren't just someone talking about a thing that they know stuff about yeah i've seen one other approach which was pretty cool which was what we called a study group there was a group of about eight or ten engineers that wanted to learn go that's go the language not go the board game and they got together in a group and there was like one group facilitator who would basically

give a homework assignment each week and the group would work on that homework assignment right there and then you know i think some of them would take it home and work on it at home and then they would come back the next week and circle up and talk about what they learned and things that surprised them and it was pretty cool they did that for a number of weeks i don't remember how long but yeah i mean more there's just so many different ways to do this and maybe maybe one way to keep it fresh and fun and not just the same old thing every week is to kind of rotate styles and just know that you have this time on the calendar every two weeks or every month and you can use that time for either traditional lecture style presentations or you can mix it up i feel inspired

dave i'm gonna i'm gonna change stuff up in our team tech talks cool anything else we should say I don't think so. Good luck and good on you for putting it together. I think that's cool. Yeah, I think it's valuable. I think good things will happen if you put effort into it. All right, what can people do if they just cannot get enough of this and want more?

More of this. I'm doing, I'm gesturing. What does the gesture describe it so I can make sure I tell them the right instruction? Well, now, like my gesture now is rubbing my microphone. Okay. So more rubbing of the microphone. Okay, if you want that, go to softskills.audio.

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